DOCUMENTS

Senator BRAGG (New South Wales) (10:07): 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.