News Wrap

Housing focus in the budget 2024/25

Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers MP handed down the Australian Labor Party’s budget for 2024–25.

Chalmers outlined a range of measures for housing, with the government set to invest a further $6.2 billion in housing initiatives.

These include:

• Increasing the maximum rates of Commonwealth Rent Assistance by an additional 10 per cent.
• Providing $1.9 billion to invest in concessional loans to community housing providers and other charities. $1 billion towards crisis and transitional accommodation for women and children fleeing domestic violence.
• $1 billion of funding for states and territories to build infrastructure that could support new homes and for additional social housing supply.
• $9.3 billion for states and territories to combat homelessness, provide crisis support, and build and repair social housing.
• $90.6 million to boost the number of construction workers, with $88.8 million for 20,000 additional Fee-Free TAFE training places to increase the pipeline of workers for construction and housing.

Additionally, the government said it will extend the instant asset-write off, which allows businesses with turnover of $10 million or less to deduct $20,000 from eligible assets for another year, inject $25.3 million to improve payment times to small businesses, and set aside $23.3 million to increase eInvoicing adoption.

Chalmers said that the government aims to build 1.2 million homes in the five years from this July.

Firstmac hacked

Non-bank lender Firstmac became the latest victim of hackers, after it confirmed a “cyber incident” in which a third party accessed the lender’s IT system.

EMBARGO, a ransomware gang, took responsibility for the hack and claimed it had taken possession of over 500 gigabytes of data, which included “full databases, source codes, [and] sensitive customer data”.

It had held Firstmac to ransom and published a ransom demand on its darknet leak site with a ransom deadline of 8 May 2024. It uploaded a data package to its leak site on 9 May, which reportedly included customer addresses, loan and financing details, balance and account information, and email addresses.

Firstmac said that if brokers receive any inquiries from customers related to this incident, they should “direct these queries promptly to Firstmac so we can address their questions promptly”.

“If customers have received a letter from Firstmac, we recommend brokers refer these customers back to the instructions in this letter, which clearly outlines the support available, including IDCARE, and steps they can take to protect themselves from scams or phishing attempts,” the spokesperson said.

Firstmac has said that there is no ongoing impact on business operations and that its systems were “secure”, with business continuing “as per normal.”

Rate hikes not off the table

Following the May monetary policy meeting, where the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) held the cash rate steady at 4.35 per cent, RBA governor Michele Bullock said that the board has discussed the possibility of a rate hike.

The board has not ruled out any potential rate hikes in the future.

“If we saw that inflation expectations were starting to shift and that it was going to take markedly longer to come back into target, then we might have to be thinking about whether or not there needs to be an interest rate rise, but at the moment that’s not our central forecast,” Bullock said.

Non-banks taking the lead in broker commitment

Initial findings from Agile Market Intelligence’s Third-Party Lending Survey revealed that brokers believe the non-banks are the most committed to the broker channel.

The survey found 82 per cent of broker respondents said they were satisfied with the non-banks in this regard, while the non-major banks came in at a close second at 80 per cent.

The major banks, however, lagged behind their non-bank counterparts by 12 percentage points. Only 70 per cent of brokers said the big four were committed to the third-party distribution channel.