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

The motion agreed to by the Senate on April Fools' Day seeks explanations on two separate orders: OPD 119 and OPD 27. It might be useful to remind Senator Bragg of what his motions were, given there have been so many of them. I'm very pleased to see that Senator Bragg has clearly had a good six-week break. I don't want to reflect on a senator's appearance, but he's clearly had some vitamin D therapy. Suntanned in here—I don't know whether he picked up the tan doorknocking in Deniliquin, greeting voters in Griffith, arguing with voters in Albury—on Dean Street there—or lingering in Leeton. I faintly suspect that none of those places were the source of the additional melatonin produced by sunshine for the old humble Bragg. I suspect it was there at Coota Beach—or skiing, perhaps.

Order 119 sought documents 'regarding the contingent liability taxpayers are being exposed to' from the Home Guarantee Scheme. That's in Senator Bragg's own words. Two documents were tabled in response to that order: firstly, an Excel spreadsheet of the modelling conducted by the Australian Government Actuary on the contingent liability of this scheme and, secondly, the papers that accompany that Excel spreadsheet and explain and provide a summary of the result. The order was for contingent liability modelling. We provided him with that contingent liability modelling in a spreadsheet with an explanation. The government has complied with this motion, and we've given Senator Bragg precisely what the motion sought. Minister O'Neil has explained this to Senator Bragg in a letter directly addressed to him, Minister Gallagher has explained this to him in a statement, Minister Farrell has explained this to him in the Senate and I'm back here for round 2 to see if I can get it through that this order has been entirely complied with.

Maybe one of his colleagues could assist him—maybe by sorting the piles of paper on his desk—to figure this out. He even told the chamber that the contingent liability has nothing to do with the Home Guarantee Scheme. This is his own motion that he's clearly very, very confused about. I'm happy to assist him by tabling it. We can nail it on his door—whatever he likes. It's job done in terms of order 119.

In relation to order 27, which related to the Home Guarantee Scheme and to our plan to build 100,000 new homes for first home buyers, the government has provided documents too. Following long-standard practice, redactions have been applied to remove names and contact details of non-executive staff. That's the normal process. As is appropriate, documents which would disclose the deliberation of cabinet are not released, but that is not a new approach from this government. It is a well-established process that has a very strong rationale and backing from this institution in order to protect cabinet deliberations. I'm not sure whether or not it really is that Senator Bragg has just lost track of what's going on here, but it does tell you a bit about the carping negativity and process focus—a complete lack of focus on the things that ordinary Australians want, which is a government that's backing them and backing their work to secure a home for them and their families.

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 statement.

Well, thank you very much for that! Moving to take note of the minister's explanation would be rather generous because it wasn't an explanation, because the minister has engaged in obfuscation here, as has the government. Going back to July last year, after the election, when OPD No. 27 was initially moved and agreed to by the Senate, we were seeking the modelling that was to underpin the five per cent deposit scheme. The idea that I have lost my mind—whilst maybe on some level funny and it may possibly be true—in this case is not true.

Since July we have been seeking access to the modelling which underpinned the Prime Minister's assertion that the Home Guarantee Scheme's expansion to anyone, effectively, would only result in a 0.6 per cent increase in house prices. The lived experience here has been a six per cent increase in house prices in six months under the Home Guarantee Scheme. We went from 0.6 per cent over six years to six per cent in just six months.

Clearly the government have no idea what they're doing. The modelling done for them was completely wrong. The government knows that this housing gimmick, its five per cent deposit scheme, was deployed into a market which was constrained by a huge collapse in supply, from 200,000 houses a year on average down to 170,000 houses a year on average, and the fact that this policy was pushed into the market at that time—it was always likely to have a price impact, which is why the government went to great lengths to get it modelled.

Of course, the modelling was only done after the policy was announced. The policy was announced during the election campaign as a giveaway, and then the modelling was produced by the Treasury. But everything is redacted. When we see the pieces of paper we get back from the government—OPDs, FOIs, whatever they are—everything is covered up. So we can't actually see the basis point on which the modelling was done.

The lack of transparency and the attempts to smear the opposition as being of unsound mind do not go very far in providing the sort of transparency and integrity this government promised it would deliver for Australians when it was elected some four years ago. Given we are here on the day of the 2026-27 budget, in which the government is proposing to break all promises made about not increasing taxes, maybe I shouldn't be surprised.

At the most basic level, I want to acknowledge the Senate's desire, as evidenced by its repeated voting pattern, to have the documents provided for public inspection. It's not good enough for the government to say, 'In relation to factoring in the supply response,' which is what the modelling has taken into account, 'we're just going to redact that whole section.' The idea that we can't see how the modelling for the government was done makes a mockery of this chamber and makes a mockery of the people who sent us to do this work. All we're seeking to do is to get to the bottom of how the modelling was done and on what basis it was done, because, clearly, the lived experience has shown the modelling was wrong. Given the government tonight are apparently going to promise that 75,000 people are now going to have access to a first home, you won't be surprised to hear that we're sceptical of their modelling efforts, given the last one was so wrong.

