Australian Family Party

The rights of faith-based organisations are about to be seriously eroded. Led by Deputy Premier Vickie Chapman, the SA Liberal Party is proposing to remove exemptions which have allowed faith-based organisations to run their schools, hospitals and other services in accordance with their beliefs. This is what happens when there is no conservative alternative in the parliament to block these leftist policies. For those advocating ‘joining the Liberal Party and changing it from within’, this theory has now been totally debunked. It doesn’t work. The only way, I repeat, the only way to stop them is to take seats from them, either directly in the Upper House as Family First did from 2002 to 2018, or in the Lower House, through preferencing. If we are serious about protecting the rights of faith-based organisations then we need to act.

Australian Family Party’s position is outlined on the Free to Believe page.

The primary aim of the Australian Family Party is to put the family at the centre of every conversation. Recent media reports about Australian SAS troop actions in Afghanistan have drawn widespread attention culminating in calls for the service medals of those who served and died be taken from their families. The Australian Family Party strongly opposes this. In a ‘Letter to the Editor’ which was published in the Adelaide Advertiser on 28 November 2020, Australian Family Party Federal Director Bob Day said the following:

Dear Editor,

As if the families of the Special Forces Task Group haven’t sacrificed enough (“Soldiers facing dismissal”, The Advertiser, Friday).

The most painful of all human emotions is betrayal. It cuts deeper than any blade. The State has a duty to these families. Society has a duty to these families.

And what the State and society owe these families is recognition. Recognition for taking on roles the rest of us cannot even begin to imagine.

Bob Day
Australian Family Party

Introduction

On 17^th March 2016, the Coalition joined forces with the Greens to amend the Commonwealth Electoral Act and abolish Senate Group Voting Tickets. Group Voting Tickets allowed voters to simply put a 1 above-the-line and delegate to their party of choice the distribution of preferences. Whilst minor parties differed widely on policy matters, the one thing they had in common was their dislike of the Greens. Using Group Voting Tickets, minor parties came to arrangements with each other to combine their votes to get ahead of them.

The Coalition-Greens deal ended that.

When these new laws were introduced, I gave the following speech in the senate:

“Nothing good will come of this. The government’s claim that these changes will benefit the voter is false. Voters will be severely disadvantaged because the government is removing from voters – approximately three million of them, their right to delegate to their minor party of choice the distribution of their preferences. These changes will result in The Greens obtaining the balance of power permanently.”

Former Prime Minister John Howard also warned the government that the Coalition’s deal with the Greens could backfire on them. “The principal beneficiary of these changes will be the Australian Greens,” Howard said.

He was right. The Greens won six senate seats at the 2019 election (one from each state) and will almost certainly repeat this result in 2022 giving them a total of 12 senators and the balance of power, enough to join forces with Labor to pass or block legislation.

The Liberals and Nationals can rail all they like against Adam Bandt and the Greens but they have only themselves to blame. They have become the Greens enablers.

The Coalition went to the 2013 election promising to abolish the carbon tax, abolish the mining tax and stop the boats. Upon election, the senate crossbench – I was one of them, voted in support of these three key election pledges. The Greens opposed them. Yet during that term, the Coalition did a deal with those very same Greens to get rid of the crossbenchers who had supported them.

They say one of the most painful of all human emotions is betrayal because it cuts the deepest. In life we put up guards and shields and filter things people say to us. But with those you trust you let your guard down, you let them into your inner most being so when someone you trust betrays you it hurts very deeply. Like the scene in the movie Braveheart when William Wallace removes the helmet of Robert the Bruce and realises he has betrayed him. The look on his face. It’s the same with political leaders. We trust our side of politics to hold the line. We vote for them, they get into power, and then they betray us. Those who voted for the Liberals or Nationals expecting them to clean up the disgracefully biased ABC or the Human Rights Commission or Section 18c (of the Racial Discrimination Act) or put an end to the appointment of activist judges or multi-million dollar grants to Marxist academics have been betrayed. Instead of practicing what they have preached, the Coalition instead teamed up with the Greens to get rid of people like me who really do want to fix those things. The Libs and Nats talk endlessly about freedom and personal responsibility and self-reliance and free speech and the rights of the individual and lower taxes and the rule of law and property rights and free markets and smaller government but when they get into office, no matter how long they’re there, they don’t do anything about these things. They talk about Thatcher and Reagan but act like Cameron and Bush.

What I would like to do today is outline a six point plan to counter both the insidious influence of the Greens, and the disappointment of the major parties.

A New Political Party

Today I announce the launch of the Australian Family Party.

1. Family Resilience

The Australian Family Party believes the family should be the nation’s top priority. The Australian Family Party believes it is time to strengthen the family, to protect the family, to fight for the family. Your family is the one thing you’d take a bullet for.

Family has what is called ‘agency’. It can do things.

Family provides meaning, belonging and security. Strong family relationships reduce depression and anxiety disorders, strengthen the immune system and speed recovery from surgery.

We all know there is no model or perfect family – every family is flawed because it is made up of flawed human beings. But the family is the place to cultivate the right way to view life and the world around us. These are indeed difficult times but we’ve known hardships before. They are the snakes and ladders of life and these too will pass.

Social ills caused by the rupturing of family relationships – divorce, de-facto relationships, fatherless households, single mothers bringing up children, high housing costs, lead to a breakdown in society.

Family breakdown is costly. Mental illness costs the economy $180bn a year. More than 3,000 Australians take their lives each year. More young men take their own lives than are killed in road accidents. Boys raised in father-absent environments are five times more likely to commit suicide, ten times more likely to abuse drugs, fourteen times more likely to commit rape, and twenty times more likely to end up in a correctional facility. Fatherless households are a dreadful problem.

As are divorce, domestic violence, loneliness and addiction to alcohol, gambling, drugs and pornography.

Suicide rates have increased. Rates of depression have sky-rocketed. Drug overdoses, the ICE scourge, something is very wrong.

There is also a strong link between dysfunctional families and crime.

We see this played out in both indigenous and non-indigenous communities.

The Australian Family Party believes it is futile looking to politicians, public sector bureaucrats and regulators to fix these social ills.

But there is hope. The family.

2. Family Economics

Power prices, house prices, water prices. Family budgets and family businesses – family farms, family shops, trade contractors, are all under siege. The unbearable cost of energy, regulation and taxation is sending family businesses to the wall.

Families which are renting or cannot afford solar panels or solar batteries are subsidising those who can. Low and middle income families are paying much more for their electricity than high income users. Water utilities hand over billions of dollars to state governments in the form of hidden taxes called ‘dividends’ – another impost on low and middle income families and pensioners. These ‘dividends’ from low income families, pensioners, renters and small business owners are then dished out in the form of government grants to all and sundry to garner votes.

Whether it’s the Federal Government or individual State Governments, our taxes, charges and utility dividends go into one general revenue account. There is no such thing as ‘this tax pays for that service’. Every dollar a low income person or pensioner or renter pays in taxes, charges or loaded utility costs (water, power) is the same dollar the government dishes out in grants, benefits or subsidies.

Then there’s childcare. Billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money is spent each year on childcare subsidies – subsidies which benefit childcare centre owners more than parents while single-income families who provide child care at home at no cost to the taxpayer are severely disadvantaged compared with two-income families who benefit from two tax-free thresholds. Mothers who want to mother their own children are penalised. The way the family is taxed, particularly the single-income family is inequitable. The Australian Family Party strongly advocates income-splitting for single-income households.

It’s the same with aged care. According to the aged care royal commission, the sector should be ripped up and started again. Billions of dollars in government subsidies have lined the pockets of aged care entrepreneurs while, as identified by the commission, nursing home residents suffer systemic neglect.

3. Family Technology

There is an indisputable link between mental health and social media. Social media kills people. Violent computer games affect boys. Cyber bullying has turned deadly for girls. Sexting is rife. Online sexual predators are pervasive. Terrorist radicalisation and recruitment are real.

The internet has become the new wild west with power concentrated in the hands of tech giants – Facebook, Google, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Netflix. These global giants are out of control. They destroy competition and privacy and misuse the information they collect.

