Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this motion that has been moved by both Senator McKenzie and myself. It's very simple motion. One might even say it should be a non-controversial motion, when you look at what we are asking the Senate to do, and that is to establish a Senate inquiry by the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee into—wait for it!—the nature, extent and impacts of misconduct in procurement processes involving publicly funded infrastructure and housing projects.

Now, as I said, one would think this was a very simple motion. Who in this place, whether you're a member of the government, a member of the crossbench or a member of the Australian Greens, would actually vote no to such a motion? There is currently a cost-of-living crisis in Australia and Australians are doing it tough, yet what do we know? What we know is this: the cost of publicly funded infrastructure in this country, including roads, including hospitals, including the flow-on effect on housing, and including schools, is around 30 per cent higher because of the actions of the CFMEU. And it's not just the actions of the CFMEU. Quite frankly, it is the actions of those big companies who do deals with the CFMEU, knowing full well that the deals they are doing are driving up costs and delaying projects. These deals are enabled by large construction companies that allow these practices to persist. Why? Because, as we know—this has been proven time and time again—these firms benefit from inflated costs and productivity delays. All the while, mum-and-dad Australians are the people who ultimately suffer the consequences and pay the price.

As I said, given the nature of the inquiry, which basically is to work out why publicly funded infrastructure in this country is costing the Australian taxpayer more and not being delivered on time—why it's potentially not being delivered at all—I would have thought it would go through with a resounding 'yes' from all members of the Australian Senate. But, as we know at this point in time, whilst the motion we are putting up is endorsed by the Australian public, who I would have thought are saying, 'Hey, if I am actually paying more for my public infrastructure I would like to know why,' the fact of the matter is that his motion for a Senate inquiry is not likely to get up, because of the vested interests in this place. And we'll talk about those vested interests shortly.

The position of the coalition—the Liberal and National parties—is very clear. Our proposal to establish this inquiry comes at a critical time. Again, I would have thought that our public spend on infrastructure—on housing, in particular, given the inability of Australians currently to get into housing—must deliver value for money.

If I was a member of the public I would be demanding from government that they spend my money appropriately.

Yet what does the body of evidence, now formulated over many years, show? It shows that public infrastructure projects are often delayed and that they run over budget. But we also know—and, again, there's been royal commission after royal commission into this—that they are subject to corrupt practices that inflate costs and cripple productivity. So true is this that it has become a cliche of any government project. It is almost now accepted that a government project, in particular where the CFMEU is involved, is one that will be delayed, will run over budget and will be subject to corrupt practices that inflate costs and cripple productivity. What a sad state of affairs, that we now live in a country where it is extremely rare for a public infrastructure project to be completed on budget and on time.

That's why Senator McKenzie and I are putting forward this inquiry. All we want to do is ensure that Australian taxpayers—it's their money; publicly funded infrastructure equals Australian taxpayers; they're the ones paying for it—are getting the best value for every dollar spent on these public infrastructure and housing projects. It is a fact—as I said, it's been established many times—that the impacts of misconduct in the building and construction sector have a flow-on impact to the cost Australians pay for their roads, their schools and their public infrastructure, including hospitals and housing. Bullying, coercion and other intimidation tactics on building sites, particularly those controlled by the CFMEU, are driving up costs and delaying the delivery of essential infrastructure and housing. It's not a hypothetical issue. As we know, it is a real and present problem affecting every Australian who relies on the timely and cost-effective completion of public projects.

I would have thought that this inquiry provides an opportunity for all stakeholders—those who want to come along and say, 'By the way, no, no, no, we're actually doing okay in Australia', or those involved in the delivery of infrastructure and housing—to come along and justify their position or, alternatively, share their horror stories. And I know it's the 'alternatively' that Mr Albanese and his government are worried about. The alternative is that they come along and share their stories of the bullying, the intimidation, the coercion and the abuse. But also they might be able to share with us what they think are the potential solutions. The CFMEU probably aren't going to like those potential solutions.

