The political party I should have a natural affinity with but am instead repulsed by is up to its old tricks.
The Greens’ pretending to care about housing is maddening, even if you won’t read as much in its fake left cheerleader, The Guardian:
New year, new housing fight.
The Labor government may have started the year keen to talk cost-of-living relief and housing solutions, but the Greens have entered 2024 vowing to push the Albanese government to make actual change.
Top of the agenda is Labor’s “help to buy” scheme, which, without Coalition support, will need the Greens’ support in the Senate if it is to pass the parliament. The shared equity scheme was one of Labor’s hallmark election policies, but the Greens, who went toe-to-toe with Labor over its housing future fund, are again pushing for rental freezes and caps.
How many times do we have to go through the same theatre? The Greens’s proposed rental caps will do nothing to ease pressures on renters.
Instead, such caps will further retard a supply-side response that is already conspicuously absent.
It will breed a black market of rental bidding to make Prohibition look tame.
It will reduce investment by landlords into maintenance, degrading the quality of the housing stock.
All of this is while the Greens dramatically boost immigration numbers from already insane levels, intensifying demand-side pressure.
It is a set of toxic policies to force metastasise a housing crisis into an intergenerational deathblow.
Fixing house prices and rents is easy. Sadly, The Greens are as fake as everybody else about it:
- slash immigration to <100k
- ban foreign purchases
- reform tax incentives to discourage speculation and boost construction
- boost public housing
Voila, higher wages, cheaper and better houses, lower rents.
Not a Green in sight.