No parent wants their children growing up being manipulated by tech engineers who know how to control their attention and make it impossible for them to do their homework, or to make them compare themselves to unrealistic standards of beauty. Social media companies manipulate people. And unlike protections for children when watching Saturday morning TV saying you can’t advertise in these ways, there are no such rules governing children watching online.

So how to respond to this new threat to our way of life? Do we try to control it or do we try to inoculate people against its effects?

Any suggestion these global behemoths can reform themselves or be trusted to ‘act fairly’ is laughable. And they’ve only just begun – they’ve been going less than 20 years. Imagine what they’ll be like in another 20 years. They’ll be craftier, more devious, more predatory, more intrusive, and more exploitative.

Things are changing so profoundly – in social attitudes, world economics, and especially technology that politicians and bureaucrats are hopelessly ill-equipped to manage it.

Politicians, public sector bureaucrats and regulators who think they can control these internet titans are either delusional or dishonest. They are bullies when it comes to ordinary citizens, but powerless – or rather, impotent when it comes to tech giants. Facebook, Google and Amazon are bigger than many of the world’s governments anyway. And once they start issuing their own currency they’ll almost be governments. Listening to politicians and regulators saying things like, “We’re going to introduce codes of conduct” or “We are going to increase fines and other penalties” or “We’re going to set up specialist units within the ACCC to better understand how their algorithms work” or “We are going to appoint an internet ombudsman” or an “eSafety Commissioner” must make the tech companies laugh out loud. And as for academics suggesting, “We need to bring them into public ownership. Nationalise them. They need to be subject to democratic, not market, control”, if you thought the owners of these tech giants were authoritarian, imagine them being owned and run by politicians and bureaucrats! Big Brother would truly have arrived. Last year (2019) Google was granted a patent to monitor home activities like a high-tech nanny reporting things people in the home are doing, saying, watching, reading and eating.

The nation state is hopelessly outdated and outgunned in the digital age. We can no longer rely on politicians, public servant bureaucrats and regulators to protect us. Citizens and businesses must protect themselves.

Tech entrepreneur and former Google insider Tristan Harris says we are in the midst of a ‘great social upheaval’. He calls it ‘the checkmate’ where technology attacks the very foundation of what we trust. He says we are entering a digital Dark Age where disinformation is more valuable than factual information. Tech investor Roger McNamee calls tech tyrants a ‘clear and present danger to democracy’.

There is only one institution which can combat the lawlessness of this digital jungle and its predators. One thing more powerful than the tech titans and cyber-bullies and their algorithms and that is the family.

The family is the best place to build relationships and learn who to trust, who not to trust, who to communicate with, and who not to communicate with. Facebook friends are not real friends, they are not family. Real family is mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

4. Free to Speak

Freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of opinion. These freedoms are critical to the very existence of a strong democracy and are recognised in international treaties and conventions to which Australia is a party. Without free speech, no search for truth is possible. People who aren’t free can never reach their true potential.

The Australian people own the Australian language, not politicians. The Australian people have delegated to politicians the responsibility to protect them from harm. They have not delegated to them the right to decide who should or should not be offended. Being offended is part and parcel of the price of freedom. Regulating for what is essentially the hurt feelings of a reader or a hearer is not the same as incitement to harm. It is not a politician’s or regulator’s role to regulate free speech, it is society’s.

When I was in parliament, I tried to amend Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. The Coalition blocked it.

Now it goes without saying that no-one should be obnoxious and no-one should be rude or insulting or offensive, but these things should not be outlawed.

Tolerance has become a one-way street. In the name of tolerance and acceptance an anti-freedom culture has developed. Views will not be tolerated if they do not conform. The rights of individuals and voluntary groups are under threat and we know from history how things turn out when free speech is repressed.

5. Free to Believe

Without free speech there can be no search for truth. Without freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, we are not free.

Western democracy was founded in Christianity and in the family. It’s why Marx and Engels, the co-authors of the Communist Manifesto, were determined to undermine both. Marx and Engels knew religion was the enemy, and the family was the enemy. They did not like what families and people of faith people talked about around the dinner table. Sound familiar? They also knew the family and people of faith did not need the state.

There are some things free people will not be dictated to or lectured about. One of them is their religion or their morals, particularly what they teach their children. They will certainly not allow themselves be bullied into submission by being called bigots or homophobes.

The debate over religious freedom seems to be not about equality and tolerance at all but about discrimination against religious people. The left calls for tolerance but what they really want is for everyone to agree with and endorse – even celebrate, their view of the world. If you don’t, you are a bigot.

And it’s not as if they try to convince or persuade people with reasoned arguments. They’re not interested in debate or argument. To quote Mark Steyn, “They don’t want to win the debate, they want to prevent the debate” and they want the legislative power of the state to force everyone to comply. Their aim is to shape society. They know that without the power of the state they have nothing.

If being free means anything it means citizens having the right to ensure that the religious and moral education of their children conforms to their own convictions – as outlined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Australia is a signatory. It means having freedom of conscience and the freedom to believe and practice the core commitments, tenets and values of one’s faith – including, for example, the rights of parents not to have their children participate in Safe Schools programs. It is every parent’s right to raise their child in their faith and in accordance with their moral principles, and it is the state’s role to uphold and protect those rights.

The socialist left is out to undermine our freedoms. They’re coming for our churches, our schools, our farms, our mines, our cars and, most of all, for our children. They’re coming for our old people with their euthanasia needles, they’re coming for our about-to-be-born babies with their grotesque point-of-birth abortion laws, their coming for our teenagers with their drug liberalisation laws, and they’re coming to indoctrinate our primary school children. They’re also coming for Christmas Day and Australia Day and Anzac Day and Remembrance Day. These people mean business. They are brutal and dictatorial.

In 2013, David Flint and Jai Martinkovits wrote a book called, ‘Give Us Back Our Country’. In the seven years since they wrote that book, it is fairly clear we are not getting our country back any time soon. If anything, more of our country and our freedoms have been taken from us. In a recent article Flint is no longer calling for our country to be ‘given back’, but rather we’re going to have to take it back.

The culture wars have always been important. The Greek-Roman wars saw Rome conquer Greece militarily, but the Greeks conquer the Romans philosophically. Rome controlled the territory, but the Greeks controlled the culture. Or as modern day management would say, ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. In Australia today, the right controls the territory but the left controls the culture.

People and faith-based institutions – schools, hospitals, aged care providers, charities, should not have to rely on exemptions from anti-discrimination laws to function in accordance with their faith. They should, for example, have the freedom to select people as they see fit. Political parties have that right because the political allegiance of a job applicant matters; in environmental groups, views about climate change are relevant; in women’s shelters, gender is important; saying you can only become a member of a chess club if you play chess is not discriminating against people who don’t play chess. In ethnic clubs and institutions, ethnicity is sensible and practical. We accept all these differences. And in religious institutions, religion matters. Forcing religious schools to become indistinguishable from secular schools regarding staffing is senseless. After all, no-one is forced to work for a religious organisation or send their children to a religious school where all the staff follow that particular religion.

Expressions of faith by a person or faith-based organisation must be declared lawful. Section 116 of the Constitution says there can be no law which prohibits the free exercise of any religion. Statutory exemptions are inadequate. Exemptions granted can just as easily be withdrawn. The right to religious freedom must be treated as a pre-eminent right and be recognised and protected. Human Rights Commissions should have no role to play. A Commonwealth law, by reference to its Objects clauses, must recognise religious freedom as pre-eminent, and override all state and territory anti-discrimination laws.

I would commend to you the 10 liberties contained in The Niagara 2020 Declaration.

6. Free to Work

There has been a dignity and sanctity associated with work since ancient times. The Hebrew word for ‘work’ and ‘worship’ is the same – Avodah. Denying a person the right to work is like denying them to right to worship. ‘He who builds a factory, builds a temple’, said Calvin Coolidge, ‘He who works there, worships there’.

When people, young people in particular, are excluded from full participation in community and working life, the social costs are enormous – drug and alcohol abuse, crime, domestic violence, poor health, depression, frustration, boredom, bikie gang recruitment, civil disorder, teenage pregnancy, even suicide. This is what happens when young people can’t get a job. They are locked out of the labour market at exactly the time they are biologically ready to enter into relationships, get married and start a family.

