Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to make a statement on the consequences for my constituents of the government’s ill-advised rush to increase public spending in response to the global financial crisis. We are all familiar with the Home Insulation Program, which resulted in 120 house fires, 1,500 potentially live foil roofs and 240,000 dangerous or potentially substandard non-foil roofs. That resulted in a $424 million safety program, a $56 million industry assistance program and an Auditor-General report showing that overpayments were around $82 million—waste, waste, waste. We are all familiar with the Building the Education Revolution Program in which many schools were forced to pay over the odds for facilities that they did not want or were not fit for the purposes they required. We have heard far less about the social housing initiative. This is what the then Minister for Housing, the member for Sydney, said about the initiative in a media release following her visit to inspect a property at Hervey Bay:

The program is delivering great value for money ... I am delighted that a local building company is doing the work on this project and that seven local tradespeople are employed on site. This shows how important the stimulus plan has been in supporting local jobs through the global recession.

The picture is rather different in Coffs Harbour, I might say. In my electorate there is a Housing New South Wales contract for three social housing projects. It was let to a company called Perle projects. Perle has now gone into administration with debts of $9.8 million. The administrators, Rodgers Reidy, have reported that they are only able to identify fixed assets by Perle of $104,372.

There are serious questions to be asked about how such contracts came to be awarded to this company under the stimulus package by Housing New South Wales. There were also other projects let under this program to the University of New South Wales, to the Catholic Education Office and to the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority. I suspect the answers lie in the Gillard government’s compulsion to be seen to be doing something and in the New South Wales government’s lack of due diligence. The result is that 58 local companies are facing the prospect of getting as little as 10c in the dollar on individual accounts running into hundreds of thousands of dollars. This government and the New South Wales government have done more damage to these small businesses and the families that depend on them than the global financial crisis ever could. Once again, we have seen their bungling hurt the very people that their actions were intended to assist.