Bob Day’s life takes a turn as senator job gone and building empire crumbles around him

IT has been a hard slog to business and political success for Bob Day who now stands on the verge of losing his empire.

Bob Day leaving his office in Kent Town. Picture: KELLY BARNES

• Senator Bob Day’s resignation has come as a shock
• Day resigns from Parliament after collapse of his Home Australia business
• How Bob Day’s resignation will affect the Senate

It has been a hard slog to business and political success for Bob Day who now stands on the verge of losing his empire.

 

On September 3, 2014, Bob Day stood to make his first speech as a Senator. It began: “Every family, a job and a house.’’

Sadly, for the suddenly ex-senator the job has gone and, according to a statement from Mr Day yesterday, his house will be next as he battles debts of tens of millions of dollars.

“Creditor liabilities greatly exceed our assets so we will also lose our family home,’’ Day, 64, said in a statement.

For a man who amassed a fortune building tens of thousands of houses all over Australia to lose his own home must seem like the cruellest of ironies. Building houses, however, was not always on the agenda for Day.

Born in Manchester, he was a “10 pound pom” who moved to Adelaide and grew up in Gilles Plains in the north-eastern suburbs.

A happier Bob Day at Parliament House in Canberra.

At Gilles Plains High School, chemistry was his best subject and it helped land him a job as a lab technician for the old Highways Department.

But life in the public service was not for Day. “I think I was a square peg in a round hole,’’ he said of his time in the public service.

He told The Advertiser in 1995 he was helping out a friend on a building site on the weekend when the light dawned.

“There I was getting pretty dirty, digging trenches and not even getting paid for it, but something just clicked,’’ he said. So he dumped the public service and joined the building industry. He studied at night to become a plumber and to earn his general builder’s licence.

He loved the industry, built his first home in 1979, registered the name Homestead Homes in 1983 and, by 1990, was building 1000 homes a year across Adelaide.

A much younger Bob Day at a building site.

Awards followed. In 1991 he was named Westpac’s Young Executive of the Year and the Australian Institute’s marketer of the year in 1993.

As his business grew so did the public voice of the married father of three children and his interest in politics.

He was an inveterate letter writer to many publications, usually pushing his favoured topics of housing affordability and the need for young people to have a job.

He would often bash the government of the day for imposing excessive red tape on business people or forcing employers to pay their workers too much in wages.

He was not afraid to push contentious viewpoints. He often referred to how he himself had come through the “school of hard knocks’’. In a letter published in The Advertiser in August 1996, he advocated that young people should be able to work for basically nothing if they wanted.

“If a young person wants to work for $1 an hour, then let him/her,’’ he wrote.

Day was a prominent donor to the Liberal Party and a member of right-wing organisations, such as the HR Nicholls Society, which promotes minimal regulation of the workplace.

He was also becoming an important figure in the national housing industry. Day served for a time as the national president of the Housing Industry of Australia.

Homestead, which was renamed Home Australia, expanded rapidly, buying businesses in Western Australia, Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales and registering sales of about $300 million a year.

The company also had a foray into South Africa, but withdrew in 2000 citing concerns about the nation’s civil unrest. And Day’s political ambitions were also growing.

The self-styled “Bob the Builder” businessman joined the Liberal Party in the late 1980s and was finally nominated to run for the seat of Makin, in the north-eastern suburbs, after sitting member Trish Draper retired at the 2007 election.

Makin was one of the nation’s most marginal seats but Day’s timing was off.

It was the election Kevin Rudd replaced John Howard as prime minister and many Liberal marginal seats were swept away.

Bob Day at a home under construction at Broadview last year. Picture: KELLY BARNES

Day was crushed 52-48 by Labor’s Tony Zappia but not before he spent somewhere north of $100,000 of his own money on the campaign.

It was an unusual campaign by most standards. Day paid Australia Post to print stamps with his face on it to put on his campaign envelopes.

Dog jackets with Bob Day for Makin were made and the electorate’s almost 100,000 voters were sent a pack containing a ruler, notepad, calendar, newsletter and an eight-page glossy brochure.

If nothing else, it demonstrated Day was prepared to spend whatever he thought it would take to get into Parliament.

The next year he had another crack at it. This time targeting the Adelaide Hills seat of Mayo, which was being vacated by former foreign minister Alexander Downer.

But he was rejected by the party at the preselection stage – the seat going to a newcomer called Jamie Briggs. He promptly spat the dummy and quit the party.

Bob Day during his time when he ran for the seat of Makin.

And not quietly. He claimed Downer had interfered in the plebiscite process to ensure his favoured candidate, Briggs, was successful.

“The whole thing was manipulated to achieve a particular outcome,’’ he said.

Day immediately took himself, and his chequebook, to Family First and stood as its candidate in the Mayo by-election. He failed to knock off Briggs, garnering 11 per cent of the vote, and then set his sights on a Senate spot with his new Family First friends.

At the 2010 election he narrowly failed to win a Senate spot, but finally succeeded in the 2013 poll, which installed Tony Abbott as prime minister.

In typical style he was straightforward when asked about his priorities when he entered Parliament.

“SA used to be one of the strongest states and now it’s a mendicant, welfare-dependent place,’’ he said.

“The truth is we are not currently viable and we’ve got to become competitive.’’

But even as he entered Parliament, the business empire he had spent so long building was starting to crumble.

He had reportedly piled $380,000 of his own money into Family First’s election campaign.

In his statement yesterday Day admitted to two mistakes in particular.

One was paying too much for the NSW-based Huxley Homes, the other was “going into politics without putting in place a proper management structure for the business’’.

“I am incredibly sorry for the pain, stress and suffering I know this will cause,’’ he said.