Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As we speak, I am just concluding the build of a house, so I've had the great experience of interacting with subcontractors, tradies and small businesses in the building industry, and they are looking at a cliff of unemployment. The pipeline is definitely drying up. I think that they were all quite excited with the announcement of HomeBuilder, but, as has been pointed out in this chamber today, the tailoring of this scheme means that it doesn't do what its intended purpose is, and that is to get people continuing to work. The builders and tradespeople I've spoken to say that, come December of this year, all the new builds that commenced 12 months ago will be finished, the pipeline has diminished and this scheme just doesn't do it. The Age experts panned the scheme. The Financial Review: 'Flaws highlighted'. The Weekend Australian: 'HomeBuilder doesn't do enough for tradies'. The Guardian: 'A blunder'. Mr Harry Triguboff: 'It doesn't address units; they're excluded.' And The Canberra Times points out, very presciently, that people who were victims of the bushfires are also excluded.

When you look at this scheme and you see who the architect is—the Assistant Treasurer, Mr Sukkar—your mind goes back to an earlier scheme where, when we asked, 'Was there any Treasury expertise used in designing this type of scheme? Did you get any rationale?' the answer was no. That was the first home buyers scheme that was announced during the election. It is very clear, when you go into these sorts of policies, that there is always agreement among economists that it is exceedingly difficult to work out the economic rationale for them.

If you have ever built your own house or gone into a contract with the builder, you will know that they are businesspeople and they will try and get you to put in a fancy heater or fancy floors and borrow the money to do that. If this $25,000 goes into a new build and the end result is that a first home buyer says, 'I can now put in a $12,000 floor,' or 'I can put in a fancy heater,' the reality is that that's an awful economic decision, because you shouldn't be borrowing that over 25 years. For bricks and mortar it's fair enough, but not for the furnishings and fixtures and fittings. I've actually heard stories of builders saying: 'Don't worry about that contract you signed last month. We'll tear it up and do a new one, because you'll get 25 grand. Aren't we looking after you!' So the economic evaluation of these schemes is that they're really not as economically good as they're purported to be.

This is exceedingly bad timing. It's quick. You've got to do it by, I think, 4 December. One hundred and fifty thousand for a renovation? I chose to knock down a house because it was going to cost me $60,000 to do a renovation. Why would I spend $150,000—in most areas outside of Melbourne and Sydney—on a renovation? You can get a house-and-land package in the outskirts of Adelaide for $300,000. As you move in 10, 15 or eight kays from the city, that package is more likely to be $600,000, but these figures don't stand up. So is it another case of Mr Sukkar getting some very targeted policy to go where he thinks there are a few votes? It doesn't seem to be broad enough to do what he's intending, which is to keep people employed, to build the pipeline of work. It's tightly constrained. It appears to be targeted, but we don't see the underpinning economic rationale for that. It may well be that, when we ask for that sort of rationale at estimates and the like, the standard answer comes back: 'It was a decision of government; we didn't give advice on it.' Hopefully that is not the case, because I would really like to see the underpinning economic evaluation of this policy as to why it is targeted in such a way.

The opposition has rightfully put up the task or the challenge to the government: why have you not done any public housing? Why is there no public housing policy for this government? Why wouldn't you use this as a time to prime that pump and to get some building in that vital sector where there is a desperate need for it? Clearly, the government has gone missing.