Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Dobell for her question, and I commend her on the representation of the people of Wyong and The Entrance, and all those areas in that part of New South Wales on the North Coast.

The answer to her question about the National Rental Affordability Scheme is that it simply has not delivered the benefits that were expected of it. Why hasn't it delivered those benefits? It is because of the poor and incompetent administration of it by the Labor Party.

In June 2014, only 19,000 of the 35,000 dwellings had been built and 16,000 dwellings had not been delivered. Not only had they not been delivered in the member's state of New South Wales, but hundreds of dwellings had not been built in Victoria and other states around Australia. Why was that? It is because of the poor design, and incompetent administration, of the NRAS. For example, foreign students were allowed to take up dwellings that had originally been designated for ordinary workers in this country. Trading incentives occurred rather than actually building dwellings around the country. More recently we have discovered, again because of the totally incompetent administration of the scheme by the Labor Party, alleged fraudulent use of incentives.

So we are on about improving the administration. We have put in place a use-it-or-lose-it situation in relation to the remaining incentives, and we are not going to proceed with the last round, which is going to save the Australian taxpayer millions of dollars.

This is typical of the Labor Party's incompetent administration. This is also the case, as the Auditor-General pointed out in his report, with the Building Better Regional Cities Program, in which he said:

… the BBRC program has been implemented in a way that gave insufficient attention to the program’s objective…

The guidelines have been ignored. The importance of achieving value for the expenditure of the taxpayer of Australia was simply ignored. I wonder who was responsible for this? It is not an easy question because they had six ministers responsible for housing under the Rudd-Gillard Labor government, but who made the mess of it? It was none other than the member for Sydney. She was the one primarily responsible for the abject failure of this scheme and for the incompetent administration of this scheme.

But, what happens when you are a failure over there? You get promoted! She got promoted so she could then make a mess of the health system in Australia, as the Minister for Health has pointed out. Having failed twice, she is now the deputy leader. If she fails again she will be the leader!