Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I've been asked to explain noncompliance with this order. As Senator McKenzie knows, when I'm asked to turn up for these things, I always do. It's order No. 196, relating to the appointment of the observer to the Housing Australia Board, which I'm advised will be made available shortly. But, as the Senate will be aware, this chamber has agreed to a very large number of orders for the production of documents with respect to housing in a very short timeframe. That occurs against the backdrop of a period in Senate procedure where, in fact, the term 'very large' really doesn't do justice to the industrial scale and sometimes automated process of requiring orders to produce that are very difficult for any government to comply with—and I think that's their intent. The Treasury is working to support compliance with these many and varied orders, but processing times are, of course, impacted as a result.

The government is delivering a higher standard of integrity, transparency and accountability. We're upholding a standard that the opposition never did. In fact, their approach to these things was not just to avoid upholding the standard but to avoid being in the same suburb as the standard. This chamber has agreed to an average of four of these orders for the production of documents every single sitting day of this parliament. Recently, the Senate even agreed to 14 orders for the production of documents in a single day. I'll give you a tip: these orders for the production of documents have impact when they're used rarely, when you know you're on to something, not as an industrial-scale fishing operation, which would make some of the large, subsidised, northern fleet operations in the Pacific and the Atlantic blush.

These orders, often with a scope that goes into the thousands of pages and often with a turnaround time of mere hours, do not just sort themselves out. There's no magical safe or filing cabinet in the ministerial wing of this building that will instantly serve up whatever documents Senator Bragg or his artificial intelligence OPD generator can produce. These take work, and the problem, Senator Bragg, is they take the work of people you'll probably never meet, people that Mr Dutton, in the last campaign, was contemptuous of. Public servants, who work hard for Australia every single day, instead of delivering for Australia, are now wandering around the office trying to work out how to comply with the latest 14 Senator Bragg orders for the production of documents. That takes real work from real people, who otherwise would be doing real things, not pandering to your or your team's requirement to try and desperately hang on to something that gives some credence to what otherwise has been one of the worst periods of opposition in Australian political history.

The volume and scope of these orders have blown out of all proportion, not just in recent historical terms but in terms of history since the federation of this great country. I would urge those opposite who are responsible for this malfeasant approach to public administration to spend the Christmas break having a little bit of a think about how to use Senate procedures with a bit of impact and purpose to deliver a few hits for your side—that's okay; that's what it's for. But industrial-scale fishing operations aren't in the public interest.

These documents will be made available shortly.

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You just don't like primary production, do you?

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is another primary production word that I could use to describe this process, Senator Canavan—

Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Let's not.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

but I won't tempt the Deputy President by using it.

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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the response.

The minister's response wasn't really an explanation. It was a summary of the government's complaints that the opposition is seeking transparency on the activities of this executive government. Of course, that's what we're here to do. We're here to get to the bottom of things. Ultimately, we have two main jobs. We have to try and hold the government to account on its expenditure of public funds and its administration of programs. That is the job the Australian people would expect us to do on their behalf. So it doesn't surprise me that the same government that wants to gut the FOI Act to ensure that Australians can't understand the inner workings of their own government is having a massive sook about the opposition seeking documents.

What are the documents we're seeking? The documents we are seeking go to the appointment of an observer to the board of Housing Australia. Housing Australia would be one of the greatest boondoggles in the history of federation. It's a $10 billion scheme that's been going for two years and couldn't build a dunny. What it has done is purchase houses that Australians could acquire themselves. That's what it's done. This hugely expensive bureaucracy has had an observer appointed to it. You have a board full of political hacks and losers that are there to spend the taxpayers' funds that can't be trusted by the government. The government appointed all the dead people from Victoria who have been running a dead government down there for years and years, running the poor old people of Victoria into the ground. They're all on the board of this fund. Then they've got someone from Treasury, appointed by this minister, who goes to the board meetings. Not only do they go to the board meetings; they speak in the board meetings, so they're privy to the financial judgements. When we look at the outworkings of the tenders from Housing Australia, who are the greatest beneficiaries? It is the Labor Party's best friends, the super funds and union aligned bodies that are getting billions of taxpayers' funds. This is a very expensive way to build houses.

It may be the case that it's much better for the government to build public housing, but they've decided to go down the route of this hybrid model where they have to pay off all their mates, spivs and crooks. So we're asking questions about what's going on down there. We want to know why the government has appointed an observer to the board of Housing Australia. Who is this person? Why have they been appointed? What are they doing? What are the terms of their appointment? What can they do in the board meetings? What can they not do? What should they recuse themselves from? We're talking about $10 billion. Billions have been promised. In some cases, we're looking at dwellings costing the taxpayer $1.3 million. The average cost of a new dwelling in this country is $500,000, but the taxpayer is being asked to cough up 1.3 million bucks.

