Auditor-General Housing Australia expansion welcomed

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We welcome the expansion of the Auditor-General’s review into Housing Australia - including scrutiny of additional funding in the 2025–26 MYEFO; and scrutiny of Treasury, which oversees Housing Australia.

There are serious questions about the quality of the government’s spending on housing and the performance of Housing Australia.

Labor has thrown more than $80 billion at housing, created a $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF), built a giant new bureaucracy, and Australians are still stuck with fewer homes.

As part of this $80 billion commitment, there was a big expansion in the government’s liability cap for the HAFF in the 2025-26 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) - from $26 billion to $44 billion, as well as other multi-billion Housing Australia commitments in MYEFO - without much transparency. Further, Housing Australia is overseen by Treasury, which also prepares the Government’s Budget.

Australians do not know whether all this money is being spent efficiently, whether real value is being delivered. Labor is presiding over one of the biggest housing disasters in our nation’s history. There is no clear mapping of the spending to actual dwellings being built by the HAFF.

That is why this extra scrutiny is welcome.

The HAFF was sold as the solution to the housing crisis. Instead, it has become the elephant in the room. Taxpayers are being asked to fund extraordinary costs for very poor results, with reports the government is paying up to $1.2 million to build a single dwelling.

Meanwhile, Housing Australia appears to be counting existing homes as “new supply”, rather than delivering a meaningful uplift in construction. Labor is already falling well short of its 1.2 million homes target. They are at least 80,000 homes behind to date and are on track to miss the target by hundreds of thousands.

The government’s own modelling pointed to a shortfall of more than 260,000 homes as early as May 2025, and the situation has deteriorated since.

Under the former Coalition Government, Australia averaged around 200,000 housing completions each year. Under Labor, that has dropped to around 170,000 annually.

Labor is presiding over one of the biggest housing failures in modern Australian history. This is now being carefully scrutinised, as it should be.

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