Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says housing affordability and supply will be high on the agenda for the national cabinet meeting in Brisbane on Wednesday.
The meeting will consider measures such as limiting rent increases to once a year and banning no-fault evictions, removing investment barriers for super funds, streamlining planning restrictions, and providing incentives for projects.
Albanese says the federal, state and territory leaders are “on the same page” with regard to the issue, and recognise that housing supply is the key.
He stated that the blocked $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund and national housing accord, which aims to build one million new homes over five years beginning in 2024, are critical to releasing supply and reducing housing market pressures.
Albanese also said that other measures, such as the $2 billion social housing accelerator fund, build-to-rent incentives for the private sector to deliver rental housing, and the largest increase in rental assistance in 30 years, would “assist people to help lift the cost-of-living pressures which are there by increasing housing supply”.
“Every premier and chief minister as well as the commonwealth gets it”, Albanese said.
“And we’re all on the same page. We all know that housing supply is the key. We all know as well that … renters need more rights, but it can’t be done in a way that actually dampens housing supply”.
Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, who has been lobbying the federal government to lift immigration, said that without greater housing supply, “those cost-of-living pressures that are such a factor for so many of us will continue to be a really big challenge”.
However, state and territory leaders will reportedly oppose the Greens’ push to introduce a rent freeze in response to the housing crisis.
The Greens’ housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather has described the rent reforms to be discussed by the national cabinet as “unambitious”.
Economist Phil Soos nailed the Greens’ hypocrisy on Twitter:
Unbelievably, Greens housing spokesperson, Max Chandler Mather, recently backed the Albanese Government’s record immigration program, arguing that it is not driving the housing crisis (let alone destroying the environment).
And there is the nub of the issue. Australia will never build enough homes so long as the federal government continues to grow the nation’s population like a science experiment through mass immigration:
Growing Australia’s population by between 400,000 and 500,000 people a year, as projected in the federal budget, necessarily means permanent housing shortages, rising rents, and increasing homelessness.
Reducing net overseas migration to historical (pre-2005) levels of around 100,000 migrants a year is the only genuine solution that will allow the supply of housing and infrastructure to keep pace with demand via population growth.
