Having a roof over one’s head, a place to call home, is a fundamental right for every individual. Until all levels of government collaborate with institutional investors and the not-for-profit sector to provide more affordable housing and accessible services, housing stress and homelessness will remain a blight on Australian society. (more…)
Category: Politics
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Making Housing Affordable Series. MICHAEL PERUSCO. Revitalising social and affordable housing
The discussion and commentary about housing affordability in Australia has reached a crescendo in recent months. But an important piece of the housing puzzle cannot be overlooked in the debate: the role of social housing.
It is time for governments across the country to recognise that a well-functioning social housing sector is critical to balancing the housing market’s equilibrium. It cannot be pushed aside for more populist political topics. (more…)
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Making Housing Affordable Series. SAUL ESLAKE. The causes and effects of the housing affordability crisis, and what can and should be done about it.
Treasurer Scott Morrison is right in saying that “there are no single or easy solutions” – even though he (and others on his side of politics) tend to ignore this advice in emphasising ‘supply-side solutions’ and decrying any suggestion of policy measures which are intended to dampen demand, especially from investors. (more…)
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Making Housing Affordable Series. PETER PHIBBS. The politics of property and the role of urban planning
The narrative provided by the property industry and by some politicians is that the planning system creates large bottlenecks to more supply. Yet the reality is that we have been generating record levels of supply in Australia in recent years. While supply is undoubtedly important, it is not the key moderator of price that it is in some other markets. (more…)
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Making Housing Affordable Series. NED CUTCHER. Running the private rental market at a loss, for profit
Understanding how unaffordable housing affects renters is increasingly important, since more Australians can expect to rent for longer. How do negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount affect affordability, amenity and security for renters? Encouraging “mums and dads” to invest in the private rental market is not all it’s cracked up to be, and tenants’ advocates have been calling for reform. (more…)
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Making Housing Affordable Series. DAMIEN WEBB. An institutional scale solution for the social and affordable housing challenge – from a super fund’s perspective
Many well-intentioned solutions have been proposed to address Australia’s housing affordability problem, yet fail to gain traction because the challenges faced by key stakeholder groups aren’t being addressed simultaneously. We believe success on a material scale will be more likely when this occurs.
We propose a model that potentially meets the needs of government, capital markets, and community housing providers in a simultaneous fashion, via the intermediation of a nationally owned, centralised property clearing house. (more…)
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Making Housing Affordable Series. MARCUS SPILLER. The planning system, politics and housing affordability
Forever expanding supply on the urban fringe is unlikely to provide a solution to retreating affordability of home ownership. Housing needs to be expanded in those places where good jobs, services and infrastructure are.
The inner and middle suburbs – where the good jobs and opportunities are – represent the major battle ground for NIMBY-ism. (more…)
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Making Housing Affordable Series. JOHN DALEY, BRENDAN COATES AND TRENT WILTSHIRE (1). Why should we care about housing affordability?
Housing affordability includes a grab-bag of concerns: less money to spend on goods and services other than housing; falling home ownership rates; worsening access to jobs; increasing wealth inequality between and among generations; and increasing risks of a housing-led economic downturn.
Responding to these concerns requires careful analysis of the underlying drivers and of the potential impact of policy changes. (more…)
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Making Housing Affordable Series. JOHN DALEY, BRENDAN COATES and TRENT WILTSHIRE (2). Sorting reality from the appearance of action on housing affordability.
Governments have raised expectations among voters anxious to see action on housing. There is no shortage of proposed policy solutions. But how do we sort the good from the bad? Many policy ideas sound good, but won’t do much in practice. Some will make housing affordability worse, drag on economic growth, or subtract from budget balances that are already in trouble. There are reforms that would make a big difference, but none is politically easy. If governments want to be seen as serious on housing affordability, they’re going to have to make some tough choices. (more…)
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Making Housing Affordable Series. TIM WILLIAMS. Housing affordability is not just a supply problem
The housing affordability debate is being wrongly understood as just a supply problem. The real cause of house price inflation is excess liquidity and debt, combined with overly generous tax incentives. (more…)
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IAN McAULEY. Doing without private health insurance
Every year the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission reports on competition and consumer issues in private health insurance (PHI), and recent reports show increasing consumer dissatisfaction with PHI. Most complaints relate to unexpected charges when claims are made and confusion over terms and conditions. (more…)
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JOHN MENADUE. A rigged gas market and market failure.
Yesterday, the government announced that it would impose an Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism on gas exports from July this year. This will give the government authority to limit companies’ gas exports if they are emptying Australian gas reserves to meet overseas export contracts. Two years ago – I drew attention to the market failure in gas policy. I have reposted below that article of April 28, 2015. John Menadue (more…)
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RICHARD BUTLER. Malcolm’s Anzac Day Gift. Australian troops will be in the Middle East for the ‘long term’.
The Prime Minister’s statement that Australian military forces will need to remain in Afghanistan and the “Middle East” indefinitely must be clarified as must be the powers under which such decisions are legitimately made. (more…)
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JOHN TULLOH. Trump’s first 100 days – so what?
The media have been besides themselves in anticipation of Donald Trump’s first 100 days in the White House this weekend. It’s as if this is some magic marker by which to judge his next 1359 days in the Oval Office. It is meaningless. (more…)
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IAN McAULEY. The Liberal Party’s French Connection
The political future of Kelly O’Dwyer, Minister for Revenue and Financial Services (presently on maternity leave) is uncertain, as Liberal Party members in her electorate move to disendorse her. On one level this conflict can be seen as the shenanigans of Liberal Party faction wars, but at another level it reveals a deep malaise in our political system. (more…)
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GREGORY CLARK. Pingpong diplomacy and Whitlam’s first visit to China.