So the construction industry, business owners, subcontractors and of course employees all have a story to tell. Again, all this inquiry will do is ensure that their voices are heard. But, as I said, the inquiry is not going to be limited to just the disgraceful actions of the CFMEU. This inquiry will shine a light on the entire process, from the moment a project begins until the moment it ends. The behaviours we have seen year in year out from the CFMEU—and, as I said, the body of evidence is in; it's been in for several years now—are driving up costs and delaying projects. But this is the key point here: they are enabled by large construction companies that allow these practices to persist.

I've stood in this place and said that before, back in 2016, and, guess what? The Australian Labor Party were in opposition. They fought us every single step of the way to try and curb these practices.

It is a fact that these large construction companies benefit, as I said, from inflated costs and productivity delays, and the only people who end up suffering are the Australian people. They suffer the consequences. Last month, Minister Watt denied that the CFMEU's behaviour has an impact on construction costs. I would have thought that if that were the case he would have welcomed the inquiry so he could prove those on the coalition side to be wrong. This is what Minister Watt said: 'I've had a bit of a look at this, Patricia, and I cannot find any evidence whatsoever to support that.' Really? Seriously? So many sayings are going through my mind—ostrich with its head in the sand or living under a rock. Go and talk to any of the smaller builders, any of the subbies. Go and talk to Australians who are having their infrastructure projects delayed. They will tell you Minister Watt has a blatant denial of reality, but Minister Watt's comments also show and tell you all you need to know about Labor's unwillingness to confront the truth.

The body of evidence is in. The evidence shows that CFMEU construction projects cost the Australian taxpayer around 30 per cent more than they should. In Queensland, where Labor's cosy relationship with the CFMEU is particularly evident, the cost of building apartments on CFMEU controlled sites—that's right, apartments which people want to get into—is 33 per cent higher than on non-union sites. A 2024 economic analysis by the Queensland Economic Advocacy Solutions found that CFMEU controlled apartment buildings take 50 per cent longer to build. Seriously, you could not script this if you tried. The cost of a two-bedroom apartment, for example, can be inflated by an extra $287,199, pushing the total build cost from $869,687 to $1,156,886. This is not just an isolated finding. A report from Ernst & Young estimated that Labor's abolition of the Australian Building and Construction Commission would lead to an additional $34.5 billion decline in construction output by 2030, with a $47.5 billion reduction in economic activity as higher costs and lower activity act as a handbrake on the rest of the economy.

Statistics from the Australian Securities and Investment Commission show that from the past financial year to 16 June—wow!—there were 2,832 construction industry insolvencies. That is up by 28 per cent from the 2023 financial year, when there were 2,013 construction insolvencies. There were 1,200 construction insolvencies in the 2022 financial year, the last year—lo and behold!—the Australian Building and Construction Commission was in operation. This is the economy that Mr Albanese and his government preside over. These are the consequences, laid bare, of their destructive industrial relations changes.

The CFMEU's conduct has far-reaching implications, and it's not just affecting large infrastructure projects. Australian home buyers and taxpayers are the ones who are ultimately paying the price for the CFMEU's bullying, their thuggery, their intimidation and their coercion. The chief executive of the Recruitment, Consulting and Staffing Association told the ABC in July that the CFMEU has created a serious increase in costs through a lack of competition. Quantity surveyors from Rider Levett Bucknall found that the CFMEU's wage deal in New South Wales would increase labour costs by up to 19 per cent in its first year alone. Similarly, Queensland builders and developers report that productivity on CFMEU controlled projects averages three days a week due to a sweetheart deal between Queensland Labor and the union. Seriously?

The federal budget in May revealed just how much this is now costing Australians.

The Albanese government paid out an extra $10.1 billion to cover cost blowouts on state and territory infrastructure projects. Of this, $5 billion went to Victorian Labor, and not a single extra kilometre of road was built with that money. Yet as we stand here today, those on the other side, the Albanese Labor Government, sit there rolling their eyes. They remain absolutely unwilling to take serious action. All this inquiry will do is allow us to dig deeper into the role that tier 1 construction firms play in fostering a culture of collusion, intimidation and corruption. All this will do is establish that Australians are paying too much for their public infrastructure, and it may actually put some solutions on the table. But let's wait and see.

