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

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the statement.

In doing so, I note for the record that the coalition wishes Senator Wong a very happy birthday. I won't break into song here, because I might shock other senators and I'm trying to show respect to colleagues!

Well, it is a very disappointing response, Minister, because this is not a new issue. There is a sense in the response of the minister that this is all new. They had to go down to the Treasury, rustle a few rats together, get a few pieces of paper and, on the servers, try and find what the dogs and the rats hadn't actually eaten down there in the Treasury building on Langton Crescent. The fact is that this issue, in terms of the governance of Housing Australia and the bin fire that it's become, was initially the subject of a freedom of information request by me back in December 2024.

In response, the Treasury—as directed by the Labor government, I imagine—replied using an exemption and neither confirmed nor denied the existence of this report. If they had read the FOI Act that they seek to gut, they would know that you cannot use a neither-confirm-nor-deny exemption except in relation to national security or to Parliamentary Budget Office documents. The last time I looked, the government's bin fire in Housing Australia, which has billions and billions in taxpayer funds but doesn't build houses, had nothing to do with national security or the Parliamentary Budget Office. This is an embarrassing mis-step that we exposed at Senate estimates—that the government is now asking the Treasury to, effectively, make up exemptions, which are not available to the department, in order to cover up documents.

This is not a new process. We have been seeking these documents for some time. There was an admission at Senate estimates that this particular document exists. We've asked for that on notice, but the order for the production of documents is a separate legal process. The minister doesn't like that we're using the Senate's powers to get access to documents, but maybe the government should reflect upon its dreadful FOI record where citizens and senators alike find it very hard to get any information. The idea that they're promoting, now that they've said the quiet part out loud, is the gutting of the FOI laws put in place by Malcolm Fraser. Malcolm Fraser believed that the government would work better for the citizens if people had information about the activities of government.

It's a pretty simple job being an opposition senator. Our job is to make sure that the government does not misappropriate funds, that there is good value for taxpayers and that they don't run programs in a way which is not in the public interest. That's what we're seeking to do. We're not seeking to have the world record number of orders for the production of documents. No-one gets out of bed every day and says, 'I really want to be the subject of Senator Gallagher's speech in the Senate about how many OPDs I've made.' The point of doing it is that we're trying to get to the bottom of things. That's the point. I can assure you that no-one gives a rats about how many orders are made by this place. People expect us to come here to the bush capital and actually do things. We're supposed to do things here. In our role, we're trying to get to the bottom of things.

The point I make is that the government's judgement appears to be that it doesn't want to provide this document through this process. That appears to be the case, because we've been seeking the document for nine or 10 months now. It's a long time. I would expect that, unless the government want to have more problems with the management of the chamber, in the end they will do what they've done with the Briggs review and provide it in some form. There's no other result we could accept; otherwise, we wouldn't be doing our job.

We're worried about the maladministration at Housing Australia, because it has a lot of money. It has billions of dollars of taxpayer funding. It doesn't build houses. It spends a lot of money on executive salaries, recruitment, legal, retrenchments and other things that do raise a lot of questions. It's also the subject of this governance probe. You have spent $24,000 of taxpayer funds on a governance probe, which you're saying you won't give us or you might not give us. In the end, we will get the document because we'll work with the senators to ensure that the government provides us this information in the way that the law dictates. If this government doesn't do that, then we'll have lengthy question times and lots of complaints. So, in the end, I'm sure we'll get the document.