April 2017 is the 46 anniversary of the pingpong diplomacy – an event that changed the future of China. It also changed the direction of Australian politics, leading to the ALP Federal election victory in November 1972. But as I explain in the link to this posting, the change in Canberra could well have not occurred but for a chance telephone call from myself to a small manufacturing firm in Nagoya. (more…)
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VIVIENNE MILLIGAN and HAL PAWSON. Ready for growth? Has Australia’s affordable housing industry got what it takes?
Australia lacks any enumerated and resourced plan for expanding affordable housing. Recent growth opportunities in this industry have largely been small-scale, fragmented and ad hoc. As a result, providers have been highly constrained in their ability to predict and plan for growth. This has disrupted capacity-building and undermined capacity-retention.
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ALLAN PATIENCE. How much lower are we going to go?
The current Australian values and new immigration visa debates, blusteringly initiated by Malcolm Turnbull and his would-be successor Peter Dutton, represent one of the lowest points in recent Australian political history. Are these panicking populists capable of dragging the country any lower? Very likely they will try, because the politics they have now so fully embraced can take them nowhere else. (more…)
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The Australian War Memorial and weapons manufacturers
The peace of the world for future generations is anathema to the interests of those who profit from warfare. As we commemorate again the “war to end all wars”, and every war since, one can only wonder what the diggers would have thought, as we allow the industry that profits from the cruelty of wars to bask in the reflected glory of those who suffer it. (more…)
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MUNGO MacCALLUM. Turnbull’s lunge to the populist right.
And this is the big glitch in last week’s announcements – there was a lot of sound and fury, but it was hard to see just what, if anything, will really change – except, perhaps, the squalid dynamics within the Liberal Party. At least Tony Abbott has given the changes a cautious tick. But he has not, and never will, endorse the core values of his leader. He has his own announceables to ponder. (more…)
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PETER HUGHES. Citizenship Test Mark II – How much juice can you squeeze out of an orange?
It seems that Coalition governments have developed a habit of squeezing the citizenship “orange” for political advantage when there are some community concerns about migrants.
Last week’s announcement by the Turnbull Coalition government, at a time of poor government performance in opinion polls, of a “toughening” of the Australian citizenship test for migrants has a familiar ring to it. (more…)
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MUNGO MacCALLUM. Dog whistling about Australian values.
Housing will not be a centrepiece of the forthcoming budget, our Prime Minister assures us, while remaining vague about what, if anything, will be. (more…)
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It’s time for Labor to think big about policy – a people’s bank!
Tony Abbott is not the only one anticipating a change of government at the next election. Voters across the board are increasingly fed up with the Coalition and there are even signs that some of its most devoted cheer leaders in the media are beginning to give up on it. Dear old Alan Jones has certainly given up on it. So what does Bill Shorten have in store for us if the ALP wins the next election? (more…)
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DAVID JAMES. Deconstructing the privatisation scam
It is increasingly evident how pernicious the privatisation myth is. Two recent examples have underlined it: the failings in Australia’s privatised energy grid and the usurious pricing in airport car parks. Both examples demonstrated that it is folly to expect a public benefit to inevitably emerge from private profit seeking. (more…)
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DUNCAN MacLAREN. UK General Election: clever cunning or miscalculated folly?
Theresa May’s snap general election decision can be seen as hypocritical in that she ruled this out consistently (and as recently as 20th March) until, the Anglican vicar’s daughter hinted, God told her while hiking in Welsh Snowdonia over Easter to go for it since there was ‘no unity’ in the Westminster Parliament to allow her to obtain the best deal for the UK out of Brexit. No unity? For a Government which hasn’t a clue where it is going and is regarded as incompetent by the international community and national political class alike, how can it command unity? That requires knowledge of the possible outcomes from the Stygian political journey the UK is about to take with a hard Brexit. (more…)
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TIM LINDSEY. Jakarta elections a very bad look for Indonesia
The decisive defeat of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (known as ‘Ahok’) in Jakarta’s litmus-test gubernatorial election is a triumph for hardline Islamist mob agitators. It comes after years of pressure from the Muslim right and may flag a shift in Indonesian politics that will not help Indonesia’s fraying reputation for religious pluralism and tolerance. (more…)
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JULIAN CRIBB. When political fantasy trumps scientific fact
During the 1930s, around ten million Russians and Ukrainians starved to death in a horrific event known as Holodomor. Historians have attributed this disaster in part to the quack theories of Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s hand-picked boss of Soviet agricultural science. It was the world’s first big case of politics distorting the objectivity of science, for its own ends. (more…)
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JOHN MENADUE. 457 visas and our temporary residence system.
In light of government announcement on 457 visas, I have reposted below an article originally posted on 18 November 2016. See also at end, a link to an article by Joanna Howe in The Canberra Times yesterday. John Menadue.
Oversight of the management of work rights of temporary entrants into Australia is broken and needs fixing.
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MUNGO MacCALLUM. Malcolm Turnbull on superannuation and housing.
But that means nothing to the ideological right, which is now shamelessly defying Turnbull on every level. Naturally Tony Abbott is front and centre of the rebellion, with most of the usual suspects on the backbench. (more…)
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Sydney house prices – an increase of 18.9% in one year!
With only a month to go to the federal budget, the news that Sydney’s median dwelling prices rose by 18.9% in the 12 months to March is sobering. It is surely enough to jolt the Turnbull government into finally adopting bold measures to curb speculative demand in the housing market. Calls to reform negative gearing and/or the overly generous 50% CGT discount are coming thick and fast. David Murray is the latest heavyweight to add to these calls. The Coalition ignores them at its political peril. (more…)