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

With Dr Jim Chalmers running the Treasury in Australia, sometimes I wonder whether I am in Argentina or Venezuela. It is true that we are in Australia, but we have a bizarre situation where the government thinks that bureaucracies build houses. This latest thought bubble—to get the Future Fund, Australia's sovereign wealth fund, to now be directed by the government to invest in Labor's pet projects—is extremely dangerous economic policy from this government. The key point is that, just because you build a bureaucracy, it does not mean that you can build the houses.

To give you a sense of where we are on housing, in 2018 the country built 220,000 houses. This year we're down to 160,000 houses, and a million people have come into the country in the last two years under this government. We're down to 160,000 houses in this year of 2024—the same number as in 1989, when the population was closer to 17 million. That gives you a sense of the government's incompetence.

This is despite having the National Reconstruction Fund. I'm not sure what we're reconstructing from, but we've got a big fund of $15 billion. We've got the Housing Australia Future Fund, which spends more on corporate affairs and executive salaries than it does on houses. So far that fund has built a grand total of zero houses. So the idea that the government can now raid the Future Fund and get that to work on the government's favourite projects and favourite ideas is very short-term, very dangerous Argentinian or Venezuelan style thinking. I have no problem with those countries; I only use those as examples of often poor economic policy, as case studies, for Australia, and I'm very concerned that we are heading in that direction under Dr Chalmers. (Time expired)