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One Nation’s Plan: Making Homeownership Possible for All Australians

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Australians deserves to be able to afford a house. Only One Nation has the guts to propose real solutions to make sure the Australian dream is a reality for all Australians.

It’s time to kill the policies that are destroying Australians’ chances at home ownership.

Transcript

Last week’s Courier Mail is reporting: ‘New tent cities have been set up near some of Brisbane’s busiest intersections as Queensland emerges as the epicentre of the housing crisis. The latest tent city to hit Brisbane is at E.E. McCormick Place, where tents can be seen sitting on the edge of a major arterial road, with clothes hanging on lines and camp showers draping off trees.’ The chief executive of Queensland Council of Social Services—QCOSS—Aimee McVeigh, said the housing crisis was not being properly addressed, going on to say: ‘It’s incredibly heartbreaking but unfortunately pretty predictable that we’re continuing to see people, including families with children, who don’t have a safe place to call home.’ 

I’ve visited large tent cities in South Brisbane on the Brisbane River banks, in Mackay and in Townsville, and I’ve seen smaller tent cities in far too many provincial centres to list. Speaking with those residents, I was horrified to find just how many were families with children. The really sad part is that mum and dad may both have jobs. Yet, without a home for the children, one parent has to give up working to look after their children, because a tent is no place for a child. There are children living in tents. Losing that income guarantees that family will remain homeless. Thank you, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. 

The truth is the housing and rent crisis is out of control. In August 2020, the national average rent was $437 a week. It’s now $627. That’s an increase of 40 per cent over just a few years. The national rental vacancy is at just one per cent, which is far below the three per cent rate that is considered a healthy market. In 1987, the average house cost 2.8 times the average income. Today a house is 9.7 times the average income. Additionally, under this government, real wages in Australia have gone backwards six per cent. Not only are houses more expensive; working Australians are further away from being able to afford them. Many people under 30 have given up hope of ever owning a home. What a failure of governance under Labor! Surely the prime directive of a government is to leave this beautiful country in a better state than you found it in. The reverse is happening; it’s worse. 

Over the past two decades, under the Liberal and Labor ‘uniparty’, wealth inequality in Australia has increased dramatically and substantially. According to the University of New South Wales, the wealth of the top 20 per cent of people increased 82 per cent, and the wealth of the bottom 20 per cent only increased 20 per cent. That, though, does not stop the university grabbing just as much of that wealth for themselves as they can. The university lobby group, Universities Australia, recently sent my office a press release stating they could prove that 702,000 foreign students didn’t put strain on the housing market. Actually, they didn’t say 702,000; the release rather dishonestly spoke of the 200,000 new students who arrived this year rather than the total number of foreign students, which is 702,000, all needing a bed and a roof. 

To achieve this feat of denial, Universities Australia use a simple statistical trick. They use the vacancy rate as an indicator instead of rental price. Like any supply-and-demand industry, rental prices will rise until demand matches supply. This means vacancy rates should be constant across different areas, because the balancing factor is not vacancy rates; it’s rental price. Rentals are higher near a university, as landlords price into their rents the ability to have three or four students per bedroom. And, knowing how those rates are being paid with so many tenants, local councils hike up rates to exploit overcrowding. 

The national vacancy rate across Australia has fallen from 2.42 per cent in 2021 to 1.09 per cent in January 2024 because of the housing catastrophe. Why? In part because foreign students all need a bed, and more so because two million new arrivals all need a bed. Universities couldn’t care less about everyday Australians sleeping in tents, in public parks and under bridges. Universities are motivated to grab the money foreign students pay towards obscene multimillion-dollar university salaries. University fees are on average eight times what they were when the Hawke Labor government reintroduced tertiary fees in 1989. 

I’m pleased to see racketeering mentioned in this motion. So many Australian industries are being controlled for the benefit of well-connected and mostly foreign wealth funds, acting against the financial interests of everyday Australians. Racketeering could be a separate inquiry, so entrenched has the practice become. 

When it comes to ignoring working families, Labor has form. It’s clear. The reason I’m raising this in a housing speech is quite simple: university affordability is no better than it was before HECS, except now children of everyday Australians are left with a debt so high that they can’t ever afford their own home. So many young people contact my office—Australians who have done everything society has asked of them. They have studied hard, worked hard, stayed out of trouble and got a university degree, and now have a good job, only to find they were lied to. Real wages in Australia are back to 2010 levels, while houses are twice as expensive as they were in 2010. HECS debt comes off a person’s ability to repay a loan, which means its reduces their borrowing power below the price of an entry level home. They can’t borrow. Meanwhile, rents are so high that they have no ability to even save a deposit. Society is lying to our young Australians. This is not on the Labor Party alone; these problems date back to the Hawke Labor government and were made far worse under the Howard Liberal government—the uniparty at work! The message I have for recent graduates is one of hope. One Nation’s housing policy looks to the future, offering commonsense solutions to help more Australians purchase their own home while at the same time reducing rent. 

