Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

All of us want to stimulate and help the construction industry at the moment. We all want to see more homes built. We want to see more apprentices being taken on. We want to see more tradies keeping their jobs. We want more people to have a secure roof over their heads. This is particularly important as we enter the first recession in a generation, but none of this will be easy.

Only last week we saw new modelling that projected that without serious help we will lose 100,000 additional apprentices by December. We're losing them at a rate of 2,000 a week. A collapse of this size would be calamitous for the building industry. It'll add to the depth and the pain of this recession. If the Prime Minister is serious about really wanting to avert this crisis and stimulate the construction sector out of recession, he needs to do much more than what we saw with the announcement of HomeBuilder last week with great fanfare on the grass in Eden-Monaro.

There is $688 million to encourage home renovations—$25,000 for each grant. The only problem, when you read the fine print, is: who is going to be able to make use of this program? You've got to have between $150,000 and $750,000 to spend, but you've got to be earning less than $125,000. So, really, who is it that's going to borrow more than they earn? Well, there might be a few people, but they would have had this work in the planning stages already. The scheme is designed to lock out the vast majority of Australians. You've got a lot of people who'd like to get projects done, but they don't have $150,000 lying around.

What's more, I think that at a time like this, when unemployment is on the doorstep and a recession is looming, the idea that people who are earning $125,000 or less are going to take a chance with something like that really misses the reality of most people's lives. We know that there are better ways of promoting construction. We know because we did it during the global financial crisis. We didn't go into recession; we kept Australia out of recession, and one of the ways we did it was by investing in social housing with $6 billion, resulting in 21,600 new homes and 92,000 dwellings upgraded or improved. We established the National Rental Affordability Scheme to build 50,000 new affordable rental homes. We invested for first home buyers to help them into a home of their own. We began the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing, with $5.5 billion over 10 years to deal with the massive issues of overcrowding and poor-quality accommodation in remote Indigenous communities. One of the reasons we were so worried about COVID-19 getting into remote Indigenous communities is that overcrowding and poor-quality housing still plague many communities. We released the homelessness white paper during the global financial crisis and set aside $550 million for new homelessness services.

I draw the Prime Minister's attention to the fact that states and territories have managed to house thousands of rough sleepers during this period, mostly in hotel accommodation and student accommodation and so on. What a fantastic contribution to the lives of those people. What an improvement for them. But, also, what a great way of keeping the rest of us safe, making sure that COVID-19 wasn't spreading amongst vulnerable communities. It is unthinkable that we will turn the tap off and send those people back out to sleep rough on the streets when this crisis is over, but where will they go? Those opposite could have invested in extra support to build emergency accommodation for the thousands of people that are being turned away every night. Every night in Australia, thousands are being turned away, most of them women and children fleeing domestic violence. It is possible to invest in construction, to help people buy a home of their own, to help with affordable rental accommodation in the private sector, to invest in social housing and also to invest in new emergency accommodation to help those most vulnerable in our society and to support tradies and apprentices. What a shame the government has gone for such a pale imitation of a housing policy.