Subjects: Visit to Werriwa; the Coalition’s plan to revive the home ownership dream and boost building across Australia; Labor’s cost of living, energy and housing crisis hurting families and small businesses; Melbourne protests; International Monetary Fund warning on inflation; Labor’s homegrown inflation.
E&OE.
MELISSA MCINTOSH:
Good morning everyone, welcome to Austral in Western Sydney. It is fabulous on this glorious sunny day to welcome the Opposition Leader back to your second home – Western Sydney – and to be here with our candidate for Werriwa, Sam Kayal and Ned Mannoun, the local Mayor.
We’re here today to talk about unlocking homes and the barriers that people right across Western Sydney are facing, and in saying that, no one knows that better than our local candidate and I’d like to introduce you to Sam.
SAM KAYAL:
Thank you Melissa.
Good morning everyone. Thank you for coming. I’d like to welcome our leader, the Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton, to Werriwa.
Australians under Anthony Albanese are facing a housing crisis, and that’s why Peter Dutton has announced over the weekend our housing infrastructure policy to unlock the supply of housing in Werriwa.
Peter will have more to say about this shortly, but I would like to introduce the Mayor Ned Mannoun to say a few words before introducing our leader Peter Dutton. Thank you.
NED MANNOUN:
Well, good morning and welcome to Austral, the place where we’re building 30,000 homes for new Australians. Housing is the biggest challenge that our country faces. Where are our kids going to live, where are they going to be bringing up their families and how they get to work and from work and from those beautiful places, is the most important thing that we have, not just in Liverpool, but in the whole country.
We strongly welcome the forward funding of the infrastructure of the roads, of the parks, of the sewerage that will release housing.
You can see here we are in Austral, 30,000 homes are being delivered. We have a great community here who’s developing that land, but the challenge is we need the infrastructure funded upfront so our communities aren’t stuck in traffic like in Middleton Grange, where it takes 30 minutes just to travel 300m in the morning, or Austal, where Fifteenth Avenue is constantly blocked because the road is still a farm road without any gutters, without any drains, without any lighting.
We welcome this announcement and we encourage everyone to support more forward funding of infrastructure. That’s why we strongly welcome this announcement over the weekend by Peter Dutton and the Coalition government, because it’s going to mean better housing and a better quality life for our community.
PETER DUTTON:
Ned, thank you very much.
Firstly, can I just say thanks very much to everyone for hosting us this morning. Speaking to some of the tradies and some of the locals here, just about the constraints obviously in relation to road infrastructure and the difficulty that people are experiencing, just coming to and from work every day when really all they want to do is spend more time at home with their families and get home in the afternoon as quickly as they can.
I want to say thank you very much to Melissa McIntosh for being here. Obviously, Melissa knows this part of the world very well and is, as the Shadow Minister, very focussed on not just helping families in this region, but also across the country with energy affordability, which is a huge issue for families at the moment.
I also want to say thank you very much to Sam, a great candidate and obviously understands the needs here in the local community.
Thank you very much Ned for being here as well and for the leadership that you provide to the local community.
Thank you very much to Stuart Ayres and the UDIA. We’ve worked with a lot of organisations, a lot of stakeholders to arrive at this policy announcement. We’ve obviously been strongly endorsed by the Master Builders Association, by the HIA, by the UDIA, by the Property Council and others, because at the moment, as we see here, there’s land waiting, aching to be developed and the land is not being developed because of infrastructure restraints, there’s difficulties in relation to sewage and water, and it ultimately adds, particularly given the holding costs, to the end price that consumers pay.
We were talking before about what a holding cost on one of the blocks of land here, which will be about $3 million a year, will mean to the end price – about $70,000 a block additional onto that block. The Government’s had two and a half years to fix this problem up, they’ve just made it worse.
Our $5 billion announcement, which will lead to an additional 500,000 homes being built in our country, means that young Australians can believe again in the great Australian dream of home ownership. That’s what our policy is about. It’s about making sure that we can get more land, more housing and we need more supply. That’s what every Australian and every economist understands about how we need to take the first step in addressing the housing crisis that Labor’s created.
So I’m very happy to take any questions.
