QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS

Senator COLBECK (Tasmania) (16:45): I will come back to the question before the chair, which is taking note of answers given by government ministers to questions asked by the coalition during question time, which I didn't hear much of in the last contribution; you should have been taking notice during question time of what the questions were, Senator. Quite frankly, we don't need advice from Labor, the most dishonest government in living memory, about how we might operate on this side.

We're not interested in being a dishonest government like the Labor Party is. No person in this country can believe their words, even when they're conducting their take note responses to the debate on the question before the chair. We saw the tactics of avoidance again during question time today, when we asked questions about the widows, widowers and divorcee tax—some simple questions about what process the government was going through to mitigate the mess that they've created with something that they didn't know was in the legislation.

That has to be the conclusion that we take—that they don't know what they're talking about, what they're legislating or what they're voting for when they come into this chamber. We've seen it before. We've seen it in other measures.

On the firearms legislation, they didn't understand the legislation that they were voting on, which is a real concern because they truncate committee processes. They try to ram things through the chamber without proper scrutiny, and they find things that, understandably, they didn't know were in there because they haven't done the work properly in the consultation for the development of the legislation.

They are all about getting the vote done rather than doing the job properly, and therefore they don't properly scrutinise the legislation, and then they vote for things that they don't know about. When it comes to housing, I've not seen Senator Wong twist herself more than when trying to avoid answering some very simple questions in relation to the number of housing completions, as I saw today.

The simple question was: how many houses were completed under the coalition, and how many a year have been completed under the current government? The answer is simple. About 200,000 houses a year were being built under the coalition.

Under the wrecking that this government has done to the Australian economy, it's down to 170,000. It's all very well for them to say they have these wonderful aspirations, but only the Labor Party could spend $47 billion on houses and build fewer of them. There's $47 billion more being spent on housing by the Labor Party, and they're building 30,000 fewer houses per year.

What an extraordinary record! Of course, this goes with all their other broken promises. They promised lower housing costs.

Well, we know how that's going and how much more people are paying on their mortgages because of Labor's high cost of living and inflation. They promised a lower cost of living. They promised to reduce energy prices by $275.

They promised they wouldn't change the tax on superannuation, and then they legislated to do it. They promised they wouldn't change capital gains tax, and then they legislated to do it. They promised they wouldn't change negative gearing, and then they did it.

You cannot believe a thing this government says at any point in time because they just don't tell the truth. They deserve the ignominy that the Australian people are directing in their direction. Question agreed to.