Labor’s housing plan is a ‘turning point’ taking us in the wrong direction

You may have lately heard the government is launching a “intrepid” and “ambitious” $10 billion housing package, intended to produce 30,000 social and affordable homes over the next five years.

The fund appears intentionally designed to sound extra significant than it is — hearing the government is investing $10 billion into anything sounds pleasing legal, legal?

The Labor government is calling it a “landmark” plan — a “turning point” for housing. “Our plan is ambitious, because it has to be,” Housing Minister Julie Collins informed Parliament.

As a welfare recipient on the public housing waiting list, I couldn’t assist but tear my hair out watching the speeches and reading coverage. Again, empty rhetoric on inequality repeated unchallenged.

Tens of thousands of Australians are homeless, and giant numbers are experiencing housing stress. Some are being pushed into debt just to maintain a roof over their heads, and others are forced to sleep in caravans, tents and cars. In the past four years, there was a 27% increase in of us seeking assist at homelessness products and companies because they couldn’t afford rent.  

I regularly assist of us living correctly beneath the poverty line being asked to bear extraordinary rent rises, as I have. Some have considered increases of an eyewatering $140 a week — 30% in one hit for tenants surviving on JobSeeker payments.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese trumpets his modest beginnings in public housing, yet as rents soar, he appears uninterested in meaningful action to address the shortfall of 500,000 public homes. That quantity may blow out to 750,000 in a decade.

Labor’s claim of 30,000 houses by 2029 is implausible when the details of the diagram are scrutinised — especially when considering it barely covers what we’re situation to lose over the following couple of years as the National Rental Affordability Way ends. The upshot is that if the fund loses money, as the Future Fund did last year, there’ll be zero dollars for recent homes in that year — and no ability to make up for it, thanks to the $500 million yearly cap. 

This housing plan also doesn’t sufficiently cater for Australia’s population insist. As housing academic Dr Alistair Sisson has pointed out: “We constructed extra than 30,000 public dwellings in each five-year length between 1945 and 1995. [The] population in 1950 was about 8 million and in 1980 around 15 million.”

There’s a reason the government is aiming so low. As with welfare payments, it merely doesn’t want to spend money to enact what’s obvious and necessary — acquire and produce public homes. 

Labor can afford to enact this, just as it can afford to increase Centrelink payments to the poverty line. There’s no rule that says policies have to be charge-neutral, and humans must be extra important than numbers on a balance sheet. Even so, the government is choosing to give away $243 billion in tax cuts while leaving thousands and thousands in poverty. 

It has concocted a plan to take money from the value range, invest it in the sharemarket and use the interest (if there is any) for homes. The $10 billion it invests will never really leave government coffers, yet we send almost that considerable out the door each year for property investors. It’s successfully a savings diagram, no longer a housing spend. 

At the same time, the Albanese government has dominated out desperately mandatory action to halt the charge of staying housed going up — rents in Sydney went up 29.6% in the past year alone. Handouts and tax breaks for property investors have pushed up rents and house costs for decades. The government has been clear: it is going to be keeping those handouts. 

It’s hard no longer to peer a link between the fact that 227 federal politicians are landlords and the refusal to adopt policies that would meaningfully make stronger costs for renters and investors. Our political class has a property hoarding situation — and those of us who didn’t make it on to the ladder sooner than the insist are paying dearly for it.

Imagine taking this approach to any other crisis. Imagine a value range-neutral plan to purchase COVID vaccines, leading to massive shortages. A disaster response that didn’t actually save anyone from flooding because it had to balance the books.

The neighborhood wouldn’t fall for it. No one would say it’s “ambitious”. But in terms of our basic need and legal to a house, politicians have taught us to examine almost nothing. That this is called a “landmark” plan says extra about rock-bottom expectations than it does about the government’s commitments.

The Albanese government is tranquil recent. It has time to leave a determined legacy. Instead it’s running in the reverse direction of anything that would assist of us on the lowest, and even modest, incomes, cynically pitching a “$10 billion plan” that doesn’t charge a cent.

Politicians know we’re in the midst of a crisis decades in the making. This may take actually ambitious action to repair it, and there are many alternatives: eviction moratoriums for individuals who can’t absorb up with rent; controls on rents, capping and licensing and Airbnbs; removing negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts; supporting cooperative housing models; capping the quantity of investment properties a particular person can have.

That’s just to name a few. But most importantly, the government wants to really invest. No longer in the sharemarket but in acquiring and building quality homes at scale.

All these proposals will take time, but the crisis is now. The fastest and handiest thing the government can enact is make certain those of us on the lowest incomes can make rent. We saw in 2020 how rapidly and easily the government can grasp Centrelink payments to the Henderson poverty line. It must enact so again, but this time for legal. The charge doesn’t even amount to the stage three tax cuts.

But legal now the Labor government is doing none of this.

Ensuring we have adequate to live to swear the tale for the immediate future is urgent. That will purchase us breathing room while work is carried out to permanently solve the deep systemic problems in our housing machine. The prime minister must take this challenge seriously, and rise to it.