Housing Australia Future Fund Bill 2023
Consideration Of Senate Message
Mr HAMILTON (Groom) (16:38): What a joy it is to speak on this, following the magnificent member for Riverina. I’ve got to pick him up though. He missed the best song that would cover this return of the two lovers. It is of course ‘Two of Us’ by the Beatles, because of that second line, ‘Spending someone’s hard-earned pay’:
Two of us riding nowhere
Spending someone’s hard-earned pay.
Can you think of anything that better describes this wonderful collaboration that we’re seeing? It’s absolutely magnificent! It is a shame that we don’t have the other minister for housing, from the Greens, here with us, but we’ll make do. The member for Griffith has done a fantastic job, because, let’s be clear, the issues we’re having in housing supply are caused by the deployment of Greens policies at a local government level. Then he comes on top and pulls this through! It’s the greatest move that the Greens have pulled. But there is nothing in these amendments that will do anything at all to take away from the hairs that are on this terrible, terrible policy in terms of reliability and sustainability. It is simply the wrong model to deliver capital works with. This has been gone over many times. The member for Deakin did a fantastic job of this. It’s not $10 billion. It’s a borrowed $10 billion, at a cost of some $400 million a year. We need to add to that the magnificent promise of $500 million into housing every year. I want to dig into this a little bit. Grab your calculators out. This is really great because I get the opportunity to talk up Toowoomba. There’s $500 million, at, let’s say, $700,000 a house. That’s fair. How many houses are we building? It’s about 700 houses—less than the number of houses built by Toowoomba. With this grand scheme, this $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund, you almost catch up to Toowoomba. You’re almost catching up to a country city. Wow—magnificent! We do that every year, and this grand scheme, this thing that we’re all talking about—this huge investment, the biggest investment ever, that’s going to do so much for Australian housing—means you’re almost catching up to Toowoomba. It’s absolutely fantastic, guys. I don’t know what to tell you.
Let’s go to the commitment of 30,000 houses. It was a million. It’s close. It’s in the ballpark! There’s a margin of error there, but we’ll allow it, because accounting is hard. Numbers are tough. Remembering numbers is tough. But we’ll allow it. We’ll allow the 30,000 to sit, and we’re going to add to this 1.5 million people—
An opposition member: How many?
Mr HAMILTON: We’re adding 1.5 million people! But don’t worry, guys, it’s fine, because we don’t already have a housing crisis—oh, sorry; we really, really do. We were sitting with the heads of the big four banks in the economics committee, and the one thing that they repeated over and over again was we have never had a worse issue when it comes to housing supply. This is an important area, so what are we going to do about it? We’re going to add 30,000 houses, and 1.5 million Australians are going to come and join us here. How on earth does that address this? In this situation, it is an appalling policy that will not make things better for anybody.
Let’s go back through the wrong-headed details that sit with this fund. Why would you deploy a fund like this that requires you, year on year, not just to meet your repayments but to beat them, to stay ahead? And what happens if you don’t meet your repayments? Is $500 million magically going to be sprinkled down? Are we going to magically fairy-dust some money on? No. We’re going to deplete the pool, surely. This is taxpayers’ money, which will be depleted. This is not a sustainable model. Quite frankly, we might as well just spend the $10 billion. Put $10 billion into housing and walk away, and be happy you’ve done something. This has no reliability, it has absolutely no sustainability and it is completely the wrong model.
Forgive me if I take the opportunity to double-dip and point out just how great Toowoomba is. Toowoomba will be building more houses than this model will. This model will build fewer houses than Toowoomba will. What a great city we are! Without any help, without $10 billion, without all the fanfare, without all the excitement and the newspaper stories, we can just get on and do our job. In spite of that, Labor are sitting there and are going to make the biggest story they possibly can about how great their model is. It’s an absolute stinker.
