Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Deputy President, I add my congratulations for your election to an important role in supporting the chamber. It hasn't taken Labor all that long to slip back into their old habits. We see the same thing again and again and again. Rather than take responsibility for their policy failures and the things they claimed they were going to do, they simply try to fob them off, blame somebody else, deflect or talk about something else.

Even when taking note of answers, we've had the government talking about things that are completely separate from the questions that were put to them by coalition senators. I will give Senator Ananda-Rajah credit for actually addressing the housing issue, but what she and the government have failed to do is acknowledge what Treasury did when it belled the cat—that they are not going to build the 1.2 million homes that they've promised. They can talk all they like about their aspiration, but there are some practical realities out there in the market that they are not going to meet. In fact, they're going to build fewer houses than were built in the five years prior to 2025. They will build fewer houses than the coalition built in its last five years in government. So they can talk all they like about what we did or didn't do, but one thing we did do was manage to get new houses built.

It's not just me saying this. Last Saturday night, the leader of the Labor Party in Tasmania said during his post-election speech that new builds are at some of the lowest levels they have been at for many years. This is the Labor leader in Tasmania, in his speech on election night, saying that new builds are at their lowest levels for many years. This verifies what Treasury has said and what we've been saying—that this government will build fewer houses in the five years to 2030 than we did in our last five years. They spent two or three years faffing around with the policy.

You cannot believe what this government says. We've seen it before. We remember the $275 reduction in energy bills that was promised by the Labor Party. It was never delivered and never will be. We just see increases in prices. They promised a lower cost of living; well, the cost-of-living crisis is still with us. They live in this fantasy world where everything will be fine if they get up and trot out their talking points. That's not what the Australian people want. The Australian people want the government to deliver on its promises.

They need to have sensible promises, they need to have policy that will deliver on those promises and they need to not do what they did in the last parliament, which was to put in place a whole range of reforms which are working against the economy and working against the promises that they've made. I talk to people in the construction industry, the industry that I spent 25 years in before coming to this place, and they lament what this government has done to them—inhibiting their capacity to build houses. Building houses is what the government wants!

It is about time this government actually started telling the Australian people the truth. It's about time this government started keeping its promises to the Australian people. The Australian people cannot believe a thing that this government tells them. Those opposite make all these promises. They come in here with their spin, their deflection and their blaming of somebody else, but this government was re-elected on the basis of a whole range of promises as to the things that they were going to do. They didn't deliver on their key promises in the last parliament, and what we will continue to do is to make sure that they keep the promises they made in the lead-up to this parliament, because that's the least they could do for the Australian people.

Question agreed to.