So we've seen no further information from the minister this afternoon. And it's not just OPD Nos 27 and 119. There's also Senator Payman's OPD No. 208. Senator Payman has sought to get access to information, and she has received the same blanked-out, redacted pieces of paper. We have three OPDs on foot, but we have not been able to get to the bottom of the modelling underpinning the five per cent deposit scheme. At this rate, the minister will be coming in and having to do a lot more explanations where he accuses other people of being of unsound mind, which may be funny but ultimately does not advance the policy interest of the nation. This covering up doesn't help us get to the bottom of things, and it therefore doesn't give the government an opportunity to course-correct with their future policy intervention.

I'll call on the senator again to at least get the minister back to explain. I'm wondering what the value of that is. We need to seriously consider more coercive measures on the government ministers if they're going to treat this chamber in this way. Honestly, what's the point? We really need to consider whether we restrict the minister's ability to engage in this chamber in some form.

Charlotte Walker (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Housing has become one of those topics where every Australian seems to have a story. You hear it at pub dinners, at school pick-up, in group chats and in awkward conversations between parents and adult kids who still can't afford to move out. People are exhausted. They're Australians doing everything right, yet they feel like homeownership is drifting further away every single year. Young people are battling each other for rental properties like it's The Hunger Games. Families who absolutely would have owned a home a generation ago cannot get a foothold in the market. Renters are watching prices jump again and again while their wages do not. Homelessness is becoming more visible in suburbs and regional towns, where people never used to see it before. People know something is broken.

I think what frustrates Australians most is that housing has become so politicised that sometimes it feels harder to get an honest conversation than it is to get a rental application approved. This crisis did not appear overnight. For a long time, the Commonwealth stepped back from housing and left most of the heavy lifting to the states. During most of the coalition's nine years in government, they did not even have a housing minister. That still blows my mind. Imagine looking at the scale of this crisis years ago and going, 'She'll be right.' Meanwhile, Australia underbuilt homes for years while our population grew, our cities expanded and construction became slower, harder and more expensive. So, no, this is not a crisis that can be fixed with one announcement or even one budget. What matters is whether governments are willing to genuinely engage with the problem, and this government is.

Under Prime Minister Albanese, the Commonwealth stopped being a bystander and started acting like housing is a national priority again. That means tackling the crisis from multiple angles at once: building more homes, backing renters, helping first home buyers and actually trying to increase supply instead of just yelling at each other on television panels. There has been real progress already. Since coming to government, more than 240,000 Australians have bought their first home with a five per cent deposit. More than one million households have been supported through increases to rent assistance. We now have more than 24,000 social and affordable homes either planned or under construction, with thousands already completed. That matters because behind every housing statistic is somebody trying to build a life, somebody trying to raise kids somewhere stable, somebody trying to stay close to work, family or community instead of being pushed further and further out.

I think younger Australians are particularly tired of hearing housing discussed like it is some abstract economic concept instead of the thing shaping almost every major life decision they make. People are delaying relationships, delaying kids, moving back home, living with five housemates at 30, spending absurd percentages of their income on rent and then being told they just need to budget better by people who bought houses when a deposit cost roughly the same as a medium-sized iced latte now. Australians don't expect miracles from government, but they do want seriousness. They want homes built faster. They want more medium-density housing near transport and jobs. They want less pointless red tape. They want renters to be treated fairly. They want governments willing to admit this crisis is structural and requires long-term effort, because there is no silver bullet here.

The answer is not blame; it's building—building social housing, building affordable housing, building homes for first home buyers, building infrastructure so communities can grow sustainably and building enough confidence back into the system so younger Australians can imagine a future where stable housing is not treated like some impossible luxury. Housing should not feel unattainable in a country like Australia. Whilst there is still a long way to go, this government is at least willing to roll up its sleeves and actually do the work.

Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of the minister's lack of a response to this order for the production of documents, and this is a pattern that we are seeing regularly from this Labor government, in showing contempt for this chamber by not providing it with the information that we are entitled to see.

I think it is fair to say that, if the government believed this program was a good one, then they would be showing us the modelling and they'd be very happy to do so. But what we know is that this is a program that has failed, just like their HAFF has failed. Hardly any houses have been built. Now we see a five per cent deposit scheme has pushed up the price of houses. Whilst, as Senator Walker says, 240,000 people have availed themselves of that five per cent deposit scheme, the average price of a house is now around a million dollars. So the government has helped people to acquire a roughly $950,000 debt, and, on top of that, interest rates have now gone up. All they're doing is pushing up house prices and saddling people with massive amounts of debt. Meanwhile, the banks are absolutely making massive profits—

An honourable senator: Making bank!

making bank, off the interest of these loans. How about we tax the banks and then build some public housing? That would fix the housing crisis.

