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

The second core point I wanted to make is around this consumer data right. I think it's been very clear that there is a lot of mortgage fraud going on in this country. It's fuelled by artificial intelligence. There are a lot of pieces of paper that fly around when people try and get a loan. If anyone has recently refinanced or tried to get a home loan, they would have found that it's effectively a paper based system. Artificial intelligence now allows people to make duplicates or completely fraudulent documents, so I think that having the CDR hooked up to the tax office in some way for verification is well worth looking at.

The other point we looked at in this productivity inquiry was the mandate of APRA, which I think is very focused, as it should be, on prudential safety. But it also makes sense for them to consider the impact of their macroprudential tools on the ability of people to get finance so they can get that elusive first home. We didn't make any commentary on their judgements in relation to macroprudential tools, but we did make the point that they should at least make them disallowable in such a way that the Senate could actually take one out if it thought it was unreasonable. And I make that point in relation to their limits on high debt-to-interest loans and also in relation to the serviceability buffer.

The report does deal with the productivity problem that the EPBC Act has created. Despite the government's best efforts, there are still 80,000 houses ensnared inside the EPBC Act. The fact that the minister of the day doesn't publish the decisions and the judgements that he makes about the approvals or the denials is a problem, because the people who are wanting to build houses have nothing to work with. There is no precedent, if that makes sense, so publishing what is effectively going to be a compliant development under the EPBC Act would, I think, aid people wanting to build houses in this country.

In the main, I think we had a very collegiate opportunity to identify some productivity problems in the housing system. We may not agree on everything, but in general I would say that more rules and more regulations have not made more houses, and as we face a significant housing deficit, I think we ought to look at the regulatory burden of the NCC. I note from the multiple interjections that there is perhaps a strong disagreement about where the final balance should lie, but I would have thought that we should try and give people the choice to build a cheap house, if that is their wish. We should also give people the choice to build additional properties and dwellings on their properties, whether they be above or whether they be granny flats or whether they be subdivisions.

Ultimately, we want to have more buildings to house our population. We want to maintain our ethos as a great migrant nation, but we also want to be able to house new Australians. So I think this is a—

I'm very happy to go into that. I do think that the serviceability buffer has probably been set too high, but that is not something that we as parliamentarians make a judgement on, as you know. In general, I do think that this suite of options gives the government some serious policy work that it needs, because the nation has a fundamental problem. I've tried not to be too political in this contribution, but the government is stuck on autopilot in its housing policies. What it needs is a refresh, because what it's been doing for four years hasn't worked.

I'll say as kindly as I can that the high-tax, high-regulation, high-corruption model has failed to give the houses that Australians need. Most of the government's interventions have ended up making the problem worse, not better. This is a report which gives them options on productivity in terms of the banking and finance component and in terms of the regulation component. There are many other things in there, but I would have thought that even my favourite environment minister, Minister Watt, could agree to the very kind recommendation we offered, which is that he should publish his judgements about the nature of compliant development so that people in future can see that that complies and that this doesn't comply. Hopefully, they'll then be able to provide more of the housing stock that Australians sorely need. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.