It is not only morally wrong, it is economically foolish.

A single person with no dependents on Newstart (Jobkeeper) Allowance receives approximately $400 a week. The minimum wage is $740 per week. No-one is permitted to work for any amount under $740. We praise people who work for nothing – those who work in OpShops, nursing homes, meals on wheels, animal shelters and many other organisations, but we don’t allow them to work for any amount between zero and $740. Surely if you are allowed to work for nothing you should be allowed to work for something. It is absurd.

There is a solution to this madness, and it lies with focussing on the people who want to work. For example, a person could be unemployed, living at home rent-free, with no (or very low) cost of living and would be willing to work at a starting pay rate of say $20 an hour – which is a lot higher than they are getting from Centrelink, but because penalty rates on weekends or public holidays are around $40 an hour they are not allowed to take the job. So they stay on unemployment benefits, the business stays shut and the customer doesn’t get to buy whatever it is they wanted to buy. What a clever country we are.

Australia has been groaning under this yoke for a century.

For the low skilled or poorly educated or socially disadvantaged or for those who lack connections or self-confidence, the barriers to entry to getting a job are almost insurmountable.

To be clear on this, the Australian Family Party is not talking about ‘amending labour laws’ – in Australia’s case the Fair Work Act. It is saying a person’s ownership of their own labour should be absolutely sacrosanct. No person should be prevented from working under terms and conditions which suit them.

Before anyone mentions ‘WorkChoices’, I was a vehement opponent of WorkChoices. I visited Canberra on a number of occasions lobbying various Ministers imploring them not to proceed along the WorkChoices path. I suggested they leave Peter Reith’s 1996 Workplace Relations Act alone and simply allow people to ‘opt out’ if they wanted to. Those workers who wished to stay in the workplace regulation system could do so, but those who didn’t want to stay could opt out. As history shows, the former Government didn’t take my advice and Australia went from Peter Reith’s 600 page Workplace Relations Act to Kevin Andrews’ 2,000 page disaster WorkChoices.

Now we have its successor, the Fair Work Act 3,000 pages of rules and regulations. Disputes costing the nation millions of dollars can be laid squarely at the feet of the political/bureaucratic/regulatory-designed Fair Work Act. Accord-like forums comprising politicians, bureaucrats, business executives and unions are so patronising. Those who want union leaders like Sally McManus or Business Council of Australia CEOs like Jennifer Westacott or politicians like Christian Porter to speak on their behalf are more than welcome, but there are a lot of people who don’t. And those who don’t, know a lot more about their own personal circumstances and their own lives than some remote politician or union leader or business executive.

It’s been said that any place you can’t leave is a prison. Well, the present workplace regulation system is a prison, trapping people in its thousands of pages of regulations.  And when we ask why we lock people up like this, we are told “Oh it’s for their own good – we don’t want them to be exploited.” Clive James famously said Australians like to think of themselves as descendants of convicts when in fact we are overwhelmingly descendants of prison guards! We need to be set free.

The workplace prison system is an infringement on liberty, freedom and dignity. It violates a person’s right to get a job and provide for themselves and their families. It is unjust and unfair – particularly to young people where youth unemployment is over 40% in some areas.

Consider the following: a person over the age of 18 is permitted to:

• get married
• have children
• drive a motor vehicle
• buy a house
• take out a mortgage
• travel to some of the most dangerous places on earth
• smoke cigarettes
• drink alcohol
• serve in the army
• and of course vote

… but is not permitted to work on terms and conditions which suit them and their family.

The unemployed and the under-employed could lift Australia’s productivity by being permitted to work as and when and on terms and conditions, suit them.

Following the recent budget, the Treasurer talked endlessly about ‘labour market dynamics’ – “we’ve got this, we’ve got that” when the truth is they’ve got nothing. They can’t possibly know all the factors and circumstances affecting every individual worker and their family. Put simply, the Treasurer cannot begin to know what is best for you.

To Summarise

Australia has social and economic problems that it wants to solve and social and economic goals it wants to achieve – full employment, affordable housing, low crime rates, however looking to politicians, bureaucrats and regulators to solve these problems and achieve these goals is not going to work. I’ve been a politician and I’ve been a public servant. I’ve seen both up close and believe me you don’t want them running your lives for you. If we learn nothing else from watching Question Time it is these people should not be controlling our lives. Not only do they behave appallingly, they take our money and our freedom and say they will act in our best interest. Instead they act in their own interest and the interest of rent-seeking cartels. Aged care, child care, disability care. As Eric Hoffer once said, ‘Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket’. The big rent-seekers in energy, superannuation, pharmaceuticals, higher education, unions, land developers, indigenous groups, public transport and manufacturing, even government itself has degenerated into a racket.

As James Maddison once said, governments are made up of human beings, not angels. It’s why we see such abuses of power.

The major parties and their machine men live in a world that is foreign to common people.  Simply put, they do not know enough to make the correct decisions. If they did, as Bert Kelly once said, “they wouldn’t be here they’d be sitting in the South of France with their feet in a bucket of champagne!”

The simple reason is those at the top know less than those at the bottom. ‘The tyranny of experts’, the fatal deceit. The very word bureaucracy itself gives the game away. Bureaucracy is derived from two words – ‘bureau’ from the French word for ‘desk’ and ‘kratos’ from the Greek word for power, hence ‘bureau-krat’, ‘desk-power’.

Over the past decade – before Covid19 hit, when the economy was healthy, government debt increased every year under both Labor and the Coalition.  Commonwealth debt is forecast to exceed a trillion dollars – that’s 1,000 billion dollars. It is not going to end well. The old adage, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”, hasn’t been around for 100 years for nothing.

To quote the IPA’s Daniel Wild, “Whether it was Wayne Swan’s non-existent budget surpluses, Julia Gillard’s “there will be no carbon tax”, submarines that won’t keep us safe, the costly and inferior NBN, the fraud that is compulsory superannuation, the current Treasurer’s premature claim that we are “back in the black”, the $570 billion in gross commonwealth debt, and so on, our political elites get it wrong so many times”.

A renaissance is needed, one that puts the family at the centre of society.

Free markets and a free and civilised society rely on individual consciences. It is the family that nurtures the conscience. For a free society to prosper, people have to be able to control themselves. Only family can teach self-control. Only in a family can you learn to live with other people whilst maintaining your individuality.

The State has a duty to the family. Society has a duty to the family. And what the State and society owe the family is not food or housing or education or health care, what the family is owed first and foremost is ‘recognition’. We can serve Australia, and the world, best by putting the family first.

Thank you.

 

[Address to Senate Inquiry Into Decisions Made By The Court of Disputed Returns Adelaide, SA, 19 February, 2018 by Bob Day AO]

INTRODUCTION:

I only learned of this Inquiry’s existence on 29 December last year. I quickly put together a submission and lodged it 2 days later – on 31 December.

What I’d like to do this morning is expand on that submission by doing 3 things:

1. Make an Opening Statement
2. Give a brief summary of the circumstances leading to my disqualification and
3. Address some of the implications of that disqualification

OPENING STATEMENT:

First and foremost, can I say this is all a bit perplexing. A Senate Inquiry is established with former Senator Rod Culleton and myself named as of particular interest. The Inquiry was established on 6 December with submissions to be received by no later than 22 December. Neither Rod Culleton nor I were informed of any of this.

Has there ever been a Senate Inquiry into a former Senator where that Senator has not been made aware of its existence? I doubt it. It would be like the police inquiring into an incident and the person involved in the incident being neither informed of the inquiry nor interviewed about it.

After lodging my submission I was informed that it would not be accepted as a formal submission thus preventing its publication by the committee.

I would like to now table my submission, or ‘correspondence’ as the committee prefers to call it.

