Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

When a vote goes down 19 to 41 and when you've got the whole crossbench and the coalition voting against this, it tells you something. It's an absolute dog of a bill, and this is why it's not going to work. This is, again, a pie-in-the-sky housing scheme. Listening to Senator Murray Watt, you'd think that it's about us denying the younger generation the opportunity to own a home. You have done that on your own with your economic policies that you've brought in here. You promised people a $275 cut in electricity bills, and it never happened. You made promises about the Voice, and that never happened. You've made so many promises in this country, including about climate change—and that is another dog of a bill.

Let me explain this Help to Buy legislation to people. You want to put up another $5.2 billion to build housing in Australia, rather than looking at your high immigration levels. That's the whole problem. You can build these houses, but you've had an opportunity for the last two years to build houses, and not one house has been built. You've put $35 million plus into administrative costs, yet not one house has been built. That proves that you're incapable of following through and producing for the people of Australia. Apart from this $5.2 billion, your housing policy is going to cost $32 billion overall. That's what the government is putting out to build 1.2 million houses.

But let me tell the people in the gallery and the people watching that, apart from high immigration, between 2022 and 2023, you brought in 737,000 people. The reason I mention this is that you haven't even got the people to build the houses. That's the joke about all this. Some 737,000 people were brought into this country between 2022 and 2023. Of those, off the top of my head, 51,605 had skills, and, of those, only 1,800 were construction workers. What has happened in this country—only because of my push for apprenticeship schemes; I put that to the parliament, and it was passed by the coalition government—is that 100,000 apprenticeships were taken up under my policy in Australia. We haven't followed that through. No-one has done anything about it since. You haven't pushed for more apprenticeships. You actually just want to bring in people from overseas, but we're not getting them.

Another thing that you haven't addressed is foreign investment. On the last census night, approximately one million homes were vacant. A lot of these are foreign investment homes. Foreign investors aren't really allowed to buy established housing in Australia—they can only buy new properties—but no-one follows through and investigates this because you let it go under the radar. That's because state governments want to have all these foreign investors coming in because it drives up the cost of housing in Australia, and then the state governments make so much money out of stamp duty. This is what happens all the time. The public are scammed.

The reason the cost of housing in Australia is so high is foreign investment. I have been opposing foreign investment in our housing stock in Australia, as well as in prime agricultural land—or any land, for that matter. I'm pleased to hear that, under Peter Dutton's leadership, the coalition is going to look at suspending it for two years. It should be for longer than that. It should be until we've addressed the housing market.

Remember that a lot of deals are done behind the scenes. It could be the UN, the World Economic Forum or different ones that we sign deals and treaties with behind closed doors. That's the government. We here in the parliament have no idea what we've signed away. But isn't it quite interesting—do you know of Klaus Schwab? Have you heard of him? He's from the World Economic Forum. How often has he said, 'You will own nothing, yet you will be happy'? Do the public really trust the government so far as to go into part ownership with them in housing? Honestly, the only person that you can trust in owning your own house is yourself. That's why One Nation brought out the policy of allowing Australians to use their own superannuation to buy their own homes—not investment properties but their own homes. That was One Nation's policy, and it was taken up by the coalition. To be a member of parliament, you need to have vision, and you guys haven't got it.