Let’s have an overview of our housing policy. One Nation’s housing policy includes lowering immigration to sustainable levels to reduce housing demand; in fact, I will go further and say, with 2.3 million people on residence visas, we need to send some home. We would ban foreign ownership of residential property to increase housing supply; allow a portion of a person’s superannuation to be invested in home purchase; ditch Labor’s housing future fund and invest those funds into creating a new people’s mortgage scheme, offering a five per cent deposit and a five per cent interest rate; allow people with a HECS debt to roll their debt into a people’s mortgage account, improving their ability to obtain and service a loan—this is common sense and humane; and implement a five-year moratorium on charging GST on the materials used in new home construction, which will make new homes more affordable, taking $1.4 billion off the sale price of new homes over the next four years. 

Here are some more details. Non-bank financial institutions stand ready right now to take on the mortgage market and administer our people’s home loans. They’re ready. Indeed, some are in the market now in company with aggregators. It’s One Nation policy to create a people’s bank to provide Australia’s obscenely profitable banking cartel with real competition. We don’t have four major banks; we have one major bank with four different logos, with the same controlling interest—BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and First State. Efficiency in banking, including in the housing market, will not come from more regulation; it will come from more competition, driving real accountability. That’s exactly what the original Commonwealth Bank did when it was formed in 1911. 

The cost of building a house now is a massive problem. One of the reasons costs keep going up is Australian construction codes. Construction codes are meant to make sure our houses aren’t made of straw and won’t blow down if the big bad wolf, or a cyclone, huffs and puffs. Unfortunately, Australia’s construction codes have gone woke; they’re no longer just about safe houses. The National Construction Code was amended in 2022 to require all new buildings to be NDIS compliant—every single building to be NDIS compliant. Alan Kohler reports that global construction consultant Rider Levett Bucknall estimates that this adds up to $49,500 to the cost of a dwelling. Why should a young family have to shell out an extra $50,000 on features they’ll never need in order to buy their family home? Some of the requirements border on ridiculous. There must be a stepless entry to the front door, so the days of steps are over—even a handful up to your front porch. You’d have to pay for a ramp or potentially face having your home deemed illegal. 

Remember, this applies to every new building. All new homes must be built with heavy-duty, reinforced walls and a toilet. These are ostensibly so grab rails can be installed, even though they may never be installed. Where did you want to put the toilet? You didn’t think you could just put it where you wanted and where it’s convenient, did you? Are you considering skipping a toilet on the ground floor and only having one upstairs to save on plumbing? Think again. The construction codes say no. You’re forced to have one on the ground floor whether it’s cost effective for you or not and whether you need it or not. The codes now dictate where the toilet must be placed. It must be against a wall, with huge spaces left around it. As the price of land continues to go up, many houses simply don’t have the floor space to accommodate these new requirements without sacrificing others. 

Young people are paying for this, even though they don’t need it. No doubt these criteria are helpful for people with a disability, yet there’s no reason to make them mandatory in every new house for people without a disability. Many in government claim that, when it comes to housing, the problem is supply. When these changes to the construction codes alone are costing an extra $50,000 a house, there’s no hope of boosting supply, because Australians can’t afford to build. Construction codes are getting so long and complex that we practically need to be lawyers to decipher them. That’s no slight on our tradies. Most are far smarter and more useful than lawyers anyway. Our tradies should be using their hands on power tools and paintbrushes, not having to turn over pages and pages of regulations telling them how to swing a hammer. The same applies to our farmers, who are buried in paperwork. 

Unions like the CFMEU endorse these complex additions because it means more work for them. Meanwhile, quotes to build a new house leave Australians gobsmacked. The people who can afford these expensive houses are millionaire foreign buyers. There’s no doubt that foreigners are buying houses here, and that comes at the expense of an Australian who can’t get into a house. Where are the Labor government’s union mates when it comes to the issue of foreign buyers? They’re completely silent. The government calls it foreign investment. Wrong, it’s not investment. This is foreign ownership. Worst of all, Australians can’t believe what the government tells us about how many foreigners are buying houses. The Foreign Investment Review Board says foreigners buy less than one per cent of houses, yet the New South Wales state government charges a foreign purchase tax, a surcharge, and records that the number is more than double that. Surveys say it’s much higher. 

When you ask real estate agents who they are selling to, as the NAB property survey does, they say the number of foreign buyers is 10 per cent. What about shelf companies, trusts with beneficial interests or so-called dark money in foreign retail purchases? Are foreign buyers of housing sneaking through the cracks? I’ve been trying to get this question answered since November with a series of technical questions to the Australian Taxation Office. They run a data-matching program which matches the 2.4 million names of every seller and purchaser of every house in the country against ATO records. Theres’s a simple question about those records: how many of those 2.4 million names are Australian citizens, and how many aren’t—how many are foreign? Trying to get the ATO to answer that question is like trying to get blood out of a stone, yet we’re still selling houses en masse to foreigners. 

