Praise be to Andrew Brown at AAP who has pulled together the major spending policies (so far)

LABOR:

* Tax cuts – $17.1 billion over four years.

All taxpayers will get a $5 per week tax cut from July 2026, which will then increase to about $10 per week from July 2027.

* Health – $8.5 billion

Increased funding for GPs to allow for almost all clinics to bulk bill by the end of the decade.

* Housing – $10 billion

All first home buyers would be able to put down a five per cent deposit to purchase a property in an expansion of the help-to-buy scheme. A further 100,000 homes would be built exclusively for first-time buyers.

* Tax deductions – $2.4 billion over four years

Taxpayers would be offered an instant tax deduction of $1000, which would automatically cover work expenses.

* Mental health – $1 billion

More free mental health centres and youth specialist care centres would be opened across the country.

COALITION

* Fuel excise – $6 billion over one year

The fuel excise would be halved for one year, which would shave 25 cents a litre off the price of petrol.

* Tax offsets – $10 billion over one year

A one-off $1200 tax offset would be paid to those earning between $48,000 and $104,000 in July 2026. Those earning between $104,000 and $144,000 would receive a smaller offset.

* Housing – $1.25 billion over four years

First-home buyers would be able to deduct interest on their mortgage from their taxes for the first five years of their loan.

* Health – $9 billion

The coalition matched Labor funding to bolster bulk billing rates to 90 per cent by the end of the decade.

* Nuclear energy – $331 billion over the course of construction

The coalition have flagged plans to build seven nuclear reactors across five states, which would start to come online from the mid-2030s.

GREENS

* Education – $46.5 billion over four years

University courses and TAFE would be made free for undergraduate and postgraduate students.

* Environment – $17 billion over four years

The Greens have called for an extra $17 billion set aside to push environment spending to one per cent of the federal budget.

(The Australia Institute View)

There were three significant housing reforms announced yesterday – just one will increase supply and bring down prices. The other two will make things worse.

Labor’s announcement that a returned Albanese government would build 100,000 houses for first home buyers is hardly radical. Who’d have thought that actually building houses for people to live in might work? It would.

The Prime Minister’s other housing announcement – to allow people to buy a home with a deposit of just 5%, to avoid mortgage insurance – would give more buyers the chance to bid against each other and push prices up.

The Liberal policy, to allow first home buyers of new homes to claim the interest as a tax deduction, would do the same. Enabling them to dip into their super would make things worse and risk making them poor in retirement.

Neither Anthony Albanese nor Peter Dutton mentioned the two obvious reforms that would help to solve the housing crisis: scrapping or reducing negative gearing and removing the capital gains tax discount for investors.

“We welcome the government’s plan to build 100,000 homes,” said Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist at The Australia Institute.

“The Australia Institute has long argued the best way for the government to improve housing affordability is to build and own more homes for people to live in – much as it does for Defence Housing Australia.

“This plan is not radical and should become standard for all governments. 

“But the plan to guarantee a 5% deposit for first-home buyers will put pressure on prices.

“The Liberal Party’s policy to deduct interest payments on the first $650,000 of a mortgage against your taxable income is adding yet another tax distortion that will cause prices to rise.

“It would mostly benefit the wealthy in a housing market already distorted with the 50% capital gains tax discount and negative gearing. 

“Coupled with the ability to access superannuation, the Liberal’s policies would only serve to increase house prices and make housing affordability worse.

“Both parties’ policies fail to remove the 50% capital gains tax discount and negative gearing, which have turned the housing market into a speculators’ delight and been the overriding cause of the decline in housing affordability over the past 25 years.”

Pushed on the fact that international students aren’t taking up as many rentals as Dutton claims (which is a fact) Dutton says:

Of course they are. I mean, where are these people living?* If people are coming here through the migration program, understandably they want a place to live but I’m not going to see Australians displaced from housing**.

There’s only so much housing stock and if you have got a 65% increase in the number of international students coming in, and you have brought in 2 million people over a – a million people over two years, 70% increase on any 2-year period in our country’s history, of course you’re creating a housing crisis. Why would the Prime Minister be surprised at that?

