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

I move:

That the following matter be referred to the Economics References Committee for inquiry and report by 12 August 2026:

The appointment of the next Chair of the Housing Australia Board, with particular reference to:

(a) the outstanding governance issues at Housing Australia;

(b) the performance of Housing Australia;

(c) the key role of the Chair in leading an agency that is responsible for policies that shape the housing market, allocate billions of taxpayer funds and influence whether Australians can achieve home ownership; and

(d) the Senate's interest in ensuring the appointment of properly suited candidate with the commensurate skills, experience and capacity.

In moving this motion, I make the point that, in Housing Australia, the government have established a behemoth. It is an agency which is a property developer, an insurer, an issuer of bonds and a runner of various programs like Help to Buy. It is an enormous agency inside this Commonwealth government, and in the main, it is undertaking the activities that would usually be run by the private sector. It is spending literally billions of dollars of taxpayer funds, and it will do even more things over the next few years, as per the government's policy.

Even though we don't agree with having this agency doing these things, we stand for integrity in public finances and proper administration of public programs. Those would be reasonable things for an opposition to pursue. I would say that the dysfunction at Housing Australia has totally destroyed its capacity to actually undertake the functions that have been given to it by this parliament—as I say, insurer, property developer, issuer of bonds and programs. All of those things are very expensive, very significant programs. But, from the board down, the agency is very sick. It has been a very sick agency.

Through the estimates process, we have uncovered secret Treasury reports into the conduct of the board, which the government initially attempted to cover up. We have discovered that there is a 25 per cent turnover of staff in the agency, and we have discovered that there has been an observer appointed to the board by the Minister for Housing, Clare O'Neil. The director-general of the housing group of the Department of the Treasury sits in board meetings of Housing Australia. So you've got the plastic tree, you've got the airless room with maybe a couple of windows, and then you've got the Treasury official sitting in there with all the appointees, some of whom are former Labor Party politicians. Others are people who formerly worked in the property industry. That's the Housing Australia board, and they've got to be supervised by Minister O'Neil's delegate because they can't be trusted. The reason they can't be trusted is that they're wasting millions of dollars.

So far, the performance of the agency has been such that it has not been able to build houses, and the Housing Australia Future Fund is at risk, according to the government's own budget papers. The reason it is at risk is that, after 2½ years and $10 billion, it hasn't built any houses, and we get different answers at estimates as to whether it has built zero—is it on a duck?—or whether it has built 10 or whether it has built 600. Every time we ask a question, we get a different answer. The most criminal element of all of this, though, is that the agency, having failed to build houses, has been buying houses. They call them turnkey acquisitions, where they buy off a plan or they buy from developers who are building properties that Australians could actually own. Minister Gallagher said at estimates about a year and a half ago, 'The Housing Australia Future Fund has acquired and converted 340 of these properties.' The next time we had Senate estimates, Minister Gallagher had been moved on from her duties and we had Minister Ayres, who the government appointed to be a bit of a bulldozer. He had a different set of talking points. He tried to walk back and eat the words of good Minister Gallagher, who had done nothing wrong. All that good Minister Gallagher had done was read the papers delivered to her by her office which said that the Housing Australia Future Fund had acquired and converted 340 houses. Her crime was being honest. Then we had Minister Ayres come in and obfuscate with an entirely different set of talking points and different Treasury officials trying to explain that, in fact, what Minister Gallagher had said was wrong and that it wasn't doing that at all. But unfortunately these efforts have run aground because the budget has made it very clear that the Treasury actually does regard this as an at-risk program.

Fancy in a housing crisis having the idea that you have constrained supply, so you have gone from 200,000 houses a year under the last government down to 170,000 houses a year overall. The government's housing fund is now buying houses that Australians could own and is now trying to cover it up when the parliament tries to inquire into whether that's a good idea. Who would believe the government housing scheme would be on the demand side and actually making the problem worse? It's actually quite hard to believe. But, of course, the reason they're doing this is that they're worried about their numbers. After 2½ years, most people would think that with $10 billion you could build something.

Then you look at the spending commitments they have made in round 1 of the HAFF. In some cases, they are spending up to $1.5 million per dwelling. The average cost of a new build in this country is half a million dollars. They're paying three times the price the average homebuilder would be charging to build a new home. Extraordinary! There's an average of about $750,000 across HAFF round 1. This is an agency which is also committing a large amount of taxpayer funds to very expensive builds. So we have asked for all the information to be provided on how much money is being promised in HAFF round 1, round 2 and round 3 and what the progress is on building. It's very hard to get to the bottom of how many have actually been progressed and how many have actually been completed. We imagine that, at some stage, the $10 billion will actually result in a few thousand houses being built. We imagine that may be the case.

The government promised, as we heard today from Minister Wong, that this thing will build 55,000 homes with $10 billion. But, so far, after 2½ years, it hasn't been able to do anything like that. In the long run, the main game in housing is surely going to be getting the builders, the developers and the tradies to build the private housing system. Of course there is a role for social and affordable housing. This has traditionally been the preserve of the states. States have historically built public housing. Maybe there's an argument that there should be more of that. Maybe there's an argument that you should have more social housing supported by state governments with maybe the federal government standing behind it in some way. But the idea that the federal government would establish this behemoth housing fund and it would try and go around to get good value for taxpayers' money and build houses has now been disproven after 2½ years. Once we get to October, it will be three years. I think that has been disproven.