To be frank, whatever the answer, one house a foreigner buys is one too many, especially in the housing crisis. We’re in the middle of a housing crisis, a catastrophe, when there should be zero foreign ownership of Australian housing. It’s in Australia’s interest to make it zero foreign housing, just like Canada and New Zealand have recently done, yet where are the Labor government and unions like the CFMEU? They encourage more immigration and more foreign ownership and push the price of houses higher, as do the Greens, and then want a rent ceiling. 

When Labor and the union-backed super funds aren’t encouraging foreigners to snatch homes away from Australians, they’re making sure renters will have multinational corporations as landlords—BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. The concept is known as ‘build to rent’. It’s about letting huge corporations like BlackRock and Vanguard build housing estates and unit blocks so that people will be stuck renting from them forever. The government touts this as a solution to the housing crisis. Creating forever renters who are paying corporate company landlords is not a fix; it’s serfdom. 

A real solution is One Nation’s policies to get more Australians owning their own home. The Albanese Labor government is responding to a problem of their own making. Housing approvals are falling as red and green tape slow down the approval process and as building codes put developers off. Housing approvals are the lowest they’ve been for many years. Construction is falling as costs rise both from an increase in raw materials and from an increase in interest rates—and from an increase in the number of bureaucrats that you’ve appointed instead of tradies. Sales are falling in line with falling real wages and increasing home prices. A labour shortage is correctly blamed, yet we had 2.3 million new arrivals, and only a few thousand of those were builders. 

As I said, it is a problem of the government’s own making. The only response the government has is to throw taxpayers’ money at the problem. Without blocks of land, without builders, without tradies, without building materials and without buyers, money can’t achieve anything. One Nation’s housing policy will get young Australians into their own homes—even those with a HECS debt that is preventing them saving for their own home and those working families living under bridges, in tents, in caravan parks, in showgrounds and in city parks. It’s time for new, commonsense ideas. If people care about Australians, then it’s time for One Nation. 

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Pratt): The question before us is that the motion moved by Senator Cash be agreed to. A division having been called, we will defer that division until tomorrow morning. The debate is adjourned accordingly. 

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How Many Foreign Buyers Are Really Snatching Up Australian Homes?

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Since November, I have been trying to get a very simple answer out of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO): How many potential foreign buyers are they detecting?

The ATO runs a data matching program that checks the details of more than 2.4 million sellers and buyers to detect if they might be foreign.

The ATO claims only 1% of purchases are foreign, but they won’t tell me how many of those 2.4 million matches they get are flagged as potentially foreign. Watch as they again refuse to tell me how many foreigners they identify in the 2.4 million records.

They claim to have manually checked over 230,000 records every year that can’t be automatically matched to confirm whether they are Australian. With other evidence like the NAB property survey indicating up to 11% of new housing stock is purchased by foreigners, I believe the ATO figures are completely understating the level of foreign buying in the country.

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for appearing again tonight, and congratulations to you, Mr Heferen. I don’t think we’ve seen you since your appointment. My first question is about foreign buyers of real estate. Radio 2GB reported in April that foreign buyers accounted for 11 per cent of newly built homes in the final quarter of last year. This is a disaster for Australian homebuyers. Can you please provide that data for each quarter over the previous 12 months—the proportion of newly built homes bought by foreigners?

Mr Thompson: I think the 2GB article would have been using the National Australia Bank—

Senator ROBERTS: That’s my understanding.

Mr Thompson: As I think I’ve talked about at the committee before, there are a number of differences between the National Australia Bank survey and our data. So the National Australia Bank’s data is from a survey,
so it asks real estate and other real estate professionals to estimate. I think the exact question in that survey is about overseas buyers. Our numbers are coming from state and territory land title offices, which are matched
against Home Affairs data and Australia Electoral Commission data. There is a very significant gap between the numbers that appear in that survey and the numbers that we get. Our numbers are based on the definition of a foreigner under the Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Act. I think last week we released the 2022-23 numbers, which would put the estimate at around one per cent.

Senator ROBERTS: Moving onto the first home super saver scheme, I’m quoting from the eligibility requirements in guidance note 2018/1: There is no requirement for you to be an Australian citizen, Australian resident or an Australian resident for taxation purposes. Why are we allowing foreigners—not even residents for taxation purposes—access to this scheme, which is meant to be for getting Australians into their first home?

Mr Heferen: That would be a policy question for our colleagues at the Treasury.

Ms Brown: It is a policy question for Treasury, but the appropriate group for it to be directed to is markets group. That is administered by our Retirement, Advice and Investment Division in markets group. We can take it on notice and have them provide a reply.

Senator ROBERTS: I want to come back to foreign ownership again. I refer to table 3 of the answer to question on notice SBE106 from the November estimates. Through the Department of Home Affairs visa data-
matching program, how many of the real property transfer report entities records that are automatically matched to ATO records are foreign?

Mr Thompson: As we’ve answered previously, we’re not able to—the question was, ‘How many do we automatically match?’ and ‘How many do we have to go away and do additional things to match?’

Senator ROBERTS: I’m coming to that.

