Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to this attendance motion. In attending today, the minister has not provided the documents that are being sought. We're here because last week the independent review into governance and operational concerns at Housing Australia was due to be tabled. It's been sought, as we've heard, for quite some time.

The government has once again failed to comply with this OPD in a timely manner. There can be no doubt the Senate needs as much useful information about the administration of housing as we can possibly look at in what is, day to day, becoming worse and worse as a crisis in housing. In the last month, housing prices have increased by more than one per cent in a single month. We now have homeownership rates of people under 25 that are around a third, compared to 51 per cent back in the early 1970s. We've got a rate of homelessness that has increased by 10 per cent, in the years of this Labor government. So we need accountability. We need to know what's going on inside the policy solutions, so called, that the Labor government are putting forward. And we need know what's going on within the administration of this system.

I'm very concerned about what I'm hearing about Housing Australia and the Housing Australia Future Fund. We need information about these important, very large programs in the midst of a housing crisis. I'm very concerned, along with many others in the chamber, about the increasing secretive response to requests for information, particularly in relation to housing. Without publicly accessible information, non-government senators need motions like these or estimates or whatever to try and get to the answers in relation to very few questions about the administration of sizeable amounts of money to fix and respond to a housing crisis. Australians and their senators deserve to know what's going on and to have a government which is open and transparent about its spending. We want our housing system to work well. We want a housing system that responds to that frightening, rapid increase in the price of houses.

Housing Australia's mandate is to support homeownership for Australians and to improve the supply of sustainable long-term social and affordable housing—an incredibly important goal—but I remain concerned about the adequacy of the response and its administrative failures. Reporting in the Australian Financial Review notes that at least six of the top eight executives at Housing Australia have left the agency since Carol Austin took over as chairwoman in June 2023, in addition to other less senior staff who have also left, and we know, of course, Carol Austin has herself since resigned.

Publishing this independent review sought here today would help to show that the matter has been properly dealt with and that the culture within Housing Australia is working in a way to respond to a crisis that's affecting the lives of so many Australians, and we could have avoided this mess if the government had just directly invested in public housing in a direct spend, as we saw in the post-war years, that's simpler, more direct and cheaper.

An issue in relation to what's going on in our housing spend relates to the question of consultants and the budget. The issue of outsourcing public sector work, especially to consultants, really worries me. Section 46 of the Housing Australia Act states:

Housing Australia may engage consultants to assist in the performance of its functions.

Housing Australia recently said their total operating budget in the year 2024-25 was just under $60 million, but, when I look at their reliance on external contracts, it's incredible. It's really quite shocking. Over the past year, they have committed $30 million to external contracts—half the equivalent of their entire budget. That is just astonishing. How are you running an ongoing service when half of the budget or the equivalent of it is contracted out? Fourteen million of that spending is specifically on consultants—the equivalent of 25 per cent of its entire budget. I've asked Housing Australia, on notice, to explain what's in that bucket of consulting. We know what's going on in that bucket. There will be overpriced charging for poor-quality work and a failure to build up the heart, soul and capability of our public sector. Consultants are not the way forward. We need to know what this spending is doing.

In conclusion, we haven't had enough information about what's going on in Housing Australia, and we need to. We had a mere 48 minutes of questioning in estimates on this issue, and we get another go tomorrow night, which is a good thing, but we need to know more. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.