Motion - Homebuilder Program
Mr GORMAN (Perth) (11:41): This government loves congratulating itself. It's always boasting about success but never admitting to failure. 'How good are the WA Liberals?' yelled Senator Cash—a key line for the ages. We saw Prime Minister Scott Morrison claim that he won the WA state election. It's just more proof of how out of touch he is with Western Australia. I live in Western Australia, and I can tell the Prime Minister here on the record in Hansard that he did not win the WA state election. Now we have this motion, where the government is congratulating itself for HomeBuilder while doing absolutely nothing for the housing sector. If you need a slogan for a policy, instead of HomeBuilder, what about 'ShelterSeeker', what about something for the social housing sector, for homeless Australians and for low-income essential workers?
We know that homes took on new significance over the last 12 months. They became places of work, places of shelter, places where we had to crush boredom for weeks on end, and, for some people, unfortunately, places of no escape. But when this government is on to a good thing, as the member just told us, they have a tendency to cut it short. We saw it with JobKeeper, which was keeping a million Australians employed. What was the government's response? They're going to end it in six days time. We saw it with JobSeeker, which is providing essential support to low-income Australians who are about to see massive rent hikes when various rental freezes are cut off, particularly in my home state of Western Australia. Again, what was the government's response to something that is working well? Shut it down.
Then there is HomeBuilder. What will happen to this program? We've just have been told about the million Australians whose jobs are being supported by this program. The government is going to shut it down, with nothing to replace it in the social housing sector. It could fill some of that demand gap. We know that when it comes to the rollout of things, this government is always great at the announcement—and this is just houses; I'll get onto vaccines in a minute. The rollout was bumpy. We had people lodging their applications. We had disputes with state treasuries. We had problems where people couldn't meet the six-month requirement because they hadn't been provided with essential information by the government. We had building licences that didn't meet the government's criteria. It was a mess.
Then we had the problem that in some areas it caused unnecessary inflation. The chairman of the Master Builders Goldfields-Esperance branch, Brett Partington, said that buildings that used to take a week now take six weeks and that it has led to a 10 to 20 per cent increase in the cost of building houses and extensions at the moment. This is a huge problem in regional areas that this government has created because of the poor design of this policy. But it's okay because the member for O'Connor, Rick Wilson, came to the rescue. Rick loves policy on the fly; he loves making things up. Sorry—the member for O'Connor—
The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Bird ): I interrupt the member. The member seeks to—
Mr Connelly: The member should refer to members of parliament by their title.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member is quite correct. We do not refer to people by their names but by their seats. I thank the member.
Mr GORMAN: The member for O'Connor; said
I'm sure there will be a bit of leeway to allow people to press ahead and get their projects underway.
He actually said that the six-month deadline doesn't apply. I'm not sure that's actually true, but it's what he's been telling his constituents, which is a huge concern when people are making huge investments in their homes and building them up. It's a very worrying trend from this government.
One of the final things I want to talk about is that it is essential that every Australian has somewhere to call home. We've seen the congratulations from those opposite. They've allowed people to improve their homes—those who have maybe saved a few dollars here and there—but there was a very important report released by the member for Macnamara last week which talked about the housing crisis in Australia. I want to quote from that report. It says:
There’s always been a false narrative around people choosing to sleep rough. Anecdotally, it is common to hear that homeless people are choosing that lifestyle, but this is completely wrong.
People may choose to live on the street rather than use temporary housing that they can access, because a well-lit street under a CCTV camera can often be safer than an overcrowded and dangerous rooming house.
If we look at what's happened in my electorate over the last few years with increases in visible homelessness and a tent city having been erected, we see that there is indeed a crisis that this government has failed to confront when it comes to investing in social housing.