DOCUMENTS
Senator KOVACIC (New South Wales) (10:59): Why are we here? This motion exists for one simple reason: this government won't show us its homework. Two orders of this Senate for Treasury's advice on first home buyers and for the documents behind the Home Guarantee Scheme have remained unanswered for nearly a year.
That's the exact same MO that this government had with the NDIS. If they don't want to tell you something, they will run, hide and obfuscate until time runs out. This is the hallmark of this government.
It's not transparency, it's not integrity, and it's not competence. It's hiding. The hallmark of this government is to keep information away from the Australian Senate and force people into silence.
The hallmark of this government are NDAs, where people can't speak about the discussions they have with this government. That is the hallmark of the Albanese Labor government. They don't care about the information that Australians want.
All they care about is ensuring that their vested interests are protected—vested interests like the corrupt and criminal conduct of the CFMEU. They are silent about that too, blocking inquiry after inquiry after inquiry. Senator O'Neill made a comment about histrionics from this side of the chamber, and that's probably the contempt with which the Albanese government sees Australians and other senators in this chamber.
Any request for legitimate information is 'histrionics'. Demanding transparency is not histrionics. She made the comment that the request for information on this side of the chamber is out of control.
What is actually out of control is the refusal of the Albanese Labor government to actually comply with orders of the Senate. They continue to hide. Why?
Why are they doing that? It's because they know that something there will harm them. That is why they won't give us the information.
It's similar to what occurred last week in terms of the Treasury bills. The government cut a deal with the Greens in relation to that, and we have a scenario now where the Treasurer himself has no idea about the detail within elements of that bill. We have a scenario where the Albanese Labor government and their friends, the Greens, worked together last week to pass legislation that taxes widows and widowers.
It taxes anyone whose partner has died where they have a shared property together that had tax treatments under negative gearing or CGT. They're going to put something forward to fix that. But just stop for a moment and consider the fact that they passed it anyway.
They didn't care that it was wrong. They didn't care that it was going to harm people. They didn't care that it was unfair.
They wanted their day in the sun. They wanted to say, 'Look what we did,' so that they could tell their vested interests that they delivered. We should all be appalled by that act from this government and from the Greens.
One of the biggest issues that we have with housing supply in this country is the cost of construction. The cost of construction in this country has gone north as a result of the infiltration of the CFMEU into infrastructure projects. And you may say: 'Well, what difference does that make to a house?
They don't build a residential house.' Well, I'll tell you what difference it makes. It means that they lift the cost. It's an artificial increase in the cost of that labour, and then that labour will move to those infrastructure projects, away from residential housing.
In order to match that and bring workers over to residential housing, residential housing also has to increase its costs. I was told in estimates that that increase in cost is between 15 and 30 per cent. Last night, on 60 Minutes, we saw information that suggested it was around 25 per cent.
That is what the Albanese Labor government is protecting.