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The Debt Trap: Labor Government’s Housing Mirage

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I have expressed grave concerns that we are signing our young Australians up to be “debt slaves” to the big banks. It’s one thing to offer a “leg up” onto the property ladder, but it’s another thing entirely to push them into a lifetime of unmanageable debt.

During my questioning of Housing Australia, I pointed out a massive flaw in how they report their success. The department “brags” about a low default rate — only 11 claims out of 250,000 — yet admit that they stop tracking borrowers the second they refinance or exit the scheme. Think about that. If the families under the most financial stress are the ones forced to refinance or leave, they vanish from the government’s data. We’re essentially flying blind, ignoring the very people who might be “going backwards.”

I’ve said it before on the Senate floor, and I’ll say it again: this scheme is “smoke and mirrors.” Pumping more low-deposit buyers into a market where there aren’t enough houses to go around, the government is just upping the price of entry-level homes. This completely ignores the root of the problem—supply, caused by mass immigration. We’re watching house prices increase and the very people this was meant for— the younger Aussies — can’t even afford the ‘starter’ homes.

I’m not going to let this rest. We need to see the real numbers, not just the cherry-picked stats that make the government look good.

Australians deserve to know if their “dream home” is actually a debt trap.

— Senate Estimates | December 2025

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: I’ll try to be brief. I refer to data on how people who are taking on these 95 per cent mortgages are actually faring, because I have grave concerns that the government is just signing up first home buyers to be debt slaves to the banks. Firstly, does Housing Australia track participants who later refinance or discharge their lower deposit guaranteed loans with a different lender?

Mr Rimmer: I’ll pass that question to Mr Langford in a minute. The five per cent deposit scheme has been in place for five years now. Over 250,000 guarantees have been issued. Only 11 of those 250,000 have been paid, at a total cost of about $500,000, a relatively small amount of payment per claim. Out of all 250,000 Australians who were supported into purchasing a house through this program, 11 have fallen into very significant arrears.

Senator ROBERTS: If you don’t track participants who later refinance, how do you avoid a survivorship bias in your arrears metrics if the borrowers most at risk of stress are those who refinance?

Mr Langford: We only have a relationship with the borrower until the point they exit the scheme. There is no ability for us to track what happens to them beyond that.

Senator Ayres: For everybody who enters the scheme, it’s their first home. It’s not unusual for somebody to refinance. They have their foot on the ladder, so they might go and buy a larger home, a different home, a home in a different country town or whatever it is. If you are apprehensive that there might be something in addition to the 11 out of 250,000 people experiencing difficulty, everybody who has a mortgage, every Australian has challenges from time to time meeting their mortgage—

Senator ROBERTS: We certainly do.

Senator Ayres: That’s right. These people are no different from everybody else. It’s just that they’ve got a leg up because they fit the criteria of the scheme. Of course, we want them to have that first step on the ladder, to grow—to grow families and to grow in opportunity. That’s a good thing.

Senator ROBERTS: My concern is if we’re tracking to see whether they’re getting a leg up or a push down. That’s what I want to track.

Senator Ayres: The evidence in this scheme is that—

Senator ROBERTS: I’m trying to go through this quickly for the sake of everyone. Could you please provide on notice counts by year since 2020 of scheme backed loans refinanced or discharged?

Mr Rimmer: We’ll take on notice what information we have that could be useful to answer that question.

Senator ROBERTS: And where possible, with any available reason as to what they’re doing?

Senator Ayres: Yes, they’ll do their best to provide that to you.

Senator ROBERTS: That’s all we can ask for.

Senator Ayres: But don’t take it from that those are bad outcomes. Those are overwhelmingly good outcomes.

Senator ROBERTS: My office and I want to get the data to understand this.

Senator Ayres: We’ll do our best to provide what can be provided.

Senator ROBERTS: Your reports show the share of loans ‘in advance/on schedule/90-day plus arrears’. But you explicitly state you do not receive participants’ current income or valuation data and rely on lender hardship programs. Why is Housing Australia not collecting borrower-level hardship outcomes?

Mr Langford: In the way that the scheme’s designed the relationship is between the borrower and the bank. We are providing a guarantee ultimately to the lender. For a range of reasons, including privacy, we don’t get updated information from the applicants.

Ms Jarman: Further to that, each month we do get from the lenders the actual number of borrowers under the scheme in 90-day-plus arrears or in hardship.

Senator ROBERTS: Can you table or give me on notice the number of scheme participants flagged as in hardship by panel lenders by state and lender?

Ms Jarman: Yes. I don’t have the state breakdown here. I do have the overall number. We can take the state breakdown on notice.