Mr Thompson: If you think about it coming through the system: if it’s an exact match, that’s all automated. There would be a range of circumstances where we don’t get an automatic match. It could be that the date of
birth’s the wrong way. It could be a maiden name. In those circumstances, we have additional processes to match. We work down through every record. In the automatic matches, there will be some foreigners. In the ones we can’t automatically match, there will be some foreigners.

Senator ROBERTS: What percentage?

Mr Thompson: At that point—

Senator ROBERTS: You can’t tell us?

Mr Thompson: The numbers in that answer to the question on notice were addressing how many we automatically match versus how many we perform additional—

Senator ROBERTS: Correct. How many that were matched were foreigners?

Mr Thompson: If the question is about the compliance results that we get, they’re published—

Senator ROBERTS: My question is: what percentage of buyers are foreigners?

Mr Thompson: One per cent.

Senator ROBERTS: Could you provide to me on notice the numbers of foreign buyers for the last five years.

Mr Thompson: We publish that. I’ve got the latest public—

Senator ROBERTS: Okay, if you could take it on notice for the last five years.

Mr Thompson: I’ll take it on notice.

Senator ROBERTS: From table 4, immediately below that from the same question on notice from November estimates, how many of the entity records that were not able to be automatically matched to ATO records remain unverified or unresolved?

Mr Thompson: None.

Senator ROBERTS: How many unmatched records from the data-matching program remain unresolved from 2018 to date?

Mr Thompson: I think that’s the same question.

Senator ROBERTS: I want to go right back to 2018.

Mr Thompson: I’ll take that one on notice.

Senator ROBERTS: How many residential properties in Australia are owned by foreigners today?

Mr Thompson: I think that is the question around the register.

Senator ROBERTS: I just want to know how many foreigners own real estate. We’ve got a housing crisis. We’ve got people in Brisbane and all up and down the east coast of Queensland in major provincial cities sleeping under bridges and in cars, taking families home.

Senator Gallagher: Yes, but I think it’s very simplistic to say that that housing shortage is a result of foreign investment in residential housing. We’ve had a number of hearings where you’ve been told how relatively low that level is in comparison to non-foreign owned.

Senator ROBERTS: I’d like the exact numbers.

Senator Gallagher: And we’ll provide that number to you, but the link that you are saying—that foreign ownership of properties equals some of what you’ve been talking about and is a real issue in Brisbane—is not
right. The issue is supply. We’ve got to build more houses for people, not blame foreigners for it.

Senator ROBERTS: I’ve never said it’s entirely due to foreigners, but that is one—

Senator Gallagher: We need to make sure that the rules are tight, that there are restrictions in place, which there are, so that that arrangement works properly. But it’s not fair to say that the housing crisis is because we’ve got some small foreign-owned investments.

Senator ROBERTS: I didn’t say that. I said that’s one contributing factor.

CHAIR: I’ll just do some committee administration here. I’ll table three documents—the three articles referenced by Senator O’Neill earlier. The committee has agreed to a time management plan to conclude
questions, so last question, Senator Roberts.

Senator ROBERTS: I’d like to make the point that the witnesses have provided answers so late, in the past, that they’ve been distributed at 8 pm on the day before they appear in Senate estimates, 100 days after the last
hearing, and failing to raise any public interest immunity claims on answers they don’t give. That’s a clear frustration of the committee’s work.

Senator Gallagher: We will try and do better, Senator Roberts. We have had a long discussion about the number of questions on notice which are coming in and having to be managed by departments, but I agree: it’s an important accountability measure, and departments should work to meet the timeframes.

Senator ROBERTS: When it’s 100 days, it’s way late, and then it suddenly comes in at 8 pm on the night before.

Senator Gallagher: Yes. I understand your frustration.

Daily Telegraph Article: Foreigners buying homes at twice the rate claimed in official figures, according to real estate agents and state tax data

Foreigners buying homes at twice the rate claimed in official figures, say real estate agents and state tax data | Daily Telegraph

Answers to Previous Questions on Notice

SQ23-000665 SBE054 – ATO – Foreign buyer crackdownDownload

SQ23-000661 SBE106 – ATO – Data matching program for Title DeedsDownload
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Australians Deserve Their Own Home

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Australians are sleeping on the street and the Government doesn’t care.

Hundreds of thousands of arrivals are flowing into the country while we don’t have houses for the Australians that are here. 

Rent prices are up 40% and house prices are 10x the average income, completely out of reach for most of Australians. We need to cut immigration, ban foreign ownership, give Australians more savings, introduce some competition to the banking cartel and open up construction as well. 

Australians deserve their own home, One Nation will make sure they get one.

Transcript

The housing and rent crisis is a national tragedy. In Australia, one of the richest countries in the world for resources, we have working families homeless, sleeping in their cars or under bridges. In August 2020, the national average rent was $437 a week. It’s now $627, an increase of 40 per cent in just a few years. The national rental vacancy rate is just one per cent—actually slightly under that—far below the three per cent rate that’s considered a healthy market. House prices are out of control. In 1987, the average house cost 2.8 times the average income.

Today, a house costs 9.7 times the average income. This is why there are hardworking Australians sleeping on the street—families on the street. People under 30 have given up hope of ever owning a home, yet we oldies are meant to hand our young people a better life than we had. 

