Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

Today in question time we asked a whole bunch of questions about the HomeBuilder program, but I think the one that revealed the most about what makes this government tick was the question asked by member for Macquarie about people who had had their homes burned down in the bushfires over Christmas. I think we would all agree that if there was anybody we should try to help in this place, it is people who had their homes burned down, who need to rebuild their homes and rebuild their lives, who saw a lifetime of work and effort incinerated in front of them.

Under this HomeBuilder scheme, if you want to put another floor on your two-storey house and you can get the paperwork done in time then it is happy days—here is $25,000. But if you're one of those people who had your house burned down like the people in Bilpin, when the Prime Minister was on holidays in Hawaii, and you can't get the paperwork done by New Year's Eve, either because of trauma or problems with insurance companies or getting DAs through, then you might just miss out.

What we asked in question time today of the Prime Minister was for a little bit of help for these people, a guarantee that you'll be there for them to help them to access this scheme and he couldn't provide that assurance. In the teeth of these bushfires, as people had their homes burned down and other people saw flames lapping at their doors, people felt like the Prime Minister had abandoned them. They felt like the government had abandoned them. I fear now, when they hear this news, that people who had their homes burned down who can't get guaranteed access to this scheme—if things beyond their control mean they can't get to it—will feel abandoned and ignored again.

And it is not just these people who feel abandoned by this government; it is also the tradies and all the people who work in the home building industry. This is not a small industry. It employs about a million people and it's an industry that relies on a continuous pipeline of work, a pipeline that's drying up at the moment. Everybody in this place, surely, now knows that this is an industry that's headed off a cliff. The predictions before the coronavirus hit said that there would be 160,000 homes built this year, plenty of work for the industry. Now it is predicted that will drop to as low as 100,000. If that happens, it means lots of tradies would lose their jobs, lots of people who make the materials to build homes would lose their jobs. That is why we have been banging on about this for weeks. The Leader of the Opposition, the shadow Treasurer and I, and the whole team, have been saying that you have to take action to help save jobs in this industry. Last week, the government finally responded with this HomeBuilder scheme. But instead of building a guardrail at the top of the cliff, they've put a Tontine mattress at the bottom. Remember that I talked about 160,000 homes being built at the start of this year—at least that was the prediction from the Master Builders Association, which the minister mentioned in question time. Their prediction is that it will now drop to 100,000. They got Ernst & Young to do some analysis on what it would mean if you did different levels of stimulus. Based on what the government has put together here in HomeBuilder, it will provide a net extra 10,000 homes. So, it will help a bit. It will save some jobs and mean that some homes are built.

But it is not going to save all of those tradies' jobs. It will mean that, for a lot of tradies who would otherwise be on the job building homes, all they're going to be building is a longer line at Centrelink. Just for comparison sake think about what we did when the global financial crisis hit, because that smashed the housing industry like it is being smashed now. We put together a scheme that provided grants to first home owners to build new homes. We also funded the construction of new social housing and the repair and maintenance—you might call it renovation—of other homes.

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