Senator ROBERTS: And the resolution number? I don’t expect you to have the data here. How many scheme backed loans have progressed from arrears to default and resulted in a Commonwealth guarantee call?

Ms Jarman: Some 11 claims have been paid under the scheme since its start in 2020.

Senator ROBERTS: Could you provide the number and value of claims against the guarantee by financial year, and the cohort in terms of which guarantee scheme they are and geography?

Ms Jarman: Yes, we have that data.

Senator ROBERTS: You’ve previously told me that roughly 61.5 per cent of scheme loans are ahead, 38.4 per cent on time and 0.1 per cent in 90-day-plus arrears at a point in time. Do you have an update on those figures?

Ms Jarman: We do. As at the end of October, the in-advance number is 75 per cent of all loans, the on schedule is 23 per cent, the arrears number is 0.6, and the hardship number is 0.8.

Senator ROBERTS: What’s the cohort composition behind those figures—loan age, borrower, income band?

Ms Jarman: I don’t have that breakdown in front of me.

Senator ROBERTS: Can we get that on notice?

Ms Jarman: Yes, we could provide further detail there.

Senator ROBERTS: Debt-to-income and loan-to-value at origination versus latest?

Senator Ayres: Just at an aggregate level.

Senator ROBERTS: Per year.

Mr Langford: Do you mean per year of origination?

Senator ROBERTS: Yes.

Mr Langford: We’ll do our best to provide what information we have on notice.

Senator ROBERTS: Without longitudinal borrower data, these metrics really are incomplete. Can you provide distribution tables for scheme borrowers by debt-to-income bands, loan-to-value ratio bands and income quartiles at origination and latest available?

Ms Jarman: We can take that on notice.

Senator ROBERTS: The Reserve Bank finds that highly leveraged borrowers are most likely to fall into arrears in the current environment. Of your five per cent deposit borrowers, how many are in the bottom income quartile? That’s the one that the RBA refers to as going backwards.

Mr Rimmer: I’m sure Housing Australia will do their best to find that. My understanding is that the arrears rate for loans under this scheme is lower than the arrears rates in the market as a whole. My colleagues may wish to correct that if it’s wrong.

Ms Jarman: That’s correct. When we speak with our panel lenders, the feedback that they provide is that with the cohort of borrowers under the scheme the arrears performance is equivalent, if not favourable, to their other borrower cohorts.

Senator ROBERTS: We’d like to see that in the data.

Senator Ayres: We’ll certainly provide that, but that’s the evidence that’s been given time after time on this question and it fits with our experience. Working people are very disciplined about meeting their mortgage commitments.

Senator ROBERTS: They certainly have good values.

Senator Ayres: And that’s what’s going on here. That is a very good story, and an improvement on the last set of figures; 75 per cent of Australians are ahead as a result of this scheme. That’s a very good outcome.

Senator ROBERTS: What proportion of arrears and defaults sit in the going backwards quartile?

Ms Jarman: Sorry. What do you mean by the ‘going backwards’ quartile?

Senator ROBERTS: The bottom income quartile.

Ms Jarman: I don’t have any arrears data broken down by borrower cohort in front of me.

Mr Langford: If there’s a range of these statistical matters that you’re interested in, we’d be very happy to receive those and see what we can provide.

Senator ROBERTS: I’ll put them in writing for you.

Mr Langford: That would be much appreciated.

Senator ROBERTS: Have you run stress tests for the guarantee book to estimate how many will go from on time to arrears or default by quartile and debt-to-income or loan-to-value ratio bands?

Ms Jarman: Yes, every year.

Senator ROBERTS: Could we get that?

Ms Jarman: Yes, you can.

Senator ROBERTS: Once a participant refinances or exits, does Housing Australia have any visibility of their subsequent hardship or default outcomes?

Ms Jarman: No, we don’t.

Senator ROBERTS: How can parliament be confident that public reporting is not undercounting stress by removing the most vulnerable borrowers from your data?

Senator Ayres: You can’t refinance if you’re in hardship, right? That’s not a realistic thing to happen. If somebody can’t meet their obligations, they won’t get refinanced; 11 people haven’t met their obligations out of the 250,000. If they purchase a new home, they’re not doing it under the scheme, they’re doing it using the improved equity. People point to bad outcomes out of house prices going up, but there are good outcomes. House prices lift, they get increased equity, they get up the next step on the housing ladder, and then they’re out of the scheme. That’s a good thing. There’s no downside to either of those propositions. We’ll provide what we can. I understand the point you’re making.