I also move the amended motion standing in my name:

That the motion be amended as follows:

To move— That the following matter be referred to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee for inquiry and report by 28 November 2024:

The nature, extent and impacts of misconduct in procurement processes involving publicly funded infrastructure and housing projects and programs in Australia, with particular reference to:

(a) the adequacy of the Commonwealth regulatory framework in preventing and addressing corruption, bullying, standover and other intimidatory tactics in the building and construction industry;

(b) the adequacy of Commonwealth procurement contracts in ensuring the security of payments to small and medium subcontractors and opportunities to strengthen these arrangements;

(c) any practices or arrangements that discriminate, or have the effect of discriminating, against certain persons, classes of employees or subcontractors;

(d) connections between the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union, declining productivity and the escalating costs of infrastructure in Australia, including housing;

(e) the impact of misconduct on construction businesses, suppliers and skills shortages;

(f) the causes and effect of cost and delivery pressures on the Australian Government's infrastructure investment program;

(g) Commonwealth oversight of state and territory procurement and contracting arrangements for infrastructure projects with a federal contribution;

(h) examples of best practice infrastructure procurement processes around the world;

(i) improving the involvement of Indigenous businesses, small and medium business suppliers, subcontractors and independent contractors on infrastructure projects;

(j) the need for anti-racketeering laws in Australia; and

(k) any related matters.

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

Last week's Courier Mail is reporting: 'New tent cities have been set up near some of Brisbane's busiest intersections as Queensland emerges as the epicentre of the housing crisis. The latest tent city to hit Brisbane is at E.E. McCormick Place, where tents can be seen sitting on the edge of a major arterial road, with clothes hanging on lines and camp showers draping off trees.' The chief executive of Queensland Council of Social Services—QCOSS—Aimee McVeigh, said the housing crisis was not being properly addressed, going on to say: 'It's incredibly heartbreaking but unfortunately pretty predictable that we're continuing to see people, including families with children, who don't have a safe place to call home.'

I've visited large tent cities in South Brisbane on the Brisbane River banks, in Mackay and in Townsville, and I've seen smaller tent cities in far too many provincial centres to list. Speaking with those residents, I was horrified to find just how many were families with children. The really sad part is that mum and dad may both have jobs. Yet, without a home for the children, one parent has to give up working to look after their children, because a tent is no place for a child. There are children living in tents. Losing that income guarantees that family will remain homeless. Thank you, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

The truth is the housing and rent crisis is out of control. In August 2020, the national average rent was $437 a week. It's now $627. That's an increase of 40 per cent over just a few years. The national rental vacancy is at just one per cent, which is far below the three per cent rate that is considered a healthy market. In 1987, the average house cost 2.8 times the average income. Today a house is 9.7 times the average income. Additionally, under this government, real wages in Australia have gone backwards six per cent. Not only are houses more expensive; working Australians are further away from being able to afford them. Many people under 30 have given up hope of ever owning a home. What a failure of governance under Labor! Surely the prime directive of a government is to leave this beautiful country in a better state than you found it in. The reverse is happening; it's worse.

Over the past two decades, under the Liberal and Labor 'uniparty', wealth inequality in Australia has increased dramatically and substantially. According to the University of New South Wales, the wealth of the top 20 per cent of people increased 82 per cent, and the wealth of the bottom 20 per cent only increased 20 per cent. That, though, does not stop the university grabbing just as much of that wealth for themselves as they can. The university lobby group, Universities Australia, recently sent my office a press release stating they could prove that 702,000 foreign students didn't put strain on the housing market. Actually, they didn't say 702,000; the release rather dishonestly spoke of the 200,000 new students who arrived this year rather than the total number of foreign students, which is 702,000, all needing a bed and a roof.

To achieve this feat of denial, Universities Australia use a simple statistical trick. They use the vacancy rate as an indicator instead of rental price. Like any supply-and-demand industry, rental prices will rise until demand matches supply. This means vacancy rates should be constant across different areas, because the balancing factor is not vacancy rates; it's rental price.

Rentals are higher near a university, as landlords price into their rents the ability to have three or four students per bedroom. And, knowing how those rates are being paid with so many tenants, local councils hike up rates to exploit overcrowding.

