Andrew Charlton (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I know we live in a post-truth world, but, even by those standards, today's MPI is pretty extraordinary. Let's just review what's happened here. The shadow minister for housing has called on a matter of public importance, and that matter of public importance is the impact of the CFMEU on housing costs in Australia. He's come in here and he's delivered his speech on that impact. He said, 'The CFMEU is raising housing costs by 30 per cent.' That was the key fact that he used in his speech not once, not twice, but six times. He loved this fact so much that he said it over and over: 30 per cent is the amount by which the CFMEU is increasing housing construction costs in Australia.

Well, I love a good fact. I've been known to be partial to facts. So my ears pricked up, and I thought: 'I wonder where this fact comes from. I wonder where the fact that the shadow housing minister has built his entire speech on, his speech about his portfolio, comes from. I wonder where he drew that fact from.' Thirty per cent is quite a big number. If you think about housing construction costs, you've got 10 to 20 per cent profit margins. Presumably the CFMEU isn't impacting the builder's profit margins. You've got materials costs of about 50 per cent. Again, presumably the CFMEU isn't determining that. You've got labour costs of about 30 per cent. Does he think they should be zero? Is that the margin? There's no room in these costs for a 30 per cent CFMEU premium.

So I thought: 'Where would he be getting this number from? Where is this fact? Where's the report that backs it up? Where's the evidence?' This is a senior member of the opposition. This isn't somebody who is just going to come in here and spend his entire time talking about a fact that he has totally made up—surely not. So I decided to do a bit of work myself. Sitting here, using the parliamentary wi-fi, I had a bit of a google: where does this 30 per cent number come from? The only thing I could find was that it has been used by the Leader of the Opposition. The Leader of the Opposition also loves this number. He's used it three or four times. 'The CFMEU increases costs by 30 per cent.' In fact, once he gave himself a little bump up and he said to 2GB that the CFMEU actually increased the costs of construction by 40 per cent. He didn't source that one either. So then I thought, 'Let's go to the ABS.' The ABS is always going to give us some quality facts on this type of thing. And the ABS does show that housing construction costs in Australia have been going up. They've been going up quite markedly but, unfortunately, not in the way that the shadow housing minister would want us to believe.

According to the ABS, this is the trajectory of housing construction costs over the last three years. Over the last year, housing construction costs have gone up 4.3 per cent. That's a lot, but it's not as much as the previous year. It's less than the previous year, where housing construction costs went up 7.3 per cent. That was the first year of the Albanese Labor government. Then I did a bit of a scroll backwards to the previous year, the last year of the Liberal-National government. What does the ABS say that housing construction costs increased by under their watch? Just to preview: ours was 4.3 per cent this year and 7.3 per cent last year. What was the increase in housing construction costs in the year to June 2022 under the Liberals and Nationals? It was 19.8 per cent, five times higher than this year's increase. So if it's the CFMEU causing increases in housing construction costs, it's the combination of the CFMEU and the Liberal-National government.

Now, the ABS is also helpful on this question. They outline a few different areas about where housing construction costs have gone up. They talk about timber increasing 37 per cent over a period of time and concrete and cement going up 16 per cent. Nowhere do they mention or source the fact laid out by the shadow minister. This is an important question. If you're a serious political party and you come into this House on a serious question like housing costs in Australia, you need do two things. You need to be serious about the causes of that problem and you need to propose real solutions. Those are the two tests for a serious political party. We saw the shadow minister for housing come into this House, give an MPI on his own topic, make up a fact to describe a problem which has very little relationship to the actual serious problem and proposed not a single thing to resolve it. This is not a serious political party, but it's a serious issue. (Time expired)

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