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

At least in relation to OPD 27, on least half a dozen occasions now, the government has explained as carefully and as slowly and as clearly as we can imagine would assist the shadow minister—for housing, is it?—to understand what has been provided and how the government has well-established grounds for making the public interest immunity claims over some documents within the scope of OPD 27. I don't believe that after those half-a-dozen or so explanations it's possible to conceive that the proponents for this continued campaign around the OPD don't understand what is going on here. I can only believe that it is a wilful and puerile use of the Senate processes in a way that shows that there is no respect for this institution and no understanding of the value of ministerial appearances. Sit down, son—honestly!

Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Bragg.

Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) | Link to this | Hansard source

Did you just say sit down?

Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

Please. Senator Bragg was on his feet first, so I'll go to Senator Bragg.

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

I'd just like to raise a point of order with you, Acting Deputy President. Somehow, the minister has been able to concoct a scheme where the clock hasn't actually been timed, so he may actually go on for many hours.

Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

Okay. Thank you, Senator Bragg.

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

In 20 November 2025, the minister wrote to the Senate and explained very clearly that disclosure of some documents in the scope of this order would be excluded where they disclosed the deliberations of cabinet or prejudiced Commonwealth-state relations. Those are utterly reasonable and completely normal bases for public interest immunity claims. The government has made clear to you what the outcome of this modelling was—a home price impact of around half a per cent over six years. Over the course of the last 10 years, house prices have continued to increase. They go up and they go down, but the trajectory is up. The impact on that would be half a per cent over six years.

You're all very confused about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. He said something, some of you have said other things—they are in complete contradiction to each other. They may not fit what passes for a political campaign on the other side—what remains of the other side of this chamber. It may not suit what whoever's going on about this thinks is a successful campaign, but what I can tell you is that 270,000 Australians—mostly young Australians—have accessed this scheme, and you want to take it away from them. It has been life-changing for more than a quarter of a million young Australians. It's life-changing for young Australians, and you want to take those homes out of their hands. You want to rip the security of homeownership away from young Australians. You want to rip down homes that have been built. You want to denigrate participants in the housing industry who are doing their best to deliver homes for young Australians. A campaign run by spivs in sections of our capital cities who don't understand how important it is for young Australians to have a home—ordinary people who want a home. That shows why you are so remote from where ordinary Australians are on these questions and why there is no hope for you.

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

I note that no-one's ordinary, in taking note of the Minister's statement, which is a complete failure to provide the documents the Senate has asked for. It's not just the coalition; it's also the crossbench who have sought access to the modelling. The key here is that the government commissioned modelling into their five per cent policy only after the election. They announced that they would remove all the means testing and all the place caps from the scheme during an election as an attempt to cravenly buy votes, and then they thought, 'Maybe we should actually model this after the election.' They went down to the Treasury, they asked for some modelling, and Treasury came back and apparently said '0.6 per cent over six years', which was wiped out because we saw price increases of six per cent in six months at the entry level house point in relation to apartments and housing. The question is why won't they give us the parameters? Why won't they give us the detailed modelling? The answer is because they're embarrassed, because they want to cover up the warnings that were given by the Treasurer. All the things the Treasury would have written into the model, the warnings about their failure to build the houses—these are the documents, the pieces of paper they don't want to give the Australian people. The reason this Senate is insistent upon this is because our job here is to get to the bottom of things. That is our basic function as a house of review: to expose wrongdoing, expose malfeasance, expose maladministration inside the executive.

What we've seen with the five per cent deposit scheme is a massive failure. It is the abolition of means testing, which meant that last week we saw in the papers that someone earning over 600 grand was using the five per cent deposit scheme. Someone earning 600 grand is now using a government program. Government benefits are needed for people who really need them. It's supposed to be a safety net for people who are needing help. It is not supposed to be underwriting people who have significant means. There's nothing wrong with people who have significant means, but you don't need government underwriting. You don't need it. And so what we also saw was over 20 per cent of the people now in the scheme since 1 October earning more than $200,000.

