Wednesday, 21 June 2023

Housing affordability

Joe McCRACKEN (Western Victoria) (17:50): (303) My adjournment matter is to the Minister for Housing as well, and it also relates to the housing crisis that Victorians are facing, particularly in regional Victoria. I acknowledge my colleague from the Greens mentioned this tonight as well, and I think we have the same concern. We might come at it from different angles, but that is okay. The action that I seek is that the minister immediately moves to (1) work with the Minister for Planning to increase zoning of suitable land for housing, increasing land supply; (2) work with the Treasurer to abolish the failed windfall gains tax, which is a disincentive to developers and reduces land supply; and (3) work with the Treasurer to give stamp duty relief to thousands of regional Victorians, particularly the many in my electorate.

The great Australian dream was to own your own home, to own your own part of this wonderful country, to simply call it your own. It seems as though that dream is almost unachievable. My generation, gen Y, and those after me, gen Z and others, are increasingly seeing this dream as unachievable. There used to be a time when there was hope – hope to live independently, hope to live without the need to rent someone else’s property, hope to own your very own piece of earth, a hope that our income, our savings and our work would be enough to provide a roof over our head, one that we could own ourselves. Well, that hope has been brutally crushed. My hope, my aspiration, my vision is that we can once again be a state where that could be possible. The great Victorian dream – to own your own home, your own land, and to be the master of your own destiny – is what we should aspire to. But sadly that is just not a reality, and we have got the government hell-bent on ensuring that people do not own their own property and that future generations never own their own property. Stamp duty, land tax and windfall gains tax are all barriers. If you are fortunate enough to have worked hard, invested wisely and saved to purchase a second home, why on earth would you want to rent it out? The state’s rental laws do not encourage property owners to rent out their properties. A renter can paint walls without the landlord’s consent. What if we applied that same standard to bikes or cars? Would anyone want to rent those out? Probably not.

And land tax, one of the cruellest moves in the last state budget, is a massive slug on property ownership and is part of a broader ideological move to reduce private property ownership. Because of this, nobody actually wants to put their house out for rent and the market is suffering. In Ballarat the rental vacancy is 0.7 per cent; in Bacchus Marsh, 0.98 per cent; in Ararat, 0.72 per cent; and in Maryborough, 0.64 per cent. People are suffering, and it is about time that the government stopped ignoring the problem.