Marise Payne (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for COAG) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to all questions without notice asked today.

Let me start at the end and perhaps move backwards. As I said in my final supplementary question to the minister, the original promise of this government in relation to the National Rental Affordability Scheme made by then housing minister Tanya Plibersek in a press release on 5 December 2008 was that 50,000 new rental properties would be built across Australia by 2012. You really need to have a calendar with you to actually appreciate the extraordinary nature of these figures.

In the current performance summary, the government's commitment is to 25,302 dwellings by April 2013; so already half of the original commitment that was promised by 2012 in 2008. The minister advised us in his response today that the 2014 target was 35,000 dwellings under the National Rental Affordability Scheme. But the reality is that at current rates of construction, which see 9,289 dwellings built and tenanted as at September 2012, it would take the construction of over 2,000 houses per month to meet the target in the performance summary—not per year, per month. And this government says that they are bringing affordable housing onto the market in some sort of much vaunted, holier-than-thou way because they are a Labor government and that is what they do.

What it seems to me that they do is to break promises. It was pretty clear in 2008: Minister Plibersek's commitment was to 50,000 National Rental Affordability Scheme houses across Australia by 2012. So we find ourselves here in September 2012 looking at less than 10,000 dwellings. And so as the costs of this government's budget blow out everywhere else across the country, we are faced again with them not explaining how they are going to fill this black hole—this $120 billion black hole in their budget. Not one answer today actually responded to where those gaping holes will be filled. Not one answer! Not from Minister Wong, not from Minister Evans and not from any of the other ministers who had a role in today's question time. Most certainly not from Minister Carr, who has not gone any way whatsoever towards acknowledging the challenge of funding for the Gonski recommendations in education but who nevertheless can see fit to rail against state governments, which they are supposedly engaged in cooperative federalism with!

It is actually beyond a joke; it is actually verging on farcical. It does not matter if you talk to Frontier Economics, it does not matter if you read the Australian Financial Review and it does not matter if you look at the government's own figures: they will actually need to find $120 billion. That is about $20,000 for the average four-person family by 2020 to pay for their spending promises.

'Promises', though: that is the word one would be using loosely if one had any acquaintance with the housing portfolio, as I have. We have a government which has bet the house on historically high commodity prices continuing into the future, and the reality is that that will not be what happens. Look at the expectations which have been raised in so many sectors of the community and the promises that have been given. We had about 10 days in the last fortnight where if you combined the dental care scheme, worth $4 billion, and the Gonski recommendations, worth about $5 billion a year, and you added to that the unfunded National Disability Insurance Scheme as it currently stands, we had about $20 billion worth of promises just wandering around in the ether. But that is okay, because the implementation dates are—what?—2020! How many of us are still going to be here? Some of us, hopefully, but 2020! How stupid does the government think that the Australian public are? They are over vacuous promises and they are over being told that 50,000 dwellings would be built by 2012 when we cannot even crack 10,000.