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

The documents in relation to this order for the production of documents are being processed in the usual way, as is outlined in Minister O'Neil's letter to the Senate of 26 November. There are a substantial number of documents that may be in scope. It is important that these documents are considered in a thorough manner, particularly given the expansive scope of the order, which goes to a period of almost 12 months. The government, having an eye on the work of the many public servants who are engaged in the work of complying with these orders for the production of documents by various senators—Senator Bragg and Senator Payman and 'Senator ChatGPT'—generating these enormous volumes of material—

Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You need your own renewable energy power.

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

As I said yesterday, people worry—as Senator Watt was pointing out—about the amount of power that's going to be required to electrify industry and to support these data centres. The amount of power and staff that need to be engaged in complying with these vanity exercises, these vainglorious efforts for relevance from people who otherwise—

Senator Bragg sought a congratulatory letter the other day. Senator Payman's proposed order requires ministerial submissions, records of conversation, letters, briefing notes, meeting agendas, file notes, meeting invitations, meeting notes, meeting minutes, emails, instant messages and electronic messages. That is a list generated by artificial intelligence right there that just betrays the complete lack of—oh, it's sensitive soul old Braggy on his feet again.

Slade Brockman (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Minister, we don't need commentary.

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

Point of order, Deputy President. I believe the minister was impugning Senator Payman by promoting an idea that perhaps she hadn't done her own work.

Slade Brockman (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Bragg, that's not a point of order. Minister.

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

Work—you wouldn't know the meaning of it.

Opposition senators interjecting—

Slade Brockman (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Minister, let's stick to the topic.

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

You're very sensitive.

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

I actually care about the people who work for a living—a concept that may be foreign to you, Senator Bragg—in the department, who are working every day to comply with these vainglorious and ridiculous orders for the production of documents.

Slade Brockman (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Minister, resume your seat. Senator Henderson.

Sarah Henderson (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Deputy President, on a point of order, I would ask that you ask the minister, who's being most disrespectful, to withdraw that comment. On a second point of order, on a number of occasions—most recently, a couple of minutes ago—he has not referred to senators by their correct name, so please address that.

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will remind the minister to refer to senators by their correct name. If a senator has been offended, I'll ask the minister to withdraw the comment. I'm not entirely sure, to be honest, exactly what's being asked to be withdrawn, but if you have offended a senator—

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

If you asked me to withdraw—even though we're not quite sure what we're withdrawing—I withdraw it unreservedly.

Senators over there don't understand their responsibilities to the parliament, but there are, in this portfolio alone, 3,995 pages worth of documents. That is the entire length of the normal edition of The Lord of the Rings three times over—sought by people who will never read it, who have never opened any of this material in their lives. It's four times the length of Odgers' 14th edition—sought by people who've never opened it. I have to correct the record for yesterday. I did say that it was eight times the length of Senator Bragg's latest self-published book—and that was very unfair. It's 16 times the length of Senator Bragg's self-published book.

The truth is, what is this all about? It's this anxiety and antipathy from Senator Payman and Senator Bragg, who don't want young people to be able to access five per cent deposits. They're hostile to the interests of young Australians who want to get a foot on the ladder. That is a disappointing attitude, but it's the kind of attitude that's consumed the Liberal Party for its whole life, and it's the only strain of consistency that you can see amongst them.

Fatima Payman (WA, Australia's Voice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the explanation.

Recently I was reminded of a quote I'd seen a while ago. I tracked it down to former senator Rex Patrick's website. He quotes former Labor minister Barry Jones as saying:

In Canberra I feel like a member of a football team which never plays at home—the public servants have collectively about 85% of the information and we have about 15%—much of which is acquired from leaks and newspaper reports.

Every day, many of us in this place try to get that number up to 16 or 17 per cent. What we saw yesterday was the 85 per cent punching down on the 15 per cent. I thought I'd fallen through a portal to 10 years ago. I thought I was back at UWA, with the student politics that was on display yesterday afternoon. It was an act of juvenility and arrogance in equal measure. It was summed up when Senator Scarr sought to clarify the purpose of an amendment to the motion which gave rise to this attendance. Now, I'm not sure who it was—perhaps it was Senator Gallagher—but someone from the government benches called out that its purpose was 'to annoy you'. That just about says it all.