One Nation promises to fix this housing crisis for all Australians. We will make the tough decisions that the Liberal and Labor uniparty won’t. Two point eight million temporary visa holders are in the country today, up from 2.3 million pre COVID. That’s an additional 200,000 homes needed for these new arrivals. While Australians can’t afford roofs over their heads, we need some of these people on visas to leave. An Australian can’t buy a house in China, yet foreign investors can buy both new and existing houses here.

One Nation would ban all foreign ownership of residential housing. Australians must come first. We would allow people to use some superannuation to invest in their homes. After all, it’s your money. We will ditch Labor’s facade, its pathetic, bureaucratic Housing Australia programs. Instead, we’ll use the same funds to create cheap 30-year mortgages fixed at five per cent interest to get Australians into homes. 

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How One Nation Will Make Home Ownership a Reality for You!

The housing supply and affordability crisis is upon us and debating how we arrived here won’t help.

One Nation’s housing policy ‘looks to the future,’ offering common-sense solutions to help more Australians purchase their own home, while at the same time, reducing rent.  

Overview

  • Lower immigration to sustainable levels to reduce housing demand. 
  • Ban foreign ownership of residential property to increase housing supply. 
  • Allow a portion of your superannuation to be invested in a home purchase. 
  • Ditch Labor’s Housing Future Fund and invest those funds into creating a new People’s Mortgage Scheme, offering 5% deposit and 5% interest rate. 
  • Allow people with a HECS debt to roll their debt into a People’s Mortgage account, improving their ability to obtain and service a housing loan. 
  • Implement a 5-year moratorium on charging GST for new home construction, which will make new homes more affordable. 

The Role of Interest Rates in the Housing Crisis

The Reserve Bank understands that slowing down construction is an effective tool in reducing inflation and is doing so knowing it will make the housing crisis.  

This is what I mean when I say the Government is “stepping on the accelerator with handouts and government-sponsored construction,” at the same time the Reserve Bank is tightening the reins with higher interest rates. 

The result is a shambolic government from Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers. 

A shortage of home construction firms is also contributing to the problem. As of May 2024, there have been 2,500 building company bankruptcies | May of 2024 financial year. 

These failures are a result of rising material costs, approval delays, high interest rates affecting both the builder and the customer and a shortage of skilled labour.  Our immigration policy has brought millions of people into the country, however only a fraction of those migrants are qualified in construction trades.  

The Government’s answer involves a set of measures that “promise” many new homes, yet so far, only a few thousand have been delivered and they are mostly homes that were already in the pipeline. 

In other words, the Albanese’ Government’s efforts have made no meaningful impact on the crisis. 

One Nation’s approach will tackle inflation without relying on interest rate rises.  Refer to our inflation policy. 

The Role of Immigration in the Housing Crisis 

One Nation’s policy to address the housing shortage involves reducing immigration until the housing market stabilises.  

This strategy is grounded in logic that if we already have a limited supply of houses and we increase demand faster than new homes can be constructed, it will only lead to a worse housing shortage.  Even those who support high immigration should recognise that this approach makes sense. 

Anthony Albanese has overseen the arrival of 2.4 million new residents in just the last 2 years, creating a demand for 700,000 homes.  With home approvals at just 160,000 per annum, our housing shortage continues to get worse.  In turn, the worsening shortage will cause higher rents and higher home prices, putting home ownership or rentals out of reach for many everyday Australians.  

Rent controls discourages construction, making the problem worse. 

The graph below illustrates new housing approvals against population growth. Under Anthony Albanese’s Labor/Greens government, the number of home approvals has decreased while new arrivals have increased. This trend suggests that without the implementation of One Nation’s housing policy, the problem is going to get significantly worse for everyone currently living here. 

The Role of Foreign Buyers in the Housing Crisis 

During COVID, with immigration at such low levels, there was an opportunity for a “’catchup” – a period of construction without the pressure of increased demand.   

Despite this opportunity, no significant catch-up occurred, yet new homes were built.  So where did these homes end up?  

Part of the answer can be found in the August 2021 Census, which revealed that one million of Australia’s 10.8 million homes were empty on Census night. 

One Nation believes that part of the issues stems from foreign buyers purchasing new housing stock and locking it up, so that it can be sold as “brand new” when values rise. Much of the construction during this COVID period was removed from the market in this manner. The Greens also highlighted this issue: read here.  

One Nation’s housing policy includes measures to end foreign ownership of residential and agricultural property, aiming to help Australians secure homes. 

Another contributing factor are owners that decide tenants are too troublesome and choose to forgo rental income. This problem would likely be more common among foreign or corporate investors who view real estate as a speculative investment – focusing on fast capital appreciation rather than rental returns. 

Why wouldn’t foreign investors pour capital into Australian real estate, given how fast property prices are increasing?

 

Rising Australian real estate prices were an irresistible target for international and local capital. Additionally, superannuation firms are increasingly investing in residential property, potentially adding to the demand and contributing to rising prices.  

