DOCUMENTS
Senator BARBARA POCOCK (South Australia) (09:22): I also rise to take note of the contribution from the Minister representing the Minister for Housing this morning. This OPD was passed in June, and we're still waiting. From what the minister said this morning, we understand that the 'process continues'—those were his words—and that the government expects to respond 'in due course'!
Well, who knows when that will be? It's certainly not this week. And yet this is really important information.
We want to know who has access to the scheme, which the Labor government has taken the lid off to allow people on unlimited incomes to get access. We need to know this. It's important that we find out.
We're asking for it to be broken down by the top 10 suburbs. That information is important. We need it, and we need it soon. 'In due course' is no date at all.
Here we are, still waiting. One of the really consistent characteristics of this government around housing is its failure to actually meet its targets and, most importantly, its failure to give us timely, accurate information about all the ways in which housing is affecting Australians. One of the most important issues—the biggest crisis, and a most important element of the cost-of-living crisis—is the housing crisis, and yet here we are begging for data, here in the Senate, to understand what's going on.
We have governance arrangements around housing, put in place by this Labor government, that are completely inadequate. Where is the data on so many aspects of this crisis? We need it to make sense of what we're doing—to evaluate policy, to work out what's going right and what's going wrong, and to see who's being left behind.
We know millions of people are being left behind. The governance on data and information and all of these programs is utterly inadequate, and it's one of the reasons why, in this recently tabled report on the housing crisis in Australia, particularly focusing on how it's impacting on young people, we have made a recommendation that it's time for a department of housing.
We need real structures in there so that we don't have to chase data through OPDs and all these other little devices and crevices that are available to us to try and work out what's going on. We need regular data. The day before yesterday, I had a meeting with the ATO: 'Tell us what's going on with tax.' There is so much information available to us publicly and privately, directly from the ATO.
Where is the equivalent information on housing? The Minister for Housing is failing us in terms of timely data, so we use OPDs. Yes, we use a lot of them sometimes to try and get to information that is basic decision-making data in a crisis on housing, and Labor is failing us.
They need to be dealing with this data and our requests in a much more timely way, and we should not be waiting on reports from the ANAO to know what's going on. That's what we're currently relying on. We've got reasonable information from the ANAO.
The day before yesterday, we heard the Minister representing the Minister for Housing in this place attacking his opponents for using the figure of 1,432 homes so far created through the HAFF, the jewel in the crown of Labor's policy. There are 1,432 homes of the 40,000 promised, two years into a five-year program. The ANAO are saying they're very sceptical that we're going to get to 20,000 homes in two years time and then to the target of another 20,000 homes a year later.
We are so far from realistic assessment about what's going on here. The ANAO are one of the few sources of information available to us, and they say that this program and its transparency are insufficient. That's the ANAO saying it's insufficient.
So we in the Senate are joining in a complaint that the transparency of information available to us to judge this policy, in a massive housing crisis, is utterly inadequate, and we are going to continue to come here and ask for information because Australians want to know what's going on here. We heard data yesterday that nearly 80 per cent of Australians are really worried about the unlimited rent increases and want a regulation system around renting.
Where are the government's proposals on this? Where is the data on what's going on out there for renters? Average rent is now over $700 a week.
No-one on minimum wage can deal with that and put milk in the fridge. That is a massive crisis, and the government is not giving us the governance we want. Its systems are failing, and we need action.
(Time expired)