SUMMARY OF EVENTS LEADING TO MY DISQUALIFICATION:

A full description of the events leading to my disqualification is in my submission which I presume Members have read, however I would like to highlight a number of key points:

1. At no time between September 2013 when I was elected and December 2015 when the lease was signed on the building in question was I ever informed of any potential constitutional problems with the lease.
2. Throughout those 2 years and 3 months I had countless discussions with numerous departmental officers however again, at no stage did anyone mention Section 44.
3. On 7 November 2016, in answer to a question in the senate, the Special Minister of State Senator Cormann said, “Former Senator Day subsequently provided information to the department about vendor-financing arrangements underpinning his sale of the 77 Fullarton Road property. Related financial arrangements caused concerns about whether then Senator Day in fact remained connected to the Fullarton Road property. Subsequent to that, and being aware of all of the information, the department advised me (Sen Cormann) that it was open to me, and that it would not be a conflict to make rental payments under the lease from 1 March forward. The issue, to be frank, was not a concern to the department at that point in time” …. “and at no point did I receive any advice from the Department of Finance that the lease signed on 1 December 2015 in itself and in the absence of rental payments could cause a potential breach of section 44 of the Constitution.
4. No payments were ever made either to me or anyone associated with the property.
5. Notwithstanding the advice from the Department, the then Special Minister of State Senator Ryan obtained a private legal opinion.
6. Minister Ryan provided that private legal opinion to me and then Senate President Stephen Parry who contacted me on 28 October with the grim news that he was going to advise the senate on the next sitting day of its existence and then refer me to the High Court. Faced with that I felt I had no choice but to resign immediately.
7. My family business was experiencing difficulties at that time and whilst I had been contemplating resigning, I had started to work my way through those problems. The Special Minister of State’s advice and Senate President’s actions however put paid to that idea.
8. Neither the Department nor the Minister believed that the arrangement with my senate office breached the constitution. In fact the High Court confirmed their belief saying the previous ruling (the Webster case) could not be permitted to stand and changed the constitution’s meaning of ‘indirect pecuniary interest’.
9. Notwithstanding the Department’s actions over the previous three years, and the authority of three Special Ministers of State to proceed with the lease as arranged, the government argued in the High Court that I should be disqualified.

IMPLICATIONS:

The implications of my disqualification fall into 4 categories:

• The implications for the electors of South Australia
• The implications for the parliament
• The implications for future members and senators and
• The implications for me personally

Implications for voters:

At the 2013 and 2016 federal elections, enough electors gave either me or my party Family First enough first preference and subsequent preference votes to enable me to be elected to represent them in the Australian senate. The consequences of my disqualification has not reflected the will of the voters.

Implications for the parliament:

The implications for future members and senators is disturbing to say the least. I was a cross-bencher. Is it only cross-benchers who are to be referred to the High Court without their agreement?

I note there’s a Mexican stand-off in the parliament at the moment over the Member for Longman Susan Lamb who is a dual citizen. Susan Lamb and her party both claim she took reasonable steps to renounce her British citizenship and therefore shouldn’t be referred to the High Court. The argument in Susan Lamb’s case is ‘did she or did she not take reasonable steps’?

When my case reached the High Court, two hearings were held – the first before a single judge – Justice Michelle Gordon, to establish the facts, and the second before the full bench to decide my fate.

Justice Gordon found that I had properly and legitimately disposed of the property in question – including paying the full stamp duty on the transfer, that I was not a party to the lease, and that in her opinion I had done all I thought was required to comply with the constitution. Yet I was referred to the High Court and Susan Lamb hasn’t. There is obviously one rule for members of a major party and another rule for those who are not.

Had I known then what I know now, my Party and I would have opposed a referral to the High Court. And what would President Parry have done then? Put a motion forward for a hostile referral to the High Court based on a vague indirect pecuniary interest asking the Court to overturn the Webster case? I don’t think so. As mentioned in my submission, Professor Graeme Orr of the University of Queensland said that for the High Court to change the law and then backdate it to apply to someone who had relied on a previous ruling (Webster) seems somewhat unfair.

The implication in my case is, a Minister could get a legal opinion about a cross-bencher to simply put pressure on him or her.

As most of you would know, I voted with the government 90% of the time – more than any other crossbencher. So why did the government argue I should be disqualified? Would my disqualification give the government some political advantage? Or was it simply to prove the adage “no good turn goes unpunished”?

Given the Department’s advice that there was no conflict, the government could have just as easily argued I should not be disqualified. It’s hard not to be suspicious.

Implications for future members and senators:

As we all know, the Department of Finance provides members and senators with a document this thick about every minor allowance and entitlement you can think of, but not apparently anything about breaching the constitution. Does the Department of Finance owe a newly elected senator any duty of care in this area?

It was found by the High Court that I benefited from an ‘indirect pecuniary interest’ in a contract with the Commonwealth notwithstanding the fact that no payments were ever made.

Implications for me personally.

Since the Senate President informed the senate in November 2016 of the legal advice in his possession, I have been accused by senators, members of parliament, journalists and members of the public of all manner of things including fraud, corruption, misconduct in public office, cronyism, hypocrisy, self-entitlement, a cover up, ripping off taxpayers, trading my vote for office accommodation, and having my hand in the till.

The implications are obvious. A person’s life and reputation can be ruined.

I ask that this evidence, together with my submission, be made public.

How governments have:

• Cruelled the housing aspirations of millions of low and middle income households
• Disempowered and impoverished families and individuals
• Entrenched intergenerational inequity
• Weakened free enterprise, property rights, economic freedom and individual liberty; and
• Like China’s One Child Policy, set ticking a time bomb that will cause a catastrophic social and economic burden for future taxpayers

OVERVIEW

House prices matter. A lot.

In the 18 years since the new millennium, the median house price in most large American/Canadian/British/Australian/New Zealand (ACBANZ) cities has risen from an average three times median income to more than six times median income and in some cities more than nine times median income. That is, in real terms, allowing for inflation, a doubling, and in some cases a tripling, of the cost of housing.

At six times median household income a family will be required to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more of their money on mortgage payments and local government shire council rates, land taxes and stamp duty based on property values, than they would have, had house prices remained at three times the median income. That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars they are not able to spend on other things – clothes, cars, furniture, appliances, travel, movies, restaurants, the theatre, children’s education, charities and many other discretionary purchase options.

The distortion in housing markets and the misallocation of resources is enormous by any measure and affects every other area of a nation’s economy. New home owners pay a much higher percentage of their income on house payments than they should and renters pay increased rental costs as a result of the higher capital and financing costs paid by landlords.

The capital structures of these nations’ economies have been distorted to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and for those on middle and low incomes the prospect of ever becoming homeowners has all but vanished. The social and economic consequences of this change will be these nations’ equivalent of China’s disastrous One Child Policy.

The consequences are as profound as they are damaging and getting things back into alignment is going to take some time. But it is a realignment that is necessary. A terrible mistake was made and it needs to be corrected.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. History of home ownership
2. The West’s ‘One Child Policy’ – the consequences of high housing costs
3. The immutable laws of supply and demand – the causes of high housing costs
4. Red tape, green tape, housing taxes, zoning taxes, development charges
5. Free enterprise, property rights, economic freedom and individual liberty
6. International comparisons
7. Recommendations – what to do and what not to do

1. History of home ownership

Home ownership has long been a feature of ACBANZ life. During the 50 years following World War II, levels of home ownership rose steadily from around 50 per cent in 1945 to over 70 per cent by 1995. Home ownership had become both a symbol of the equality ACBANZ families shared, and a means through which an average family could provide security and stability while building wealth and claiming a tangible stake in their nation. For the vast majority, owner-occupation of the home in which they live was, and remains, a great ambition.

This aspiration, so deeply entrenched in the national psyche, was perfectly described by Australian Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies in his “Forgotten People” address of 1942. He recognised the moral, social and emotional importance of the family home:

“The material home represents the concrete expression of saving ‘for a home of our own’. Your advanced socialists may rage against private property (even whilst they acquire it); but one of the best instincts in us is that which induces us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours, to which we can withdraw, in which we can be among our friends, into which no stranger may come against our will.”

Prime Minister Menzies understood that the human instinct to build and bequeath a home, sent lasting ripples through every aspect of social and economic life.