Senator ROBERTS: Could you please provide counts on notice of scheme loans exited via refinance and any post-exit arrears or default?

Ms Jarman: We can provide the discharge reason, but I can’t provide information once they’ve discharged. I don’t have visibility of that from the lenders.

Senator ROBERTS: You can’t get it from the lenders?

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Labor and Liberals Have Failed Our Youth

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A few weeks ago, I attended the One Nation branch launch in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, where 140 everyday Australians had plenty they wanted to discuss with me. I was delighted to see so many young people in attendance, yet heartbroken by the lack of housing opportunities they’ve endured under Liberal and Labor governments.

One Nation will turn the useless Housing Future Fund into a low-deposit mortgage fund for young Australians, offering low-interest, fixed-rate mortgages for up to 30 years. We’ll bridge the deposit gap by enabling Australians to use their own super accounts to take a share in their home—not their super fund, but their personal super account, which will continue to grow as the value of the home increases. This policy will be as ineffective as the ALP’s unless housing prices stop rising through demand management.

One Nation will reduce housing demand by deporting 200,000 people who have deliberately exploited our immigration system, making room for young Australians to enter the housing market.

One Nation will restore opportunity for our young.

Transcript

Last week, I attended the One Nation branch launch in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, where 140 everyday Australians had a lot they wanted to talk about with me. I was delighted to see so many young people attending, yet heartbroken at the loss of opportunity they’ve suffered under Liberal and Labor governments. One Nation’s housing policy will make a major difference to the lives of all young Australians. We’ll turn the useless housing future fund into a low-deposit mortgage fund for young Australians, offering low-interest fixed-rate mortgages for up to 30 years. We’ll allow HECS-holders to roll their HECS loan into their home loan, reducing their combined repayments and increasing their borrowing ability. We’ll overcome the deposit gap, allowing Australians to use their own super account to take a share in their home—not their super fund, but their own super account, which will continue to grow as the value of the home grows. We’ll limit negative gearing to two homes. These policies are only half of One Nation’s solution. 

As a result of the Albanese government’s low-deposit scheme making the housing shortage worse, home prices have gone up 6 per cent—a stupid mistake. Offering incentives to help young people own their own homes increases demand, forces up prices and leaves young people worse off than before the government helped. The truth is we’re building homes faster than any other country in the world. 

Managing demand must include a review of who’s buying all these homes. We will remigrate 200,000 people who deliberately broke their visa conditions, who completed their study and simply stayed here or who lodged spurious asylum claims. Send them home. Deport them. They’re here illegally, taking up the beds of Australians. One Nation’s balanced housing policy will benefit renters and homebuyers, stabilise the housing market and safeguard the family home nest egg in retirement. It will give young people, young families, a fair go—that’s what we need. Bring it back. 

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Affordable Homes for Australians, Not Foreign Corporations

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Hundreds of thousands of Aussies are homeless. Rents have skyrocketed — up 44% in just five years, adding over $10,000 a year to the average rental bill. House prices are surging as well, pricing homes out of reach of young Australians, who now need an annual salary of $220,000 to afford a home.

The Government lies and claims that this is about supply, yet Australia is building more homes per capita than any other country in the world. The real issue is demand. Right now, there are 4.7 million non-citizen visa holders in Australia. Is mum and dad with one investment property causing this crisis? Of course not. Mass migration is outstripping supply, and big business is profiting — the Big Four banks made $30 billion in profit last year. Every new mortgage adds $750 a month to their profit, or about $200,000 over the life of a loan.

Foreign corporate landlords are another threat. Backed by giants like BlackRock and Vanguard, they’re gouging rents and siphoning profits overseas – after using every tax trick in the book to avoid paying tax. Labor and the Greens even gave these corporations a 15% tax cut. One Nation opposed it because we stand for Australians, not foreign investors.

That’s why One Nation has the most comprehensive housing plan of any party: end mass migration, ban foreign ownership permanently, introduce 30-year fixed-rate people’s mortgages, allow super to help with deposits, cut GST on building materials, overhaul costly building code changes and limit negative gearing to a maximum of two properties.

One Nation will make housing affordable again and protect Australians from predatory practices. Only One Nation has a real plan to fix this crisis.