Is Short-stay Accommodation Contributing to the Housing Crisis? 

The short-stay rental market, such as Airbnb, is often highlighted in discussions about housing. There are approximately 100,000 short-stay properties in Australia, which adds to the 280,000 rooms available in the conventional accommodation sector. 

In comparison, Australia’s total housing stock comprises 10.8 million homes, meaning short-stay properties represent less than 1% of the overall market. 

The short-stay rental market caters to people seeking holiday or business rentals and is an industry with a finite growth curve.  Many short-stay rentals are not stand-alone units.  Often, they are converted spaces like garages or spare rooms. These types of properties would not typically qualify as permanent rental accommodation under existing planning regulations.  

Many of these properties have always been used for short-stay purposes. In the past, these properties would have been managed by local real estate agents and legacy websites like Stayz. Therefore, the actual number of rental properties removed from the market for short-stay use in the past 5 years, is much less than the 100,000 figure suggests. 

While some on the left are fixated on short-stay rentals, it appears to be more an ideological abhorrence of Australians that use entrepreneurship to get ahead. 

We Need a People’s Mortgage Scheme! 

The Housing Future Fund (HFF) is an Albanese Government initiative to create a fund that invests in mortgages. Currently valued at $10 billion, it is expected to be increased to $20 billion. However, this scheme has not delivered a single new home and is limited to just a few thousand properties per year.  

One Nation proposes to turn this scheme into a low-deposit, low-interest Government-backed mortgage scheme for Australians, especially those with a HECS debt.  This proposal would help people secure homes years sooner. 

One Nation will convert the HFF into a mortgage fund, offering government-backed loans to Australians who fail to meet traditional banking criteria. This is aimed primarily at the three million HECS debt holders in Australia.  These individuals, HECS repayments can restrict their ability to buy a home, manage a mortgage or save for a deposit, as their HECS debt impacts their income. 

We propose offering People’s Mortgages with fixed terms of up to 25 years at a 5% interest rate, with the option for early repayment, and requiring only a 5% deposit. This is in line with the Government’s own low-income deposit scheme. 

Applicants will also have the option to use up to one-third of their superannuation for the deposit, with the condition that the funds must be repaid when the home is sold. 

For Australians who have been employed for several years, have a reasonable income and superannuation balance, and qualifies for the first home buyers grant, it’s likely that no cash deposit will be required for an entry level property.  Additionally, the mortgage repayments will be comparable to current rent payments. 

People’s Mortgages for HECS Debt Holders 

One Nation will offer HECS debt holders a simple and straightforward choice: 

  1. Continue paying off your HECS debt while managing a mortgage as you do now; or 
  1. Roll your HECS debt into your mortgage, extending the repayment period over a longer period.  This option allows you to secure a mortgage sooner if your income and eligibility for a First Home-Owner’s grant, along with a superannuation top-up, support it.  While this option increases the total cost of your HECS debt over time, it enables you to purchase a home much earlier. 

Mortgages will only be issued if the applicant meets the lending criteria, including the ability to make the repayments through gainful employment or a self-owned business.  

These mortgages will be administered through an Authorised Deposit-taking Institution (ADI) or approved intermediary, such as mortgage brokers. 

Case study: Blake has the average HECS debt of $25,000 and is paying that off over the average duration of 9.5 years. The debt increases every year with indexation, Blake will most likely repay a total of $29885 at $300p/m before being eligible for a home loan. Under One Nation’s low deposit mortgage, Blake can roll the $25,000 debt into their mortgage and pay the debt off over 25 years at 5% interest for a total repayment of $43,800. This will add $146 per month to the mortgage, a much more manageable figure.

For more details on how One Nation plans to make HECS fairer, refer to our HECS Policy. 

Suspend Charging of GST to Buyers 

According to the Australian, government fees, charges and taxes account for 50% of the cost of a home in Sydney and 32% in Queensland.  Housing has become a cash cow to maintain bureaucratic empires and social agendas, making it increasingly difficult for everyday Australians to afford to build their own home. 

One Nation policy will strip away red, green and blue tape, allowing tradies to get on with the job. 

I have requested the Parliamentary Budget Office cost our proposal to suspend collection of Goods and Services Tax (GST) on new home construction. The policy is straighforward – builders will be able to claim back the GST on all building materials they used in the construction of the homes, rather than passing the GST cost onto home buyers. 

This measure will cost $1.4 billion over 5 years and will lead to a corresponding reduction in the purchase price of new homes. 

Since GST revenue is collected on behalf of the states, the Federal Government will compensate the States for the reduced GST revenue.  This practical measure provides direct assistance and rewards the completion of new, ready-to-sell homes.

Addressing Building Materials Shortages 

Amid discussions about building houses, the Prime Minister is ignoring a critical issue: the availability of building materials. 

At the same time the Prime Minister is trying to build homes, the Greens and the Prime Minister’s own Net-Zero cabal are obstructing essential industries.  These groups are targeting forestry for timber, steel production for frames and supports, and cement manufacturing.  Of note, a major ingredient in cement is fly ash, a byproduct from burning of coal for power.  Therefore, eliminating coal power will also decimate Australia’s cement industry. 

