Greens Housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather appeared on Sky News where he argued that the Albanese Government’s $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) “will see the housing crisis get worse”:
“They [Labor] want to get $10 billion, gamble it on the stock market, and then spend some of the returns on housing”.
“We know that at the end of their five-year plan we’ll see more people waiting for social and affordable housing, more renters in rental stress, more people living on the streets, and that’s the sort of thing that we should be focussing on”.
“Renters getting evicted onto the streets isn’t good. Abandoning the other 640,000 people waiting for public and affordable housing to permanent insecurity is not good”.
“And it’s not good when the government has a $19 billion surplus and all they want to spend every year via the HAFF is $500 million a year from 2024-25”.
“We should be spending money directly on public and affordable housing”.
Viewed in isolation, Max Chandler-Mather’s comments are spot on.
From the expected average annual return of $500 million, the HAFF’s plan is to invest in a total of 6000 social and affordable dwellings each year.
Moreover, at $500 million each year – it is unclear what happens if the returns are negative – it works out as just more than $83,000 a dwelling funded by HAFF each year.
Blind Freddy can see that you can’t get much done for that sum of money even if you exclude detached houses.
Where Max Chandler-Mather fails is that he also endorses the Albanese Government’s extreme immigration program, in which 1.5 million net overseas migrants are projected to arrive in Australia by 2026-27, mostly into the major cities:
Source: 2023 Federal Budget
We’ll need at least 500,000 extra homes to accommodate this volume of migrants, and certainly far more social and affordable homes than the 30,000 promised by the Albanese Government.
Despite the obvious fact that Albo’s extreme immigration is driving Australia’s housing crisis, Max Chandler-Mather wholeheartedly endorses it on virtue signalling woke grounds:
“Migration has always made this country”, Chandler-Mather said in a recent podcast.
“I speak to a lot of people in my line of work, people in small businesses, aged care facilities or schools or all sorts of areas that need skilled labour, that say that there’s a shortage in Australia at the moment”.
“It makes sense that we invite people in this country to set up their lives here”.
“I think often when the migration debate appears, it often distracts, I think, from the far more important debate, which is how we distribute resources daily in this country”.
The Greens’ own immigration policies would also make Australia’s housing crisis even worse:
“It’s time for a change – we need an immigration system that puts people first.”
“Our humanitarian intake should be 50,000 places per year, with special intakes for people from Afghanistan and Ukraine.”
Where will the extra 35,000 humanitarian migrants on top of the current record immigration live? On the streets?
We should also remember that Max Chandler-Mather is one of the biggest NIMBYs who has protested against development in his own Brisbane electorate:
NIMBY Max Chandler-Mather opposes more housing in his suburb.
So, the Fake Greens support the Albanese Government’s extreme immigration, and want the humanitarian intake lifted by around 35,000 people a year, but don’t want to expand the urban footprint and don’t want to densify in their own electorates.
How does that work?
It is hard to take the Greens seriously on anything these days.
Somebody should sue them and demand their name back. They are a far cry from an environmental party.
