Doorstop 22 July 2026

Subjects: Release of the ANAO Audit into the Housing Australia Future Fund

E&OE.........

Senator Bragg

Well, who could believe that we are living in a country where you have a $10 billion fund that has been running for almost three years, that has only built a handful of houses. And of the houses that it has in its portfolio, half of those have been bought, not built. It is incredible to me that this Housing Australia Future Fund has been able to sit on 10 billion bucks, but only built 1,000 houses in three years, and of those houses, half of those have been purchased. Well, what that tells you is that the government will never ever meet its target of 40,000 social and affordable houses. It's less than 5% of the way there, and this fund has a litany of governance and structural issues that have been identified by the Auditor-General.

Now, thank goodness for the Auditor-General, because what the Auditor-General has done has exposed the lies told by the Labor Party Ministers at Senate Estimates, including Minister Tim Ayres, who have insisted that this fund is not buying houses, when it is. This fund is inflating prices in the market, competing against Australians, to purchase houses that they could have actually purchased as individual Australians. The government is making the housing crisis worse, with more taxes and also a boondoggle fund, which is going around scooping up houses that Australians could actually own themselves. That is incredible. We've never seen such gross maladministration, and the Auditor-General has been clear that the government and the Treasury have no idea what this fund is supposed to be doing, how it's supposed to be measuring its success.

But also, they've identified that they're overpaying. In some cases, they're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars above the market rate, because they're desperate to subsidise the returns of wholesale investors. This fund is more worried about scooping off money to the super funds and institutional investors, than it is about providing cheap public housing or cheap social housing for Australians. So, this tells you all you need to know about the government's priorities, that they have focused on getting money out the door to their mates in the super funds, at the expense of getting houses built for Australians. This is a government for vested interests, and this is exactly why I've referred Jim Chalmers to the National Anti-Corruption Commission, because all of these funds, alongside all their rigging of the rules for disclosure purposes, is all designed to create a system of corporate housing in Australia, where corporations like Cbus and BlackRock and the like own the houses, and they rent them out to Australians like they are serfs or slaves.

That is not the Australian dream. The Australian dream is about individuals owning houses, punters owning houses, and this shows you how crooked this government is –that this housing fund has been going for three years, it's built a handful of houses, and it's focused on subsidising the returns of investors, not getting houses built for Australians. Now, the alternative is going to be a functioning market system where builders and developers can cheaply build houses that Australians can afford to buy, with a focus on affordability over the longer term. The idea of a government fund like this has now been totally disproven in this country, and that's why if we win the next election, we will abolish this huge and colossal waste of taxpayer funds and return that money back to the Budget and back to the Australian people who deserve better.

[Ends]