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

I move:

That the following matter be referred to the Economics References Committee for inquiry and report by 1 February 2027:

The governance and performance of Housing Australia, with particular reference to:

(a) the implementation of the Housing Australia Future Fund;

(b) the administration and outcomes of its programs;

(c) the make-up of the board, including intersection with the Department of the Treasury and the existence of observers;

(d) compliance with Senate orders, the Freedom of Information Act 1982, parliamentary oversight and transparency in general;

(e) compliance with workplace standards and norms; and

(f) any other related matters.

The purpose of this motion is to establish an inquiry through the Senate Economics Committee into the governance and the performance of the Housing Australia agency. The reason this reference is necessary, and I would urge the Senate to support this important motion, is that the Labor Party's housing plan is in tatters. Each and every day we come into this parliament and hear the bragging from the Labor Party about how much money they're splurging on housing—you look concerned, Acting Deputy President. All okay?

Raff Ciccone (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm listening attentively to your contribution, Senator Bragg. Please proceed.

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

I don't want to do anything unparliamentary. The point is that the performance of the agency that is charged with expending the government's funds on behalf of taxpayers requires serious investigation. The ministers of the Albanese government regularly brag about how much money they're spending on housing—billions and billions of dollars. According to the MYEFO documents, it is now up to $80 billion that this government will have spent on housing since they were elected. Now, that's $80 billion to build fewer houses than the prior government. There is a fly in the ointment when the government is spending more money and receiving less in return. So we are wanting to investigate the governance and performance of this agency which is spending billions of taxpayer funds.

The other primary concern is that the Labor Party has charged Housing Australia to undertake functions that it has no chance of actually doing in an efficient and effective way. The government wants to be a property developer. The government wants to be an insurer. In the long-run history of Australia, invariably the government has not been good at undertaking deep private sector activity like property development and insurance. In fact, perhaps the Treasurer should go back and reread Paul Keating's memoir; he might find that in fact Canberra isn't so good at service delivery like this.

The primary reason for this inquiry is to look at the functioning of this agency which is spending a lot of money and, I would argue, has been asked to do things it couldn't possibly do well. It couldn't possibly be as good as a builder at building properties, and it couldn't possibly be as good as a private insurer at providing insurance services into the economy.

There are many governance issues. There is the fact that the chair of Housing Australia attended the meetings of the audit and risk subcommittee whilst not being a member of that board subcommittee. There is the fact that there was a secret investigation into the board undertaken by Intersection, which was covered up for 18 months by the government. That $24,000 inquiry was commissioned by former minister Julie Collins to look at the significant issues inside the board of Housing Australia. There is the fact that the agency is seeing a 25 per cent staff turnover ratio. Every year at Housing Australia, 25 per cent of the people take off. In the past year, six of the top eight executives have left. This is an organisation that is under huge pressure, because it's been asked to do all these things. The headline of a Sydney Morning Herald article of 27 November last year reads, 'O'Neil reads riot act to agency as Labor seeks to keep housing probe secret'. The point is that the minister, Clare O'Neil, has had to go down to Housing Australia, bang open the doors and say, 'Look, I'm going to read you the riot act, because things aren't so flash here.' And the reason things aren't so flash is that you've got people attending committee meetings that they shouldn't be attending, you've got board dysfunction, you've got massive staff turnover and you've got executives in an exodus from the organisation. So, there are governance issues inside the organisation.

Then there is the fact that the agency is spending $30 million on consultants—a massive amount of money on consultants—again, from a government that said they were worried that the taxpayer was spending too much money on consultants. And there's another huge staff cost of tens of millions of dollars over the life of this agency. That brings me to the primary concern about performance, which is that the agency has billions of dollars invested in it but doesn't seem to be able to build many houses. The fact that we have tried to get to the bottom of how many houses have actually been built but can't seem to get a straight answer—it seems to have been five or 10 or 20 or 30 or 100 or 200 or whatever; we don't seem to know how many have been built.

What we do know is that this agency has been egged on by its political masters to buy houses. It's been buying houses. We've traversed this in Senate estimates and in other places, and it's been revealed that the organisation has been buying houses.