One Nation’s Strategy to Tackle the Building Materials Shortage 

  • Approve the harvesting of plantation timber for the domestic construction industry, with conditions for adequate replanting and regeneration. 
  • Building new, clean steel plants at Abbot Point and Port Hedland to capitalise on Australia’s competitive advantage in steel production. This will lower costs, improve the quality and increase the availability of steel for the construction industry. 
  • Utilise steel mills to provide fly ash for cement production and provide heat for production of ceramic tiles and other building materials. 
  • Promote the development of an Australian hemp industry to produce hemp-based particle board, building bricks and insulation. 

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Foreign Buyers Snatching Houses Away From Australians in a Housing Crisis

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The government’s lies about how many foreigners are buying houses during a housing crisis are coming back to haunt them.

Firstly, the government claims ‘foreign buyers are barely making a dent in the market’. The truth? 11% of new houses in Australia were bought by foreigners (Q4 2023). Secondly, ‘foreign buyers only go for luxury homes’. Reality: the average price of a home bought by foreigners is almost the exact same as the average house price across capital cities. That means foreign buyers are directly outbidding average Australians for an average house. Thirdly, despite saying the don’t make an impact on the housing crisis, the government is now implementing small fines for vacant homes.

Why does the government go through all of this deflection and lying when they could just take One Nation’s policy: BAN Foreign Ownership completely.

That’s just the problems with foreign ownership of housing! Never mind the next topic I asked about: letting a foreign company takeover Australia’s military warship builder…

Does this government understand anything about putting Australians first?

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: I’d like to table the transcript of a broadcast by Ben Fordham. Reporting from radio station 2GB indicates that foreign buyers bought 11 per cent of all new housing stock in this country. How are you letting this many foreign buyers snap up houses out of the hands of Australian homebuyers?

Ms Kelley: As we’ve talked about previously, our latest statistics show that foreign investors purchased around 5,360 houses in the 2022-23 financial year.

Senator ROBERTS: It’s been claimed by some that foreign buyers don’t make a material impact on the average Aussie because they’re only buying trophy homes—$30 million mansions down at Point Piper and so on. Looking at the $5.3 billion for 4,700 properties purchased by foreigners, according to these figures, that’s an average price of $1.1 million. The combined capital cities average median house price is $1 million. Those foreign buyers are actually directly competing in the middle of the market, aren’t they?

Ms Kelley: I should note again that the level of foreign investment in residential real estate is under one per cent of the total purchases that occur in Australia. In terms of residential properties with values under $1 million, that accounted for about 78 per cent of the purchases.

Senator ROBERTS: Minister, your government is increasing the fines and fees for foreign buyers of Australian houses. You’re acknowledging that it needs to be controlled. Why don’t you just stop fiddling around and ban foreign ownership of Australian houses altogether, like we’ve advocated, like the Canadians are now doing and like the Kiwis are now doing?

Senator Gallagher: We welcome foreign investment in our country. It plays an important role across our economy. But those changes we have announced to foreign investment, both for the application fees and double vacancy fees, are about ensuring foreign investment aligns with our agenda to lift housing supply. It’s aligning it with the other work we’ve been talking about this morning in Homes for Australia.

Senator ROBERTS: Working families who are returning home at night to sleep in their car won’t be encouraged by that. But let’s move on. How does the Foreign Investment Review Board treat defence-related companies in its approvals? If a company is producing a defence-related product, how is it treated?

Ms Kelley: The foreign investment review framework takes a case-by-case risk based approach. On 1 May the Treasurer announced a range of reforms to the framework. Under that framework we were very clear about the areas we would scrutinise more strongly. The government has made some decisions around those areas, and we are now actively implementing them.

Senator ROBERTS: It doesn’t sound like being a part of the defence industry enlivens a specific criterion in your approval process.

Mr Tinning: Yes. If it’s a national security business, which includes defence industries, then it’s subject to a zero-dollar threshold under our framework. So all foreign investment approvals—

Senator ROBERTS: So shipbuilding would be part of that, if they’re building defence vessels?

Mr Tinning: Correct. That’s right.

Senator ROBERTS: Do the current rules ever allow you to approve the sale of a sovereign defence industry asset to a foreign buyer?

Ms Kelley: That would depend.

Mr Tinning: As Ms Kelley said, it’s on a case-by-case basis, so we would need to see a specific application.

Senator ROBERTS: Why would we ever allow that?

Ms Kelley: As the minister has said, foreign investment is essential to our domestic economy and has been for decades. What the framework does is—we assess every foreign investment application in terms of our national interest and in terms of national security.

Senator ROBERTS: I understand that the potential sale of Austal to a South Korean bidder, Hanwha, had pretty much fallen off the radar. Then Minister Marles reignited it by saying, ‘I don’t see why there’d be any concerns.’ Does the defence minister’s view factor into your assessment at all—that the sale of Austal, the company that builds Australia’s warships, wouldn’t be a problem?

