Housing

Australia faces a significant issue in housing affordability and data shows that owning your own home creates financial security however right now, Australians are struggling to enter the housing market. 

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It’s not acceptable that Australians believe that no matter how hard they work, that they feel they will never own their own home. 

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Senator Kovacic believes in regular policy discussions on how to remedy this including:

• A review into potential tax changes, whether they be capping the number of properties that can be negatively geared by institutional investors, working with the states to replace stamp duty or, at a minimum, correcting decades of bracket creep.

• We need to balance the aspirations of the next generation with the realities of our housing market including allowing Australians the choice to unlock and access their own money to buy their own homes in particular accessing their superannuation to do so. 

• It is an uncontested fact that owning your own home in retirement—not your super balance, but owning your own home—is the single most important factor to ensure living with security and dignity. Yet we cannot access some of our own savings to actually buy our own homes.

• This is particularly the case for women over 55—the fastest-growing cohort of homeless in our country. A woman over 55 in crisis, or any person in crisis for that matter, can access their super for emergency expenses but not for a deposit to buy their own home. It is a counterintuitive Labor government policy that hinders the individual and economic empowerment of Australians, especially women.

The federal Liberal team is squarely focussed on incentivising supply, to ensure that local and state governments are equipped to deliver the required infrastructure to facilitate that supply.

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