The national vacancy rate across Australia has fallen from 2.42 per cent in 2021 to 1.09 per cent in January 2024 because of the housing catastrophe. Why? In part because foreign students all need a bed, and more so because two million new arrivals all need a bed. Universities couldn't care less about everyday Australians sleeping in tents, in public parks and under bridges. Universities are motivated to grab the money foreign students pay towards obscene multimillion-dollar university salaries. University fees are on average eight times what they were when the Hawke Labor government reintroduced tertiary fees in 1989.

I'm pleased to see racketeering mentioned in this motion. So many Australian industries are being controlled for the benefit of well-connected and mostly foreign wealth funds, acting against the financial interests of everyday Australians. Racketeering could be a separate inquiry, so entrenched has the practice become.

When it comes to ignoring working families, Labor has form. It's clear. The reason I'm raising this in a housing speech is quite simple: university affordability is no better than it was before HECS, except now children of everyday Australians are left with a debt so high that they can't ever afford their own home. So many young people contact my office—Australians who have done everything society has asked of them. They have studied hard, worked hard, stayed out of trouble and got a university degree, and now have a good job, only to find they were lied to. Real wages in Australia are back to 2010 levels, while houses are twice as expensive as they were in 2010. HECS debt comes off a person's ability to repay a loan, which means its reduces their borrowing power below the price of an entry level home. They can't borrow. Meanwhile, rents are so high that they have no ability to even save a deposit. Society is lying to our young Australians. This is not on the Labor Party alone; these problems date back to the Hawke Labor government and were made far worse under the Howard Liberal government—the uniparty at work! The message I have for recent graduates is one of hope. One Nation's housing policy looks to the future, offering commonsense solutions to help more Australians purchase their own home while at the same time reducing rent.

Let's have an overview of our housing policy. One Nation's housing policy includes lowering immigration to sustainable levels to reduce housing demand; in fact, I will go further and say, with 2.3 million people on residence visas, we need to send some home. We would ban foreign ownership of residential property to increase housing supply; allow a portion of a person's superannuation to be invested in home purchase; ditch Labor's housing future fund and invest those funds into creating a new people's mortgage scheme, offering a five per cent deposit and a five per cent interest rate; allow people with a HECS debt to roll their debt into a people's mortgage account, improving their ability to obtain and service a loan—this is common sense and humane; and implement a five-year moratorium on charging GST on the materials used in new home construction, which will make new homes more affordable, taking $1.4 billion off the sale price of new homes over the next four years.

Here are some more details. Non-bank financial institutions stand ready right now to take on the mortgage market and administer our people's home loans. They're ready. Indeed, some are in the market now in company with aggregators. It's One Nation policy to create a people's bank to provide Australia's obscenely profitable banking cartel with real competition. We don't have four major banks; we have one major bank with four different logos, with the same controlling interest—BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and First State. Efficiency in banking, including in the housing market, will not come from more regulation; it will come from more competition, driving real accountability. That's exactly what the original Commonwealth Bank did when it was formed in 1911.

The cost of building a house now is a massive problem. One of the reasons costs keep going up is Australian construction codes. Construction codes are meant to make sure our houses aren't made of straw and won't blow down if the big bad wolf, or a cyclone, huffs and puffs. Unfortunately, Australia's construction codes have gone woke; they're no longer just about safe houses. The National Construction Code was amended in 2022 to require all new buildings to be NDIS compliant—every single building to be NDIS compliant. Alan Kohler reports that global construction consultant Rider Levett Bucknall estimates that this adds up to $49,500 to the cost of a dwelling. Why should a young family have to shell out an extra $50,000 on features they'll never need in order to buy their family home?

Some of the requirements border on ridiculous. There must be a stepless entry to the front door, so the days of steps are over—even a handful up to your front porch. You'd have to pay for a ramp or potentially face having your home deemed illegal.

Remember, this applies to every new building. All new homes must be built with heavy-duty, reinforced walls and a toilet. These are ostensibly so grab rails can be installed, even though they may never be installed. Where did you want to put the toilet? You didn't think you could just put it where you wanted and where it's convenient, did you? Are you considering skipping a toilet on the ground floor and only having one upstairs to save on plumbing? Think again. The construction codes say no. You're forced to have one on the ground floor whether it's cost effective for you or not and whether you need it or not. The codes now dictate where the toilet must be placed. It must be against a wall, with huge spaces left around it. As the price of land continues to go up, many houses simply don't have the floor space to accommodate these new requirements without sacrificing others.

