COMMITTEES
Senator McKENZIE (Victoria—Leader of the Nationals in the Senate) (19:03): After listening to my colleague, the shadow minister for housing, Senator Bragg, give an outstanding contribution about why this inquiry is so necessary, I've headed into the chamber to talk about why housing is necessary—and I'll get to that later in my contribution, referencing the Page Research Centre's great work around family policy and the role of stable housing in raising the next generation of young people.
In Senator Bragg's contribution, he made very clear what our role is here. I have been here for a very long time. I've been here for so long that I remember when the leaders of political parties stood in this chamber and got the call as precedents.
The role of the Senate is actually to hold the executive to account. Having been in the executive, sometimes that wasn't such a great outcome—to have colleagues, crossbench and the opposition make you be accountable as a minister and as a member of the executive of our parliament and our country. Our Constitution itself gives this chamber and each and every one in it a specific responsibility to hold ministers to account.
They sometimes don't like it, and governments specifically don't always like that scrutiny, but that is our role. When you have the great privilege of sitting on the government benches as part of the executive, that role doesn't change. Senator Bragg bringing this reference to the economics committee is an important aspect of our jobs here as senators.
Transparency and accountability shouldn't just be something you use on your social meme platforms prior to an election, as if somehow you can pick up being a transparent, accountable politician or party or member of parliament, or a man or a woman of integrity. It's actually something that has to be lived in daily practice. Despite talking a big game prior to the election, Anthony Albanese's government has found it a lot harder to practice transparency and accountability and be men and women of integrity than to talk about it.
Every day in this chamber, whether it's using the guillotine to silence senators' debates on critical bills and issues on which the Australian public have asked us to speak on their behalf or whether it is the pathetic responses to questions during question time, they depart from the field each and every time. We have seen that day in, day out on the current fuel security issue.
They've been unable to tell us where the supply gaps are. They've been unable to tell Australians where they can actually purchase fuel at an affordable price and what they're doing, as the responsible party here, to solve this issue or at least make it as least impactful as they can on Australian families and businesses. Senator Bragg rightly wants to bring Housing Australia before the economics references committee so that not only the opposition but the crossbench too can do the work we were sent here to do.
This is not an insignificant amount of taxpayers' funding; it's $80 billion. That's a lot of schools that could be funded, a lot of potholes filled and a lot of bridges built for that amount of money, but the Labor Party has decided. They won the election, so they have the right to decide where to spend hardworking Australians' money, and they've chosen to put $80 billion of apprentices' tax dollars, hairdressers' tax dollars, teachers' tax dollars and coppers' tax dollars into this organisation and their housing program.
So it is only right and proper that the Senate itself and our committees and estimates process examine that. In the process of examining the Housing Australia Future Fund, the Affordable Housing Bond Aggregator, the National Housing Infrastructure Facility, the National Housing Accord, the Home Guarantee Scheme, capacity building and the Help to Buy scheme, there have been some issues raised that require greater examination.
Rather than voting against that, we're all giving up our time to go and prosecute these things. The public servants that will be appearing will be bound to give senators their answer, but that is their job. The Labor Party is voting against a reference to the economics committee.
I've been here long enough to know that a reference inquiry never used to raise an eyebrow for former governments of both stripes unless you had something to be worried about or were trying to control the political narrative. And that's exactly what the Labor Party is trying to do about this. Despite our political differences, we all know that housing is a critical issue, particularly for young people in this country.
It doesn't matter whether you live in Bendigo, Albury, Deniliquin or in our major capital cities; getting into your first home, particularly, is becoming harder and harder. When a government comes in saying that they've got the solution and that they're going to take a big swag of your taxpayer money to solve it, we want to know where the houses are; why they're not more affordable; why Australians, particularly older women, are still living in tents; and what you're doing with people's money.
And basic tenets of governance, like conflict-of-interest and making sure you're not giving not just jobs to your mates but cash to your mates—that's the problem. So I would actually ask the Senate to support this reference to the economics committee. It's not setting up a new select committee, where somebody is going to get extra dough for being the chair; it's simply a reference to make sure we all do our job in holding the government to account.