Transcript

Australia has hundreds of thousands of people who are homeless. Rents are skyrocketing. They are up by 44 per cent in just the last five years. That’s $10,500 a year on top of the average rental bill. House prices in the capital of Queensland increased 1.8 per cent in just one month—a 22 per cent annual pace. Australians have been lied to and told this is only about supply. They can get away with this because no-one tells Australia how bad demand is. With 1.8 million permanent visa holders and 2.9 million temporary visa holders, we currently have 4.7 million non-citizen visa holders in this country. Is mum and dad having one investment property really causing the housing crisis? Come on. Or is having 4.7 million visa holders in the country outstripping supply? Running this program of mass migration is incredibly profitable for big business, especially our big four banks. This week, one of those banks, Westpac, posted a $7 billion profit. 

There are some abusers of negative gearing. It could do with some tweaking. On the whole, however, it’s a minor impact in the scheme of supply and demand. There’s a far bigger problem than mum-and-dad landlords with one house negatively geared. There’s a growing and worrying acceptance of foreign, corporate landlords in Australia. These predatory multinational corporations are backed by investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and First State. They only have one goal, which is to extract as much money as possible from the Australian population through gouged rents and siphon those profits out of the country tax free. 

Last year, the Greens joined with the Labor government to give these foreign, corporate landlords a 15 per cent tax cut on the profits they’re sending overseas with the build to rent act. One Nation stood strong on principle and opposed handing foreign corporations a 15 per cent tax break. We couldn’t believe it. The fact is, Australia is still in a full-blown housing crisis. It’s an assault from all sides on nearly every aspect of supply and demand. One Nation took to the election the most comprehensive policy to fix the housing crisis of any party. Many Australians agreed, which is part of the reason why we doubled our number of senators. 

Here’s our comprehensive plan on housing. End the mass migration program, which places huge strain on housing while only 0.6 per cent of migrants are building workers. We will establish people’s mortgages—30-year, fixed interest rate mortgages issued by the government, similar to government bonds and replacing the government’s Housing Australia Future Fund. We will allow people with HECS debts to roll their debts into their people’s mortgage, allowing them to get into a home loan that the banks would never give them, at a cheaper rate. We will ban foreign purchases and foreign ownership of Australian housing and farmland. The Liberals and Labor have talked about a two-year pause on foreign buyers of new houses. Come on; be fair dinkum! One Nation will extend that to new and existing houses, making the ban permanent while forcing current foreign owners to sell to an Australian within two years. We will implement a GST moratorium on building materials, cutting 10 per cent off the materials cost of building a home. We will conduct a root-and-branch gutting of the National Construction Code, especially changes that force every single new home to be completely NDIS wheelchair compliant, adding an estimated $50,000 to the cost of building each home. We will allow a person’s superannuation account to invest in their home, closing the deposit gap while protecting their superannuation. We will boost the Australian timber industry to make housing materials as cheap as possible. And we will deport—remigrate—200,000 people. 

One Nation’s comprehensive plan takes care of all aspects of supply, demand, financing and cost. Only One Nation has a comprehensive housing plan. 

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Albanese Sides with Billionaires—Farmers Fight Back

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Recently in Parliament, Prime Minister Albanese tried to ridicule me, saying “Senator Roberts thinks that build to rent is part of the World Economic Forum’s agenda”‘ before calling it ‘a conspiracy theory. It reminded me of Gandhi’s quote: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

After One Nation doubled our Senate representation, it seems the PM has moved from ignoring to ridiculing — and in doing so, he engaged in misinformation.

Let’s be clear: the WEF’s push to end single-family homeownership is real. Their “you’ll own nothing and be happy” slogan isn’t a conspiracy—it’s a stated goal. The Albanese government’s nature-positive plan borrows heavily from WEF’s SUB (sustainable urban policy), after meeting with the new WEF co-chair Larry Fink of BlackRock.

Everyday Australians—especially our hardworking farmers—are being ignored while billionaires get the PM’s attention. No wonder he was booed at the Bendigo bush summit and chased out of town by farmers on tractors.

Labor is no longer the party of the worker. It’s the party of predatory billionaires destroying our country for profit, power and control. We’re going to need more tractors.

Transcript

There’s a quote from Gandhi which reads: ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.’ I was reminded of that quote last Thursday when Prime Minister Albanese said of me in the House of Representatives: ‘Senator Roberts thinks that build to rent is part of the World Economic Forum’s agenda’—cue the spooky music— before calling this ‘a conspiracy theory’. Now, I can understand, after One Nation doubled our senators in the last election, why the Prime Minister would feel the need to move from ignore to ridicule. In trying to engage in ridicule, the Prime Minister only managed to engage in misinformation.  