Extensive national and international research confirms what we intuitively know, namely, that home owners have better health than their renting peers and children from low income families who live in a home owned by their parents, do better than children from low income families who live in rented accommodation. Home owners have a tangible stake in their community. They live where they choose and for as long as they choose. Unlike renters, they do not face the prospect of having to pack up the family and move on at the expiration of a lease. Nor do they face ever-increasing rents for a property in which they will never have a stake. Home owners have greater self-confidence, they move less frequently, they are more involved in their communities, and their children are also more likely to become home owners. In addition, they have significantly greater wealth and, in communities where home ownership levels are high, crime is lower, household incomes are higher and some studies even show divorce rates to be lower. “Emotional security, stability, and a sense of belonging” are listed as the top reasons for home ownership followed by “financial security and investment”.

In recent years however, a disturbing trend has emerged in the level of home ownership among young families. It is in substantial decline. Whilst those who bought into the housing market before 1999 when prices were low have done well, those who bought after 1999 have had to take out big mortgages in order to enter the market.

2. The West’s ‘One Child Policy’ – consequences of high housing costs

A disturbing socio-economic shift is occurring. A schism, a rupture, creating a new ‘haves and have nots’ split between largely older existing home owners who as a result of soaring property prices have accumulated significant wealth, and younger, would-be home owners. Housing is being consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer people. Homelessness is growing. And as populations grow, the situation is worsening. Low income people – young people in particular, are spending a much higher percentage of their income – up to 50%, on housing costs than previous generations at the same age, and the number of young people in rental accommodation has doubled. The number of years to pay off a home loan has increased dramatically and the number of people who are ‘mortgage free’ by age 50 has halved. And the number of first home buyers receiving assistance from family and friends has doubled since the 1970s.

As high housing costs raise the cost of living and reduce the standard of living, places which have the highest housing costs eg California, also have the highest poverty rates.

Low income households in particular have been disproportionately affected by the rise in house prices. Their spending on housing as a percentage of their income has risen significantly more than households in higher income brackets.

The severity of the problem is also being masked by low interest rates. An interest rate rise would be catastrophic for the many home owners who have borrowed huge sums in order to enter the market highlighting the danger of measuring affordability, as some do, by the capacity to meet mortgage payments, rather than the total amount owed.

In creating the conditions for housing to become the privilege of the few rather the rightful expectation of the many, governments have produced intergenerational inequity and breached the moral contract between generations which dictates that we should leave things better than we found them.

In making housing much less affordable for the next generation it has denied them much more than a roof over their heads, it has denied them the security and benefits that go with home ownership and the opportunity to provide options for themselves in later life.

Those who own their homes have much more control over their lives. They can choose where they will live and how they will live. Many are now choosing to defer having a family in the hope that they will be able to somehow put together the funds to buy a home later in life. If they can’t afford to buy a house they reason, they certainly can’t afford to have children.

With changing demographics – the number of taxpayers supporting non-taxpayers, it is imperative that as many citizens as possible own their homes by the time they retire. Aged pensions were not designed to cover mortgage or rent payments. National governments who are responsible for aged pensions, and future taxpayers will have a massive problem on their hands.

This massive escalation in the price of housing carries with it a multitude of detrimental impacts. Establishing affordable rental accommodation for those in greatest need becomes even more difficult for social and public housing authorities as they seek to purchase land and houses in a greatly inflated market. Road widening and major infrastructure projects experience cost blow-outs as land acquisition costs skyrocket, and establishing schools, community centres, health services and business facilities becomes difficult, and at times impossible. The whole community suffers as a result of increased tax, transaction, finance and establishment costs.

High house prices also distort labour markets. Cities would benefit greatly if people could afford to live in them. Instead they live elsewhere depriving cities and creating labour shortages.

German economists are said to be baffled by reports that rising house prices in many western countries are deemed to be ‘good news’. In Germany, inflation in house prices, like inflation in energy prices or food prices, are considered just the opposite. How can it be “good news”, they ask, when it now takes two incomes to support a mortgage when previously young couples could buy a home and raise a family on one? Or that a homebuyer will pay many hundreds of thousands of dollars more in mortgage payments and government taxes and charges than would otherwise be the case?

The answer of course is not economics but politics. As house prices rose dramatically in recent years, political parties reaped the political benefits. Voters felt richer. But this is now backfiring. High house prices are no longer viewed as a political asset but a liability – particularly for conservative or right-of-centre parties which have traditionally embraced home ownership as an article of faith. A policy space they once owned now represents a real and present danger. They are in danger of being judged by their electorates as having failed. Like the prisoner on death row whose imminent demise ‘focuses the mind’, the politics of housing affordability is putting the political class on notice. Governments which trumpet a $1,000 a year tax cut are failing to do anything about a $10,000 a year increase in mortgage costs.

China’s ‘Great Wall of Family Planning’ was one of the boldest policies any nation has implemented. However, 35 years on, the policy’s disastrous effects are becoming more and more evident. The policy has upended traditional structures for supporting older generations and caused social unrest that will be felt for decades to come.

The Chinese government has since acknowledged the disastrous social consequences of the gender imbalance as a result of its one child policy. The shortage of women has increased mental health problems and socially disruptive behaviour among men, and has left many men unable to marry and have a family. The scarcity of females has resulted in kidnapping and trafficking of women for marriage and increased numbers of commercial sex workers, with a potential resultant rise in human immunodeficiency virus infection and other sexually transmitted diseases. There are fears that these consequences could be a real threat to China’s stability in the future.

Housing is slowly undermining western economies like China’s policy is undermining its social demographic structure. It is a massive government-mandated constriction of supply – not of citizens but of houses.

China has abandoned its policy mistake. The west needs to do the same before it passes the point of no return.

3. The immutable laws of supply and demand – the causes of high housing costs

It was once the case that if a person, or indeed a country, knew how to make something, the world would beat a path to its door. The factories and mills of 19^th Century England bore witness to the power of being able to make things. Britannia ruled the waves. Today, manufacturing is global. From motor vehicles to whitegoods, kitchen appliances to widescreen TV sets, personal computers to cell phones, the world is awash with supply – and demand. And yet despite this ever-increasing demand, prices continue to fall.

Despite numerous dire warnings over the past 200+ years – most notably Thomas Malthus’ 1798 book ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’, predicting population growth would eventually exceed food production resulting in famine and starvation, even global food supply continues to exceed demand by a considerable margin.

So why does housing – a simple manufactured product, defy this trend? Why does a house, which like other manufactured goods contains readily accessible components, increase in price out of all proportion to other consumer products?

Under normal market conditions, when demand increases, prices rise and markets respond with increased supply thereby reducing prices.

Demand stimulators like immigration, low interest rates, favourable tax treatments and first home buyer grants have unquestionably increased demand for housing. However increases in demand do not, of themselves, cause prices to rise. The exponential increases in demand for cell phones, laptops and plasma televisions in the first decade of the new century for example did not lead to increases in price. In fact the opposite occurred – prices fell, in some cases by more than half, due to increases in supply of these goods. The post-war population explosion ‘baby boom’ was matched by increases in housing supply but house prices barely moved.

So what has gone wrong?

On the fringes of most cities there is a more than adequate supply of cheap land available and housing industries ready, willing and able to put good quality houses on it at competitive prices.

So why are houses not being built on this cheap land? Cheap land attracts not only home buyers but commercial interests as well, leading to enhanced employment opportunities.

Whenever there is money to be made, opportunities to do business with governments present themselves – particularly in tightly controlled markets like land. Relationships between business people and governments are as old as regulation itself.

What can give these relationships real potency however is what’s been called the ‘Baptists and the Bootleggers’ phenomenon. The term stems from the Prohibition days, when members of the US government received private donations from Bootleggers – rent-seeking business people eager to maintain a scarcity (and resulting high price) of their product (alcohol). These same Members of Congress then justified maintaining the prohibition by publicly adopting the moral cause of the Baptists who were extolling the evils of the product.

