Despite the attendance of Paul Keating, and plenty of invocations of Bob Hawke, the Labor of the Hawke-Keating years was little in evidence at Labor’s election campaign launch. Anthony Albanese presented a platform heavy on manufacturing, nation-building, better pay and conditions and an expansion of the concept of universal care to aged care and childcare. This was old-school Labor stuff, much of which could have been heard in the 1970s — but with two crucial modern twists.
Most of all there was a return to government banking — right in front of the prime minister who’d sold off the Commonwealth Bank, Keating himself.
Labor’s help-to-buy housing scheme — in which the government would fund partial equity in new homes (40%) and existing homes (30%) for a maximum of 10,000 low- and middle-income applicants a year — will in effect return the federal government to mortgage financing, albeit via equity not lending, and in a limited form (in 2021 there were around 140,000-150,000 first-home buyer loans). Applicants would able to buy out the Commonwealth’s equity when they choose to. Returns from the scheme — which would see the Commonwealth part-own a substantial stock of property — would be directed to social housing construction.
The scheme will merely add more Commonwealth-funded demand for housing without adding supply, although the one positive design element is that it significantly incentivises the purchase of new housing rather than existing housing stock, meaning applicants could save 10% of the purchase price of a home if they opt for a new build.
To address the supply side, Albanese also announced a state-local-Commonwealth housing supply council, though that promises little more than talk about land supply.
It’s an old-fashioned, economically irrational solution — and likely to be popular exactly for that. It was also of a piece with Albanese’s pitch for a nation that, as he incessantly reminded us, “can do better”.
His five-part pitch centred on energy investment, including a new commitment to expand electric vehicle charging stations across the country; more investment in manufacturing — including $1 billion to be spent on value-added manufacturing in areas like lithium and nickel; more and more independent infrastructure investment; addressing the gender pay gap and improving tertiary education, including by using local procurement in Commonwealth infrastructure investment; and Labor’s “care” package involving already announced support for aged care and child care — plus an outbidding of the government on reducing PBS costs, with all PBS scripts to be capped at $30.
Albanese also led off at the very start with a commitment to implement the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Commencing his launch with a commitment on Indigenous reconciliation, recognition and treaty reflected that, while economically old-school, this wasn’t the 20th-century Labor Party on display.
There is some promise in these pledges, whether the housing scheme just bumps up the price again remains to be seen but there looks like there is going to be a lot of factors working to make them cheaper.
I know Labor can’t take on the owners of mainstream media until elected and with at least significant support from others but, this country won’t get any where until our media regulations look at the marketing psychology and manipulation that is so overbearing for our culture and diversity.
The only way that our democracy can regain some oxygen and grow again is if an independent regulator is given enough power that can’t be rescinded by the next coalition government easily.
It may be that there is no way of unseating or competing with the cosy relationship of fossil fuels and embedded vested interests in how and what information is streamed out of media.
A well found set of regulations that pushed through an ethical and moral standard , in whose interest type threshold, is what is required. Will we be left with a medical or environmental bill, or weaken democracy because of, will help us prepare for the future.
While they’re at it the ABC needs to be less easily defunded and filled with “political”appointments.
A good start in defanging the unbridled malignity and power of Moloch is to immediately cease placing SES Appointments in the OZ – hit ole’ scrotumface where it hurts, in his moneysack.
Once upon a time there was something called the Government Gazette wherein new laws & regulations were required to be officially promulgated.
Either use that for advertising government tenders and civil service, esp the heavily compromised & overpowerful SES, vacancies.
Or maybe that new fangled, digithangy called a website?
I’ve written about this elsewhere. ( IE the options for transparency in recruitment)
IMHO the tiny scale of PS adverts would not affect editorial a jot anymore unlike in the 1980s
It’s the last remnant of the erstwhile ‘rivers of gold’ advertising revenue which sustained Fairfax before it became Fauxfuks post Wocka.
The removal of ALL government advertising from Moloch’s rags might not be a fatal blow but it would hurt and send a clear message that his reign of terror is over.
The massage being the message these daze, that would be symbolically significant.
Post-2019, the manifest bipartisan agreement that demand side tax reform is now (permanently) off-the-table as a prerequisite part of any fair, tenable and structurally enduring housing affordability solution simply means that we will never, ever hit upon one. We all know as much. There’s certainly not a single politician, economist, fiscal adviser, wonk, journalist or academic not full well aware that without long overdue reform of these grotesquely regressive distortions, housing inequality and over-pricing Ponzi irrationality will just continue to spiral out of control. Until the market implodes. Which it will likely begin to do so from next Tuesday.
But whenever it does, we shouldn’t ever forget the collective ‘complicity of willed ignorance’ over a couple of decades of our expert cohorts, as on display again in both the presenting and reporting Labor’s latest ‘pantomime housing affordability’ policy.
We all know it won’t help one bit. Everyone, from Albo to BK to me to old mate down the road sleeping rough on a bench.
Nobody who owns a house wants government to do anything about increasing affordability for those who don’t. Nobody who owns a house can afford government to do anything about increasing affordability for those who don’t. Hence, housing policy is now a ludicrous bipartisan pantomime, both ALP and LNP pretending to try to do the impossible: make houses cheaper for those who don’t own one while continuing to make them grow more valuable (at unsustainable rates) for those who do.
Confronting the housing crisis will require that the generational theft of the last few decades be voluntarily reversed by the thieves. That’s why the crisis won’t be confronted, and will sooner or later just engulf us.
It’s never those at the top of a ponzi pyramid who suffer the most when it inevitably collapses.
I think that it was Calouste ‘Mr 5%‘ Gulbenkian, one of the early 20thC US robber baron financiers who, when asked how he had become so wealthy, answered “By selling too soon!”.
