Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I reckon gambling reform is really important, and I think governments have got to learn about gambling. They've got to learn about gambling on the stock market with borrowed money. I reckon that's a really important reform that's got to come in. We've got to make sure that they can be educated about that, that if you do borrow $10 billion at a certain interest rate and whatever the returns you make don't match that interest rate, then you might lose money.

This is gambling reform writ large. Losing your own money is a problem. We've all done it. I went to the Melbourne Cup last year. I can't remember which horse I had my 10 bucks—which is all I bet each year—on, but it certainly wasn't a winner. You feel a bit sad about it. But when you're gambling with other people's money you've got to understand how hard people work to earn it, and that's the problem with this Labor government and many Labor governments, with a couple of exceptions, over the past hundred years The Andrews government are a classic example of a government who doesn't understand how hard people work to earn money, and they show that they don't understand that by callously flushing it down the toilet, such as with the Commonwealth Games—classic example.

Housing reform's really important. When talking about housing developments and working with my constituents, some of whom are developers, some of whom are builders, I've always found that the problem with building houses isn't the capital—the capital can flow into the housing market. It's not about taxpayers money. It would be one thing if it were taxpayers money from the budget, but this is like, 'Let's borrow something and hope we have a bit of a win so that we've got some money for housing.' The problem is more the red and green tape, the time, the effort and the expense it takes to turn something from a paddock—and there are plenty of paddocks around Shepparton, the city I'm from; Shepparton's expanding—into a development where someone can go and pour a slab and start building.

Hopefully a young family can go and buy a house, the great Australian dream that many of us have been lucky enough to participate in, and I hope that many more can. The dream's alive in regional Australia, but I'll tell you what, the way state and local governments approach planning and the time and expense it takes means a lot of development companies just say, 'It's too hard.' We could get more houses built if we focus our reforms there, focusing on the real issues, and not by gambling, not by saying, 'Let's borrow $10 billion and see if we can make a little bit of money out of it.'

There are developments outside greater Shepparton. There is a development just outside a place called Tatura which is in my electorate. Tatura's got a really small population, but it's got all these huge industries: Tatura Milk, Unilever and all of the service industries—and I hope Tatura Milk thrives as an industry, but I'm worried about it. They're worried about it because of the callous disregard of those opposite to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, one of the most productivity-destroying pieces of legislation I've ever seen come into this place. Hopefully Tatura Milk can survive, keep going, thrive and provide dairy products not only to Australians but to people all over the world, but what they need is more people.

If we need more people to move to Tatura to work in these industries, they need to build more houses. They need to make available the land to build more houses. It's very hard to do that because of what you've got to go through with local government planning schemes and state government planning schemes. I read somewhere—correct me if I'm wrong—that approvals in New Zealand take something like six to 12 months. It can take six to nine years for approvals in Australia. That doesn't help us build houses, that helps us build bureaucracy. We need less bureaucracy and more buildings. We need less taxpayer money wasted. Let's pour some slabs and build some houses.

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