OPD 208 relates to the Australian Government 5% Deposit Scheme. Now, a five per cent deposit sounds great. The bar to get a mortgage is lowered and more people have the opportunity to buy their first home. But let's think about what a five per cent deposit means. It means a 95 per cent mortgage. It means hundreds of thousands of dollars more in interest for banks over a period of a loan. The banks love it. Just yesterday it was reported that the Minister for Housing's director of policy, the guy who came up with the five per cent deposits, has left for the Commonwealth Bank. That's not a bad little rort! It also means, as more people are able to enter the market and demand increases, the cost of housing will increase. Even Treasury has said that this program will push up house prices. So if you get into the program, congratulations. You'll soon be joining the ever-expanding group of Australians who are behind on their mortgage payments as the RBA tells us that inflation is back on the rise and that the rate-cutting cycle is over.

For those who don't manage to get into the scheme, its effect on house prices means the Australian dream will just keep drifting away. I'd like to acknowledge the efforts of Senator Bragg, who has struggled to have the modelling for the five per cent deposit program released through freedom of information, a system which this government believes needs to be more secretive. I don't want Australians to think that this is just a Canberra-bubble transparency issue, however. For the Australians who have been priced out of the housing market, it's all too real. The government hiding evidence that their programs exacerbate unaffordability means they can avoid having to take action on the things that would make housing more affordable in a systemic way.

We've heard that this government is thinking about addressing the tax concessions that have turned housing from a place to live to an investment vehicle. A reform budget is reportedly in the pipeline, and I hope those reports are accurate. The capital gains tax discount and negative gearing, as I have said for years now, must be addressed. They've been putting upward pressure on house prices for decades, and first home buyers of Australia have been increasingly unable to keep up with these price rises. If we want to make homeownership something that is available to many and not the few, we must attack housing affordability from every single angle.

In October it was reported that we were on track to fall at least 27 per cent short of the 2029 housing target. We cannot leave current settings as they are and hope that things will just miraculously get better. We need to look at tax settings, we need to alleviate the skills shortages, we need to reduce the cost of building houses, and we need to break free of the ball and chain of nimbyism. If we do not do so, the trend towards Australia becoming a nation of renters subordinate to a landed elite will accelerate.

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

I rise to take note of this particularly disappointing explanation by Minister Ayres. I want to commend Senator Payman for bringing this motion to the Senate, because it highlights the failure of this government to comply with orders of the Senate or to comply with FOI arrangements. I'd say that the people of Western Australia are getting good value from Senator Payman and her OPDs. The government make it sound as if it's a crime that we would dare ask questions or seek to get the information which is germane to policy judgements that they are making and are getting wrong.

The Labor Party is great at politics, but they're very bad at doing stuff. They're very bad at management, and this is a great example of a policy announced in an election campaign, five per cent deposits, in which the government would remove all the means testing and make it available to anyone, thereby supercharging the demand side of the market. This was announced in May, and then three months later they thought: 'Maybe we should get some modelling done. Maybe we should see whether this might actually have an impact on the housing market.' So they went off to Treasury, and they said to Treasury: 'We've got this new policy coming in later this year. It's a big policy. We're uncapping a government scheme. We're giving everyone free insurance, so you can get a 95 per cent mortgage, whoever you are and no matter what your circumstances are, pretty much'—quite a significant intervention from the federal government in the housing market—'We forgot to ask you for modelling when we announced it in the campaign. Could you please go away and work out how much damage this might do?' I'm sure they didn't express it in that way. That's my own editorial, in case you were wondering, Deputy President. So they sent off an email to the Treasury, and the Treasury did some analysis and they came back with a number, and they said that the changes that the government was making to the five per cent deposit scheme would increase prices by 0.6 per cent. The Prime Minister, when he was asked at some stage about this, said it was 0.5 per cent—and we won't split the difference on a relatively small number, but that was the number that came up.

As a result, we also moved a motion in this place to get access to the modelling, back in August. Senator Payman's motion was back in November. And all we have received back, in the OPDs, is just pages and pages of redactions, which are pretty useless and don't really make any sense. The same can be said for the FOIs, which came back with pages and pages of redactions, including the key part, underneath where it says '0.6 per cent', where all the assumptions and the commentary would be—the sensitivity analysis. Now, I'm sure that Treasury would have said, 'Well, 0.6 per cent—it could be, but here are a whole lot of factors that need to be taken into account, and qualifications.' But you know what? We're not allowed to see those. Those are state secrets. The Commonwealth funds its own Treasury to do modelling on policy programs for the community, but we are not allowed to see that modelling. Whether we do an FOI or an OPD, the government has some ridiculous reason for not giving us this information.

