Ross Cadell (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

There is a slightly bawdy saying I've been considering, but I will clean it up a bit for this: couldn't organise a pee-up in a brewery with a fistful of dollars. We know what that means. That describes the housing policy of this government. Just a short time ago, $10 billion was allocated to the Housing Australia Future Fund, and zero houses have been built.

On another bill today, Senator Canavan was talking about how the government doesn't build houses here—that he'd have trouble building a house and I'd have trouble building a house. With $10 billion and 12 months, I think I could have managed it. I could have managed to get one going, Senator Canavan. But this government—zero houses. That's why we're talking about this housing policy. As we heard in the questions from Senator McKenzie today, if the government is real about the 1.2 million houses that have to be built, they're going to have to build a new house every 2.2 minutes. Their policy has been $10 billion for zero houses in a year, but now it has to be one built every 2.2 minutes from now to achieve that.

This government knows how to talk the talk, but they don't know how to walk the walk. They bring out these stats—and we heard the impassioned arguments just then about statistics, yours versus mine, this versus that. The facts don't lie. They haven't built a house.

You can argue about the benefit of this other policy and say, 'Who will be able to buy the house?' But it doesn't matter; we're not building enough. Population is increasing in Australia faster than we are building bedrooms to put people in, and that is the problem.

Senator McKenzie raised the point that the average Australian mortgage has now risen 9.3 per cent in one year. The problem with that is it's not just about housing. People are remortgaging their house, refinancing, to pay their bills. They're borrowing more money to try and stay afloat. The average mortgage is going up higher than the average house simply so that people can borrow money to pay it back to other people. That's what these stats on homeownership say: it is a symptom of the Australian economy that the housing market is very weak and very precipitous. If you are borrowing money to pay your bills, it is only a matter of time before it catches up to you. What we'll see in the early new year is people spending up, buying their kids Christmas presents and loading their credit cards—doing all of these things. Then we'll see this debt come back to bite people when they can't afford to pay those bills and they need to borrow more, and when we see mortgages go up again, because they're doing that.

We need to be building more homes—not choosing who buys them, but building more. We need to be getting these approvals through. We need to be doing all these things, and it needs to be done in an efficient way. It needs to be done with the private sector building homes. We've heard stuff about the CFMEU and the large developers getting them out of the way and putting their 30 per cent costs on it.

We're getting this data on housing completion that is not comparable to anything during COVID. We heard the comments from the previous senator, about how stats fell so low prior to COVID. The housing completions for 2023-24 are lower than that. They are the lowest they've been in 10 years now. If they were disastrous in 2019, before COVID, they are now super, double disastrous. That is the truth of the matter.

If we aren't building homes, prices will just go up. If people are borrowing more to pay their bills, the servicing will go there and they'll get worse. The bottom line is that this economy is in trouble. The symptoms are all there. People are refinancing. Businesses are going under. We heard about the costs that they now want to put through on small businesses—on the anti-money-laundering stuff. It's not about whether we support money laundering or not. That's another question. It's about proportionality. How do small regional businesses—small regional lawyers, small regional accountants, small regional real estate agencies—go out there and put in the $30,000 worth of costs to comply with this? Proportionality is not there, because this government doesn't support small business. Why is that? Because their super funds can't own them, and their unions can't control them. If you're out there in a small business doing it tough, it is simply because this government doesn't have a way to influence and control what you do.

If it's not their industry super funds going out there and buying up big business, getting the multinationals and getting their seats on the boards, it's the unions coming in and telling your workforce what to do. They don't want you to succeed; they want to cripple you. That's not good enough, and that's what we're seeing more and more. They're getting bigger and bigger so that there is more that the government can control. Remember, this country was built on individuals out there having a go and making this the lucky country, not the government doing so. It's the people that do it, not the government.