Mitchell Callagher:
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Dahlsens Trussme here in Hume. My name is Mitch Gallagher, I’m the branch manager here. It’s great to welcome the Minister for Housing and her team to members of the media to our site today. Dahlsens is a fifth‑generation family‑owned business that has been supporting Australian builders since 1877. Next year we’ll celebrate our 150th year in business. Across Australia, we have more than 70 trade and manufacturing sites.
Here in Canberra, we’re proud to have bought the Trussme, a long‑standing local business for frame and truss manufacturers, into the Dahlsens family. Our role is simple, we support residential builders with frame and truss, building materials, advice and reliable delivery so they can help keep projects moving. We’re proud to support local builders who are building homes across Canberra and the surrounding region. Thank you for coming, and welcome to Dahlsens.
David Smith:
Thanks, Mitch. My name’s Dave Smith, member for Bean. It’s great to be down here in the industrial heartland of Bean here in Hume, and at Dahlsens, a company with over 140 years of history delivering outcomes right across the country, but here particularly delivering outcomes to builders in Canberra and across the region. But great to be here with Professor Mathew Aitchison from the Building 4.0 CRC, and my good friend Clare O’Neil, the Minister for Housing. This last fortnight’s all been about housing and delivering housing outcomes for all Australians and today we’ve got more announcements to make, and I’d like to hand over to my good friend, Clare O’Neil.
Clare O’Neil:
Wonderful, thank you so much, David, and thank you for having me again in your beautiful electorate of Bean. I want to say to Mitch and the Dahlsens family, we’re absolutely thrilled to be here, we love the work that you’re doing, and today is all about building on that fantastic innovation that this company has now been doing for almost 150 years. I want to welcome Professor Mathew Aitchison, who runs 4.0 CRC for housing, and we’re investing in a project that’s been really his baby, he’s one of our main innovators in housing in our country, and we are fantastically supportive of the work that he’s doing.
Australians have a housing system that’s stacked against them. We want Australians to get ahead and we want them to do it in a home that they own, and we’ve got already the most ambitious housing agenda that a Commonwealth government has had for 70 years. We built on that significantly in the Commonwealth budget about 2 weeks ago, and that was focused on 2 important priorities: building more homes for our country and levelling the playing field for first-home buyers. One of the main reasons that we have a housing crisis in our country is because for 40 years we’ve not being building enough homes.
One of the reasons for that is that we have been a bit slow as a country to adopt innovative methods of home building. If I look at a country like Sweden, about 80 per cent of the homes built there are using modern methods of construction; in Australia that number is more like 5. Now the answer to the affordability challenges facing us in housing in Australia is we’ve got to build, build, build, and if we want to build the housing that Australia needs, we are going to have to think differently about how homes get built in this country. Today our government’s announcing a $40 million investment in the Kit‑of‑Parts approach. This is bringing thinking of modern methods of manufacturing into home building for our country. It means that we can build homes faster, it means we can build homes more efficiently, and it means we can better meet the needs of the Australian people, and I’ll hand to Matt to talk a little more about the approach.
Professor Mathew Aitchison:
Thank you so much, Minister for this announcement, and also I’d like to thank our colleagues from Dahlsens for welcoming us here today. This funding is a really important step towards modernising how we deliver housing in Australia. The reality is that while many industries around the world have transformed over the last 100 years, we still make buildings very much the same as we have previously. And at that same period costs have gone up and productivity has continued to fall. That really means, as the Minister said, that we need to start thinking differently about how we deliver housing at scale in Australia.
For the last several years Building 4.0 CRC has been collaborating with the New South Wales government on the project, as we have also been collaborating with industry partners around the country. We’re trying to explore practical ways to implement new ideas that could deliver modern manufacturing, more R&D, through coordinating supply chains and also through developing standard and repeatable building systems. The Kit‑of‑Parts approach that the Minister referenced today in our announcement is just one part of that broader work. I think what’s important today is not just the funding, but it’s a recognition that we need long‑term collaboration between government and industry and research, we need more R&D, and we also need to invest in industry capability building which we’re doing. So we’re really proud to support this next phase. We’ll continue to work with government, states and territories around the country and industry to improve the way we deliver housing more efficiently and more productively. Thanks so much.
Journalist:
The Coalition is describing today’s CGT taxes legislation as a wedislation, is it fair to be merging both tax cuts and major changes to the country’s tax system in one bill?
O'Neil:
What’s before the parliament today is a package of reforms that help level the playing field for first home buyers and make our tax system fairer for Australian workers. They’re being put forward as a package because they are a package. The changes in one part of the package pay for a tax cut for 13 million Australian workers, and we hope the parliament will give them favourable consideration today.
Journalist:
WA Premier, Roger Cook, is now the second Labor premier expressing concerns against the CGT changes. Are you worried this bill is losing support from within?
O'Neil:
This is a big reforming budget that’s needed for our country. Anything that is big and difficult in our country is going to have people that don’t support what we’re doing, and we absolutely accept that.
What I would say about what’s going on with the capital gains discount is a few key points: the first is that our government is not removing the capital gains discount, we are changing the way that it is calculated. Small businesses right across this country who have my absolute firmest admiration retain the 4 generous discounts to the discount that they already get. It means effectively that most small businesses around our country are paying very reduced or no capital gains tax on sales.
And finally, I just remind everyone we’re consulting, of course, as a good government should. This is a significant change to the tax system and any government worth their salt is going to talk to the people affected.
Journalist:
The purpose of the tax changes has been done by the government to allow more young Australians into homes. Have you lost control of the narrative if business groups have been loudly opposing the bill in how it affects their investment?
O'Neil:
We’re making some really big and important changes to housing in this country, housing changes that have been shirked by governments now for decades. Our government is making the tough decisions, standing up and saying that we have to change this system. We’ve got a broken housing market in Australia, it is hurting millions of people who live in our country, and our government’s doing the hard thing to create a fairer system for all Australians.
Journalist:
And finally, Minister, biotech and big business are now pushing to be a part of any potential carve‑out. How likely is this and when can we see those details?
O'Neil:
There’s a lot of respectful conversations happening at the moment about the CGT discount and the new way of measuring that discount. The Treasurer and the Prime Minister are actively involved in those discussions and they’re continuing in good faith.
Journalist:
With the bill being introduced today, there’s accusations that you’re, I guess, trying to hide by not doing a Senate inquiry. What do you make of that, and would it be fair to give other people a say in an inquiry process that would follow in the Senate?
O'Neil:
The bill being introduced before the parliament today begins to enact visionary reforms that were in the federal budget that are all about levelling the playing field for first home buyers and creating a fairer tax system for Australians. This is a big change, and of course the Prime Minister and the Treasurer are leading discussions on behalf of the government to deal with the affected communities of people. These are going to be serious good faith discussions and they’ll continue into the coming weeks.
Journalist:
How have those discussions gone so far? Have you had discussions with the Greens or the Coalition when it comes to getting this through without an inquiry?
O'Neil:
So we are speaking to the Greens about their support for the legislation that is before the parliament, and I’d say to the Australian people the Greens political party have advocated fiercely for us to change housing tax concessions for more than a decade, and I do think that it is going to be the right thing for them to come forward and support us with the legislative passage before the parliament.
If I could just say briefly about the Coalition, they are the only people in our country that cannot see that we have a broken housing market, they are the only people in our country continuing to defend the broken status quo, and that is a very sad thing for them. Angus Taylor said the Liberals need to change or die, and when it comes to housing, I can absolutely see they have chosen the latter approach.