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

The coalition will be supporting the Defence Housing Australia Amendment Bill 2025 because we support AUKUS and, of course, we support our defence forces, who do an incredible job for our country. But this issue of defence housing is, of course, linked to the broader issue of housing, because the people who are serving in our defence forces and in our kindred spirits' defence forces also require houses to live in when they are serving our nation. This bill doesn't make any provision for the additional resources which are required for housing the defence forces, and that is no surprise to me, because this is a pattern that we see across the board with Labor's housing commitments. A very good way of describing it is 'all feathers and no meat'.

What we've seen, over the weekend, on the back of the economic summit, is a litany of promises and puff pieces about what the government is going to do on housing, but let's just be clear on the record so far. This government has presided over the biggest surge in population growth since the fifties and a consequent, similarly big collapse in housing completions over the past few years. We have a larger population, the largest population that we've ever had, and a massive collapse in housing construction. Over the last three years of the Labor Party's tenure on the treasury bench, we have seen endless discussion about housing, and we see the Minister for Housing brag about the $40 billion that the Commonwealth is spending on houses—great, $40 billion on housing for fewer houses than were built under the last government. Under the last coalition government, we saw an average completion rate of 200,000 houses each and every year. Now we are down to 170,000 houses a year after three years of Labor's brainless bureaucracy.

And the incoherence of their housing agenda is just so clear. Today you see the government promising to expand the Home Guarantee Scheme. Over the weekend, they were saying they wanted to cut red tape, and now they want to become the largest mortgage insurer in the country. The government either wants to be the world's biggest bureaucracy or it doesn't. This is absolute incoherence. Either you want to cut red tape and you believe in the private economy delivering for Australians or you don't. So I am very confused; I'm extremely confused. Now, maybe it's because I'm not very intelligent. It could well be the case. But just to step through these few issues from the weekend is very hard to follow, extremely hard to follow.

We see a commitment to cut the National Construction Code. Okay, that's good; it sounds like a reasonable idea. It is very complex. There are thousands and thousands of pages and gobbledegook in it. This was the policy the coalition had at the last election. We said we'd freeze the NCC because it's complex. It is a lot of red tape. It is hurting the building sector. Builders, tradies and developers find it extremely hard to comply with. It has increased costs because of the changes that were made in 2022. So we said, 'Let's pause the NCC for 10 years.' The government said, 'That's a terrible idea,' and the Minister for Industry and Science at the time, Mr Husic, said this 10-year freeze would result in 'shoddy hotboxes'. They pooh-poohed that; they said, 'That's a bad idea; the coalition is stupid.' And now we see that the government has adopted the policy we had just a few months ago at the election of freezing the NCC, albeit a shorter freeze—it's a one-year freeze, not a 10-year freeze—and they have committed to making some changes to the code in this calendar year. I'm not sure what those changes will be. From the government's point of view, they're promising the Australian people less red tape, but, in order to deliver that, they're going to change the code in 2025 and then have a freeze until 2029. That's the first thing.

The second thing they announced on the weekend was that they would try to push housing approvals through the EPBC Act. That is a very good idea. Again, this was a policy that we had at the election because we recognise that the way that the government has administered the EPBC Act over the last three years has resulted in fewer houses being approved and developed. In fact, in one development that I visited in Queensland—one of the largest in Australia, which has been releasing lots of land since 1989—last year was the first year they hadn't released any lots, because of the EPBC Act. A parrot flew over a block of land in 1971 and now we can't have any houses there. It's the administration of the EPBC Act which has been causing a loss of housing supply, so we welcome the view that the government now has, that it will try to use the EPBC Act to push through approvals and supply. We welcome that.

Then we see the government has today announced plans to expand the Home Guarantee Scheme. As I say, it is incoherent at best to be arguing that you want to cut red tape and help the private economy get houses built and help people get into houses while also arguing that the way to do it is for the government to become the largest mortgage insurer in the country and to become a property developer. These are the two policies announced during the last campaign, which Labor won. Labor said that they would become the largest mortgage insurer and that they would develop 100,000 houses. This is from a government that has a $10 billion scheme, the Housing Australia Future Fund, that, in two years, with $10 billion of the people's money, has built 17 houses. It has been running for two years and has built 17 houses. We think it's 17. The minister said 17, zero, 2,000—who knows? Either way, even if it were 2,000 for $10 billion after two years, it is not a very good return.

The idea that Canberra is going to solve the nation's housing crisis by becoming a massive property developer and insurer is crazy. When you look at the idea of expanding the Home Guarantee Scheme, which was initially designed to target low-income earners, to everyone, it means that the children of billionaires can now use the Home Guarantee Scheme to fund their first house purchase, which is bizarre—at the least—mistargeted and very dangerous. What about the size of the contingent liability that the taxpayer now faces? How big is that? Tens of billions of dollars, I imagine, because the taxpayer is now funding these insurance products for wealthy Australians. Why are the taxpayers of Australia funding a mortgage insurance scheme for wealthy Australians? I don't know the answer to that question, and I'm not sure the government knows the answer to that question. I think they like the idea of putting out press releases and puff pieces about how well they're doing on housing, when the stats on the scoreboard are very clear: more people and fewer houses, and that is why we have a massive housing squeeze.

First home owners have never faced a larger cliff. Offering a five per cent deposit scheme to middle- and high-income earners is not the right policy for Australia. The taxpayer should not be required to fund that. The Australian people ask themselves why we now look at 10 years of budget deficits. This is one of the reasons. This idea, that the taxpayer should be funding a huge amount of middle- and now upper-class welfare, is a sick proposition that the Australian people should not have to fund.

When you ask about housing and you look at the Defence Housing Australia Amendment Bill 2025 before the Senate today, the point is really on supply. These demand-side endeavours, if targeted, can potentially make some improvements for low- and middle-income Australians. But the proposition that is facing the Australian people is really one of a lack of housing supply. Until the government is able to better understand what is holding back the supply, by talking to builders, developers and tradespeople, then they will never solve this crisis. Unfortunately what we now see are more bandaids, more press releases and more puff pieces, and, frankly, an incoherence. Either the government believes that cutting red tape is a good idea or it believes that the Commonwealth government should be the provider of all services. It can't be both.

We want the government to be better. Our job is to work very hard to highlight the deficiencies in policy whilst we develop our own credible solutions. So we welcome the idea that the EPBC Act could be improved in terms of its administration. We are quite relaxed about the idea of a home guarantee scheme targeted at low-income people. And, as I say, we supported the idea that the NCC was too complex and was causing massive problems for people on the ground. So we are open-minded to supporting sensible ideas, but we don't think the bureaucratic approach of having housing boondoggles like the Housing Australia Future Fund and then guaranteeing mortgages for children of billionaires is the way to go. We think that that is a problem. That is a problem that I can't explain to anyone on my side of this parliament. We hope that in due course the government will be able to explain why it believes that the taxpayer should be funding mortgage insurance schemes for people with very high incomes.

Until we know the answer to that question, I'm not sure the government will be to make any headway on housing. So far, the scoreboard is that there are more people than ever and, frankly, fewer houses than we've seen at any time in the past decade.