James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to commend the Defence Home Ownership Assistance Scheme Amendment Bill 2022 to the House and reiterate the excellent contribution made by the member for Herbert in the chamber earlier today as the shadow minister responsible for this area, along with the member for New England. I would like to start, Deputy Speaker Wilkie, by thanking you and all those in this parliament who served our nation for that service. We are debating bills relating to supporting our veterans and, obviously, they are extremely important. We are also very lucky that the debates are so well-informed by members of the House and the other chamber who are veterans, who have served our nation and who have their own significant experience of the challenges that veterans face and the ways in which we can do better. We all know that we can do better for veterans; indeed, we have a royal commission under way into veteran suicide which will report when it is ready. I am sure that is going to have recommendations that we as a parliament will need to engage on. I would hope that reform in an area like veterans' affairs is almost always something that is bipartisan. We shouldn't even use the term 'bipartisan' anymore, because, I suppose, it should be unanimous within the chamber from all members.

This is a bill that I am quite confident all members of the House will be very comfortable supporting. It loosens the criteria that is in place to support veterans to buy a home. How could anyone oppose that? It is excellent that the scheme has been in place since, I believe, 1991, from memory. It has been reformed over the years, but this is an opportunity for us to improve and increase the support that is provided to veterans to buy a home.

We in the coalition always look for opportunities to do more to support our veterans who have served our nation. We are also very supportive of home ownership and of helping anyone, not just veterans, with the really important economic security that comes from buying a home. Veterans obviously have unique challenges in buying a home by the very nature of their service in the armed forces. It is likely that they won't have an enormous amount of control over where they may be posted to or deployed to, whether that is within country or overseas, and that is a unique disruption that not many other people experience in their careers. If we all think about the logical progression in our adult lives towards the security of buying a home, that is particularly disrupted if you are serving in the armed forces and you don't have an enormous amount of certainty about where you will be stationed or deployed to, not only where that might be but how frequently that might change. It would be very difficult to make a commitment towards housing at times—not always, but at times—in line with what those of us who don't have that uncertainty in where we will be domiciled on an ongoing basis will have. The scheme really does recognise and support the fact that it is more difficult for those who serve our nation to be able to, with the same amount of certainty, enter the housing market. It, therefore, provides support to overcome that.

I know that Defence have made the point in reviews, in estimates et cetera that retention is as much a focus for them as recruitment. Initiatives towards retention in some circumstances are more important than recruitment. We obviously want to help and support those who join the armed forces to stay for as long as we can keep them for, given the enormous amount of resources put into recruitment and training. Providing more secure economic certainty for them and pathways after they leave the services makes sense to assist in the retention of service personnel. The logic of that has been clear by the reality that we've had this scheme since 1991. There is a lot of sense in helping to improve access, expand access and make it a lot more straightforward for veterans to access the scheme. The bill achieves exactly that. Further reform in this area may well come to light based on the outcomes of the royal commission.

All members of parliament have veteran communities. I'm sure we all engage with them very deeply and thoroughly. Sometimes that is in important acts of commemoration, like the one we will have this Friday for Remembrance Day. I am sure most members, like me, have more than one RSL in their electorate. We do our best to get to as many of those commemorative events as we can at various times through the year. In this country Remembrance Day is very significant, but there is also Anzac Day, Vietnam Veterans' Day and more. I have in my electorate the suburb of Dernancourt, which is named after a village in the north of France where there was very significant Australian engagement in the First World War. We would all have similar specific commemorations that occur, depending on our electorate.

We engage with our veterans through those opportunities but also of course sometimes, regrettably, we engage with veterans when they need help and support. At times that is helping them navigate some of the challenges in dealing with the government in getting access to the services that they are quite rightly entitled to. The member for McEwen, the previous speaker, had a specific example that he is quite rightly proud of. He assisted a veteran who was struggling to get an outcome through the bureaucracy. Equally, I'm sure any member of parliament has at times had veteran constituents who needed their support to get access to the services that they absolutely deserve and the supports that they need.

In my view this bill also goes towards the prevention of future risk to veterans. The economic security of home ownership is certainly a big part of the sort of support that we haven't always provided to veterans. We haven't always done as good a job as we could have and that can exacerbate some of the challenges that they have in re-entering civilian life after their service. Economic security is always going to be front and centre to that. The challenges in getting access to government services exacerbates that.

In my view the economic security of owning a home will go a long way to helping more veterans have the support that they need for the life that they create after their service to our nation. We know the value of home ownership in any circumstance. It is extremely reassuring and, in fact, relieving. It puts people in a position to have the sort of stability that they would hope to have in the life that they are creating for themselves after serving our nation. With those comments I commend the bill to the chamber.

See this speech in context