The truth is the World Economic Forum opinion leader, who originated their mission statement ‘You’ll own nothing and be happy’, is the same person who used the stage at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos to call for an end to single-family homeownership. Danish politician Ida Auken advanced his idea as part of the West’s sustainable urban policy, or SUB—as in subhuman. SUB is where the Albanese government took the name and many elements of its nature-positive plan, after meeting with the new World Economic Forum co-chair, BlackRock’s Larry Fink. Our Prime Minister should really be better informed on WEF’s evil agenda—or perhaps he is informed.  

One thing’s clear: the world’s predatory billionaires have no trouble getting time with our Prime Minister. The people who can’t are everyday Australians, including our hardworking farmers who put food on our table and who we need more than ever to feed the millions of new Labor arrivals—our farmers who contributed $72 billion in exports last year to feed and clothe the world. No wonder the Prime Minister was booed and heckled while on stage at last week’s Bendigo bush summit and then filmed being chased out of town in the company of farmers on tractors.  

Labor is no longer the party of the worker. It’s the party of predatory billionaires destroying our country for profit, power and control. We’re going to need more tractors.  

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One Nation’s Plan for Economic Growth and Self-Reliance

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This budget is a mockery of governance that seeks to make Australians reliant on government handouts. It ensures that power is no longer vested in ‘We The People,’ instead it’s in ‘Them the Bureaucracy.’

The world has been here many times before and clearly, Treasurer Chalmers has failed to study history. The more the government borrows—$44 billion in this budget—the less private enterprise has available to invest and grow the economy for all who are here. The more the government spends, the less is available for private enterprise to create real jobs, making everyone more reliant on the government.

One Nation is offering the Australian people a comprehensive economic plan to restore wealth and opportunity for every Australian. One Nation will immediately return $40 billion into the pockets of everyday Australians, funded through savings of $90 billion. This plan includes paying off an additional $30 billion a year from our national debt and investing $20 billion a year for 10 years in infrastructure to grow our economy. In my budget reply, I explain how this will be achieved.

Transcript

This budget that we’ve just had delivered is a mockery of governance that seeks to make Australians reliant on government handouts, ensuring power is no longer vested in us, the people, but instead is vested in them, the bureaucracy. The world has been here many times before, and clearly Treasurer Chalmers has failed to study history. The more government borrows—$44 billion in this budget—the less private enterprise has available to invest and grow the economy for all who are here. And there are too many here: five million new arrivals in the last 10 years—five million. There have been 2½ million under this Labor government in just the last three years. This is the major reason for the cost-of-living and housing catastrophe. The more the government spends, the less is available for private enterprise to create real, productive jobs and the more reliant everyone becomes on the government. 

One Nation is offering the Australian people a comprehensive economic plan to restore wealth and opportunity for every Australian. One Nation will immediately return $40 billion into the pockets of everyday Australians, funded through savings of $90 billion, which will also enable us to pay off an additional $30 billion from our national debt and invest $20 billion a year for 10 years in the infrastructure to grow our economy. Here’s how we’ll be putting more money in people’s pockets—more money in your pocket. No. 1 is reducing electricity prices by 20 per cent to save $6 billion. Currently the system of priority dispatch turns coal-fired power stations off during the day to make room for solar and wind. Operating a coal plant this way causes damage which shows up in much higher maintenance costs and breakdowns, increasing the price of coal fired electricity. One Nation will turn priority dispatch around and run coal plants to at least 80 per cent capacity 24/7. We expect this power will be sold into the grid at around $55 per kilowatt hour, compared to the average price last quarter across all types of power of $120 per kilowatt hour. That’s less than half of what it has been. This should reduce power prices by 20 per cent immediately, and, over time, as we build new coal plants, it should cut power prices by 50 per cent. The government pays for the electricity it uses, so this will reduce the government’s electricity costs by $3 billion and save consumers and businesses $6 billion a year. That’s more money in your pocket. 

No. 2 is income splitting to save $8 billion. One Nation will introduce income splitting, allowing a couple with at least one dependent child to split their income between both partners. If there’s only one breadwinner earning the average wage, the family will save $9,500 a year in tax. That’s $9,500 that stays in your pocket. This measure will cost $8 billion a year, offset in part from tax on the resulting higher economic activity. And we expect more parents to be able to afford to stay home and mind their children, reducing government subsidised childcare. 

No. 3 is $13 billion a year in excise cuts. One Nation will cut the fuel excise by 26 cents a litre for three years and then review it to see if it continues. The ACCC monitor fuel prices daily, and I’m confident the reduction will be passed on to consumers. Fuel is an input cost right across the economy. Lowering fuel prices lowers commuting costs for consumers and transport costs across the economy, including for groceries, saving consumers and industry $8 billion a year. That’s more money in your pocket. We will remove the GST on insurance policies, saving consumers $3 billion a year. And we will remove the excise on alcohol sold in hospitality venues. This will save consumers more than $1 billion a year. That’s more money in your pocket. This policy is not about drinking; it’s about supporting hospitality venues and offering Australians a safe place to drink in a social environment—a community. 

