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

I will start by thanking colleagues who have already made statements this evening. From the government, I thank Senator Ananda-Rajah and Senator Darmanin. I've really enjoyed working with those senators, as well as with Senator McKenzie, on this committee. We had a lot of fun at the public hearings, but I'll move on to the serious matter of the productivity challenge that the country has.

We are living through a great decline in our nation, which is very regrettable, and our productivity trajectory is very poor. Yes, people can use speeches in this place to apportion blame to various people, but I think, in the main, it has been a bit of a bipartisan job. In relation to housing productivity in particular, we have had a serious problem, in that the bureaucrats have been allowed to run on autopilot and ministers of the day, potentially of both shades of government, have just let things happen without properly considering them.

The point of this interim report is to land a series of policy options on housing productivity. There are matters of finance and banking. There are matters of how the regulators are set up. Then, of course, there is the matter of the National Construction Code, which is probably the biggest lever the national government has in terms of determining how productive or unproductive the housing system might be. The National Construction Code is one of those things that every bloodsucker and every rent seeker has found a way to get their snout into. So what you've got is a National Construction Code which has ballooned from a couple of hundred pages 30 years ago to now 2,000 pages and it is effectively unreadable.

As a failed accountant and a very poor auditor, I take the view that, if a professional in an industry can't understand their own governing rules or has no chance of ever actually being able to read them, it's not a very good sign. I take the view that the 2,000 pages, which it has now ballooned to, are not a sign of health for the housing sector. Effectively, it is a punitive way to deal with people coming into the housing system. It says: 'You've got to have all this gold plating.' Everything has to be mandatory. You must have a house built as if you are disabled or as if you are wanting to have the most super-duper energy-efficient house known to humanity.

I think the general view is that the house should be—