So it is with land development.  Political parties are lobbied by and receive donations from property developers keen to maintain the scarcity of the product (zoned land), which results in higher property prices. The members of parliament then get on the property-owning bandwagon themselves and, keen to maintain their own new-found wealth, publicly support urban planners who continually rail against the so-called evils of ‘urban sprawl’, none of which stands up to scrutiny. The resulting urban growth boundaries which restrict home building activity through zoning laws, force new home buyers into high density housing developments downtown (CBD) and in inner suburbs, and are a classic example of the Baptists and the Bootleggers phenomenon at work – the monetisation of urban planning. Property bootleggers often respond by saying more fringe land does not need to be rezoned (from low value rural to high value residential) because “there is 15 years supply of (high value) zoned land available” – owned by them of course. Price is not mentioned. At current prices, the land may well take 15 years to sell. Price matters. If they doubled the price they would have 30 years of land available, as that’s how long it would take to sell. If they halved the price the land would be sold in less than 2 years. The price difference between land zoned for housing and land not zoned can be as much as 100 times. The incentive for land owners to engage in everything from misconduct to outright corruption is immense in pursuit of either the windfalls available in the case of owners of unzoned land, or to maintain asset values in the case of those holding large tracts of zoned land.

Claims that urban sprawl is bad and that urban densification or urban consolidation is good for the environment, or that it stems the loss of agricultural land, or that it encourages people onto public transport, or that it saves water, or that it leads to a reduction in motor vehicle use or that it saves on infrastructure costs for government are false. Urban consolidation is an idea that has failed all over the world. Whether it’s traffic congestion, air pollution, the destruction of bio-diversity or the unsustainable pressure on electricity, water, sewage, or stormwater infrastructure, urban densification has been a disaster. Urban consolidation is not good for the environment, it does not save water, it does not lead to a reduction in motor vehicle use, it does not result in nicer neighborhoods, it does not stem the loss of agricultural land, it does not save on infrastructure costs for government and worst of all it puts home ownership out of the reach of those on low and middle incomes. Sir Peter Hall of the London School of Economics claims, “The biggest single failure of urban densification has been affordability.”

This limiting of housing on the urban fringes of cities distorts the inner suburban market where the ‘Save our Suburbs’ groups – committed to maintaining the character of existing suburbs by limiting the amount of additional in-fill housing, are highly effective. This further exacerbates the supply/demand distortion.

And it’s not as if high rates of construction of high density housing apartments – a favourite of urban planners, leads to improved housing affordability. Sydney, Toronto and Vancouver which have seen very high rates of high rise apartment construction are among the worst cities in the world in terms of affordability. Here again, planning restrictions limiting the number of apartments per site in the form of height restrictions add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of an apartment. In Sydney for example, the average construction cost of a high rise apartment is $430,000 whereas the sale price is over $800,000.

And it is young home buyers, hit with the spiralling costs of home ownership who end up paying.  Whilst it is true there has been an increase in younger people preferring downtown (CBD) apartment living, they are mostly forced into these overpriced units without being given the choice of a low cost, free-standing home of their own on the fringe. Given the price distortions inherent in today’s housing market, it is impossible to know what the trade-off points might be between downtown living, size of home, large backyard, children, pets, and suburban living.

Given housing is such a political hot potato, governments have responded. But unlike ‘the war on drugs’ where governments’ primarily focus on trying to limit supply, with housing, the overwhelming response by governments has been calls to limit demand – lower levels of immigration, the removal of favourable taxation treatments – negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts and bank lending restrictions.

These are merely window dressing, and, together with measures like changes to self-managed superannuation fund rules, pension rules, first home owner grants, shared equity schemes, social/public/community housing projects, deposit saver accounts, stamp duty exemptions for people down-sizing, congestion taxes, land taxes, negative gearing, capital gains tax, bank lending restrictions (eg requiring banks to have less than 30% of loans as ‘interest only’) they are totally ineffectual at solving the affordability problem.

4. Red tape, green tape, housing taxes, zoning taxes, development charges

Planning controls, development restrictions, environmental regulations, multiple jurisdictions, minimum lot sizes, lengthy approval processes, ‘developer’ contributions, ‘affordable housing’ requirements on new housing developments … building a house is no longer a simple matter. What has for centuries been an uncomplicated industry has become mired in planning rules and regulations which have sent prices skyrocketing. Restrictive planning rules – effectively housing taxes, now account for up to 50% of the cost of a house.

Traditionally, actual land costs have been no more than 20% of the total cost of a house and land package. Average construction costs have also been fairly consistent across most jurisdictions at approximately $1,000 per square metre or $100 per square foot, a figure that has changed little in over 30 years. This equates to an average construction cost of a 150 square metre or approximately 1,500 square foot starter home of $150,000. Likewise land development costs – roads, water, sewage, power, telecommunications, footpaths and street signage, across most jurisdictions are consistently around $40,000 per lot. Add profit margin and raw land costs of $10,000 per lot for a total house and land of $200,000

– three times median incomes. In places where there is light planning regulation, new homes can be purchased for this price. In places where there is heavy planning regulation, new homes are more than double this price.

The affordability of housing is overwhelmingly a function of one thing – the extent to which governments impose rules and regulations over the construction of houses and land allotments.

In essence, what has been described as a ‘housing affordability’ problem is simply a ‘land affordability’ problem.

Ludwig von Mises, one of the most notable economists and social philosophers of the twentieth century, made a striking observation about those who seek to exert their planning influence on the lives of ordinary people:

“The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute pre-eminence of his own plan.”

Most urban planning can be traced back to the UK’s 1947 Town & Country Planning Act. For the past 70 years this template has been an enduring testimony to both the folly of government bureaucratic interference and the dogged and blind adherence to a flawed dogma.

Over 70 books are currently in print on government policy failures– from World War 1 to the space shuttle disasters to the global financial crisis and associated credit rating fiascos to foreign policy disasters. These include ‘The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914’ (Clark); ‘The Blunder of our Governments’ (Crewe & King); ‘Understanding Policy Fiascos’ (Bovens & ‘t Hart); ‘Not Steering but Drowning: Policy Catastrophes and the Regulatory State’ (Moran); and of course, Sir Peter Hall’s ‘Great Planning Disasters’. In his book, ‘American Nightmare: How Government Undermines the Dream of Homeownership’, Randall O’Toole, one of America’s leading public policy analysts, documents example after example of government planning failures. He demolishes the widely held belief that government planners are somehow smarter or more capable of managing the future than market forces. “Better to fire the planners and let free people, free minds and free markets use the genius of their freedom”, he says.

Where the free market kept house prices affordable for the best part of a century, government interference and price fixing has done the opposite.

Even the 2008 Global Financial Crisis had its origins in the interference of the Clinton and Bush administrations, by instructing banks to extend mortgages to low-paid and minority Americans who were unable to afford them.

Why were people unable to afford homes when the cost of building was low? And, why did the sub-prime crisis affect some States in the US but not others?

The answer to these questions goes to the heart of government failures – central planning, in this case urban planning controls.

These can be traced back even further than Clinton and Bush to Franklin D Roosevelt and his National Housing Act (1934).

The 1934 Act began the practice of lending to minority groups and people on low incomes. The market at the time responded to this government interference with a practice called ‘red­lining’ whereby certain areas on maps were identified as being ‘high risk’. This then led to the enactment of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and subsequently Jimmy Carter’s 1977 Community Reinvestment Act.

Following this came Clinton’s ‘Community Development Financial Institutions Act’ and ‘Low Income Housing Tax Credit’ program of 1994 in which the Clinton Administration pressured US banks and mortgage companies to relax their lending criteria so that minority groups and those on low incomes could buy more houses. At one point, 40% of financial institutions’ loans were to low income people.

What triggered the catastrophe of 2008 however was the added components of ‘new urbanism’ or ‘smart growth’ urban planning laws in many of the large housing markets of the US -California and Florida, in particular, and ‘non-recourse loans’ or ‘jingle mail’ – if a property dropped in value below the amount owing to the bank, the homeowner could simply walk away from the property without being liable for the banks’ losses. The owner simply mailed the keys to the bank, hence the term ‘jingle mail’.

During the 1990s house prices in these highly regulated states rose dramatically on the back of an ‘everything to gain, nothing to lose, non-recourse loan’ mentality and ‘new urbanism’ which severely restricted the supply of land on the urban fringes of many American cities. This was not the case however in low planning regulation states like Texas and Georgia.

