Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

The reason the Housing Investment Probity Bill 2024 has been recommitted for debate in the 48th Parliament is that the maladministration, the integrity failures and the performance failures of this housing scheme are one of the greatest failures of public policy in my lifetime. And this is a fund, the Housing Australia Future Fund, which holds $10 billion of the people's money. So far, the scoreboard for this fund, for $10 billion, is the acquisition of 300 houses, thereby making the housing crisis worse. Who could imagine that the government of Australia would be competing with people in a constrained housing market? Three hundred houses acquired and 17 houses built in the Australian Capital Territory—that's the scoreboard so far, for $10 billion. It's not going well.

But the broader issue here goes to the integrity of public finances—$10 billion. This integrity bill is designed to ensure that these funds will not be plundered by the criminal mafia elements of the CFMEU and its related party fund, the Cbus organisation. The CFMEU is responsible for a 30 per cent premium on apartment buildings in parts of Australia. For many younger Australians, their first house is not going to be a standalone brick-built house; it will be a small apartment. This 30 per cent CFMEU criminal mafia tax on Australian housing, brought to you by the Labor Party, should not be tolerated.

What we have here is a $10 billion fund of taxpayers' money which could, in fact, be used to go into business with those same people. The people that brought you the housing crisis, the CFMEU, could actually have their fund, the Cbus fund, engaged by the Housing Australia Future Fund. That is an outrage, so this bill principally seeks to exclude that organisation—or any organisation connected with the criminal mafia elements of the CFMEU—from accessing taxpayer funds. That is the point of this bill.

We have seen, over these last few years, a very, very close relationship between the CFMEU, Cbus and the Labor Party. After the government won the 2022 election, one of their first acts was to abolish the Building and Construction Commission. If ever you needed evidence that this is a government for vested interests, that is it—one of its first acts was to abolish the strong cop on the beat.

We saw during the last parliament very close engagement between the Cbus super fund and the government. In fact, the Treasurer, Mr Chalmers, filed a false public interest immunity claim with this parliament to protect documents given to him by Cbus, which is chaired by his former boss, Mr Wayne Swan, who's also the president of the Labor Party. Mr Chalmers filed a false public interest immunity claim to protect documents from being exposed to public glare which were mainly about private lobbying that the Cbus fund was engaging in because it didn't want to disclose certain taxes and fees to its members. This was very untransparent and a very large failure of integrity.

So it doesn't surprise me that in the Sydney Morning Herald today there is the headline, 'Secretive Albanese government goes backward on transparency'. This government has gone out of its way to obfuscate, to block freedom-of-information requests and to frustrate the Senate's requests for documents. We are paid to do these jobs here in Canberra, to get to the bottom of problems, to expose wrongdoing and to give the Australian people the transparency that they deserve in a liberal democracy. This government has gone out of its way to block those processes from being properly undertaken. All you have to do is go through and look at the documents tabled in response to orders for the production of documents provided to this Senate; they are replete with black out. There's more blacked out than there is text, whether it's for an FOI or an OPD.

As I say, what happened in the last parliament was that the Treasurer of the Commonwealth filed a false public interest immunity claim to protect his mate Mr Swan and Cbus. The reason we know the contents of that secret lobbying is not that the parliamentary process worked under the government. It is not. We know because of the Information Commissioner. The Information Commissioner assessed the FOI and found that there was no case for a commercial-in-confidence claim by Mr Chalmers, that this was secret lobbying and that the public deserved to know. Thank God for the Information Commissioner! Or, since I'm an atheist, thank 'goodness' for the Information Commissioner. But we shouldn't have to rely on the Information Commissioner. The government treats the parliament like garbage. They have no respect for our constitutional obligations to hold them to account. They have no genuine commitment to the promises they made about integrity and transparency. The numbers, as published in the Sydney Morning Herald today, give you all the evidence that is required.

