MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE

Senator BRAGG (New South Wales) (15:59): I should acknowledge the good Senator Scarr's motion. He's one of the one of my favourite senators, I should probably say, at this point. Of course, all senators are equally favoured, but I think he makes a very good contribution on the committee and in this parliament, working in a collegiate way where it's possible to do so.

I make the point that this budget has been a shambles because the government have had to have four goes at this. They had a budget in May, where they announced their 30 per cent tax on everything, ostensibly to fix housing—hilarious. Then they came back in June and said they were going to make some changes to startups.

Then they came back later in June and announced their crooked SMSF deal with the Greens. Then last week they said that they'd play around with this widow's tax. The problem that we have in this country is that, in raising $77 billion of taxes from the people—remembering that the government has no money of its own other than what it raises from the people—the government have not bothered to do any regulatory analysis to work out where the problems are in raising $77 billion in new taxes.

So what we've found is that there are problems, because this will be a widow's tax. If you die or you get divorced, you will lose access to grandfathering. It also raises the problem that they haven't even bothered to define 'new build'.

For a policy which apparently has been held out to be about housing, they haven't even bothered to define what a new build is. Then we have this ridiculous thing around the self-managed super funds. The government have decided that they would kowtow to the Greens, their alliance partner, and that they would ban SMSFs from borrowing to invest in housing.

Setting aside the idea that it is insane to try and stop any investment into housing, because we need more houses—one thing we need more of in this country is more housing. So we shouldn't be bothered about where the investment is coming from, but the government have a deliberate design feature to reduce housing supply by 35,000 with their negative gearing and capital gains changes.

Now they have a new policy to reduce housing further by many thousands. The fly in the ointment here is that the government have no idea how many houses they will deprive the Australian people of because they haven't even bothered to model it. They have no idea what the impact of their self-managed super fund ban is going to be.

They have no idea. We asked the minister representing the Prime Minister on Thursday, 'How many houses?' She said '4,000 fewer'. Today we read in the Financial Review that those claims are ridiculous.

Just eight providers wrote more than 4,000 loans last year. This begs the question: does it matter whether it's 4,000 or 400 or four million? Yes, it does, because a government that knows what it's doing would know how many houses they're taking away.

The more important point is: Why would a government want to reduce housing supply by four million, 400 or four? Why would you want to have fewer homes? If a person who has an SMSF is borrowing to invest in an off-the-plan scenario to build a new house, why is that bad?

What's wrong with that? It doesn't make any sense to me. I can't understand it.

Maybe my brain is full of rust. It's possible. I'd say on this occasion it's unlikely, because I can't think of any reason.

I can't even understand the Communist or socialist manifesto including a rationale or a reason or a justification to cut housing supply just because you don't like the investor. I'll tell you what is crooked and criminal. It's that the government has cut out all its mates in the big super funds from these reforms.

So, if you are a punter, you pay 30 per cent tax; if you are Cbus or 'Wayne Swan and the 40 thieves' or whatever running AustralianSuper, you only pay 10 per cent. They have deliberately created, through the tax code, arbitrage to support the bloodsuckers, the Draculas out there and all these people that run their campaigns and fund their political party because the problem the Australian people have is that they have a government for vested interests here.

They have a government that doesn't give a rat's about their people. All they're worried about is how they enrich their mates and pay off their bad political debts. What we've seen today is chaos, confusion and a budget with more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese.