Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

For the 117th time—

Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You exaggerate!

Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's 120 so far. Order for the production of documents No. 197 requests a report which was already requested by Senator Bragg at Senate estimates. As indicated to Senator Bragg at the estimates hearing, the government is considering what documents are and are not in scope and appropriate for tabling. The government expects to be able to respond to him in the usual way.

Senator Bragg's initial OPD, agreed on 28 October, gave the Minister for Housing two days to respond. This original order was not followed by a compliance motion before the motion which sets up this attendance. Not only is this a departure from standard practice; it's really an abuse of the process to require ministerial attendance on an OPD that has been with the minister for a week and one day. Senator Bragg alone has submitted around 30 OPDs in the 21 days of this parliament. That is as many OPDs in three weeks as were agreed to in the 50 years between 1914 and 1964—a span that included 13 parliaments and two world wars. This is less about government transparency and more about Senator Bragg's political theatrics. It may also assist the Senate and Senator Bragg to know that the orders for the production of documents regarding housing portfolio matters are best directed to the Minister representing the Minister for Housing rather than to the Minister representing the Treasurer.

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

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the statement.

In doing so, I note for the record that the coalition wishes Senator Wong a very happy birthday. I won't break into song here, because I might shock other senators and I'm trying to show respect to colleagues!

Well, it is a very disappointing response, Minister, because this is not a new issue. There is a sense in the response of the minister that this is all new. They had to go down to the Treasury, rustle a few rats together, get a few pieces of paper and, on the servers, try and find what the dogs and the rats hadn't actually eaten down there in the Treasury building on Langton Crescent. The fact is that this issue, in terms of the governance of Housing Australia and the bin fire that it's become, was initially the subject of a freedom of information request by me back in December 2024.

In response, the Treasury—as directed by the Labor government, I imagine—replied using an exemption and neither confirmed nor denied the existence of this report. If they had read the FOI Act that they seek to gut, they would know that you cannot use a neither-confirm-nor-deny exemption except in relation to national security or to Parliamentary Budget Office documents. The last time I looked, the government's bin fire in Housing Australia, which has billions and billions in taxpayer funds but doesn't build houses, had nothing to do with national security or the Parliamentary Budget Office. This is an embarrassing mis-step that we exposed at Senate estimates—that the government is now asking the Treasury to, effectively, make up exemptions, which are not available to the department, in order to cover up documents.

This is not a new process. We have been seeking these documents for some time. There was an admission at Senate estimates that this particular document exists. We've asked for that on notice, but the order for the production of documents is a separate legal process. The minister doesn't like that we're using the Senate's powers to get access to documents, but maybe the government should reflect upon its dreadful FOI record where citizens and senators alike find it very hard to get any information. The idea that they're promoting, now that they've said the quiet part out loud, is the gutting of the FOI laws put in place by Malcolm Fraser. Malcolm Fraser believed that the government would work better for the citizens if people had information about the activities of government.

It's a pretty simple job being an opposition senator. Our job is to make sure that the government does not misappropriate funds, that there is good value for taxpayers and that they don't run programs in a way which is not in the public interest. That's what we're seeking to do. We're not seeking to have the world record number of orders for the production of documents. No-one gets out of bed every day and says, 'I really want to be the subject of Senator Gallagher's speech in the Senate about how many OPDs I've made.' The point of doing it is that we're trying to get to the bottom of things. That's the point. I can assure you that no-one gives a rats about how many orders are made by this place. People expect us to come here to the bush capital and actually do things. We're supposed to do things here. In our role, we're trying to get to the bottom of things.

The point I make is that the government's judgement appears to be that it doesn't want to provide this document through this process. That appears to be the case, because we've been seeking the document for nine or 10 months now. It's a long time. I would expect that, unless the government want to have more problems with the management of the chamber, in the end they will do what they've done with the Briggs review and provide it in some form. There's no other result we could accept; otherwise, we wouldn't be doing our job.

We're worried about the maladministration at Housing Australia, because it has a lot of money. It has billions of dollars of taxpayer funding. It doesn't build houses. It spends a lot of money on executive salaries, recruitment, legal, retrenchments and other things that do raise a lot of questions. It's also the subject of this governance probe. You have spent $24,000 of taxpayer funds on a governance probe, which you're saying you won't give us or you might not give us. In the end, we will get the document because we'll work with the senators to ensure that the government provides us this information in the way that the law dictates. If this government doesn't do that, then we'll have lengthy question times and lots of complaints. So, in the end, I'm sure we'll get the document.