Coming back to this bill, we have been able to, because of a largely blacked out OPD, discover the details of the first round of the Housing Australia Future Fund tender. In that tender, the government has given significant funds to an organisation called Assemble, which apparently is going to be building houses in Melbourne. The site and the legal description of the buildings are blacked out, of course. It's top secret. We shouldn't be able to know where taxpayer funds are going to build houses! The funding arrangements through the availability payments, which is how the taxpayer funds are transferred to organisations like Assemble, are also blacked out.

We are not allowed to know how taxpayer funds are being expended in relation to the Housing Australia Future Fund, and the relevance here between Assemble, the CFMEU and Cbus is that this is a consortium of super funds. This is the government funnelling money through the Housing Australia Future Fund to their favourite vested interests, the big super funds, that they want to make the perpetual landlords of Australians. The government's agenda in housing is to give money to the super funds so that they can own houses that Australians can never own because the government is more focused on the narrow, vested interests of their favourite constituencies—the unions, the super funds and all the other bloodsuckers—than they are on the interests of working Australians. They think it's better that a big institutional fund—it could be a super fund, it might be the Qatari sovereign investment fund, which they've given a tax cut to, so they can own build-to-rent houses for 15 years that will never be owned by Australians. They don't care. Their agenda is institutions first and the people last, because they have become the party of organised vested interests and the party of organised capital.

So the reason that this amendment to the housing program is needed is that there can be no place for criminal mafia elements of the CFMEU in the nation's housing program. As bad as this program is, in terms of its failure to deliver—after two years of operation, it has delivered 17 houses in the capital territory, and it has acquired 300 houses, making the housing crisis worse—surely, everyone here would agree that taxpayer funds shouldn't be going to the CFMEU and its constituent bodies. We shouldn't forget that the CFMEU has been put into administration by this parliament. But the CFMEU still controls a number of board seats on the Cbus fund. It still appoints board members to the super fund, even though it's in administration, and the trust that holds the licence that owns the Cbus fund is owned by the CFMEU in part—21 per cent.

We're living in a country where a union can be put into administration by the parliament, but it can still own a massive retirement fund, and that retirement fund, which makes distributions back to that union in administration, can apparently participate in a taxpayer funded housing scheme. It is very regrettable that we are in this situation, and we want the government to be the best government it can be, but the reason it's failed on housing and has built fewer houses than the last government is that it's put all of its faith in Canberra based bureaucracies which don't build houses, and it's obsessed over its favourite vested interests.

The housing crisis will never be solved by a singular Canberra bureaucracy. The government needs to go out there and talk to the people who are needed to solve this housing crisis. It may shock you, Deputy President, but Canberra bureaucrats don't build many houses. They shuffle a lot of papers—very well, I'm sure, and I'm certain there are many paper cuts. But the people who build houses are builders, tradespeople and developers. The government needs to talk to these people to work out how it might actually achieve its target because, under the last coalition government, on average, there were 200,000 houses built every year. Under this government, we're down to 170,000 houses a year, despite allowing more than a million people into the country. This government has presided over a massive collapse in housing. They have built bureaucracy and not houses. They have wasted billions of dollars on bureaucracies, which don't build many houses, and, apparently, they are allowed to get into bed with the criminal mafia elements of the CFMEU and Cbus.

In closing, the government has talked a big game on transparency and integrity. We know that it has failed to deliver on its proper obligations in relation to FOIs and OPDs. It has been the most secretive government in living memory and it has presided over a disgraceful maladministration of taxpayer funds in relation to the Housing Australia Future Fund.

One small change the government could make to improve the governance integrity of this scheme is to guarantee the Australian people that taxpayer funds will not be exposed to the people who helped cause the housing crisis—the CFMEU, the same people who added a 30 per cent tax to new apartments, which squeezed the life out of the Australian dream for young people. Young people can't get a first apartment because of the CFMEU's 30 per cent tax, brought to you by the Labor Party. These people should not have access to taxpayer funds, and I urge the Senate to look at this clearly and cleanly and to vote for integrity when this comes to a vote.