Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Hansard source

The central charge against this government is that it is a government for vested interests. What I mean by that is that it has worked so hard for its favourite fellow travellers that it has had no time to solve the central economic challenges which are facing Australians. You can look at that by virtue of an assessment of the failure to beat inflation compared to almost every other country which we would compare ourselves to. Or you could compare our record in government to the current government's record in relation to housing construction. Of course, if you look at any of the major opinion polls of Australians under the age of 40, people are going absolutely bananas about the housing strife. That is the same issue regardless of whether you are a renter or a person paying a mortgage.

The collapse in housing construction under this government has made the housing crisis so much worse, because if you constrain supply, then you make housing so much harder. In fact, under this government, we've gone from building 220,000 houses in 2018 to just 160,000 houses this year. That is the same number of houses we built back in 1989, when the population was just 17 million. There's been a disaster in housing. With trimmed mean inflation still sitting at 3.5 per cent, you'd have to say that interest rate relief is some time off yet. While they are cutting the official cash rate equivalent in other jurisdictions and getting on and building houses, we are stagnating here with stubbornly high interest rates and inflation and stubbornly low levels of housing construction. That is making the Labor Party's record here very painful for the Australian people.

I think it is one thing to go through the figures, but it is another to hear the government make their political points in question time and in these debates here in the Senate and the House. The thing that strikes me is the tin ear of the government. They almost are prepared to make the point that Australians have never had it better. It is this tin ear which I think is linked to this major problem I identified a few minutes ago. When the government only works through the laundry list of issues important to its favourite fellow travellers, it has no time to solve the major economic problems of the day—the problems facing families and small businesses. These are the issues on which the government ultimately will be judged.

In the last week, we've had an opportunity to traverse the government's obsession with governing for favourite vested interests. We've been able to call some of the major super funds and the regulator APRA to a Senate hearing, where we've heard that the government are very happy to allow the major shareholders of big super funds to receive dividends from the funds but not be on the hook when things go wrong. In other words, the government is happy for the CFMEU and all the other unions to take money out of super funds. It was millions and millions of dollars in the case of CBUS. It's been $5.8 million over the past three years during Mr Wayne Swan's tenure as the chair of CBUS. But things go wrong. In the case of CBUS, they were sued by the corporate cop ASIC for failing to pay death benefits and failing people in their hour of need when there is a family bereavement. The government is very happy for the super fund owners—the CFMEU in this case—to be absolved and to have no interest in paying the regulatory fines which are more than likely coming the way of the super funds. They're very happy for the unions to take the dividends from the super industry, but, when things go bad, they are off the hook.

This is a deliberate design feature. We know that Mr Chalmers and Mr Jones moved amendments to legislation in the last parliament to prevent these funds from being on the hook for major fines. I'm very pleased to add my weight to Senator Dean Smith's MPI. It demonstrates again that this government is a government for vested interests, always looking for the best way to protect and preserve the interests that are most important to them—not to the Australian people.