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

We're getting close to the 11:45 guillotine that the government has put on this really important set of bills, which is really disappointing. As I said in my previous contributions in this place, it's really disappointing that, once again, we see the Australian taxpayer having to be the one who forks out because of Labor's botched policy development. If only the Labor Party had actually bothered to put together an appropriate product to take to the market to address the issue they were seeking to deliver on, instead of just coming in with this ridiculous $10 billion off-balance-sheet financially engineered thing that we know is very unlikely to deliver the kinds of funds which would enable the disbursement that Senator Ayres is crowing this fund will be able to deliver.

As I said, once again, it's the poor old taxpayers of Australia who are the ones who will have to suck up the cost to them. That's because, at the end of the day, as a general rule governments don't have money; it's usually out the pockets of taxpayers that we have money to fund these things. We had an amount of $2 billion sent to the states and territories earlier in the year to make sure we had them on side, and now there's another billion dollars of taxpayer funds to fix this up so they could buy the support of the Greens.

Here we are, standing here today—before we have even passed this legislation—with a 30 per cent blowout in the Housing Australia Future Fund. The legislation hasn't even gone through this place yet! We're also having a guillotine, because, clearly, those opposite don't want us to continue to ask questions about where they're getting the money from, what the modelling is and why they've failed to define terms such as 'social housing', 'affordable housing' and 'acute housing'. These are really fundamental definitions in order for us to understand what this particular legislation is going to do. In the absence of those definitions, we can only imagine the opportunity for the states and territories to use these disbursements and to use this fund as a slush fund. They could do whatever they like with the money that this government is obviously going to channel through to them.

This is just another classic example of a rushed, headline policy that has not had the detail dealt with and, once again, Australian taxpayers and the people who are impacted by this will be the ones who suffer. We actually don't know whether there will be one house delivered by this. Clearly, the Greens have managed to convince the government to put in a minimum disbursement of $500 million. We have no modelling to understand whether that $500 million is even a realistic amount of money to be delivered as a net gain from this fund over a period of time. And we're not talking about this fund generating $500 million, because of course the interest has to come out of it. We don't know what the modelling is around the interest and we don't know what the government is expecting. But what we do know is that if we base it on what happened last year—if this fund had been in place last year—not only would it not have made any money it would actually have lost money. So the question the government needs to answer for the Australian public is: how long is this $10 billion actually going to last under the current circumstances? We have great volatility in our markets and there are no security provisions in there in order to save for a rainy day. That's because they have agreed with the Greens that the disbursement is a minimum of $500 million. If the fund makes more than that—please, it would be great if it did—they're going to disburse all those funds. So they will disburse the extra funds in the years they make more than the net $500 million—if they do—but there's no provision for what they're going to do in putting money away for the years when they don't make the money.

The opposition will not be supporting the Housing Australia Future Fund Bill because we believe that it's absolutely bad policy and the IMF has said that it's bad policy. Once again, this government is just shoving something through here with no regard or consultation simply because they want tick off an election commitment and to hell with the consequences!