Ms Kelley: We take into account a range of factors when foreign investments are assessed, and the national security aspects are very important. We liaise across government for views on the issues associated with a foreign investment application and then the advice is then put forward to the Treasurer for a final decision.

Senator ROBERTS: Minister, why would the defence minister say that the sale of Austal, the company that builds Australia’s warships, wouldn’t be a problem? He’s the defence minister and he’s looking at selling a maker of some of our warships.

Senator Gallagher: I haven’t seen those comments, but the defence minister would be very well briefed on all matters relating to that.

Senator ROBERTS: I’ll come back to the Treasury after the opposition asks questions.

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Community Forum in Cannonvale

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I will be joining One Nation MP Stephen Andrew, Julie Hall for Whitsunday, and other One Nation candidates contesting seats in the upcoming Queensland election in October.

We are keen to hear your concerns and for you to be a part of the solution to help build a safer and better community! See you there.

Dining in? Please book meals direct with the Reef Gateway Hotel on (07) 3051 7626

Help us keep track of attendance by RSVPing here: https://qld.onenation.org.au/community-forum-on-cost-of-living-with-julie-hall

Read more about Julie Hall here: https://qld.onenation.org.au/julie-hall

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Community Forum in Kilcoy

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I will be joining Adam Maslen, your Candidate for Nanango, to listen to your concerns on the proposed Battery Storage Proposal in Hazeldean.

I am also keen to hear any other concerns you and your community may have.

Help us keep track of attendance by RSVPing here: https://qld.onenation.org.au/hazeldean-battery-proposal

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Community Forum in Rockhampton

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I will be joining David Bond, our Candidate for Rockhampton, to listen to your concerns on the issues that matter to you, your family and your community.

Be a part of the solution to help build a safer and better community! See you there.

Dining in? Please book meals direct with the Rocky Sports Club on  (07) 4807 6519

Help us keep track of attendance by RSVPing here: https://qld.onenation.org.au/community-forum-youth-crime

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The Greens’ Hypocrisy Exposed

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In their recent Motion, the Greens criticised property investors. Perhaps they should heed the saying: “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” or in this case, “Those with housing portfolios shouldn’t throw Senate motions.”

Greens’ Senators Faruqi and McKim reportedly own four properties each, with Senator Faruqi even clearing native trees in koala habitats to build luxury rentals in Port Macquarie. It seems ironic that these Greens, who are themselves property investors, proclaim themselves champions of both property investor critics and koala conservation. The old saying seems true: every accusation is actually a confession.

In well-balanced housing markets, investors play an important part in housing supply. Excessive immigration, however, under successive governments has devastated the Australian dream of home ownership. 547,000 immigrants arrived in 2023 alone, creating a shortfall of 120,000 homes just to accommodate them, not including natural population growth.

One Nation will cut immigration, boost home construction and prioritise Australians first—no more immigrants until every Australian can afford a roof over their head. To assist first home buyers, One Nation proposes 5% fixed-rate mortgages that would save over $800 per month.

It’s time to put Australians first and ensure everyday Australians have a fair shot at home ownership.

Transcript

When will this government actually care about Australians? For most people, the Australian dream of buying a home is dead. This government would rather have people as housing slaves: either debt slaves to the banking cartel, with unaffordable mortgages, or rent slaves, with overseas investment funds like BlackRock and Vanguard as landlords.  

In their motion, the Greens criticise property investors. Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, or, rather, those with housing portfolios shouldn’t throw Senate motions. Greens Senators Faruqi and McKim reportedly each own four properties. Remember Senator Faruqi’s native tree clearing in koala habitat to build luxury rentals in Port Macquarie. Yet the Greens property investors say they’re the enemies of property investors and the saviours of koalas. The old saying seems true: every accusation is actually a confession.  

I’ve got nothing against property investors. In well-balanced housing markets, investors play an important part in housing supply, yet successive governments pushing record immigration destroyed the dream of owning a home in Australia. In 2023 alone, 547,000 immigrants arrived. For arrivals alone, we were short 120,000 homes. That’s not counting the housing shortfall for natural population growth. The extraordinary demand for housing for new arrivals must be turned off. One Nation is the only party that can be trusted to make the tough decisions on cutting immigration to reduce housing demand, getting more houses built and putting Australians first—no more immigrants until Australians can afford a roof over their head. Send some visa holders back to their countries until house construction catches up. Our building codes are distorted with overly complicated nonsense to comply with the United Nations and World Economic Forum demands. That stops our tradies building more houses. We’ll get rid of it. We’ll bring the banking cartel into line.  

For first home buyers, One Nation’s five per cent fixed mortgages will be more than $800 a month cheaper. To get people into their own homes, put Australians first.  

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Save The Date Maryborough

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Friday, 21 June 2024: Join me and your One Nation candidate, small business woman and community leader, Taryn Gillard.

Secure your spot: ttps://www.trybooking.com/CSTZV

Friday, 21 June 2024

1pm to 3 pm

La Familia Restaurant

8, 373 Kent Street

Maryborough

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