The combined effects of mandated lending to low income groups and non-recourse loans together with skyrocketing house prices caused by planning regulations and restrictions in land supply presented lenders with a serious dilemma. Their mandated low income customers could not afford the repayments, so all sorts of financial products were developed

– sub-prime loans and mortgage insurance schemes (derivatives).

As has been sorely realised, anything not based on economic reality is doomed to failure. Sub-prime loans and mortgage insurance derivatives were not economic reality. The fallout sent shock waves across the globe.

After the GFC, headlines like Time Magazine’s, “Home Ownership has let us down” and the Wall Street Journal’s, “Poor better off renting” missed completely the cause of the problem.

5. Free enterprise, property rights, economic freedom and individual liberty

“The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. His cottage may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter—but the King of England cannot enter. All his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.” –William Pitt, British House of Commons 1763

Without property rights there can be no freedom.

Peruvian economist and author of ‘The Mystery of Capital’, Hernando de Soto, has shown property rights and property ownership have provided a foundation for the development of nations to the benefit of ordinary citizens:

“Legal property gave the West the tools to produce surplus value over and above its physical assets. Whether anyone intended it or not, the legal property system became the staircase that took these nations from the ‘universe of assets’ in their natural state to the ‘universe of capital’ where assets can be viewed in their full productive potential.”

The economic and personal security that comes from investing in your own home delivers, over time, a reduced housing cost and the wide range of future choices that come with having a valuable and tradable asset.

Home ownership gives citizens the asset means to start a business or put children through university. It must not be taken away.

Jane Jacobs, in her book ‘The Life & Death of Great American Cities’ observes, “An economy, if it is to function well, is constantly transforming poor people into middle class people. Planning should cause people to be better off, not worse off.”

Since the industrial revolution, people in developing countries have been flocking to the cities in search of a better life. And whereas in the 18^th, 19^th & 20^th Centuries, cities and suburbs grew to accommodate the influx and working class people became middle class people, 21^st Century governments are denying those on low incomes those same opportunities.

Restrictive planning laws take away property rights. They deny land owners the right to develop their land and in doing so disempower families and individuals and empower governments.

Matthew O’Donnell, from the Centre for Independent Studies in Australia states, “The greatest of all forms of spontaneous order is the market system itself. Every day goods and services are bought and sold by the millions without any central planner pulling the strings. It is truly wonderful how our daily needs are met with no one having any semblance of overall control. The burgeoning wealth of capitalist societies compared to the failure of every central planned socialist state confirms that the market system more efficiently allocates society’s resources than any consciously designed system could ever hope to.”

It is the role of government to prevent – certainly not encourage, the enrichment of one group at the expense of another. Impoverishment of one group will eventually lead to the impoverishment of every group. Through housing we are witnessing this first hand.

Housing has gone from a relatively free market to one controlled by rent-seekers and regulators.

The rising generation should not be denied a home of their own merely to satisfy the ideological fantasies of urban planners and the financial interests of rent-seekers. The parents of the rising generation should not be denied the joys of grandchildren because young couples have to work to pay mortgages instead of raising a family. The joke that high mortgages are the new contraceptive is becoming no laughing matter. Young women used to be afraid of getting pregnant, now, as they approach 40, they are afraid of not getting pregnant. Couples should be able to pay off a home loan on one income so they can start a family in their late 20s, not in their late 30s or early 40s.

6. International comparisons

When making international comparisons of housing affordability, it is instructive to compare not just countries but cities, states and provinces within those countries. Housing affordability varies markedly within countries in direct relation to particular cities’ urban planning policies. The disparity within some countries is significant. For example, in Canada’s British Columbia province, Vancouver has a house price to income ratio of 12.6 (the median house price is 12.6 times the median household income) whereas the city of Edmonton in Alberta province has a house price to income ratio of 3.7. In the United States, cities in California – Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and Santa Cruz all have house price to income ratios over 9.0 whereas Cleveland and Cincinnati (Ohio), Oklahoma City (Oklahoma) and St Louis (Missouri) all have house price to income ratios of under 3.0.

International studies show unquestionably a direct correlation between land use regulation and housing affordability – where there is more regulation, houses are less affordable. Demographia’s Annual International Housing Affordability Survey www.demographia.com of nearly 300 housing markets in 9 countries compares house price to income ratios in each city and country.

“For metropolitan areas to rate as ‘affordable’ and ensure that housing bubbles are not triggered, housing prices should not exceed three times gross annual household earnings. To allow this to occur, new starter housing of an acceptable quality to the purchasers, with associated commercial and industrial development, must be allowed to be provided on the urban fringes at 2.5 times the gross annual median household income of that urban market. The critically important “development ratios” for this new fringe starter housing should be 17 ­23% serviced lot/section cost -the balance the actual housing construction. Ideally through a normal building cycle, the Median Multiple should move from a Floor Multiple of 2.3, through a Swing Multiple of 2.5 to a Ceiling Multiple of 2.7 -to ensure maximum stability and optimal medium and long term performance of the residential construction sector.” -Hugh Pavletich, Demographia Co-Author

In the US, 13 of the 54 major cities surveyed by Demographia are rated as severely unaffordable; in the UK the ratio is 6 out of 21; in Canada 2 out of 6; in Japan, of the two cities surveyed – Osaka/Kobe/Kyoto and Tokyo/Yokohama, Osaka/Kobe/Kyoto has a price to income ratio of 3.5 and Tokyo/Yokohama has a ratio of 4.8. In Singapore the ratio is 4.8, in Ireland, Dublin has a ratio of 4.8 – up from 3.3 in 2011, Galway 4.0, Cork 3.7. Waterford 2.7 and Limerick 2.2. are rated affordable Irish housing markets.

All of Australia’s major markets have urban containment policies and all have severely unaffordable housing – Sydney 12.9, Melbourne 9.9, Brisbane 6.6, Adelaide 6.3 and Perth 5.9.

Australia’s unfavourable housing affordability is in significant contrast to the 3.0 ratio which existed before the implementation of urban containment (urban consolidation/densification) policies.

All 3 of New Zealand’s major housing markets are rated as severely unaffordable – Auckland 8.8, Wellington 5.5 and Christchurch 5.4. Hong Kong has a severely unaffordable ratio of 19.4.

(Demographia’s 14^th Annual International Housing Affordability Survey – reproduced with permission).

“Urban Containment Policy: In contrast with well-functioning housing markets, virtually all the severely unaffordable major housing markets covered in the Survey have restrictive land use regulation, overwhelmingly urban containment. A typical strategy for limiting or prohibiting new housing on the urban fringe an “urban growth boundary,” (UGB) which leads to (and is intended to lead to) an abrupt gap in land values. Contrary to expectations that higher densities would lower land costs and preserve housing affordability, house prices have skyrocketed inside the UGBs. This also leads to extraordinary price increases that attract investment (speculation), a factor that has little or no impact on middle-income housing affordability where there is liberal regulation (as opposed to urban containment).” – Wendell Cox – Demographia Co-Author.

According to the latest (2018) UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index, Hong Kong, London, Sydney, Toronto and Vancouver are at the greatest risk of seeing a correction in their house prices.

“Price bubbles are a regularly recurring phenomenon in property markets. The term “bubble” refers to a substantial and sustained mispricing of an asset, the existence of which cannot be proved unless it bursts. But recurring patterns of property market excesses are observable in the historical data. Typical signs include a decoupling of prices from local incomes and rents, and distortions of the real economy, such as excessive lending and construction activity. The UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index gauges the risk of a property bubble on the basis of such patterns. Vastly overvalued housing markets, as measured by the UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index, have historically been associated with a significantly heightened probability of correction and greater downside than housing markets whose prices developed more in line with the local economy. This year’s (2018) UBS Global Real Estate Bubble Index publication reveals the cities in which caution is required when buying a house and the places in which valuations still seem fair. In this edition, Los Angeles and Toronto have been added to the selection of financial centres.” -UBS

Housing affordability has become not just a global problem but a global crisis.

As bad as the aforementioned countries are, the problem is growing faster in developing countries –India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Central and South America.

