Chandler-Mather delivers housing permacrisis

Advertisement

The fake left has finally achieved something on housing. It has made it worse.

The Greens will help the Albanese government pass its Help to Buy shared equity scheme for homeownership and Build to Rent tax incentives, despite failing to win any concessions from Labor in return for its support.

The Greens leader, Adam Bandt, and housing spokesperson, Max Chandler-Mather, announced the shift in policy at a press conference on Monday afternoon, explaining that they had pushed Labor “as hard” as they could without success.

“The Greens can announce that we’ll be waving through Labor’s two housing bills after accepting that Labor doesn’t care enough about renters to do anything meaningful for them,” Chandler-Mather told reporters in Canberra.

The Chandler-Mather combination of unworkable and unreasonable policy demands has collapsed having achieved nothing.

And how’s this for stupid.

Greens housing spokesman Max Chander-Mather says Labor was on the “brink” of changing negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount during negotiations on housing reform. 

Well, I’m on the brink of delivering world peace!

The Labor/Greens fake left alliance is now the party of housing permacrisis with extreme immigration as the centrepiece.

The Labor/Greens supply side solutions are all awful.

Advertisement

Help to Buy is a budget-run ponzi-scheme to drive up prices.

Built to Rent corporatises homebuilding, leading to smaller and more expensive apartments.

The public housing program is a joke, running 40% below target, with overall construction volumes well below the previous cycle.

It reminds me of the famous Milton Friedman dictum: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Advertisement

It’s not perfect across the aisle, either, but it is better.

The Coalition’s goal of materially lower immigration will address rents and homelessness while taking pressure off prices.

Lower public spending and interest rates will aid access to buying.

Advertisement

But super for housing is another bubble inflater.

Of the two imperfect policy platforms, the LNP is superior if you believe in more affordable housing and lower homelessness.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.