The first tender for the Albanese government’s $2.9 billion Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) has been launched, with Housing Australia overseeing the tender.
Under the revised HAFF, the Labor has promised to develop 40,000 social and affordable homes over the next five years, or 8,000 homes per year.
The AFR revealed on Monday that purchases of unsold apartment stock and office-to-residential conversions are eligible projects for funding under the HAFF.
“We’re kick-starting the single biggest investment in social and affordable rental housing in more than a decade”, Housing Minister Julie Collins said.
On Tuesday, Housing Australia head Nathan Dal Bon told The AFR that there is currently a 12-month window in which the government can buy unsold apartment stock before the private market recovers.
“There’s a particularly good opportunity over the next 12 months, so we’re hearing, in terms of focus on those properties that would have gone to the private sector”, Dal Bon said.
“We’ve been hearing that in places like Melbourne the opportunity to undertake some spot purchases is quite attractive at the moment and that you can potentially pick up some surplus stock for cheaper than what it is to build at the moment”.
There are two fundamental problems with Labor’s HAFF.
First and foremost, the number of homes targeted – 40,000 over five years (or 8,000 a year) – is a drop in the bucket and is dwarfed by the 518,000 net overseas migrants that landed in 2022-23, let alone the projected 1,633,000 net overseas migration (NOM) projected over the five years to 2027-28:
The revised NOM forecasts outlined in December’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Update (MYEFO) are cumulatively 458,000 higher than what was projected in Labor’s October 2022 federal budget.
They are also cumulatively 138,000 higher than was forecast in the May federal budget.
Second, purchasing already built homes under the HAFF does not add to overall supply. All it does is shift the ownership from the private sector to the community sector.
This second point was explicitly acknowledged by one anonymous banking source who told The AFR:
“It’s all well and good to pull new stock out of the pipeline, but at the end of the day, starts and finishes are the same”.
“There’s no uptick in new housing being delivered – you’re just rebranding stuff in the pipeline”.
Sadly, Labor’s HAFF is a con job. Even if it was successful, it would deliver only 40,000 homes over five years – a drop in the bucket against Labor’s historically high immigration.
Meanwhile, actual housing construction continues to fall, meaning the supply shortfall is widening at an alarming pace:
In turn, Australia’s rental vacancy rate has fallen to historical lows, while rental inflation is running rampant:
Source: Shane Oliver (AMP)
The bottom line is that Australia’s housing crisis will continue to get worse under the Albanese government’s ‘Big Australia’ immigration.
Labor are bigger charlatans than the Coalition ever were under “Scotty from Marketing”.
