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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the explanation.

It's very clear that the government has decided that it does not want to give the public access to the Treasury modelling and the detail surrounding the five per cent deposit scheme. That explanation from Minister Farrell on behalf of Senator Ayres on behalf of Minister O'Neil was a random set of words about the contingent liability in relation to the Home Guarantee Scheme, which has nothing to do with the five per cent deposit scheme price modelling, which the government know is the purpose of these motions. It has been the purpose of these motions going back to August 2025, when we first had the Senate adopt our motion that the price disclosures needed to be made.

The government will say that they have complied, as well, on the five per cent modelling. The five per cent modelling is largely redacted—in fact, almost entirely redacted. So we don't know, in fact, what was advised by the Treasury to the government. I make the point that it is clearly a huge affront to the public, after the Senate has ordered multiple times that these documents be produced, for the executive to say: 'We're refusing to give them to you, and we're refusing to acknowledge the fact that they even exist now. We'll change the subject and pretend that all the other senators and everyone else who's listening are too stupid to follow the debate.' That's effectively what their position is now. Last time Minister Ayres gave his explanation, he talked about the Liberal Party. That was his explanation in relation to five per cent deposit nondisclosure. Today we have Senator Farrell say that his explanation is about the contingent liability, which has nothing to do with five per cent deposit price modelling.

The substantive point here is that the Treasury did modelling for the government on the five per cent deposits as an afterthought. They did it in July, almost three months after the May 2025 announcement. The pieces of paper they've given us, which are mainly redacted, actually detail the work that Treasury had done. We just don't know what they actually said. For example, the Treasury says that they expected there were going to be 16,000 additional first home buyers in the first year, but we already know, based on the projections from the Home Guarantee Scheme after it was expanded on 1 October last year, that we're on track for over 66,000, an additional 30,000 people. So the numbers that were in this heavily redacted piece of paper from Treasury, which we're not allowed to see the rest of, are clearly wrong. The Prime Minister of the country has been going around saying that the changes that they're making to five per cent deposits will only result in a 0.6 per cent increase in prices. We know that's wrong, based on all the market analysis. We know it's massively wrong. It looks as if the reason they don't want to present this piece of paper without redactions is that they also know it's wrong. So they have massively misled the Australian community by lying and saying that their changes to this Home Guarantee Scheme or five per cent deposits will not increase prices, when they have and they knew about it before.