TRANSCRIPT:
An audit has begun into the design and delivery of the Federal Government's Housing Australia Future Fund also known as H-A-F-F.
Established in 2023, it's aim was to address Australia's housing crisis by providing funding to boost the supply of social and affordable homes.
It started off with $10 billion and was aiming to build 40,000 social and affordable rental homes over five years.
The fund is under pressure for spending the equivalent of only eight Sydney homes last year.
Shadow minister for housing and homelessness Andrew Bragg is calling it one of the biggest public policy disasters of his lifetime.
"It is wasting taxpayer funds, it is overpaying for houses, in some cases, it's going to be paying more than $1.3 million per house when the average cost of a house in Australia is about $500,000."
Auditor-General Caralee McLiesh announced the nine-month audit is underway.
The audit increases pressure on the fund, whose Chair, Carol Austin, resigned this month amid a probe into allegations of bullying.
Assistant Treasurer Ben Mulino backs the legislation.
"Australia Future Fund is a well designed scheme that has already seen a very significant number of housing projects approved. I've seen a number of those in my own electorate. I've been at events with the Minister for Housing, where I've seen very substantial developments which will provide homes for people in fantastic areas, social and affordable housing."
Housing minister Clare O'Neil is blaming the Opposition and the Greens for delaying the fund.
She claims the 55,000 affordable homes were far better than the 373 social and affordable homes built by the Coalition in the last decade.
"The historic package that our government is implementing, is focused primarily on building more homes for Australians. We're doing that by building 55,000 social and affordable homes, something the Greens political party did everything to stop us doing."
Greens Senator Barbara Pocock has welcomed the audit, arguing the fund has always been too complex and too slow.
"Why isn't the government investing directly in public and community housing? They should be directly putting their money into public and community housing. It's faster, cheaper, and it worked the last time Australia faced a housing crisis in the post war years. We know we can do it. We've done it before."
Kristin O'Connell from the Anti-poverty Institute agrees with the sentiment.
She warns, however, that the difference between public, community, and affordable housing may not be clear to people who don't need low-cost accommodation.
"Public housing is something that we used to have a lot of in this country, and lots of different types of people lived in it. It is owned by the government, rented from the government, and you pay rent, no matter who you are, if you live in it, when we look at community housing that is often being run by church organisations. We operation being run by church organisations and other corporate charities that are very large scale and operate in very similar ways to property developers. It's really focused on building up an asset portfolio, you have less security of tenure that means that the community housing landlord has more reasons and more ways they can evict you than your public housing, landlord."
She says the Housing Australia Future Fund is structured to incentivise maximum returns for developers.
This encourages them to build homes with market-tied, "fake affordable" rents instead of genuinely affordable, income-tied community housing.
For public housing, Ms. O'Connell believes the fund provides no incentive.
"There are zero incentives for anyone to build public housing, because the whole thing incentivises state governments to sell off and privatise their public housing and replace it with Community Housing instead. So not only are the people who are accessing the fund more likely to try and build things that will get them higher rent, we also have state governments advocating responsibility and public housing tenants across the country losing their homes with the help of the federal Government."
She also points out that affordable housing has income caps and is tied to market rents.
"Affordable housing isn't what they call it. It's not affordable if you live in a place like Sydney, where market rent for a one bedroom apartment is $600, your so called affordable housing is going to be $500 for a one bedroom apartment."
The ANAO audit is expected to report its findings by June 2026.