I own a house and desperately want a government that will do something about housing affordability for people who can’t afford a home. My house is my home and not an investment vehicle.
The harsh reality is that to make houses more affordable for those who currently ain’t got one is that the value of yours will have to fall in real terms dramatically. Probably 40-50% over the next decade in real terms. You’ll be stuck with the same mortgage you have now over that time, of course. I’d probably say that CGT exemption on it will need to bd phased out in that time, too.
That’s the proposition, catoke. You’re going to need get a whole lot nominally property-poorer. There is, by literal definition, no other way to make houses more ‘affordable’.
I am not sure about that. That is to say I don’t disagree necessarily. It is just that in the scenario you are presenting, if the value of a house recently bought plummets for whatever reason and people get nominally “property poorer”, whatever that is, then this is a situation of a Depression. Not a downturn or a recession but a fully-fledged Depression of the recent like of the GFC I and for those in Europe, the GFC II.
This is not a scenario conducive to good government or even a continuation of inept democratic government but a harbinger of Fascism like 20s Italy and 30s Spain and Germany.
I don’t think that making people get into homes comes at the expense of turfing those who are currently living in homes, out the door. This is what Russia tried with its Kulaks, (its better off peasantry), and all that did was to make everyone poor if they didn’t starve to death first.
I came into my current home in 1998. I am lucky I know and to some extent privileged even though I don’t feel it with having to work and pay costs and everything. Still, I don’t think the money I paid for my place came at the expense of someone else or the situation of buying a property and taking a chance came at the expense of someone else.
I did a check a fair while ago comparing what I paid as opposed to others historically for my home. It had only changed title 3 times – me being the last. It sold for about $20,000 less 8 or so years prior to when I purchased it. I was not expecting property prices to rise so dramatically. I knew they were going up but 3 to 4 times in 6 years? Come on. There are various reasons for this but it is wrong to single people out who were enterprising enough to acquire one, usually at considerable expense. What is wrong with the property situation is not germane to people’s personal circumstances who have acquired property. What is wrong is the acquisition of so much property by investors and the use of property as an investment vehicle. This is a factor of government policy (cutting the CGT on assets held for over 1 year by 50%) and economics (too many people chasing too few assets, in this case housing, and the effects on the price of assets and the cost of money in the form of interest payments). Property acquisition was a better, nobler art form in the times of pre-Sydney Olympics.
If only more people felt the way you do – a home where one is secure and not subject to rapaciou rents, leases & landlords.
Polly Adler in her 1953 book “A House is not a Home” alluded to a somewhat different for-profit motive/commercial proposition regarding bricks & mortar.
The zillion dollar cost – NB not value – of a house is irrelevant if one sells and then must pay 2 zillion for another.
Yes, agreed, I hasten to add, catoke…onya, and if only more single dwelling owner-occupiers remained resistant to the illusory lure of property ‘wealth’. It’s only the Ponzi-predator asset class who spew out that hypnotic burley.
The Ponzi-predator asset class of property owners and investors are only doing so because this is the easiest way to make money and provides the safest form of investment. There is simply not enough business investment going into productive capacity. There is too much personal and business investment in the property market and this will change as we get higher interest rates and we look to decarbonise. Business investment will make people and other businesses decarbonise in a way the troglodytes and denialists in the Federal Government and their supporters are unable to. By force and by higher charges. The rural areas will be stuffed as will some mining areas. I would be concerned if I were a Hunter Valley resident dependent on coal industry.
Who gives a flying f### what Albo said in front of class traitor and over-rated bozo Paul (mooody Bluues) Keating? Funny huh? Keating sold the CBA which was a bad move and got out of any govt measure to significant economic measures through macro policy. There is nothing wrong or unusual about govt involvement in the housing industry or property market. Keating!? And Hawke? Never had an original idea between them. Sure they implemented policies but they did not originate any. They borrowed Medicare from Gough’s Medibank which was loosely based on America’s health system of the same name and the workings of the UK’s National Health – their post-war safety net. They deregulated the finance industry by implementing the recommendations of the Campbell Committee of Inquiry into Banking and Finance – something Howard wanted to at least look at but useless Mal (the other one) wouldn’t touch. Super in Australia was around for Commonwealth Public Servants since 1922 and the idea of National Insurance, a type of all-encompassing unemployment insurance, health insurance and retirement/superannuation/pension scheme, was around in Australia since the 1930s under bloody Menzies for Goodness Sakes. And it was an idea instituted in Germany under the damned Kaiser since the 1910s when Australia introduced the Age Pension. Albo’s idea of the “Hard to get” Home Owners scheme is a sort of piltdown tinkering at the edges of a massive problem and is targeted towards people who can’t rely on the bank of mom and dad and who aren’t likely to inherit much when their parents pass in the chips. The idea of Government intervention in the property market or the residential construction industry exists in the US where the 2 government backed Mortgage houses Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac account for half of all their home loans. The tax payers of the US finance home borrowers which they found to their cost in the GFC I.
Good overall but I don’t think the “hard-to-get” housing assistance policy will do much more than bump up house prices. I don’t think Federal Governments are adept at developing land strategies for housing development. This is conducive on future settlement patterns, migration levels, economic change, environment constraints, etc. God help us if we are subject to unending greenfield residential housing development. Landcom NSW was hardly trouble free during its existence. There were near riots when they tried to action/sell land in the early 1990s, “recession town”, and they couldn’t get their reserve bid and wouldn’t accept bids for land they didn’t like the price being offered by prospective buyers. And God help us again if we have a real and prolonged recession, not one induced by a pandemic or a war.