Today in Parliament, Abigail contributed to a debate criticising the Minns First Home Buyers Assistance Scheme, highlighting that decades of similar grants have not improved housing accessibility or affordability and instead inflate prices for new buyers.
Abigail said:
As The Greens' Treasury spokesperson, I contribute to debate on yet another self-congratulatory but mostly harmless motion from the Government. The Menzies Government introduced cash grants for first home buyers in 1964. The home savings grant offered $500 to married or engaged couples under the age of 36 to buy a home. The Fraser, Hawke and Howard governments all had their own iterations of the scheme. State and Territory governments over the years have added to the Federal schemes by offering additional cash or by lowering or waiving other associated costs such as stamp duty.
The basic premise of those first home owner grant programs is that they make it easier for a broader range of people to enter the housing market because they lower the deposit barrier, but the evidence after six decades does not bear that out. The schemes do not appear to significantly increase housing accessibility for new entrants into the market at all, but actually just accelerate the purchase of a home for those who were already going to be able to do so. In other words, the scheme does not broaden access; it just hastens the entry of the same pool of people into the market.
If the schemes do not lead to more people being able to enter the housing market, do they at least make housing more affordable? No, the statistics do not bear that out either. By increasing the purchasing power of first home buyers, the schemes actually inflate house prices. Members do not need an economist to tell them that. It is logical that, all other things being equal, giving people money to spend on housing will just increase house prices, and that is what it has done. The data indicates that the schemes actually reduce housing accessibility in the long term. Further, they tend to benefit existing home owners, who will profit from their property prices increasing, and disadvantage future first home buyers, who will be forced to pay more.
While no doubt welcome for those who find themselves in a housing market that has been so poorly managed by successive Federal and State governments, and who are able to get to the point where a little bit of extra assistance will help them buy a home quicker, the Minns First Home Buyers Assistance Scheme is yet another in the long list of policy mistakes that led to the housing affordability crisis in the first place. We really need to finally address the structural drivers of the problem: the policy settings that make it easier for a person to buy their tenth home than their first. That starts with scrapping the billions of dollars given out each year by Federal and New South Wales governments to investors and developers and instead putting that money into building genuinely affordable public housing. But sure—Government members can pat themselves on the back again for yet another case of doing what amounts to nothing in the face of a crisis.
17 September 2025