Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of the minister's lack of a response to this order for the production of documents, and this is a pattern that we are seeing regularly from this Labor government, in showing contempt for this chamber by not providing it with the information that we are entitled to see.

I think it is fair to say that, if the government believed this program was a good one, then they would be showing us the modelling and they'd be very happy to do so. But what we know is that this is a program that has failed, just like their HAFF has failed. Hardly any houses have been built. Now we see a five per cent deposit scheme has pushed up the price of houses. Whilst, as Senator Walker says, 240,000 people have availed themselves of that five per cent deposit scheme, the average price of a house is now around a million dollars. So the government has helped people to acquire a roughly $950,000 debt, and, on top of that, interest rates have now gone up. All they're doing is pushing up house prices and saddling people with massive amounts of debt. Meanwhile, the banks are absolutely making massive profits—

An honourable senator: Making bank!

making bank, off the interest of these loans. How about we tax the banks and then build some public housing? That would fix the housing crisis.

Senator Walker talked about a whole range of impacts that this housing crisis is having, and I agree with her on that. But what I don't agree with her on is that Labor has risen to the occasion to actually tackle the scale of this crisis, and it is a crisis. Labor have now been in government for four years, and they are about to hand down their fifth budget. Every measure that they have taken in the last four years has been tinkering around the edges rather than tackling the actual problems. We need a massive build of public housing in this country. That is the way that we will tackle the housing crisis.

Senator Walker talked about the fact that the government's made some increases to rent assistance. The government's own Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee says, in its most recent report, that all of those gains have now been lost; they've been negated because now rents have gone up and the cost of housing has gone up. Labor might as well have not made that increase to rent assistance, because, by making the problem worse, they've just neutralised the gains.

If this government had the courage to stand up to the big end of town, it would be taxing the one per cent, it would be making sure that the banks were paying their fair share of tax, it would be making sure that gas corporations were paying at least 25 per cent on their gas exports, it would be making sure that the billionaires in this country were paying their fair share and it would be making sure that corporations in this country—every corporation—were prevented from price gouging people. There's the revenue they could generate from really tackling capital gains tax and negative gearing, not just tinkering around the edges like we're hearing, and actually taxing the gas corporations and stopping fossil fuel subsidies. And maybe don't pay for those submarines that we'll never see from a country that has a leader that is tanking his own economy.

If they actually had the courage to do these things—to stand up to their corporate mates and the big end of town—we'd have the money we need to tackle the housing crisis, to build hundreds of thousands of public homes to make sure that people have a roof over their head and to raise income support so that people on the lowest incomes in this country can afford to live. The fact that they won't release the documentation tells us everything that we need to know. They are embarrassed by this policy, and it's not working.