Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Deputy Speaker Claydon. It's quite extraordinary, but unsurprising from members opposite. We know you can't bite the hand that feeds you, and it's very interesting to see how defensive members opposite get when defending the CFMMEU—people who abuse women on building sites and who threaten and intimidate many people, including women, on building sites. The member should be ashamed of that contribution.

I want to congratulate the member for Bowman for bringing forward this motion tonight because members opposite don't want to talk about the litany of crimes inflicted by the CFMMEU. Indeed, their Premier in South Australia got shamed into handing back money that they had taken on the eve of an election from the CFMMEU. We hope that that will lead to further members of parliament and leaders of the Labor Party around the country feeling similar shame for taking money from an organisation that is a criminal organisation. Judge after judge in the Federal Court, or the federal circuit court, have made the point that no amount of fines imposed on the CFMMEU will change their conduct. The conduct is not just little disturbances on worksites. The conduct includes the most serious and grievous threats to individuals—people who just want to go to work and just want to work. So for those opposite to defend the CFMMEU by abolishing the ABCC is quite extraordinary. Let's be frank. As I said at the beginning, it's very difficult for a political party like Labor to bite the hand that feeds it.

I want to touch on something that's related to this motion from the member for Bowman, and that is the crisis that we're now seeing in the residential construction industry, no doubt exacerbated by the rhetoric that Labor has utilised with the ABCC. Today we saw the most recent data from the Master Builders Association, that now shows projections which sees new starts reducing each year, all the way through to 2024. Indeed, by 2024, we will see 50,000 less homes built in that year than we saw in 2021, the year when the government put in place a suite of measures to support the residential construction industry—50,000 less homes by 2024. Yet what have we heard from the Labor government or the Labor housing minister? Nothing. We've heard absolutely nothing from the housing minister of this country to support the residential construction industry and the many hundreds of thousands of people who work with, and rely on, new home sales. We've seen new home sales fall off a cliff in the last two to three months. I'd say to members of the government—indeed, I'd say to the minister—being in government, you are confronted with problems that you may not necessarily expect, but it is your job to address those problems as they arise. Now we're seeing residential construction falling off a cliff. That's going to affect the entire supply chain of people working. We might not feel it now, because of the huge pipeline of work that was left to you by the former government, but it will eventually hit. It's going to affect the bricklayers, the plumbers, the electricians, those who sell the homes and the architects. There are nearly a million people employed in the residential construction industry.

The challenge for Labor and for the housing minister is: what is your plan? You have a budget in a matter of weeks. We want to see in the budget what the plan is to support residential construction. If we don't see a plan from this minister and this government then what we will be seeing is a government that accepts that housing starts will drop to 174,000 by 2024, down from the 230,000 that were delivered in 2021. These aren't just jobs for the people who are building the homes, but they are new homes and, in many cases, first homes for Australians. We saw first home buyers rise to their highest levels for nearly 15 years under the former coalition government. We saw in one year the first home buyers go from about 100,000 to nearly 170,000 people. That is a profound difference to those people, and if we don't see a plan from the Labor Party in the budget on how they support residential construction, and how they support first home buyers—who are typically the ones who purchase those new homes—then what Labor will be saying is that the Master Builders Association's forecasts are acceptable, and I think that would be a huge problem for our country.

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