That's why the Senate is, frankly, frustrated. And it's not just the Liberal Party or the National Party; it's the Greens; it's the crossbench—everyone is frustrated, because our job is to get to the bottom of things, and, whether the government likes it or not, we're trying to do our best to get to the bottom of the basis upon which policy judgements are made by this government, how they spend taxpayer funds and how they administer programs.

At the moment, there's a lot of maladministration—a lot of wasted money. So we're trying to do what we're paid to do. And the government cries and cries, like a little baby, that we've moved too many motions or something. But we're never going to give up on trying to get to the bottom of why these policy judgements were made and whether they were made on a sound basis.

I'll tell you what: the evidence is in, because Mr Albanese says 0.6 per cent, but the market data shows that, in the first month of operation, the market jumped by 1.2 per cent, which is double. So that's why we want to know what the Treasury advice said, because we already know that it's wrong.

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

I rise, also, to speak on this motion. I've got to say, the minister's response today was extraordinary. It was insulting. It trivialised an issue that is affecting the lives of millions of Australians—first home buyers; young people; people who've given up on getting into housing. And he doesn't think this is serious. He made a lot of jokes; he thought it was an amusing issue. And he defended the hardworking public servants who try and get this data out to the Senate to inform decisions. He didn't deal with the critical question that this seeking of information is trying to address.

We are in a housing crisis where we need to know what works and what doesn't and the impact of policy changes on the critical crisis in housing. This OPD is looking for documents which show the effect of that five per cent deposit scheme on house prices—the second time the minister has been required to attend and explain the failure to comply with this matter. We're a chamber of review, and it's important that we get the data, the information that we need, so that we can take apart and examine, look at, the rationale and the modelling of the impact of this decision on pushing up house prices.

Prices are completely out of control in this country and they are affecting the lives of so many families and households. The parliament had no oversight of the recent expansion of the five per cent scheme which removed income limits entirely for people to have access to this scheme. Where is Labor's commitment to the low-and-middle income earners, the first home buyers, who really need the most help?

We've had people across the country who are experts—economists, the Reserve Bank, Treasury; so many experts—tell us, they all warned, that these changes would result in increased prices in housing, and they have. If you feed demand, you push up prices where supply is constrained—especially in the case of moderately priced housing, which is where first home buyers are focused. This change has pushed up prices at the lower end of the market. Prices of homes eligible for the scheme jumped 3.6 per cent in the last three months of 2025. That is incredible. First home buyers out there are despairing. They were despairing before a 3.6 per cent increase in that last quarter.

These are extraordinary times, and we have a right to the information, the assumptions, that are in this modelling. Now, with another interest rate rise, workers, renters and mortgage holders are going to cop even more economic pain from rising inflation, so we need real solutions informed by decent data. We need to cut tax breaks for wealthy property investors and build social and affordable housing but we also need to stop the very lucrative revolving door between ministers offices and the hugely profitable big-donor corporates, like the Commonwealth Bank. We need to break the link between those who advise and those who benefit from decisions.

When the Minister for Housing—or the 'minister for higher house prices' as the Financial Review called her today. When her adviser takes up a job at an institution that's amongst the greatest beneficiaries of Labor's policy in this case, what are mortgage holders, renters and first home buyers supposed to think? I'll tell you what they think. They think it stinks. They see it for what it is. They don't like it. They know it's a revolving door, and they know that they are affected by decisions which advantage the wealthy, institutions and advisers and do down those who are trying to make it work out there in the housing market. The revolving door corrupts our democracy. It prioritises the interests of big business over the community.

Australians are fed up with the jobs-for-mates mentality that has plagued successive governments. This is why we've supported—here, in the Greens—strengthening lobbying oversight by extending the ban on former ministers lobbying to five years and applying it to senior staff. The Senate has a right to ask for information and the Senate has a responsibility to hold ministers to account. When ministers come here to talk about the data they have not supplied, we should not be insulted and we should not be trivialised. We should be respected and provided with the information we need so that we can actually make the decisions that help homebuyers in a housing crisis, that help renters and that can come to grips with the biggest crisis we've seen in the postwar period, which deserves a serious minister bringing serious responses to the Senate. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.