These are reasonable questions. The minister can whinge and cry his crocodile tears about the opposition seeking answers, and he can use his stupid fishing metaphors, but what he should be doing is asking his mates at the super funds why they are funding Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine. Why isn't Minister Wong looking after the sanctions? Why are we as a country allowing these financial institutions to undermine our own sanctions? Instead we hear about fishing boats which are apparently trawling for information as if this is some mission which has no destination. The destination we are seeking is to uncover the paperwork that underpins the appointment of the observer to the board of Housing Australia. That's all we want to know.

We tried to get these documents back in October, and we received a letter from the minister saying it was going to take time because they were down in the bowels of Treasury, and they were digging around with torches on their hats and everything trying to find these pieces of paper. Now here we are at the back end of November, and we still don't have the paperwork. So we wait with bated breath. I don't think it's a bad thing that we're trying to get to the bottom of things.

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

I rise to take note of the minister's explanation. As I've said time and again, as have many of my colleagues in this chamber, I'm deeply concerned by the lack of compliance with Senate motions by this government. This isn't a new trend. The Centre for Public Integrity raised the alarm on declining compliance rates in 2023. Compelling the production of documents is one of the most significant powers this chamber has to hold government to account. In the area of housing policy we're seeing a particular lack of transparency and accountability from this government at a moment of deep crisis around the housing issues in our country. I'm still waiting for my overdue OPD on public and community housing spending, which was due back two months ago.

Housing is a crucial issue. There's nothing more important right now than having a safe roof over your head, and so many people are struggling, especially renters—seven million Australians in three million households, and all those first home buyers and homeowners who shrink when they read the headlines every day in our newspapers and listen to the radio. It's getting worse for those people who want to enter homeownership, and especially for our young people. We see so many people living in crippling housing stress and with huge mortgage repayments. Homelessness is also a growing problem—10 per cent growth on Labor's watch, since Labor came to power. Everywhere you look, the news is only getting worse and worse.

Just today, Cotality's new housing affordability report shows that Australia's housing affordability has 'hit new lows' compared to the past five years. The median house is now 8.9 times the median income, up from 6.6 just five years ago. National dwelling values have grown 6.3 per cent in this year to date, and Westpac forecasts they're going to grow by an enormous nine per cent next year. In reality, this means that saving for a 20 per cent deposit for a house now will take more than 12 years—12 years!

Cotality's report points to the growing divide between those who own property and those who do not, saying that capital gains themselves potentially widen the gap. We have in our tax policy right now a new engine firing historic levels of intergenerational inequality, driven by tax benefits for wealthy property investors. Cotality also says that those who already own a home and have made strong capital gains can use that windfall profit towards their next property purchase, and we know that is happening, hand over fist, across our financial and housing system. This creates a larger gap of access to housing for those who do not own property and have little possibility in the near future of doing so.

So when will the government listen? When will they finally tackle the unfair capital gains discount and negative gearing tax breaks? The Labor Party used to want to address these unfair, unsustainable and distorting tax breaks for wealthy property investors. Treasurer Jim Chalmers once said that reforming negative gearing and capital gains tax discount was the 'most meaningful lever' that government could pull on housing affordability. In 2017 Senator Brown said:

Any housing affordability package that does not deal with negative gearing and capital gains tax discount is a sham.

And in 2017 Senator McAllister said:

There is something very, very wrong about a tax system that privileges the investor over the young person, the young couple, perhaps a young family, seeking to buy a home to live in.

Spot on, Senator McAllister! She said that our unfair tax system would have 'very significant social consequences as fewer and fewer Australians are able to enter the housing market'—a housing market that has only got worse on Senator McAllister's watch. And these are Labor's own words. What happened to this party, which was willing to take on the big end of town and wanted to put people in places where they had a roof over their head?

Reforming the unfair capital gains discount and negative gearing would reduce inequality and rebalance the housing market. PBO analysis commissioned by the Greens shows that 50 per cent of the benefits of capital gains tax discount go to the richest one per cent—that's 50 per cent of the benefit going to the top one per cent. Instead, we could redirect those billions of dollars into building new public and community housing. Jim Chalmers admits that he got Treasury to model the impact of changes to that tax. He knows what we need to do. Let's get on with it.

Question agreed to.