It’s what they do best. And with every passing day, they get better at it.
As expected, Labor will let “help to buy” die rather than engage on property tax reform:
Anthony Albanese has challenged the Greens to vote against Labor’s shared equity scheme for housing, rebuffing the minor party’s demands to horse-trade in return for cutting housing tax concessions.
On Sunday the prime minister said the government would put its help-to-buy legislation to parliament, where “the Greens can vote for it, or they can vote against it”.
“It’s as simple as that,” Albanese told reporters in Nowra after the New South Wales Country Labor conference.
The comments signal Labor may seek to call the Greens’ bluff and avoid a second round of fractious negotiations over housing by putting the bill to a vote without having secured a guarantee of support.
Not having “help to buy” (which should be called “help to inflate house prices) is a good outcome for the nation. It is one of the most stupid policy ideas in the long history of stupid policy ideas for housing.
But it also means, let’s face it, another 10k Aussies without a home of their own.
All of these Greens housing stunts are achieving precisely nothing for Australians. Which is just fine with the Greens. Cheaper is not their purpose. They are about pretending to care to attract younger voters from Labor.
The truth is, until The Greens wake up to dramatically slashing immigration, not raising it manically, they are the worst housing affordability party in the parliament.