Young people are paying for this, even though they don't need it. No doubt these criteria are helpful for people with a disability, yet there's no reason to make them mandatory in every new house for people without a disability. Many in government claim that, when it comes to housing, the problem is supply. When these changes to the construction codes alone are costing an extra $50,000 a house, there's no hope of boosting supply, because Australians can't afford to build. Construction codes are getting so long and complex that we practically need to be lawyers to decipher them. That's no slight on our tradies. Most are far smarter and more useful than lawyers anyway. Our tradies should be using their hands on power tools and paintbrushes, not having to turn over pages and pages of regulations telling them how to swing a hammer. The same applies to our farmers, who are buried in paperwork.

Unions like the CFMEU endorse these complex additions because it means more work for them. Meanwhile, quotes to build a new house leave Australians gobsmacked. The people who can afford these expensive houses are millionaire foreign buyers. There's no doubt that foreigners are buying houses here, and that comes at the expense of an Australian who can't get into a house. Where are the Labor government's union mates when it comes to the issue of foreign buyers? They're completely silent. The government calls it foreign investment. Wrong, it's not investment. This is foreign ownership. Worst of all, Australians can't believe what the government tells us about how many foreigners are buying houses. The Foreign Investment Review Board says foreigners buy less than one per cent of houses, yet the New South Wales state government charges a foreign purchase tax, a surcharge, and records that the number is more than double that. Surveys say it's much higher.

When you ask real estate agents who they are selling to, as the NAB property survey does, they say the number of foreign buyers is 10 per cent. What about shelf companies, trusts with beneficial interests or so-called dark money in foreign retail purchases? Are foreign buyers of housing sneaking through the cracks? I've been trying to get this question answered since November with a series of technical questions to the Australian Taxation Office. They run a data-matching program which matches the 2.4 million names of every seller and purchaser of every house in the country against ATO records. Theres's a simple question about those records: how many of those 2.4 million names are Australian citizens, and how many aren't—how many are foreign? Trying to get the ATO to answer that question is like trying to get blood out of a stone, yet we're still selling houses en masse to foreigners.

To be frank, whatever the answer, one house a foreigner buys is one too many, especially in the housing crisis. We're in the middle of a housing crisis, a catastrophe, when there should be zero foreign ownership of Australian housing. It's in Australia's interest to make it zero foreign housing, just like Canada and New Zealand have recently done, yet where are the Labor government and unions like the CFMEU? They encourage more immigration and more foreign ownership and push the price of houses higher, as do the Greens, and then want a rent ceiling.

When Labor and the union-backed super funds aren't encouraging foreigners to snatch homes away from Australians, they're making sure renters will have multinational corporations as landlords—BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. The concept is known as 'build to rent'. It's about letting huge corporations like BlackRock and Vanguard build housing estates and unit blocks so that people will be stuck renting from them forever. The government touts this as a solution to the housing crisis. Creating forever renters who are paying corporate company landlords is not a fix; it's serfdom.

A real solution is One Nation's policies to get more Australians owning their own home. The Albanese Labor government is responding to a problem of their own making.

Housing approvals are falling as red and green tape slow down the approval process and as building codes put developers off. Housing approvals are the lowest they've been for many years. Construction is falling as costs rise both from an increase in raw materials and from an increase in interest rates—and from an increase in the number of bureaucrats that you've appointed instead of tradies. Sales are falling in line with falling real wages and increasing home prices. A labour shortage is correctly blamed, yet we had 2.3 million new arrivals, and only a few thousand of those were builders.

As I said, it is a problem of the government's own making. The only response the government has is to throw taxpayers' money at the problem. Without blocks of land, without builders, without tradies, without building materials and without buyers, money can't achieve anything. One Nation's housing policy will get young Australians into their own homes—even those with a HECS debt that is preventing them saving for their own home and those working families living under bridges, in tents, in caravan parks, in showgrounds and in city parks. It's time for new, commonsense ideas. If people care about Australians, then it's time for One Nation.

Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question before us is that the motion moved by Senator Cash be agreed to. A division having been called, we will defer that division until tomorrow morning. The debate is adjourned accordingly.