Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

The opposition will be supporting this suspension, because it is our view that the government has had every opportunity to negotiate with the Greens or anybody else in this place so that your bill will actually reflect the will of this chamber, but you haven't. You haven't even tried. Senator Farrell, in your contribution, you said that, if this bill went through, you could start providing this crisis accommodation, veterans accommodation and Indigenous accommodation tomorrow. Well, you could too if you actually negotiated your bill so that it could get through this place.

Instead, you are absolutely hell-bent on coming in here and continuing to put up a $10 billion future fund with not one guarantee of a cent of this money ever ending up in the housing market. Basically, what you're doing is putting forward a bill that is saying that $10 billion is going to be gambled on the stock market—or to that effect. If you were really deadly serious, you could spend this money today. You don't need to put this legislation through in order to put money into the social housing, affordable housing and support housing that you come in here and talk about. You could have just put it into your budget. That would have been a pretty simple way to do it.

But what we are seeing is a government that is losing control. You may have said, Senator Farrell, that the Greens are losing control. I would actually contend that it is you who are losing control, which will be demonstrated by the fact that you can't even control your legislative agenda today because you haven't done your homework.