Mal Brough (Longman, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

‘It costs nothing to maintain them,’ says the member for Sydney. They get rent, they contribute themselves, and then they get $1 billion from the Commonwealth. The real facts are that, under Labor stewardship, there are fewer houses, after a $10 billion injection from the Commonwealth government, than there were 10 years ago.

Some states are better than others. New South Wales has in fact gone backwards over the last five years. As I recall from the last figures we have, New South Wales has gone from having 140,968 houses in 2000-01 to 138,580 houses in 2004-05. So they have managed to lose around 2,500 houses—not a bad effort. If you are wondering where these figures come from, they are from the Housing Assistance Act 1996 annual reports. They are not my figures; they are from annual reports that tell you how many houses the state Labor governments have built and owned.

Mr Schwarten has been the minister up in Queensland since about 1998. He has declared war on me. Why doesn’t he declare war on state taxes and do something for the people of Queensland who want to have the opportunity to have a low-cost house? In 1998, Queensland had 57,752 houses; today there are 57,289. He has lost around 400 houses.

But who is the blue ribbon, world champion, gold medal winning minister? It is Mr Jay Weatherill, from South Australia, who is without a doubt the best Labor minister for losing houses. In 1996-97, South Australia had the proud record of having 60,698 public and community houses. By 2004-05, Mr Weatherill had managed to drop that number to 51,628. I am not reading that incorrectly. Even though we have given them hundreds of millions of dollars, Mr Weatherill and the Labor Party have managed to lose some 9,000 houses in that time. What an extraordinary feat!

What did the coalition say? We said, ‘Let’s go and test the market and see whether the market has any better ideas.’ I have here the first report from my department since I announced that policy and said, ‘Let’s just see whether someone can do it better than the state Labor governments.’ So far, we have had 274 organisations, individuals, local councils, community housing organisations and small, private companies, as well as financial institutions, express an interest in bringing forward this sort of valuable information to the debate.

A Howard government will always hold state Labor governments to account. It is not the blame game. It is about saying to state Labor governments: ‘You have failed the people that you are elected to support. You have not provided the housing. You are overcharging in taxes and charges.’ What we get here is the pious behaviour of the Leader of the Opposition and the member for Sydney, who not once will stand up for their constituents and say to the Labor governments: ‘Hey, enough’s enough. You can’t just keep taking it out of the back pocket of these families. They can’t afford it.’

You cannot continue to mislead the public. You cannot mislead the lady sitting at the kitchen table and tell her untruths such as: ‘You are going to get $50 or $60 from a Rudd government.’ She will not get it. That was a lie. You know it. It is time you came clean and did the right thing by the Australian public.

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