My fear is that this agency has been more worried about how it works out its availability payments and its subsidies to institutional investors than it has been about getting a good deal for taxpayers. That is my fear. In the case of HAFF round 1, the biggest beneficiary, with over $2 billion, is the Assemble group, which is owned by the super funds. This is an organisation which, with its owners AustralianSuper, HESTA and CBUS, had lobbied the government and Dr Chalmers about having a housing future fund that would subsidise the returns for investors, because they of course want to be involved with receiving taxpayer funds. It's not good enough for them to open the door every day and have 12 per cent of people's wages and salaries fall in. They also want to find ways to capture more money from the Australian people via the taxman, via the federal government. And so they devised a scheme which the Housing Australia Future Fund is now delivering, where they open the door and they get huge subsidies from the housing fund to build build-to-rent houses that Australians will never own. They will build apartment blocks that Australians will never own, courtesy of the taxpayer allowing the funds to get to scale in the first place with management contributions then through these contracts through Housing Australia.

My great fear, as I said, is that the agency has been much more focused on supporting the subsidies for institutional investors than it has been on supporting the taxpayer getting the best value for money. The Australian National Audit Office is about to finish its performance audit into this agency. This is going to be a very important audit. This audit, I am sure, is going to highlight that taxpayers have not received value for money when it has come to this program, because how could it be the case that you could be paying two or three times the market rate for a new house? How could that be justified? I don't see how there's any explanation for that. So that is going to be a significant governance concern for the agency going forward.

The chair, of course, is going to be appointed by the executive. We understand that. In Australia, we don't have confirmation hearings for this type of appointment. But I think it's only reasonable that we consider the type of skills and the capability of the people that will be on the board of this agency. It's not good enough to have more Labor mates and the unions dumped onto this board that's going to be spending tens of billions of dollars. We have to have in this program someone who has brains and some experience—someone who's going to screw down the money and get the best value for taxpayers. Whether we agree with these programs or not, we are all Australians. We all want to see the Australian taxpayers get the best possible value for money.

If we have another situation where the board is descending into infighting and maladministration, this program will stagger on. There will be bad deals made. There will be more conflicts of interest. If you were to do an internal audit of the organisation, the first recommendation would be, 'Why the hell do you have a Treasury official sitting in your meetings when you're dishing out billions of dollars?' particularly in relation to the conflicts of interest which may be there in relation to round 1 of the HAFF, where the biggest beneficiary is the super funds which have extensive links to the government. We know that Dr Chalmers used public interest immunity claims to cover up the representations he received from CBUS. I have no idea whether that has to do with his association with Mr Swan or someone else, but the fact is that he used the public interest immunity claims system to protect information that should have been tabled in the Senate through the FOI process and through the OPD process. The Information Commissioner through that out. The Information Commissioner said, 'I've reviewed this claim, and my judgement is that the information that was provided to Dr Chalmers from CBUS about these housing matters is lobbying and should be disclosed.' Thank goodness for the Information Commissioner, because they were able to deal with this as an FOI.

Unfortunately, in the Senate, when we try to seek information through orders for production, we just get stymied. All we see is obfuscation when we're making genuine inquiries. We've made inquiries in relation to many programs that have been administered by this behemoth. For example, the five per cent deposit scheme is administered by Housing Australia. The Prime Minister said that it would drive up prices by 0.6 per cent over six years. It's resulted in a six per cent increase in prices six months. We are not allowed to see the modelling, the risks and sensitivities that were conducted by the Treasury in relation to these matters. We have tried. We had an attendance yesterday from Minister Ayres, who spent most of his time talking about my appearance rather than dealing with the actual matter at hand. He spent a lot of time trying to accuse me of being insane and enfeebled and all those sorts things, which were all very funny, but these are serious matters.

The coalition and crossbench have been trying for many months to get to the bottom of these things, and that's why we are recommending this inquiry to the Senate. We think someone appointed to chair this agency needs to have the skills and capacity to do the job properly. We want to take submissions and have a hearing where we can force the Treasury to explain their process and actually do our job, which is to try and kick the tyres on the proposed approach going forward for this agency. We don't have the time at estimates to get to the bottom of these things. We need a special inquiry into this particular matter right now before the government makes the appointment.

I think this will help the government make the best possible judgement, because it will shine a light that the government should not just be appointing another former failed politician from Victoria or some other failed state. They should be looking to appoint someone who can actually do the job and get the best possible value for taxpayers. This person needs to be very smart because they are going to be running an insurance company which is giving unlimited guarantees. They are going to be running a massive property developer. They are going to be running the Help to Buy Scheme. They are going to be issuing bonds. They probably need to be smarter than anyone who works in this building. We want the best person, and we recommend this inquiry to the Senate.