This has become a grotesque scheme. It has pumped prime prices at the entry level now since it was uncapped in October last year. This is the wrong policy for Australia. Even the way that the prudential regulator APRA prices these mortgages, which creates an arbitrage between the government product and the LMI, is horrendous because it prioritises a government scheme over the other schemes when it may be the case that the other schemes are fine. So their policy is to ensure that almost any Australian can use a government mortgage insurance scheme which was initially about helping people who are of lower incomes.

This is a scheme that is going to need more scrutiny as we head to the next elections. The purpose of this motion is to get access to the modelling that was produced by the Treasury. It's not good enough for the government ministers to come in here and say, 'Treasury came back and said there was 0.6 per cent price growth over six years.' Everyone knows that's wrong. It is wrong. No-one agrees with it, whether it's Cotality, any other private sector data provider or any punter, basically. They will tell you that that is wrong. So we want to see the parameters. We want to see the design features of the modelling so that we can properly understand where this has gone wrong.

We all need to devise alternative policies for the next elections. I would say that it's probably a reasonable assumption that almost every party would agree that there is some role for government intervention here at the bottom end, but we need to get access to this information. It really shows a disdain for this chamber that the executive believe that they can walk over us as if we are just a bug in their shoe, when we have been well remunerated to come to this place, to get access to information and to inform public debate and policy formulation. The fact that the government stymies our ability to get access to these documents does make a much greater case for us to have a debate about whether the Senate's power can be properly deployed, because, as it stands, this chamber is being neutered by the executive, and we're allowing it to happen.

So I'd say to the crossbench that I think, if this is to continue on, it's going to undermine our democracy and we need to consider whether it should change.

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

I also rise to take note of Minister Ayres's response on behalf of the Minister for Housing. The measure that Minister Ayres has responded to is seeking documents which lay out the methodology behind a very significant program in a massive housing crisis that is affecting millions of Australians across our country—in our country towns, in our regional areas, in every city. To this OPD, No. 27, the minister points to the fact that he has given us the answer, an answer which has been proven to be entirely wrong out of the model. A change of 0.6 per cent, half a per cent, over six years in the price of housing—we need to know how that model was arrived at, to make sense of a figure which has so clearly misjudged the actual circumstance here.

But it's not just about the details of the model here; it is about a principle of respecting the Senate and giving the Senate the information it needs to make sense of this crisis and to make sense of the programs that this government is offering. The five per cent deposit scheme is uncapped. It is being used by people, clearly—we now have evidence—to purchase investment properties. There are real problems with this scheme, and this Senate should be treated with—the minister himself used the words—respect and understanding. Well, we want to understand, and we do respect the data. We do want to see the modelling, and we want to see its detail to make sense of a policy in a crisis that deserves the highest level of action by this Labor government.

Minister Ayres ended his comments by saying that this is all arising from 'a campaign run by spivs in our capital cities'. I find that offensive. I spent last week in Perth.

I spent last week in Perth and I can tell you there are hundreds of Western Australians who are homeless. They are in their cars. They are under bridges. They are sleeping rough across the city and in our regional towns in Western Australia. They came to us, to our Senate select committee, to give evidence about what this does to them as individuals, as families—how it affects communities. We took evidence from someone who lost their home at 11 years old, who was homeless at 11 years old. Another person had been homeless from her early 20s. She had been homeless for 11 years. The crisis that is underway for young people, for older women, for people across the country that is exemplified by what we're seeing in Perth is an emergency. And this Senate deserves respect, to use the minister's own word. It deserves the information and it deserves full disclosure about the policies and their background.

In Perth, we heard about 1,300 families evicted from public housing without grounds in the past eight years. That is incredible. It is the disarray, the disaster that is represented by our public housing across our country. Come to South Australia. It is a disaster. We have not been replacing public housing. We've been knocking it down and we've been casting people out of rentals, with no public housing opportunity available to them, into their cars and into their tents across our parklands. So many people in Western Australia asked me last week, 'How have we arrived at this circumstance in our wealthy country?' And I walked around the streets of Perth, those tall buildings sparkling in the sun, a city that exudes wealth. It has enormous opportunity and resources and it is part of a country, one of the wealthiest in the OECD area, where we have hundreds—indeed, thousands—of people homeless because of the failure of this policy.

