Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There's a man who's not on top of his brief, I have to say. I rise in support of this motion. I'm probably the only person in this chamber or the House of Representatives that's a builder. I spent 30 years in the building industry both as a construction lawyer and also as an actual builder, a hands-on builder, so I can speak with some authority on this point, and I'm very pleased to do so.

Around about May or June last year, I had a lot of my—don't go, member for Perth; please stay!—colleagues contact me and say, 'Andrew, we have got no work on the books beyond about August or September,' and a lot of them were very, very fearful of their economic futures. So I had some discussions with Michael Sukkar, the Assistant Treasurer and housing minister. What we looked at was ways that we could encourage—don't go, member for Perth!—builders to be able to stay in work, because we knew that they were facing an economic cliff. So HomeBuilder was born. It's a $25,000 subsidy to enable owner-occupiers. What the member for Macnamara said is total rubbish about that this is assisting people who are investors. It assists only owner-occupiers. What it does is help owner-occupiers to build their home—it doesn't have to be their first home. But what we are seeing is the largest increase in owner-occupiers, first home owners, the numbers of people buying and building their first homes, since 2009. So, for those opposite to say that this isn't assisting first home buyers or that it's assisting investors, is fundamentally false. That's why I said the member for Macnamara is not on top of his brief.

When we first launched HomeBuilder, we had the shadow Treasurer in question time saying: 'This will never work. This program will never work.' And there was a cacophony of voices from those opposite—

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