Jim Chalmers has no idea what’s coming next.*** What they have done is fuel inflation that’s driven up the cost of – the price of interest rates. This is a typical Labor Government. And if you put them in for a second term you’ll end up with Victoria is at the moment or where we were after the Keating years or where we were after the Hawke – after the Rudd-Gillard years, we can’t afford three more years of this. We can manage the economy, we can get our country back on track but Australians just can’t afford three more years of Labor particularly a Labor-Greens Government. You have a look in Ryan and Brisbane, the damage that those Labor members have already done. And Trevor Evans and Maggie Forrest, they’re two exceptional local candidates who will be great members of our Government and they’re going to work hard for their local communities because they want to see young renters being able to afford accommodation and to have some head-room in their budget. At the moment people aren’t insuring their cars or houses because they’re just trying to find every dollar of savings in their budget under a bad government****.

*Purpose built student accommodation, mostly.

**Many also live with families already in Australia

***No one does. That’s what Trump has done. The RBA says these are ‘uncertain times’

****Insurance has increased as a result of climate change

The Coalition’s sole answer to the rental affordability crisis is to cut international students, which take up about 4% of private rentals. COOOOOOLLLLLLLL

Dutton:

Rents are up by 18% under this Government. Let’s be clear about it. For every 42 international students who have come into Australia, one student accommodation place has been planned and approved but not built. So if we wonder why Aussie kids are 20 deep in a queue to try to rent a unit, or to try to find a place to, you know, to sleep, that’s part of the reason.

Now, we reduce the number of international students, we reduce the number of people coming through the migration program, and we massively increase the supply of housing – that’s how we can help young Australians who are renting or those who are seeking to buy. Labor has people on a treadmill at the moment and you’re going backwards.

People are going backwards as the figures demonstrate. Almost two years of household recession in this country under Labor – now, the Prime Minister wants to talk about everything but his record. He’ll throw mud and he’s negative and he’s out there with his scare campaigns because he doesn’t want you to believe that the next three years will be the same as the last three years but they will. What he’s promising is more of the same which is a disaster for people who are renting, for pensioners, for small businesses, for families, and we’re not going to have that situation. I want to be a Prime Minister who can fix the economy that Labor has damaged. I want to be a Prime Minister who can fix the cost-of-living crisis that Labor’s created.

I want to be a Prime Minister who can fix the housing dilemma that has been created over many budgets now and over many intakes through the migration program and Australians aren’t silly, they can see through the lies of the Prime Minister and the Labor Party. As we go to the next election, I believe Australians will make a decision about their future, what is in their best interest and in their best interests is to have a Coalition Government cleaning up Labor’s mess and putting in place good policies.

Oh hey economists, everything is fine because everything the Coalition is offering is just short term, so you don’t have to worry – Peter Dutton.

Just in relation to the announcements that we have made, we haven’t locked in a recurrent spend. So for, you know, the economists-minded people, we haven’t locked in recurrent spend like Labor has. They spent over $17 billion under their tax cut which is 70 cents a day starting in 15 months’ time. Australians need help now which is why we have done the 25 cent a litre tax cut on petrol. We don’t lock that in. We provide support now. As we did during COVID. I mean, Australians will remember JobKeeper* and JobSeeker and the support that we provided to keep the economy going to help families pay their mortgages and their bills, to keep businesses alight. We didn’t lock that into legislation that now is being spent every year. We put it in place to deal with the difficult circumstances before us.

And the difficult circumstance before us now is not COVID, not a GFC, it’s something much worse than that – it’s a Labor Government**. What we’re doing is we’re putting immediate support by way of the 25 cent a litre cut to fuel. Now, that costs about $6 billion.

*which included giving companies who didn’t need it billions of dollars, which they just kept. Oh and then it helped contribute to inflation. Huzzah.

**WTF is he talking about?

Peter Dutton again ignores questions about any of the detail of his own policy, including cost, which he is being asked about because he is obsessed with what Labor is spending, and instead pretends that it’s totally normal to not have any detail on the policy you are releasing and every one should just trust him.

Dutton is a multi-millionaire, who wants housing prices to continue to rise, but somehow become more affordable for first home buyers, who was calling tax cuts “an election bribe” until he decided he needed to do them too (short term) who has voted against the little bit of cost of living relief offered by the Labor government, who has no climate policies, who is cutting the fuel excise for one year because he is obsessed with fuel guzzling big utes, while also vowing to cut the cost of those fuel guzzling big utes so that more people buy that instead of an efficient vehicle, who wants to cut migration to free up housing (which no one says will work) but somehow also bring in skilled labourers to build extra housing, who has not mentioned renting or poverty once in this election, who has changed policies mid campaign, can’t actually tell you the detail of policies, or is just silent on them, who also was also a part of the Howard government that gave us these messed up housing tax and climate policies and then a member of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments that baked it all in – now he just wants you to trust him. Give me a break.

