Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Housing Australia Amendment (Accountability) Bill 2025. This bill is fundamentally about three very basic things. It's about transparency, it's about oversight, and it's about protecting the Australian economy from reckless government policy. More importantly, it's about reducing that risk of excessive executive overreach.

The objective of the bill is straightforward. It provides an important parliamentary oversight on all the directions made under section 12(1) of the Housing Australia Act, but, specifically, it relates to those directions that constitute the Housing Australia Investment Mandate—

(Quorum formed) which includes the Home Guarantee Scheme and the Housing Australia future facility. But the real impetus of this bill lies in the fundamental alteration in the expansion of the Home Guarantee Scheme, which came into effect earlier this month. That expansion has now meant that there are no income caps on the Home Guarantee Scheme participants, there are no caps on the Home Guarantee Scheme places, and the scheme can now be used to purchase more expensive property.

Labor's expanded policy has fundamentally altered the original design and intent of the Home Guarantee Scheme, which the coalition established as a highly targeted scheme for low-income earners who struggled specifically with low or no deposits. These individuals still had great credit ratings, and they were approved by banks, but they just couldn't get that deposit together. So this was the first rung on the ladder. It limited the number of participants and it limited the number of houses that were available to be purchased by capping the cost of those houses. Essentially, this program now is a free-for-all. Under the existing law, these material changes to the directions that are governing the mandate can now be enacted not by a policy that needs to go through the chamber but instead by a simple instrument that's issued by the minister.

Crucially, this instrument is not disallowable by the parliament, a fundamental tenet of good governance and good government. The process is not in the spirit of transparent and democratic government. Regulation is there to fill in detail. It's not there to implement substantive changes that impact the functioning of the Australian economy. But that's what this bill will prevent. It will prevent that massive executive overreach. It seeks to protect Australians from the whims of a government that are making significant decisions without meaningful consultation and without parliamentary oversight, which is exactly what this chamber is here to do. The government's hesitance to properly consult and their broad use of delegated legislation align with evidence suggesting that this is one of the least transparent governments in Australian history, and it seems to be increasingly so.

(Quorum formed) Well, isn't it extraordinary that the moment I start talking about transparency and a lack of it from this government games start being played that do exactly that. What has just happened, twice, is that Labor have shut down private senators' time. We're not talking about what they want to talk about, so they have shut it down, twice, for no reason. Can I point out that one senator was actually in the chamber when quorum was called and ran outside! I know you're new, but you can't do that. You can't duck outside the chamber after quorum has been called.