Senator Walker talked about a whole range of impacts that this housing crisis is having, and I agree with her on that. But what I don't agree with her on is that Labor has risen to the occasion to actually tackle the scale of this crisis, and it is a crisis. Labor have now been in government for four years, and they are about to hand down their fifth budget. Every measure that they have taken in the last four years has been tinkering around the edges rather than tackling the actual problems. We need a massive build of public housing in this country. That is the way that we will tackle the housing crisis.

Senator Walker talked about the fact that the government's made some increases to rent assistance. The government's own Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee says, in its most recent report, that all of those gains have now been lost; they've been negated because now rents have gone up and the cost of housing has gone up. Labor might as well have not made that increase to rent assistance, because, by making the problem worse, they've just neutralised the gains.

If this government had the courage to stand up to the big end of town, it would be taxing the one per cent, it would be making sure that the banks were paying their fair share of tax, it would be making sure that gas corporations were paying at least 25 per cent on their gas exports, it would be making sure that the billionaires in this country were paying their fair share and it would be making sure that corporations in this country—every corporation—were prevented from price gouging people. There's the revenue they could generate from really tackling capital gains tax and negative gearing, not just tinkering around the edges like we're hearing, and actually taxing the gas corporations and stopping fossil fuel subsidies. And maybe don't pay for those submarines that we'll never see from a country that has a leader that is tanking his own economy.

If they actually had the courage to do these things—to stand up to their corporate mates and the big end of town—we'd have the money we need to tackle the housing crisis, to build hundreds of thousands of public homes to make sure that people have a roof over their head and to raise income support so that people on the lowest incomes in this country can afford to live. The fact that they won't release the documentation tells us everything that we need to know. They are embarrassed by this policy, and it's not working.

Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Women) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This government has failed on housing. This government has also failed on transparency, which is why we are here speaking on this topic. This government refuses to provide information that has been requested by a senator in this chamber. Instead of explaining why or providing that information, they choose to mock that senator for seeking the information. That is the hallmark of this government. They provide what they want to, when they want to, how they want to and if they want to. That's not how democracy works.

Senator Walker made a comment, as she finished speaking, that housing should not be unattainable in a country like Australia. She's right. Guess what? It is unattainable in this country. Guess what else? It's become even more unattainable over the last four years under the Albanese Labor government. Throw whatever rocks you will at others around this chamber, but it is those opposite, those sitting on the government benches, who are accountable for where we find ourselves today. I am tired of it. It should not be impossible for a young person to buy a home. It should not be impossible for a woman restarting her life after she's been impacted by domestic violence to buy a home. It should not be impossible for any person in this country to buy a home. It should be something that they are able to do without question.

The policies of this government have made it harder for Australians to access housing. Regarding the five per cent deposit guarantee scheme that Senator Bragg has been speaking about, the Prime Minister said that their modelling suggested—and I'll read it to make sure that I don't get it wrong—that it would push up house prices by only 0.6 per cent in six years. Their reckless policy has actually pushed up prices of entry level homes by 3.6 per cent in the December 2025 quarter alone. In this chamber, we told them that that would happen. We told the same people who have spoken this evening, and they would not listen to us because, as always, they knew best. Guess what? You don't know best. You have made it worse. You have tanked our economy. You have mismanaged it in the most appalling way, and Australians are paying the price for it; moreover, young Australians are paying the price for it.

Now they're championing that they have created change and intergenerational equity, and that will be announced tonight in their budget. Explain to me how that happens when now it's just young Australians, who don't own their own home, who won't be able to negative gear. They can't afford to buy a home where they have grown up or where they work. If you had an idea about maybe rentvesting, or purchasing a home somewhere else where it's cheaper, to get your foot onto the property ladder, you can't do that because that wouldn't be fair. Explain that to me, because I don't get it.

Tonight, this government is planning to pull the ladder up so that young Australians can't get on the property ladder, based on what they themselves have leaked to the media about what they're doing in the budget. They should be ashamed of pretending that what they are doing tonight in the budget is about intergenerational fairness when all it is about is plugging their own spending holes. They are taxing Australians more because they have spent far too much and they do not know how to manage that. And they dare to lecture us about asking them to be accountable in this place. They dare to lecture us about wasting their time by making them be transparent. I suggest to them that they should be doing that. This government needs to step up and lead, which it has not yet done in the past four years.

Question agreed to.