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

You are so dishonest!

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

I'll take that interjection. It buys houses. In fact, the interjection is illuminating for the chamber, because the minister at the table was actually the person who was able to enlighten the committee—

Raff Ciccone (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Senators, can I just take a moment. I don't have to remind everyone, but interjections are disorderly, and I ask that they be refrained from. Thank you.

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

Well, I'm happy to take them. The minister at the table tonight is the same minister who told the Senate estimates committee that they were in fact buying off the plan. So, they are buying properties that could be owned by Australians but, instead, the government of Australia is buying properties. They are buying, not building. They are using taxpayer funds to actually compete with Australians in the market, which is another reason this agency is in a lot of trouble.

Then you come to the spend quality. The average cost of a new build is about half a million dollars. But in some cases this government is spending $1.3 million to build a new property. The problem with that is that they are having to fund investors. They have to underwrite the investors' involvement, because of course they are a government for vested interests; they always want to protect the investors, and they want to, quite openly, partner with their good friends of the superannuation lobby who want to invest in housing. So, the taxpayer has to fund this. The taxpayer has to fund the availability payments which go to investors in these projects.

This is another issue that we cannot get to the bottom of. We cannot see a line-by-line breakdown of the availability payments, because apparently that is commercial-in-confidence. So the taxpayer can't find out how much they are underwriting the costs of the Commonwealth of Australia working with Cbus or Australian Super in order to purchase houses for the long term. So, spend quality is a problem.

Then we have the Home Guarantee Scheme, the insurance company that the Commonwealth is now running, and it is doing it with no means testing. So any Australian, whether of modest means or significant means, can now use the five per cent deposit product issued by Housing Australia. The problem with that is that, given that supply has been crashed by this government, they have pump-primed demand, and in the first month of the operation of Labor's scheme you see a 1.2 per cent increase in house prices at the entry level. What we're seeing is a big disparity in the price differential between properties inside the Home Guarantee Scheme and properties outside. House prices are too high for first home buyers in Australia, and one of the reasons they're too high is that, after having crunched and collapsed supply, they have now pumped prime demand at the entry level. They say they want to help first home buyers. They say they're very virtuous people and want to help first home owners or prospective first home owners. There's no doubt the Labor Party is very good at politics. They're very bad at management, but they're very good at slogans and stickers. This five per cent deposit scheme might sound good, but it is very bad for younger Australians because what you're seeing is that first home price getting higher and higher and that first home getting further and further away. So this is another problem. The Home Guarantee Scheme, administered by Housing Australia, also seems to have significant governance issues.

These are all the reasons why we must have more than just an audit by the Australian National Audit Office. We must look at the structure and operation of this agency which is expending billions of dollars directly but also now responsible for a very significant digit liability through the uncapping of these five per cent deposits where any Australian with any means can now call on the Commonwealth to ensure their mortgage. Even the richest Australians can now access welfare through this Labor Party. Then you wonder why you've got a 'spending in the budget' problem. The Reserve Bank is really pleading with the Treasurer to cut spending. Spending at 27 per cent of GDP, the highest in living memory outside of the pandemic, is forcing higher interest rates and more household pain for Australians. One of the reasons for that is simply the government's reckless spend. They are reckless with spending actual money in terms of the outlays and they are reckless with how they use things like guarantees. The guarantee scheme here is not free. It is not free money. This is a liability that must be met by all Australians.

When we have asked questions about Housing Australia at estimates and we have had Minister Ayres and other ministers in the chair, there's been a lot of obfuscation by the government and the agency. It's been hard to get to the bottom of things. When we've received documents like the intersection report, even the title of the document has been redacted. There are pages and pages of redactions here in this document, which I know I am out not allowed to use as a prop. But the point is that even the title of the document is redacted. When the Centre for Public Integrity says this is the most secretive government since the Keating government, this is one of the reasons—the documents that have been funded by taxpayers on the performance of this agency are not provided to the Senate. The Labor Party campaigned that they would be a government that would have integrity and would be transparent, but we haven't been able to get to the bottom of things.

