Shadow treasurer slams Help to Buy, pushes super for housing

Speaking on the Mortgage and Finance Leader podcast, shadow treasurer Angus Taylor outlined his thoughts on housing affordability crisis and what government is doing to address it.

The Liberal politician and member for Hume said he opposed the government’s Help to Buy scheme, with a dissenting report to the Senate economics legislation committee inquiry recently, showing that the Coalition believed the shared equity scheme was “utterly underwhelming” and akin to “shuffling deck chairs as the Titanic sinks.”

Moreover, the dissenting report noted that the scheme largely replicates state government shared equity schemes that already exist and which have largely been relatively unpopular. For example, 94 per cent of places in the virtually identical NSW scheme (Shared Equity Home Buyer Helper) were still unused as of March 2024.

Speaking on the podcast, Taylor elaborated on why he opposed the government’s shared equity scheme: “We want to see more home ownership by Australians, not more government ownership of homes. It’s pretty simple.

“You know, I’ve long believed that a central part of the Australian aspiration is to own your own home, typically with a backyard or with a bit of space. I mean, some are happy to be in apartments, but generally speaking, Australians have preferred to have a freestanding home. And that’s a hugely important part of the Australian dream.”

Taylor outlined that ”a big part of the Australian progression as you grow up and leave uni and get a job or whatever it is, you get a trade, you buy yourself a home and you grow a family”.

“So we want to see more of that,” he said.

“Labor’s answer to that seems to be: The government’s going to own at least part of your home, or the government’s going to build homes and rent them out or the industry super funds are going to build more homes and rent them out to you.

“That’s not the answer. We want to have genuine home ownership.”

Instead, Taylor flagged that the Liberal Party was committed to its policy (announced before the last federal election) to enable Australians to use “some of [their] superannuation to go into [their] home for first home buyers”. (Indeed, a Senate inquiry report into retirement outcomes has been pushed back a full year to examine the role home ownership plays in Australians’ post-work phase of life, including the use of super to purchase housing).

“The starting point is an incredibly important principle, which is that superannuation is Australians’ money, not the government’s money,” he said.

“Labor, including the Treasury, often talk about superannuation as though it’s their money to be spent on their pet projects. No, this is Australians’ money. They should be free to choose how to invest it.

“It’s there for investment, for a good retirement. And we’ve got to make sure that we give them those options and make those options as broad as possible. But it’s not for the government to tell people how to invest. It’s for them to work that out with a good adviser.

“It’s a bizarre situation, isn’t it, where my self-managed super fund can invest in anybody’s home except my own. It’s just almost weird. But that’s what Labor wants.

“We think owning your home is a crucial part of it.”

On the Mortgage and Finance Leader podcast, Taylor added that he also believed the undersupply of housing also needed to be looked at to improve housing affordability, particularly given the “very high immigration rate”: “We’re seeing real declines in the investment in infrastructure and that’s something that needs to be addressed.”

“We’ve had almost just over a million new adults in Australia since Labor came to power in the last couple of years, and 250,000 homes [built]. So that’s about half the number of homes you actually need. It’s not enough for that immigration rate.

“While, as Liberals, we’re great believers in a sensible skilled immigration program, those numbers are just stunning; more than double of what they averaged in our time in government. So it’s made home ownership, I think, a whole lot harder.”

You can find out more from shadow treasurer Angus Taylor and his thoughts on how the financial services and advice industry is faring, the economy, and taxing unrealised capital gains on superannuation in the Mortgage and Finance Leader podcast, below:

[Related: Is Help to Buy just ‘shuffling deck chairs as the Titanic sinks’?]