Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I certainly intend to get to the substance of the debate, but I did want to reflect on the previous contribution. It is a transcendental experience listening to Senator Rennick. He is the beat poet of the Senate; it's a series of odd allusions brought together that make very little sense—almost as much sense as the policy justification for HomeBuilder that has been made here and in other places.

I understand that Mr Sukkar said HomeBuilder would support 140,000 jobs and 27,000 building projects. Just combining those two numbers for a minute makes you realise how fundamentally ill-conceived the policy foundations of this scheme are. It has all of the hallmarks of a Morrison government policy announcement. It will increase inequality. It will provide negligible stimulus. There is a very big number attached to the program: $688 million—so a very big number. By not being a round number, it conveys the impression that it is somehow precise.

So the number is big and conveys the impression of precision, but there will of course be, as with all of these schemes, zero delivery. Very little money will go out the door. It's all about the announcement, not about the delivery. No doubt there is a television ad coming our way soon to make sure that people understand how precisely large the amount of money is, how precisely precise it is and what enormous stimulus it will provide. No doubt there will be people in high-vis jackets—maybe they could borrow Senator Canavan's high-vis jacket; it doesn't get much use! No doubt there will be earnest expressions of support for the tradespeople of Australia. But there will be zero delivery.

It's a scheme that will pay people a small amount of money in the context of an overall building project to do building projects or renovations that they were going to do anyway. You can't find a serious person in the building industry who supports this proposition. You certainly can't find a sensible economist—one with a degree and a bit of postgraduate learning—who is prepared to go out and publicly advocate for this scheme. It is all spin and no substance, big announcement and no delivery.

Some people—sceptical people—believe that this announcement is all about the politics. I'm not sure that that's true. I think you would struggle to find a household in Eden-Monaro that would benefit from the HomeBuilder scheme. All of the focus group work, all of the data work, all of the clever work that is done in the Liberal Party national secretariat, has produced this policy as somehow a policy that will provide some advantage. But the problem is, when it meets the real world there won't be too many people. Senator Cormann said 22,000 had registered interest already, which just establishes that the people who are registering interest for this project are people who had already decided to build. It is just like a vacuum, sucking forward projects that people were proposing to do, dragging them into this side of Christmas. That means no extra work will actually be done. It will just shift when small building projects were going to be done.

What an extraordinary claim, that this program will support 140,000 additional jobs. If you look at median house prices in Cooma—$317,500—it's very hard to imagine that a $150,000 renovation's going to be done to one of those homes. It's a program that will overcapitalise a very small number of people's properties. It won't deliver a single extra job. It will be just one more policy— (Time expired)

Question agreed to.