Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In my electorate of Blair in South-East Queensland we have many fine organisations of military and returned service personnel—Leagues clubs et cetera. There are many fine people; it is a place where people purchase homes and retire after serving at the RAAF base at Amberley. We honour those military people who have served overseas as well as at the RAAF base at Amberley and at other places throughout Australia. We want to make it plain to them that we support them, and that is why we have done many things to make their lives easier.

In my electorate, for a start, we have Defence housing of a quality that was never seen under the previous coalition government. This weekend, in fact, I am opening some Defence houses in Ipswich. We have provided the Defence Home Ownership Assistance Scheme, which was rolled out on 1 July 2008, helping ADF members and their families to achieve home ownership in a way that the previous government never did. I heard the member for Paterson going on about what they have done. You would wonder what they did in all those years—the Howard years. What would you believe of the vague and obtuse references they made? We made commitments to the veteran community at the last election, and we fulfilled that by undertaking the review.

Mr Baldwin interjecting—

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