No. 4 is increased funding for the ACCC. In February One Nation called for an increase in funding for the ACCC to enable a thorough investigation of supermarkets, airlines and insurance companies for profiteering and dishonest business practices. I note that Treasurer Chalmers tonight in the budget has required the ACCC to spend $38 million on policing supermarkets, which will be hard after he cut the ACCC’s budget by $48 million. One Nation will provide whatever it takes to investigate and prosecute illegal behaviour from supermarkets, airlines and insurance companies. Prices must come down, and profit margins should not be excessive in these essential industries. 

No. 5 is increasing Medicare funding by $3 billion a year. One Nation will prosecute fraud in the Medicare and PBS system, which the government knows is happening yet does not have the courage to solve. We will impose longer wait times before new arrivals can access Medicare and review drugs being offered under the PBS that received emergency-use authorisation during COVID. 

This $40 billion of more money in your pocket will be paid for with the following spending cuts to cut government waste. We will abolish net zero and climate change measures. One Nation will withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto protocol and the Paris Agreement. We will end net zero. We will abolish the department of climate change and their agencies, schemes and boondoggles. Existing solar and wind contracts will be honoured. No new subsidies will occur. Today’s budget reveals that the whole climate scam costs the government $35 billion a year. The cost to the private sector is anywhere from $1 trillion to $2 trillion depending on who’s doing the numbers. This is a massive cost on Australian households that One Nation will abolish. 

One Nation will return the NDIS to its original purpose, helping the severely disabled, and introduce means testing, saving $20 billion a year and improving care. 

We will withdraw from the World Health Organization and ban the World Economic Forum. For too long Australia has been held hostage to unelected, unaccountable, corrupt foreign bureaucrats at the World Health Organization and predatory billionaires operating their puppet organisation, the World Economic Forum. It’s a cabal which, during COVID, transferred $5 trillion from everyday citizens into their own pockets. One Nation will withdraw from the UN World Health Organization and will only provide cooperation where we believe it will assist in world health. We will withdraw from the World Economic Forum and the World Bank, saving around $1 billion a year in contributions, administration and in the costs of implementing policies such as One Health, which can only be described as anti-human.  

We will end mass immigration. There are 75,000 people in Australia illegally, right now, mostly with expired visas. One Nation will deport them all. There are 1.1 million people here with student related visas, which are students and their families, who can now accompany students. Australia only has 480,000 student places, so clearly there are people who are rorting the system, at our cost. One Nation will send home any student and their family who is not following the terms of their visa, which are to study and to complete their course. 

One Nation’s policy will initially result in a negative net immigration of 90,000 a year, meaning more people will leave than enter, because with around 220,000 departures a year we will only allow 130,000 people a year to enter. Ninety thousand more people will leave than enter. This will put downward pressure on the cost of housing and free up homes for Australians who are currently living in tents or who are underhoused. Unlike under Liberal and Labor policies, all people who enter will be skilled.  

Education is a state responsibility. Yet we have federal bureaucrats telling state bureaucrats telling regional bureaucrats telling headmasters telling teachers what to teach—too many mouths to feed along the way and harming educational outcomes. The Program for International Student Assessment, PISA, is an OECD program which assesses reading, mathematics and science literacy of 15-year-old students. Australia is not in the top 10 nations, and our latest ranking shows a score below the OECD average. We will abolish the federal Department of Education, including the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority and NAPLAN, saving $2 billion a year, and return education to the states in accordance with the federal constitution.  

Last year the Allianz insurance company found Australian businesses were spending $27 billion on DEI and related mental health measures in 2024-25. While One Nation supports legitimate mental health concerns, there’s clearly a significant cost involved in DEI. If half of this $27 billion is for DEI, and the government is a quarter of that, then DEI is costing taxpayers $3 billion a year and adding $10 billion a year to the cost of goods and services in Australia. One Nation will abolish woke and bank these savings for taxpayers and the Australian public.  

Next, One Nation will end foreign multinational gas companies rorting the natural gas royalties. We will change from where royalties are levied from profits and switch to point of production—that makes perfect sense—and create a domestic gas reserve, raising up to a $13 billion a year from offshore sales.  

We will reduce foreign aid, saving $3 billion a year, with the remaining aid being targeted to those in need instead of being a slush fund for political influence.  

