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

I rise to take note of this particularly disappointing explanation by Minister Ayres. I want to commend Senator Payman for bringing this motion to the Senate, because it highlights the failure of this government to comply with orders of the Senate or to comply with FOI arrangements. I'd say that the people of Western Australia are getting good value from Senator Payman and her OPDs. The government make it sound as if it's a crime that we would dare ask questions or seek to get the information which is germane to policy judgements that they are making and are getting wrong.

The Labor Party is great at politics, but they're very bad at doing stuff. They're very bad at management, and this is a great example of a policy announced in an election campaign, five per cent deposits, in which the government would remove all the means testing and make it available to anyone, thereby supercharging the demand side of the market. This was announced in May, and then three months later they thought: 'Maybe we should get some modelling done. Maybe we should see whether this might actually have an impact on the housing market.' So they went off to Treasury, and they said to Treasury: 'We've got this new policy coming in later this year. It's a big policy. We're uncapping a government scheme. We're giving everyone free insurance, so you can get a 95 per cent mortgage, whoever you are and no matter what your circumstances are, pretty much'—quite a significant intervention from the federal government in the housing market—'We forgot to ask you for modelling when we announced it in the campaign. Could you please go away and work out how much damage this might do?' I'm sure they didn't express it in that way. That's my own editorial, in case you were wondering, Deputy President. So they sent off an email to the Treasury, and the Treasury did some analysis and they came back with a number, and they said that the changes that the government was making to the five per cent deposit scheme would increase prices by 0.6 per cent. The Prime Minister, when he was asked at some stage about this, said it was 0.5 per cent—and we won't split the difference on a relatively small number, but that was the number that came up.

As a result, we also moved a motion in this place to get access to the modelling, back in August. Senator Payman's motion was back in November. And all we have received back, in the OPDs, is just pages and pages of redactions, which are pretty useless and don't really make any sense. The same can be said for the FOIs, which came back with pages and pages of redactions, including the key part, underneath where it says '0.6 per cent', where all the assumptions and the commentary would be—the sensitivity analysis. Now, I'm sure that Treasury would have said, 'Well, 0.6 per cent—it could be, but here are a whole lot of factors that need to be taken into account, and qualifications.' But you know what? We're not allowed to see those. Those are state secrets. The Commonwealth funds its own Treasury to do modelling on policy programs for the community, but we are not allowed to see that modelling. Whether we do an FOI or an OPD, the government has some ridiculous reason for not giving us this information.

That's why the Senate is, frankly, frustrated. And it's not just the Liberal Party or the National Party; it's the Greens; it's the crossbench—everyone is frustrated, because our job is to get to the bottom of things, and, whether the government likes it or not, we're trying to do our best to get to the bottom of the basis upon which policy judgements are made by this government, how they spend taxpayer funds and how they administer programs.

At the moment, there's a lot of maladministration—a lot of wasted money. So we're trying to do what we're paid to do. And the government cries and cries, like a little baby, that we've moved too many motions or something. But we're never going to give up on trying to get to the bottom of why these policy judgements were made and whether they were made on a sound basis.

I'll tell you what: the evidence is in, because Mr Albanese says 0.6 per cent, but the market data shows that, in the first month of operation, the market jumped by 1.2 per cent, which is double. So that's why we want to know what the Treasury advice said, because we already know that it's wrong.