Negative gearing is the great unmentionable. For some reason we are just not allowed to talk about it. It can be talked about without saying that it should be abolished overnight, but there is a very strong case for looking at whether or not it should be modified in some way. It amounts to a $2 billion subsidy to those who are better off.

It is in many ways inflationary and in many aspects encourages the speculative side of the real estate market over those who are simply trying to buy a house to live in. We have the capital gains discounts that were put through this chamber in 2000, I think it was. They provide a massive incentive for more speculation in the real estate area and a massive gain for those who are better off. We cannot even measure how much of that goes into the housing area.

We have the first home owners grant. That has perhaps provided some short-term relief for many people, but in many respects it is also an inflationary measure. We have the capital gains tax exemption for the family home.

Again, in raising these things I am not proposing that they all be removed; but I am saying that we have to look at how much goes into that and what impact it has on the cost of housing and on equity issues and what other measures we could look at to address that. Some academics have estimated that up to $30 billion a year--maybe it is only $20 billion or maybe it is $30 billion; it is a hell of a lot of money--in all sorts of different ways is being spent in subsidies.

We have all the rent assistance payments now that are going up and up and up. It is well over $1 billion. We have $1 billion in the Commonwealth-state housing agreements. Rent assistance is now more than that.

All of those things are going into the mix in an untargeted, ad hoc, bandaid way with no overarching strategy. In many cases the data is not even collected to know where it is going, who it is going to and how it is being applied.

If you look at the first homeowners grant, you see that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent; and we do not even know who it is going to. We do not even know which houses are being bought for it. We do not know the price of the houses that it is being applied to. We do not know if it is the best way to spend public money.

You have got billions of dollars going to this key area of the economy, and raising all of those issues is in no way suggesting they should all be stopped. But it is suggesting it is about time we stopped and had a look at them in totality, and looked at what it means and what their impact is. We are spending tens of billions of dollars a year in various ways or via forgone revenue, and we do not know what impact it is having.

We do not know where it is going and we have no way of assessing whether we could spend the same amount of money in a much fairer, more economically efficient and more effective way that would ensure affordable housing for a much greater proportion of the Australian community.

Why won't we do it? Because nobody wants to open it. There are too many vested interests; it is much easier to just blame the states or blame the federal government. Nothing progresses, and what happens instead is that more and more Australians fall further behind and the housing affordability crisis gets worse.

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