We will abolish the white and black Aboriginal industry. As already announced, we will replace the national Indigenous grants agency, the Aboriginal units across every department and agency and associated programs and boondoggles. We will replace that parasitic mess with direct grants and essential remote infrastructure based on need not race, saving $12½ billion and getting better care to the Aboriginals in the community.  

Taken together, these savings will total $90 billion a year, with $40 billion going back to taxpayers and $20 billion going to infrastructure, which I discussed this afternoon. One Nation’s plan is a real economic plan, designed to lower the cost of living while expanding the economy and restoring wealth and opportunity for all Australians. 

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One Nation Plan: Two-Year Grace Period for Non-Citizen Property Owners

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Under the One Nation plan, anyone that owns residential property yet isn’t an Australian citizen or permanent resident, will be given two years to sell their property back to an Australian. The two-year grace period will ensure there isn’t a flood of properties onto the housing market.

Let’s get Australians into affordable houses while keeping the market sound.

Transcript

Australians are rightly stunned and confused. Why are foreigners, people from other countries, allowed to buy real estate while Australians are made homeless and sleep on the street? China dominates foreign purchases of Australian real estate, snapping up the most of any country in the world. China snaps up houses and farmland across our country, yet Australians are banned from buying a house in China. Add to that Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, the United States and the United Kingdom. The list of countries that grab Australian real estate goes on and on. 

Australians are suffering through a housing crisis, a catastrophe. The average mortgage size has never been higher, with expensive repayments crushing household budgets. A house in Brisbane used to cost three times the average income. Now it’s 10 times. This combination of high house prices and high interest rates means the average Australian is paying more of their wage on mortgage repayments than a homeowner would in 1990, when the Reserve Bank of Australia’s cash rate was at 17 per cent. I’ll say that again. As a proportion of income, mortgages are more expensive today than when the RBA had rates at 17 per cent. 

The rental market in Australia is broken. Vacancy rates, a good measure of whether it’s even possible for people to find a rental, have been at crisis levels for years. The average rent for a house in Brisbane has gone from $467 a week in 2020 to $740. For a unit in Brisbane, rent has gone up from $381 to $587 in the same period, since 2020. What’s the government’s response to the hurt Australians are feeling trying to get into a house? Labor will keep letting foreigners buy residential real estate. 

While the Liberals signal they might do something about it, their proposal doesn’t go far enough. Peter Dutton doesn’t want to stop foreign ownership of real estate. He wants foreigners to be back here buying up the farm in two years. The Liberals’ temporary pause is not good enough. Australia needs a complete ban on foreigners owning houses in this country. The Liberals won’t do anything about the houses that are foreign owned right now—they can keep them. In 2017, ANZ estimated that foreigners owned up to 400,000 Australian homes. That’s enough for a million Australians to live in, and that number of homes can only have increased since then. 

One Nation would implement a true ban on foreign ownership. Under our plan, anyone that owns residential property yet isn’t an Australian citizen or permanent resident will be given two years to sell their property back to an Australian. The two-year grace period will ensure there isn’t a flood of properties onto the housing market. Let’s get Australians into affordable houses while keeping the market sound. When the Liberals would be opening back up purchases for foreigners, One Nation would be completing the greatest transfer of houses out of foreign hands and into Australian hands in history. In this debate, we will hear Labor senators get up and claim that foreign ownership is less than one per cent. We’ll hear them claim it’s foreign investment. That’s a lie. It’s ownership. And their numbers aren’t true. 

In that 2017 report I mentioned, ANZ said, based on Foreign Investment Review Board data, foreigners had purchased an estimated 25 to 35 per cent of new Queensland homes. Later in 2017, the government introduced a new annual vacancy fee for foreign owners of residential properties. You won’t believe this next coincidence. After the government started charging a fee on foreign owners, the number of foreign owners declaring themselves to the government dropped from between 25 and 35 per cent to one per cent. It was just like magic! When NAB asked real estate agents directly how many foreigners they were selling to, the percentages were in the double digits. That’s more than 10 per cent. We know that. It’s a fact. The New South Wales government has even recorded foreign purchases at more than double what the federal Labor government claims they are. It doesn’t matter what the real number is anyway. One foreign purchase is one too many while Australian families are sleeping on the street. 

Foreign ownership is one part of the housing puzzle. One Nation has comprehensive solutions to all of the levers we need to pull to get Australians into affordable houses. These including pausing immigration to reduce demand, abolishing GST on building materials, establishing five per cent fixed rate mortgages, enabling HECS debtors to get a loan and deporting 75,000 illegal residents now. 

