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

I don't want to do anything unparliamentary. The point is that the performance of the agency that is charged with expending the government's funds on behalf of taxpayers requires serious investigation. The ministers of the Albanese government regularly brag about how much money they're spending on housing—billions and billions of dollars. According to the MYEFO documents, it is now up to $80 billion that this government will have spent on housing since they were elected. Now, that's $80 billion to build fewer houses than the prior government. There is a fly in the ointment when the government is spending more money and receiving less in return. So we are wanting to investigate the governance and performance of this agency which is spending billions of taxpayer funds.

The other primary concern is that the Labor Party has charged Housing Australia to undertake functions that it has no chance of actually doing in an efficient and effective way. The government wants to be a property developer. The government wants to be an insurer. In the long-run history of Australia, invariably the government has not been good at undertaking deep private sector activity like property development and insurance. In fact, perhaps the Treasurer should go back and reread Paul Keating's memoir; he might find that in fact Canberra isn't so good at service delivery like this.

The primary reason for this inquiry is to look at the functioning of this agency which is spending a lot of money and, I would argue, has been asked to do things it couldn't possibly do well. It couldn't possibly be as good as a builder at building properties, and it couldn't possibly be as good as a private insurer at providing insurance services into the economy.

There are many governance issues. There is the fact that the chair of Housing Australia attended the meetings of the audit and risk subcommittee whilst not being a member of that board subcommittee. There is the fact that there was a secret investigation into the board undertaken by Intersection, which was covered up for 18 months by the government. That $24,000 inquiry was commissioned by former minister Julie Collins to look at the significant issues inside the board of Housing Australia. There is the fact that the agency is seeing a 25 per cent staff turnover ratio. Every year at Housing Australia, 25 per cent of the people take off. In the past year, six of the top eight executives have left. This is an organisation that is under huge pressure, because it's been asked to do all these things. The headline of a Sydney Morning Herald article of 27 November last year reads, 'O'Neil reads riot act to agency as Labor seeks to keep housing probe secret'. The point is that the minister, Clare O'Neil, has had to go down to Housing Australia, bang open the doors and say, 'Look, I'm going to read you the riot act, because things aren't so flash here.' And the reason things aren't so flash is that you've got people attending committee meetings that they shouldn't be attending, you've got board dysfunction, you've got massive staff turnover and you've got executives in an exodus from the organisation. So, there are governance issues inside the organisation.

Then there is the fact that the agency is spending $30 million on consultants—a massive amount of money on consultants—again, from a government that said they were worried that the taxpayer was spending too much money on consultants. And there's another huge staff cost of tens of millions of dollars over the life of this agency. That brings me to the primary concern about performance, which is that the agency has billions of dollars invested in it but doesn't seem to be able to build many houses. The fact that we have tried to get to the bottom of how many houses have actually been built but can't seem to get a straight answer—it seems to have been five or 10 or 20 or 30 or 100 or 200 or whatever; we don't seem to know how many have been built.

What we do know is that this agency has been egged on by its political masters to buy houses. It's been buying houses. We've traversed this in Senate estimates and in other places, and it's been revealed that the organisation has been buying houses.