Consistent studies show that between 75% – 80% of people across the world would like to own their own homes. And whilst the world is breaking out of poverty at a rate unparalleled in history – from 44% in 1981 to less than 10% in 2015, for the democratisation of wealth to continue, the housing road block must be removed.

7. Recommendations – what to do and what not to do

Regrettably, the general public is profoundly ignorant of the underlying causes of housing unaffordability.

Edmund Burke once said “It is the job of political leaders to teach people that which they do not know”.

Appealing to the political class alone to solve the housing crisis will not suffice. The public needs to be informed of both the causes of the problem and the solution. As former Australian politician Bert Kelly said of protectionism – once considered a settled public policy position, “trade protectionism needs to be made intellectually and morally disreputable.”

First, what not to do. As discussed above, policies which seek to suppress demand -lower levels of immigration, the removal of favourable taxation treatments – negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts, bank lending restrictions, changes to self-managed superannuation fund rules, pension rules, congestion taxes and land taxes, are futile. As are attempts by governments to assist home buyers with first home buyer grants, shared equity schemes, social/public/community housing projects, deposit saver accounts and stamp duty exemptions for people down-sizing.

As for what to do, first and foremost, where they have been applied, urban growth boundaries or zoning restrictions on the urban fringes of cities should be removed.  Residential development on the urban fringe should be made “permitted use.” In other words, there should be no ‘zoning’ restrictions in turning rural fringe land into residential land.

Create a low entry level for those wanting to develop housing allotments. Smaller players need to be encouraged back into the market by abolishing compulsory so-called ‘Master Plans.’ If large developers wish to initiate Master Planned Communities, that’s fine, but they should not be compulsory.

Allow the development of basic serviced allotments ie water, sewer, electricity, stormwater, bitumen road, street lighting and street signage. Additional services and amenities – ornamental lakes, entrance walls, childcare centres, bike trails and the like can be optional extras if the developer wishes to provide them and the buyers are willing to pay for them.

No up-front developer or infrastructure charges. All services should be paid for through the rates system – paid for ‘as’ they are used, not ‘before’ they are used.

National or Federal Governments should consider using commerce or corporations powers to override state or city planning laws to allow land holders the right to make their land available for housing.

Similarly, National or Federal Governments which have state or city grants systems should reduce their federal grants commensurate with profiteering from land supply constraints driving up state and/or city tax revenue.

Countries which have strong competition laws should investigate state and/or city planning and/or land management agencies.

Cities should emulate policies where access to home ownership is made easy – Houston and Atlanta in the US, and adopt policies that reflect simplicity not complexity, neutrality not favouritism, transparency not opaqueness, and stability not instability as seen in cities listed on the UBS Bubble Index.

A United Nation’s sustainable development goal is “to ensure adequate housing for all by 2030”.

Without decisive action, this goal will never be achieved.

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This article was first published by Bob Day in May 2018.

It was Benjamin Franklin who said, ‘In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.’ Will Rogers responded: ‘Yes, and the only difference between death and taxes is that death does not get any worse every time parliament sits.’

I note that over the past 12 months, the strategy to repair the budget has shifted from cutting spending to now raising revenue. If that is the government’s strategy then it begs the question: what is the best way to raise revenue? As we attempt to answer this question, can we please set aside preconceived ideas and beliefs and look at the facts, the figures, the evidence and the logic because these all give rise to one irrefutable conclusion. If you want more revenue then lower the tax rate. Let me explain.

Tax law in Australia has been described as unintelligible. It is practically impossible to know what the law is and what it means. As we have learnt from bitter experience, in any area of compliance, rules and sanctions must be clearly spelt out so people know how they are supposed to behave and what will happen to them if they do not. The resultant attitude of many taxpayers to tax law is to treat the law and the courts as irrelevant. ‘Forget legal advice, just give me an ATO ruling that will protect me from penalties or prosecution,’ many say. Other taxpayers of course just surrender and pay up. Systems which are complex in their application and debilitating in the sense that the more you earn the less of each dollar you keep, and unfair and unreasonable in the sense that people feel penalised for working, are destined to failure. Anything not based on economic reality is doomed to failure and it is clear that our tax system has failed us.

Australia’s cash economy is estimated at about 15 per cent of GDP—that is approximately $240 billion—one of the largest in the developed world. An underground economy of that magnitude requires the involvement not only of a lot of businesses but also of millions of consumers. As we know, laws only work when people believe in them and at the moment they have no respect for our tax laws. High tax rates undermine enterprise and destroy the will to work. Behavioural response is a reality.

The prospect of giving up half or more of any additional earnings leads people to decide that it is simply not worth it. Taxation then starts to produce gross inefficiencies as people stop working as much or as hard as they used to and governments find their taxes are not producing the revenue they expected. Similarly, many on welfare benefits decline opportunities to work due to the punitive effect that small earnings and high tax rates have on the security of their welfare benefits and the value of extra work. As for people on very low incomes, they fare worst of all, for as they increase their earnings, higher rates of income tax combined with the loss of means-tested benefits deprive them of up to 80c of every extra dollar they earn.

If we are to extricate ourselves from this dysfunctional system, the goodwill of the public needs to restored by getting tax levels back to something which most people would see as reasonable. To do this, we need to make three specific policy changes Firstly, in order to remove one of the most significant tax avoidance avenues, align personal tax rates with company tax rates—in other words, make personal tax rates and corporate tax rates the same. Secondly, raise the tax-free threshold; and, thirdly, introduce a single-rate tax system.

Single-rate, flat taxes are gaining popularity across the globe. The reason Treasury officials like the idea of single-rate flat taxes is that they work. Single-rate, flat taxes increase economic efficiency by reducing distortions, improving the overall allocation of resources, encouraging labour supply and stimulating economic growth. If one looks at the experience of those countries which have introduced a single-rate, flat tax and also the tax reforms of the 1980s which took place in Britain and America, reducing tax rates causes revenues to rise. If you want more revenue, lower the tax rate.

Some further examples. When the Australian company tax rate was cut from 39 per cent to 30 per cent, revenues went up not down. The famous Reagan tax cuts in the US in the 1980s from 70 per cent to 28 per cent produced a $9 billion increase in revenue, when everyone said there would be a $1 billion shortfall

Russia is another example: the move to a 13 per cent flat rate tax in 2001 increased their revenues. When Sweden halved its company tax rate from 60 per cent to 30 per cent, revenues tripled.

Resistance to paying tax declines as people’s tax rates fall. Conversely, when taxes increase, people respond accordingly. Former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr’s attempt at revenue raising by introducing the vendor stamp duty in 2004 resulted in less revenue being collected, not more, and it was scrapped after just 12 months. Single-rate flat taxes have now been adopted in over 30 countries and counting. In a research paper commissioned by the Association of Chartered Certified Accounts, Australia’s Professor Sinclair Davidson concluded:

Our existing tax system is flawed and unsustainable. … A single-rate flat tax with a generous tax-free threshold would be a major improvement on the current Australian tax system.

Australia is becoming uncompetitive. In 2006—nine years ago—an inquiry headed by Dick Warburton and Peter Hendy benchmarked the Australian tax system against tax systems applying in other major trading nations. Mr Warburton said:

… we should be looking at major tax reform—not just tax cuts, but reforms that look at the whole structure of the tax system. One of the ways you can do that is broaden the base and cut the rate.

Mr Hendy called for personal tax rates to be cut to equal company tax rates.

We also need to start reducing the current 30 per cent company tax rate. It cannot be done overnight, but the government could start by cutting the rate by one percentage point in this year’s budget and then announcing its intention to make a similar reduction every year it is in office. That would hold out the prospect of a 20 per cent company tax rate, if the government is really serious about an internationally competitive tax system, and a 20 per cent personal tax rate by 2025.

Nobody enjoys paying taxes, but in the 1950s and 1960s relatively low taxation and a comparatively simple set of rules meant that people paid what was due without too much complaint. Today, however, the government and the ATO find themselves locked into a destructive relationship of repression and resistance with ordinary taxpayers. Where people can avoid tax by exploiting loopholes they will do so; where they cannot, as with ordinary PAYG taxpayers, they will just become resentful at the unfairness of it all.

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Originally delivered by Bob Day as a speech to the Senate, 25 March 2015.