Both parties will release their costings in due course. That’s how the elections operate. What’s important now is people go into the Easter break and as they go into discussions with their families, it’s about who is better off to manage this economy and to keep our country safe.

It’s who is better able to restore the dream of home ownership. Who can give you $1,200 back of your own money to help you through Labor’s cost-of-living crisis. Who can cut petrol by 25 cents a litre on day one so that local tradies and families and delivery truck drivers and farmers and others receive that benefit, pensioners, people across the economy can benefit from that and as we have said, we’re not supporting Labor’s wasteful spending because its drives up inflation and when the Reserve Bank Governor in our country says that there is a hem-grown inflation problem from Labor’s spending she’s right. Interest rates came down much more quickly than they did in this part of the world in comparable economies and as we know in this country, Australians feel it in their hip pocket, they have been ripped off by Labor.

That’s what Labor’s legacy is and I don’t think Australians can afford three more years of Labor and I want to make sure that we can help manage the economy so we can deal with Labor’s cost-of-living crisis. We can fix up Labor’s energy crisis which is jacking up the cost of everything. We can restore the dream of ownership, and we can deliver excellent first-class health services in a way that Labor just can’t.

Honestly – wtf is this?

Dutton:

As we have said, I want to see house prices go up, but we need more supply into the market which is exactly what we’re doing. We’re bringing on 500,000 more homes than Labor is proposing. Bringing on through to the cut of the migration program – 100,000 existing homes which we free up for renters and for first home buyers. Rents have gone up by 18% under Labor and people are losing faith in this Government and so they should.

How does this help with housing affordability?

Dutton: “In relation to our policy, we are creating 500,000 new homes through our $5 billion fund to help councils with critical infrastructure.”

This is an old policy by the Liberal Party the figures are rather on the dodgy side. But helping “council with critical infrastructure” is a nice way of saying helping property developers.

Rather than spend $5bn building new homes over 5 years (which would almost be double what is currently spent building residential homes by the public sector across Australia), instead the Liberal Party proposes spending $5bn over 5 years to allow property developers to build infrastructure so that they can then sell land for a greater profit.

And what infrastructure? Well, the announcement is wide-ranging – “the roads… the water, the sewerage, the power, the telecommunications”. But while you might think this shows how large the announcement is, actually it just reveals how laughable it is to suggest this will unlock the construction of 500,000 homes over 5 years.

In the last financial year, $43.2bn was spent on infrastructure building roads, water storage and supply, sewerage and drainage, electricity generation transmission and distribution, pipeline and telecommunications.

Does anyone really believe an extra $1bn a year is going to “revive the home ownership dream and boost building across Australia.”

Good Dolly.

Every question Peter Dutton is asked about his big spending agenda – tax cuts, interest on mortgage tax cuts, the fuel excises – all of it is foregone revenue, while Dutton has also committed to matching Labor spending on health and other major policies – Dutton just talks about Labor’s ‘big spending agenda’.

It’s as transparent as the underwear in your dad’s drawers growing up.

It is obvious that the focus groups have told the Liberals to link Labor and Greens together as much as possible, because he can not utter a sentence without saying Labor-Greens government.

Honestly. It is all so stupid.

Oh good. Now we have our latest unity ticket from our major parties – who both want house prices to keep going up.

Clare O’Neil said this last year. Now Dutton is saying it.

I want to see them (house prices) steadily increase. I don’t want to see a situation where Labor crashes the economy and somebody who’s paid $750,000 for a house today is worth 600,000 in 18 months time under an Albanese-Bandt Government.

That would be a disaster. People would be sitting on a house that is wotht less than what their mortgage is. That’s what happened frankly in the ’80s and ’90s when Labor last presided over a recession. Now, Jim Chalmers is talking about a recession in our country and he’s panicking at the moment.(He is not talking about a recession and Dutton is being incredibly irresponsible here)

Labor can’t manage the economy. That much they have proven. (Inflation is down in the target band and the nation did not enter a recession) And I want to make sure that house prices steadily increase and we’ll do that if we get the supply-demand equation right. But if you flood the market with a million people over two years, which is a 70% increase on any 2-year period in our history, of course all those people want houses as well and that’s why we’re cutting migration, so we can deal with Labor’s housing crisis.

Anyone else want to join me in screaming into the abyss?