On foreign purchases and ownership, we are clear. Only One Nation will implement a real, permanent ban on foreign purchases. Only One Nation will force foreign owners to sell their houses to Australians. Only One Nation will extend the ban on foreign ownership to our valuable farmland, to protect our ability to feed Australians first. Only One Nation can be trusted to truly put Australians first.

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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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Net Zero Policies Plays a Part in High Inflation

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The Greens’ and Labor’s net zero policies are a large part of why we have high inflation. By replacing low cost coal with expensive industrial wind and solar, power prices rise, which then drives up prices across the board.

The Motion from Greens’ Senator McKim to introduce price controls to combat inflation is an example of “feel good” politics. Price controls often lead to companies withdrawing from the supply chain, leading to inevitable shortages and black markets.

In what was once the “lucky country,” this would be a tragedy!

Transcript

Inflation is out of control across the Australian economy. It’s disgraceful though for the Greens to leverage this human disaster to advance their green communist ideology. Advocating price controls is the economics of wishful thinking—a victory of feelings over facts, common sense, historical experience and basic economics. Price controls don’t work. They have never worked and will never work, and they make things worse. 

The price of an item is not some magical creature with a life of its own that government can control. Price is an outcome of other factors—material costs, input costs and retailer margins, to name a few. In recent times, the Greens have talked about the lack of competition in retailing, especially in food retailing, but they have missed the point. The answer to poor competition is not price controls; it’s more competition. It is Harris Farm Markets opening new concept stores that rival Coles and Woolworths. It’s the Reject Shop, which increasingly undercuts Coles and Woolies by significant amounts. It’s your local butcher or produce store, which now sell products cheaper than Coles and Woolies. 

To a degree, the Greens are using misdirection. They’re asking Australians to look over here at profiteering instead of looking at the root cause of inflation, which is the increasing cost of business inputs, starting with the Greens’ own net zero energy policies. Net zero fairytale power is pushing up power prices, and, if power goes up, everything goes up. Farmers need power to run their coolrooms, they need diesel to run their farm equipment and they need fertiliser, which is made from natural gas. Manufacturers and wholesalers need electricity, gas and diesel for every aspect of their operations, yet the Greens are over there on my left—on everyone’s left, really—advocating for no new oil or gas projects. Scarcity causes the price to rise. Their own net zero policies are a major cause of inflation. Now the Greens want to fix that with price controls. Controlling the price causes producers, wholesalers and retailers to go broke as their input costs exceed their selling price. To stay in business, these companies will most likely stop selling anything they sell at a loss. 

This is exactly what happened in Venezuela and Sri Lanka, where price controls led to food shortages and black markets appearing for food staples. Criminal gangs moved into those black markets. I know Coles and Woolies are bad, but I would take them over criminal gangs. Sri Lanka is especially relevant here. Their food crisis was caused by forcing farmers to abandon the use of hydrocarbon fertilisers and pesticides in the name of net zero—inhuman. Farm productivity fell and prices rose, as farmers tried to make enough money to feed their families. The government intervened with price controls. The result was food shortages, starvation and then rioting that forced the government to back down and, once again, allow modern production techniques to feed the people. Another problem with price controls is that investment moves away from industries that are rendered unprofitable with price controls. Investment in buildings, equipment, software and staff training will fall in price-controlled industries. That is fact that has been proven repeatedly throughout history. This leaves long-term supply deficits that will keep prices higher for longer and hurt everyday citizens. 

Unlike the Greens’ policies, One Nation’s policies will solve the cost-of-living and housing crisis without making either problem worse. We will do the opposite of the Greens, which is always a good policy. We will reduce red, green and blue tape. We will reduce new arrivals until the market can fairly provide for those who are already here. In housing, we will prevent homes being owned by those outside of Australia and allow councils to impose penalty rates on vacant homes or on those being used for casual letting which conflicts with the zoning. We will review the federal government housing code, which imposes unnecessary requirements, including making every house wheelchair friendly despite there being no wheelchair users in the house. I understand that that adds about $40,000 to the price of every new house. We will allow Australians to use their super to invest in their own home. We will create a people’s bank to provide mortgages at five per cent interest over 30 years on a five per cent deposit and allow a HECS debt to be rolled into the mortgage so that people can get a home loan. This policy means that an Australian with a good job, even if they have a HECS debt, will be able to afford their own home now and start paying it off. 

There are many, many ways to solve the humanitarian disaster that the policies of successive Liberal and Labor governments have created. Price controls and green policies on housing, immigration, the environment, mining and farming are the exact opposite. One Nation wants to free up the people and free up our markets. 

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