When even the developers start telling you to cut demand for property, you know you have a big problem:
A dysfunctional planning system and huge labour shortage will cripple the Albanese government’s target of 1.2 million new homes in the next five years, despite billions of dollars of public funding pouring into the sector, warn senior property industry figures.
Nigel Satterley, the prominent West Australian developer, said only half of those homes would be finished – between 600,000 and 650,000, “if we’re lucky” – because of a lack of workers to build them.
…Tim Gurner, the billionaire Melbourne developer, said the problem was not just a labour shortage but a combination of poor planning laws and high costs and that 14 of his 30 development sites were on hold as a result.
Let’s recall that the 1.2m homes only prevent the current property shortage from worsening.
If we get only half as quantitative peopling continues, the dwelling shortage will mushroom towards a million. The rent and house price implications are socially, financially and politically disastrous.
We will have homelessness roaring up the household value chain as the working poor are tossed onto the streets. Youth will be living in tent cities. Soaring house prices will create colossal wealth inequality.
As house prices roar higher, we will have higher interest rates and mass bankruptcies in households. Inelastic supply creates boom and bust cycles, so this will become a financial stability risk.
Politically, state and federal governments will turn over like leaves in the wind as the polity rebels in the search for competent leadership.
All of this and for what? So that Labor and The Greens can lord it over everybody with bigoted labels while it quantitative people’s working people to death?
This is madness.