QUESTION:
The Federal Government has also announced $26 million today to develop roads, water pipes and other infrastructure for housing development in South West Sydney. Could you explain for us the key differences between what the Coalition’s proposing and what the Government’s proposing in that area?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, the key difference is that the Government wasn’t doing this before our policy announcement. When you look at where they’ve been spending money, the Government’s been spending money on studies, on surveys, on courses. Our money is going into infrastructure to pull out those road blocks, and to get the land released to market as quickly as possible so we can get young families into homes. As we’ve seen from the Government, there’s a lot of talk and very little action.
Now, if the Government has been inspired by our announcement and they’re now putting money into real projects, we would welcome that, but frankly, they’ve had two and a half years to do it, and they’ve turned a housing problem into a housing crisis because over the last two years they’ve brought in about a million people, but only built 350,000 homes.
We also know that new home starts are at an all time low. You’ve got a situation at the moment where over the last 12 months, the Government’s built about 100,000 homes, compared to about 210,000 homes a year when we were in government. No wonder Australians are finding it really frustrating at the moment, and many have given up on the dream of home ownership under the Albanese Government.
QUESTION:
Also on housing, the Business Council and the Government’s Housing Minister Clare O’Neil have spoken about stamp duty. The Housing Minister has said that it’s a bad tax. Do you agree with that?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, I mean it’s okay for Clare O’Neil to release these thought bubbles, but she’s the Minister. Is she proposing that the Commonwealth will provide subsidies which would be in the many billions of dollars to State Governments for that lost revenue? Is she proposing a land tax?
The only thing we know about the Albanese Government is that they’re looking at stopping negative gearing, which would be a disaster for rental properties in this country and they might have a dream of industry super funds owning a ‘build to rent’ unit complex, and Australians adopting that as their housing choice; the Coalition is not about a rent for life model. Our policy is to get young families into homes as quickly as possible, and that’s exactly what we do in relation to this policy.
QUESTION:
Would you be looking to work with the States on moving away from stamp duty?
PETER DUTTON:
Very happy to work with the states and look at suggestions that are being made, but I’m not aware of any serious suggestion. The Treasurer hasn’t mentioned this, the Prime Minister hasn’t mentioned this, and what we know is that both the Prime Minister and the Treasurer are at war at the moment on their issue of and their policy formulation around stopping capital gains discount, and also curbing or abolishing negative gearing, which would have a devastating impact on the housing industry and would only drive up prices.
QUESTION:
Yesterday you said that the federation was dysfunctional. What would you propose to improve the way that the states and territories work together?
PETER DUTTON:
Well look, I think to Kevin Rudd’s great credit, in 2007 he spoke about the tension, ending the blame game that existed between the three levels of government.
We’re a population of 27 million people, and many people will argue that we’re over governed. Now, I think what needs to be discussed in our country is how we can reduce the cost of compliance, application cost, duplications of processes. It adds literally tens of billions of dollars a year as a drag on the economy, and ultimately that cost is passed on to consumers.
I want to make sure that we can have a building industry which is the best in the world, and over the last couple of years, through changes to the National Construction Code, the Government’s added about $60,000 to the cost of a home being built. As part of our policy, we’ve announced a 10 year freeze of the National Construction Code so that we can put downward pressure, not upward pressure on house building prices.
That’s a discussion that we can have with the states and the territories and the local governments as well about how we can condense and make more efficient those processes.
QUESTION:
And far right protesters dressed in all black chanted white supremacist slogans and disrupted an asylum seeker rally in Melbourne. Is that concerning?
PETER DUTTON:
It is. It’s disgraceful and it should be absolutely condemned. Any act of intimidation or violence is not to be tolerated in our community, and I hope the police can take appropriate action.
QUESTION:
[inaudible]
PETER DUTTON:
I think every Australian will be horrified by the news from the IMF overnight that shows Australia really lagging at the back of the pack when it comes to inflation.
Inflation is higher in our country. Interest rates have already started to come down in New Zealand, in Canada, in the United Kingdom, in the United States, and they should already have come down here.
If the Government had have put in place the measures in the last three budgets to bring downward pressure on inflation, instead of upward pressure, Australian families would already be paying less for their mortgage.
I think the IMF has really rung the alarm bell here to signify that the Albanese Government has not a clue what they’re doing when it comes to economic management and that’s why inflation is higher here than in every other comparable country, and we’re seeing a situation where Australians are paying the price for bad economic decisions by the Albanese Government.
Alright, thank you very much.
[ends]