DOCUMENTS

Senator AYRES (New South Wales—Minister for Industry and Innovation and Minister for Science) (09:01): OPD No. 546 seeks 'documents setting out the total number of first home guarantees issued by Housing Australia for the 2025-26 financial year to the end of May 2026, broken down by the top 10 suburbs in each state and territory'. In relation to that order, senators will be aware that the Minister for Housing wrote to the Senate to provide an interim response, advising that more time would be required to satisfactorily comply with the order.

I'm advised that this process continues. The government expects to be able to respond to the order in due course, so we will, as a government, responsibly, to the extent that it is possible, comply with the order of the Senate. That's what we do as a government when it is possible to do so.

It is not the same response that I offered earlier this week in relation to another order for the production of documents which was captured by the cabinet confidentiality protections that are there to protect responsible Westminster-style governments in a way that has been the practice of the Australian government and this Senate not just for the last four years, not just for the last four decades, but for the period of existence of responsible democratic government in Australia.

This of course occurs in the context of a record number of orders for the production of documents agreed in this parliament with particular emphasis on this mechanism in the housing portfolio. It's become absolutely clear that Senator Bragg and his colleagues, on this question, as their wheels are spinning in policy terms, are bogged with an incapacity to be able to develop real policy that would build homes.

They have substituted a capacity for policy development with a capacity for OPD drafting—abusing and traducing the processes of the parliament and this Senate in a kind of frenzied effort to distract Australians from the fact that this party, which used to be in the mainstream, used to be in the centre-right of Australian politics, has become completely unmoored.

Nothing would symbolise that more than this fact: we now have as many OPDs in this Senate—a record number—as public houses built by the coalition in a decade. There are more orders for production of documents than houses built for Australians, who needed them, by the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments combined. That really should start to bring home to what's left of the sensible centre over there—not much—and to reasonable observers of Australian political life that this is a party that has completely lost its way.

They're trying to confect a transparency crisis because they don't have anything to say about the policy issues. Let me give you a tip. OPDs are designed to be used in a sparing way when you're actually onto something.

We used them in relation to some of Senator McKenzie's abuses of power and some of the other abuses over the Morrison period that were serious and sustained failures of governance during that sordid period of government. You ought to be a little bit more strategic and treat the Public Service with respect— (Time expired)