As this reference makes clear, it is not just about the probity issues and the governance issues around the administration of the money and the decision-making process; it's also about the compliance with workplace standards and norms. Again, we can talk a big game about the type of workplace we think we should all be in. I've been here long enough to remember sitting here as normal on a Monday night at 10 or 10.30, and, if senators had to speak on a bill, they were given the right to do that well into the night, instead of what happens now, in the name of workplace safety, norms and standards.
So why aren't we ensuring that government entities also have the same concerns? One of the issues I am very concerned about is the compliance with Senate orders. Again, we do it every day: we move OPDs—orders for the production of documents, for those following along in their harvester at home at the moment—we come in here, the Senate votes for a minister to produce documents, and minister after minister after minister after minister fails to comply.
They hand in stacks of blank paper. Again, having had the great privilege to serve as part of the executive, yes, it was incredibly frustrating, yes, annoying and, yes, time consuming to get those Senate orders, but, if you respect democracy, if you respect the Constitution and this chamber's role in our federation, if you respect transparency, accountability and this chamber, then, despite it being a pain, you should comply.
And you as the minister actually have the great right to say, 'That little line of information will prejudice something that we're trying to do or is cabinet-in-confidence.' There are mechanisms with which you can withhold certain pieces of information. In the main, you should be open and transparent. But you're not.
That goes to a culture within the whole organisation of the Labor Party and this government, and Australians and the media are getting very, very sick of it. It also goes to freedom-of-information requests. I want to briefly go to the substantive issue, which is about why housing is such a significant issue here in this country.
At the last election, the Labor Party took a suite of initiatives to the election, they won, and they're implementing them with a great wad of cash, as I said. The Liberal and National parties took a policy grounded in evidence and local engagement. We went out to local communities, to builders and to local councils and said: 'Why can't you get the houses built?
What is literally stopping you, council X, builder Y, from opening up that greenfield site?' They said over and over again, 'There has been a reduction of government funding at a state level for basics—sewerage, water, power, telecommunications.' In a democracy as wealthy as ours, you'd think we could get sewerage right. The Romans a little while ago got started on that project, but here we are, in a country like ours—we've got housing developments on the outskirts of capital cities in this country where trucks go into the new housing estate and truck out sewage everyday because state governments have failed to invest in this.
That would open up thousands of blocks. What does that do? It makes it cheaper for more people to be able to get into their first home.
That's what it does. We put $5 billion on the table for that, and we said: 'It's not just an issue for people in the cities. It's also an issue in big regional capitals and small country towns, so 30 per cent of that money is going to be guaranteed to the regions.' And it wasn't just local councils who said thank you; the housing builders also said thank you because that actually helps them make those developments profitable.
We weren't prepared to just shovel money for land banking, because we wanted houses built, so we put a timeframe on it. That is still a good policy. Four years after that election, when I go out and consult with local communities, that is what they want to see, blocks opened up, the frameworks being opened so that young people, in the main—they are mainly the ones who are going to buy these types of properties—get a foot in the door.
The biggest piece of your financial security in this country will be owning your own home by the time you retire. That is the expectation, and that, sadly, is what young people right across the country are losing hope in ever being able to do. When housing becomes unaffordable, and we've seen it in the data time and time again, young people make decisions about having a family.
If you're not getting into your first home until you're 35 or 36 then you're putting off starting a family. The three or four kids you might have liked to have had pares back to one or two because of the simple reality of biology, so that becomes a significant issue. The Page Research Centre has done a fantastic body of work, and I would like to commend Gerard Holland on it.
I'd also like to commend Virginia Tapscott, a journalist, an author and a mother of four kids in country New South Wales who is speaking very honestly and openly about raising a family and how we, as policymakers, can make that easier for them. One of the pieces is obviously child care and making that more about choice for how families want to care for their children and structure their arrangements, but another is housing.
This paper, and I highly recommend it to listeners, shows that we actually need to recognise that housing supply has not kept pace with demand, and Senator Bragg went straight to the heart of that. Eighty billion dollars—a lot of money for a lot of agencies that I read out earlier—but is the supply matching demand? We know that planning is an issue around that, and it was a pleasure to join the Australian Institute of Architects and others last night in the theatrette here, where the Urban Design Awards were being held.
The institute are absolutely going to be submitting to the productivity inquiry we've got around housing and how we can make this better. I would like to see the Senate support this motion, for us to do our job and for the government to stop running scared.