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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the response.

The minister's response wasn't really an explanation. It was a summary of the government's complaints that the opposition is seeking transparency on the activities of this executive government. Of course, that's what we're here to do. We're here to get to the bottom of things. Ultimately, we have two main jobs. We have to try and hold the government to account on its expenditure of public funds and its administration of programs. That is the job the Australian people would expect us to do on their behalf. So it doesn't surprise me that the same government that wants to gut the FOI Act to ensure that Australians can't understand the inner workings of their own government is having a massive sook about the opposition seeking documents.

What are the documents we're seeking? The documents we are seeking go to the appointment of an observer to the board of Housing Australia. Housing Australia would be one of the greatest boondoggles in the history of federation. It's a $10 billion scheme that's been going for two years and couldn't build a dunny. What it has done is purchase houses that Australians could acquire themselves. That's what it's done. This hugely expensive bureaucracy has had an observer appointed to it. You have a board full of political hacks and losers that are there to spend the taxpayers' funds that can't be trusted by the government. The government appointed all the dead people from Victoria who have been running a dead government down there for years and years, running the poor old people of Victoria into the ground. They're all on the board of this fund. Then they've got someone from Treasury, appointed by this minister, who goes to the board meetings. Not only do they go to the board meetings; they speak in the board meetings, so they're privy to the financial judgements. When we look at the outworkings of the tenders from Housing Australia, who are the greatest beneficiaries? It is the Labor Party's best friends, the super funds and union aligned bodies that are getting billions of taxpayers' funds. This is a very expensive way to build houses.

It may be the case that it's much better for the government to build public housing, but they've decided to go down the route of this hybrid model where they have to pay off all their mates, spivs and crooks. So we're asking questions about what's going on down there. We want to know why the government has appointed an observer to the board of Housing Australia. Who is this person? Why have they been appointed? What are they doing? What are the terms of their appointment? What can they do in the board meetings? What can they not do? What should they recuse themselves from? We're talking about $10 billion. Billions have been promised. In some cases, we're looking at dwellings costing the taxpayer $1.3 million. The average cost of a new dwelling in this country is $500,000, but the taxpayer is being asked to cough up 1.3 million bucks.

These are reasonable questions. The minister can whinge and cry his crocodile tears about the opposition seeking answers, and he can use his stupid fishing metaphors, but what he should be doing is asking his mates at the super funds why they are funding Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine. Why isn't Minister Wong looking after the sanctions? Why are we as a country allowing these financial institutions to undermine our own sanctions? Instead we hear about fishing boats which are apparently trawling for information as if this is some mission which has no destination. The destination we are seeking is to uncover the paperwork that underpins the appointment of the observer to the board of Housing Australia. That's all we want to know.

We tried to get these documents back in October, and we received a letter from the minister saying it was going to take time because they were down in the bowels of Treasury, and they were digging around with torches on their hats and everything trying to find these pieces of paper. Now here we are at the back end of November, and we still don't have the paperwork. So we wait with bated breath. I don't think it's a bad thing that we're trying to get to the bottom of things.