Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) | Hansard source

I thank the member for bringing this motion on. I think that everybody in this House genuinely wants to see more homes built and ensure that Australian people have a roof over their head. Whilst I do commend the member, we can't agree on the policies. And we have seen in my electorate alone housing go up by up to 60 per cent over the past 18 months to two years, and the influx of people from metropolitan areas into coastal areas—I mean, you can't them; it's beautiful. But it's caused homelessness to an extent that we haven't seen before. It is very sad when you see mums and dads with their kids in car parks, sleeping in their cars.

I've referred to the policy, and the first issue is the accelerator fund—$2 billion—which didn't form part of this budget, didn't form part of last budget and will be given to the states and territories effectively untethered. I've been listening to the speeches here today and in the past, and nobody seems to be mentioning that, over the past five years, states and territories have sold off over 30,000 social and affordable properties and haven't replaced what they've sold. They've only replaced 10 per cent of those 30,000 homes. Now, if we're about to give $2 billion of taxpayers' money to the states and territories, there must be some accountability. There must be a tether between that fund and seeing affordable homes built. Otherwise, we are going to see exactly what we've seen in the past: that those funds will be used for other things apart from social and affordable housing, and we'll continue to see properties sold off. That's the first issue with the accelerator fund. We do need to start calling out those states and territories for their failure to provide that housing for our most vulnerable.

Then there's the HAFF, the Housing Australia Future Fund. This is $10 billion of borrowed money. This is what people don't understand. This isn't money that's coming out of the back pocket of the government of the day—money that we have in our coffers. This is borrowed money. We've heard the statistics, and it's economics 101. In the first year it will cost $400 million to set up the fund, without building one home, because the government is investing in equities. That's as much information as we have—in equities. Now, I'm no economist, but, sometimes, equities don't pay. If we invest this $10 billion of taxpayers' money—or borrowed money, which the taxpayer will then have to pay off; and we have no guarantee that these equities will pay—then there is a real risk that, year after year, there will be a deficit in the HAFF, a deficit in the $10 billion and not one home will be built. That is the problem with this policy.

Then we need to look at the 1.5 million people that this government intends to bring in over the next five years, while intending, through the HAFF, to only build 6,000 homes. Where are these people going to go? We don't have enough homes for our own citizens right now. Therefore, you have two failed Labor policies that will not see one home built in the foreseeable future. Labor has the audacity to criticise the coalition and the Greens—I don't often say that—when the policies prove to be inadequate, and that's what the problem is with these policies.

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