Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Veterans’ Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to inform the member that I used the term advisedly as an adjective to describe a grouping of three parties, not a formal title ascribed to two parties. Coming back to that third party, the Greens, Australia very well knows how the Greens like to try and use an argument about saying that they are going to strive for something better, that things could be better, that we should be doing things better, that we should be doing it the Greens' way. The Greens' way has delivered a decade of inaction on energy policy—that's what they delivered to this country.

The Greens' way is now holding up housing funding for women and children fleeing domestic violence, older women who are experiencing homelessness, Indigenous communities that need to have proper housing afforded to them and housing for veterans that are homeless or at risk of homelessness. That is the approach they are taking. If they genuinely held the view that they thought we should be doing more or better—as they would say it—they would support this and continue to push us to do something else. But instead what they do is try and hold all of these people that would benefit from the Housing Australia Future Fund to ransom. How do they get to do that? Because they're in a noalition of the Greens, the National Party and the Liberal Party. It is absolutely shameful.

As I mentioned in question time earlier today, for all of the rhetoric you hear out of the Liberal and National parties about supporting our veterans—those people who put themselves on the line for our country—they undermined the Department of Veterans' Affairs, they failed to resource it properly, they talked up the new IT system and they didn't actually give it any funding. When given the opportunity to support funding for veterans experiencing homelessness, the first thing they do is stand at that dispatch box and say, 'We will support funding for housing for our veterans.' Then, in the proceeding nine months, they spend the whole time opposing the legislation that would do that very thing!

It is absolutely outrageous and it is hypocritical. You walk in here and try to say that we are the failure when it comes to housing policy. It is your failure! You didn't deliver over nine years, you didn't deliver over your time. You could have done this and then you didn't. We come in to clean up your mess and what do you do? You don't even support it happening! Instead, you try and talk the big talk. You go out and say, 'We're supporting veterans.' But, in reality, when it comes to what you're actually doing in this chamber and in that chamber in the other place, you aren't supporting veterans: you're undermining the support for veterans.

And you know it. I know that these organisations are calling you. They're calling their backbenchers and calling their senators. You are the failure for veterans and housing. (Time expired)

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