We can't see the availability payments. We can't see the subsidies Labor are paying to their mates at the super funds. We can't see the government's report because it is all redacted. We can't get to the bottom of the staff turnover. We can't get to the bottom of the dysfunction of the hellhole that is Labor's Housing Australia. So we are very pleased that the Audit Office are independent of the government and can't be bullied by the government and that they will do their performance audit into the quality of the spend which has now reached $80 billion. It's $80 billion to get fewer houses. That's why we need this Senate inquiry. The Audit Office will do an inquiry which is going to be mainly financial in nature. It will look at some of the qualities of spend, no doubt, and it will make recommendations to the parliament and the government. But a Senate inquiry can look at the governance and structure of the agency.

The board appears to be a very politically motivated set of appointments. I have to say that the competence of the board is really in question. Even at the Senate last estimates hearing, when I was able to ask the new chair when they were appointed, they didn't even know. They had to look at a piece of paper to find out that they had been appointed in the last week before the estimates hearing. Maybe this particular person was appointed because that they didn't have any knowledge of the issues at Housing Australia; they predated his very recent appointment.

These are all the reasons why the Senate should vote for this motion. We should have an inquiry which allows us to make serious recommendations about the structure and operation of this agency. The Audit Office will do the financial piece, but we should do the governance piece. If the government are going to spend this money, we should try and encourage them to do it as best as they can for the Australian people. These aren't our policies, but our job is to hold the government to account, to get value for taxpayers and to make sure that there is no maladministration. That is our job. So that we can do our job better, we are hopeful that the crossbench will support this motion.

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

Senator Bragg is urging the Senate to vote for this proposal for a committee inquiry. That would require us to deal with it before 7.30. I'll of course endeavour to make a contribution that makes sure the Senate gets an opportunity to do that. If we fall short of that and I run over time—Senator Bragg could have prevented me from doing that by pulling up stumps on his contribution at 7.14. But we'll need to come back and talk about all this again if we can't get to a vote on the referral.

This is the problem with the modern Liberal Party. It's all tactics and no strategy. What you do a couple of hours ago—you want a referral to the Economics References Committee. I'll make sure I stay relevant to the economics committee and this referral. Senator Canavan is on the economics committee. Senator Bragg and his mates conducted an ambush in here. They didn't tell Senator Canavan and tried to dump him off the committee. It was only the Labor Party, defending Senator Canavan's right to sit on that committee, that asked a few questions about what actually is going on here. What can we do to contribute, to try to get a little bit less of the toxic politics, the nastiness and the character assassinations that have gone on? We're here to help.

Senator Canavan is being bullied out of his position on the economics committee because a bunch of you, who seem to be getting better at ambushes—I'll speak of another ambush, a bit like one of those Mafia dos. It happened just before a funeral. Everybody got together at somebody's house. They looked like a group of ghosts caught exiting a house that they'd been preparing to haunt. These boyos getting together—some of whom have never achieved national prominence before. Suddenly there they are. 'I want to be the machine guy.' They're hanging out with each other, talking about who they're going to kill, who they're going to get, what they're going to do and what a boffo in whatever state it was wants to do for Mr Taylor or for whatever his name is—the member for Canning. These characters are all about the hate and not about their mates. They are all about the internal conflict and not about ordinary Australians trying to get a home. That's the problem.

The toxic politics, the negative politics, the 'no-alition' politics that utterly absorbed the National and Liberal parties over the Morrison period—remember him?—and over the last term, when you had nothing useful to contribute for Australia, have come back to haunt you now. If you haven't got anything constructive to say, if you look down on ordinary Australians trying to have a go, then you end up in this toxic bin fire of nasty politics and self-absorption. In this joint, these characters over there—mirrors would wear out from them looking at themselves and thinking about themselves. They're talking to each other about themselves and talking to each other about how much more right wing they want to become, how much more divisive they want to become and how much more hateful and isolated and nasty they want to become. There's never a moment's thought for ordinary people who want to buy a home. There's never a moment's thought for ordinary people who want their wages to go up. There's never a moment's thought for building things, constructing things or doing things together.

Debate interrupted.