Paul Scarr (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make three quick points in relation to this matter. The first is that Senator Bragg is doing his job. Senator Bragg is doing his job by asking for these orders for the production of documents and getting these orders for the production of documents passed with the majority of the Senate. As we know, in the Senate, we can only get a majority of the Senate if the crossbench supports the coalition in terms of asking for these documents. So he is doing his job.

The second point I'd like to make is that, as Senator Bragg said, he first asked for these documents under the FOI Act back in December last year. It is disingenuous to say the time limit on the order for the production of documents is too short when these documents were asked for under the FOI Act in December 2024 and were also asked for at Senate estimates. These documents have been asked for under the FOI regime. They've been asked for at Senate estimates. It was only because the document wasn't produced that the order for the production of documents was passed by the Senate. The third point I want to make is that there is a theme here. I previously raised the issue in this place in relation to the report which was made by the Centre for Public Integrity—one of our outstanding non-government organisations—which says the Labor Albanese government is 'leaning into a culture of secrecy'. That is the phrase that they use.

The Senate is doing its job asking for these documents. The Senate is doing its job by scrutinising the performance of this fund, which has billions of dollars of taxpayer funding invested into it. And the Senate should keep doing its job.

Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to this attendance motion. In attending today, the minister has not provided the documents that are being sought. We're here because last week the independent review into governance and operational concerns at Housing Australia was due to be tabled. It's been sought, as we've heard, for quite some time.

The government has once again failed to comply with this OPD in a timely manner. There can be no doubt the Senate needs as much useful information about the administration of housing as we can possibly look at in what is, day to day, becoming worse and worse as a crisis in housing. In the last month, housing prices have increased by more than one per cent in a single month. We now have homeownership rates of people under 25 that are around a third, compared to 51 per cent back in the early 1970s. We've got a rate of homelessness that has increased by 10 per cent, in the years of this Labor government. So we need accountability. We need to know what's going on inside the policy solutions, so called, that the Labor government are putting forward. And we need know what's going on within the administration of this system.

I'm very concerned about what I'm hearing about Housing Australia and the Housing Australia Future Fund. We need information about these important, very large programs in the midst of a housing crisis. I'm very concerned, along with many others in the chamber, about the increasing secretive response to requests for information, particularly in relation to housing. Without publicly accessible information, non-government senators need motions like these or estimates or whatever to try and get to the answers in relation to very few questions about the administration of sizeable amounts of money to fix and respond to a housing crisis. Australians and their senators deserve to know what's going on and to have a government which is open and transparent about its spending. We want our housing system to work well. We want a housing system that responds to that frightening, rapid increase in the price of houses.

Housing Australia's mandate is to support homeownership for Australians and to improve the supply of sustainable long-term social and affordable housing—an incredibly important goal—but I remain concerned about the adequacy of the response and its administrative failures. Reporting in the Australian Financial Review notes that at least six of the top eight executives at Housing Australia have left the agency since Carol Austin took over as chairwoman in June 2023, in addition to other less senior staff who have also left, and we know, of course, Carol Austin has herself since resigned.

Publishing this independent review sought here today would help to show that the matter has been properly dealt with and that the culture within Housing Australia is working in a way to respond to a crisis that's affecting the lives of so many Australians, and we could have avoided this mess if the government had just directly invested in public housing in a direct spend, as we saw in the post-war years, that's simpler, more direct and cheaper.

An issue in relation to what's going on in our housing spend relates to the question of consultants and the budget. The issue of outsourcing public sector work, especially to consultants, really worries me. Section 46 of the Housing Australia Act states:

Housing Australia may engage consultants to assist in the performance of its functions.

Housing Australia recently said their total operating budget in the year 2024-25 was just under $60 million, but, when I look at their reliance on external contracts, it's incredible. It's really quite shocking. Over the past year, they have committed $30 million to external contracts—half the equivalent of their entire budget. That is just astonishing. How are you running an ongoing service when half of the budget or the equivalent of it is contracted out? Fourteen million of that spending is specifically on consultants—the equivalent of 25 per cent of its entire budget. I've asked Housing Australia, on notice, to explain what's in that bucket of consulting. We know what's going on in that bucket. There will be overpriced charging for poor-quality work and a failure to build up the heart, soul and capability of our public sector. Consultants are not the way forward. We need to know what this spending is doing.

In conclusion, we haven't had enough information about what's going on in Housing Australia, and we need to. We had a mere 48 minutes of questioning in estimates on this issue, and we get another go tomorrow night, which is a good thing, but we need to know more. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.