Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

Isn't it great to have a decent member at last representing the people of Wyong and The Entrance and surrounding areas in the Central Coast of New South Wales. I can say to the member for Dobell that, yes, I am aware of the Audit Office report into the Building Better Regional Cities Program. This report is a savage indictment of the incompetence and the partisan pork-barrelling of the previous government. This is a program that had as its target some 8,000 new affordable homes and yet it is expected to deliver no more than 3,200. Indeed, by mid-2016 it will be even less than that—2,969 homes out of 8,000 that were expected to be delivered under this program. But it is actually worse than that. Do you know how many houses have actually been built of the target of 8,000? Not 3,000, not 2,000, not 1,000; just 247 homes of the target of 8,000.

This was a $100 million program. I said that this was partisan pork-barrelling. Four out of the five grants went to Labor or Labor aligned electorates under the previous government. So where do you think it went? It went to prop up Craig Thomson in Dobell. It went to prop up the previous member for New England, Tony Windsor, in that seat. As the Audit Office has said today, the minister used—these are the words of the auditor—'unpublished eligibility criteria', 'implemented in a way that gave insufficient attention to the program's objectives'. That is code from the auditor for this partisan pork-barrelling of this particular program—it gave 'insufficient attention to the program's objectives'. Indeed, the Labor minister at the time, according to the advice of the auditor, ignored the department's advice, and that department's advice was that these program grants were lacking in 'merit' and were not 'value for money'. I wondered which of the six hapless housing ministers under the Labor government might have been responsible for this.

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