So I want the minister to come here and be honest and respectful to the chamber. Give us the data. Give us the breakdown of the modelling not just on the five per cent scheme but on other schemes as sought by this Senate. We've seen youth homelessness increase by rapid figures in the past decade—32 per cent in Perth in the past decade—and rent is up by 50 per cent just since 2020. So we need action and we need data and we need modelling about what's going on for the third of Australians, many of them young people, who are now renting for decades. It's not a short, temporary, transitional period of renting as you accumulate your first home deposit; it takes twice as long in this year to accumulate your deposit as it did 10 years ago. So we have a lot of work to do here and we need a respectful response from the minister on the modelling, on the actual details of the modelling and on the background to any policy which the government brings forward to help us deal with a massive crisis that Labor's policies at present are not touching the sides of.

Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to take note of the minister's pathetic answer to an order of the Australian Senate. In listening to Senator Pocock and Senator Bragg and as a former minister of the Crown who had to attend this chamber when required to provide answers that this chamber requested, when institutions such as the Australian Senate are disrespected and disregarded to such an effect as is currently occurring under orders for the production of documents, freedom of information requests—right across the desire for the parliament and the people to get answers from executive government about the decisions they're making on our behalf—this government fails time and time again. It says a lot about the culture of secrecy and control that the Australian Labor Party is conducting itself with. If you thought the ALP conference was an example of command and control, they are using that exact type of behaviour here in the Australian Senate.

It is not very often that the National Party, the Greens, the Liberal Party and the entire crossbench all agree, but we did, and we asked the government to come forward with the modelling that they continually quote from, that somehow the five per cent deposit scheme was going to see a tiny, infinitesimal decrease in property prices over a large period of time. And what have we seen? We've seen the exact group of Australians—this policy was set up under the former, coalition government. This policy was set up to help first home buyers—low incomes, restricted access—so that it wouldn't have the negative impact across the housing supply chain that this policy has under Labor. We need to get to the bottom of it and understand the modelling, because government minister after government minister saying, 'We're relying on Treasury modelling, but we're not going to show you the details,' doesn't allow us to prosecute the issues within the assumptions made et cetera that the government has based their decision on.

As Senator Bragg pointed out, the Labor Party made the election promise to do this without actually having done the technical work and the impact assessment prior to coming to government. It's almost as if Treasury have had to retrofit their advice to suit the Labor Party's election commitments. That's not how that's supposed to work. That's not how the Public Service is meant to work, so we are absolutely seeking that detail. Treasury warned that the five per cent deposit scheme led to riskier loans and a surge in high loan-to-value lending because buyers have small buffers and are more likely to end up in negative equity. The Labor Party ministers don't seem to know what negative equity means, as we saw from Matt Thistlethwaite's embarrassing comments and their litany of economic failures and incompetence—

Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McKenzie, please take your seat. Minister?

Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) | Link to this | Hansard source

The senator knows that she should refer to people in the other place by their correct title.

Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McKenzie, please refer to people in the other place by their correct title.

Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) | Link to this | Hansard source

His name is Matt Thistlethwaite, and he lives in Maroubra, in New South Wales. But, if he's now going under another name, I do apologise to the member.

Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McKenzie, please take your seat. Minister?

Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme) | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Mckenzie has, in fact, just wilfully done it again. She knows that he ought to be referred to as the member for Kingsford Smith or Mr Thistlethwaite.

Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) | Link to this | Hansard source

Member for Kingsford Smith. As both Treasury and the RBA have warned, loan-to-value ratios have increased at 90 per cent to 95 per cent LVR range over the past six months—and, as a result, the five per cent deposit scheme's expansion since 1 October 2025. Under the HGS, the Australian government provides a guarantee covering part of the lender's risk, in theory allowing borrowers to purchase homes with a smaller deposit without having to pay LMI. We've been trying to get this advice from Treasury since July last year, and this government continues to ignore not just the opposition but the entire Australian Senate. They removed the means cap, which means that a couple earning in excess of $674,000 can access this scheme and that it is driving up the price of those entry-level houses and apartments which this policy was set up to help. The Labor Party's failure on housing continues, and it is the low-to-middle income earners in this country that are paying the price.

Question agreed to.