When the national cabinet sits down on Wednesday to discuss Australia’s housing affordability crisis –including changes to renters’ rights — the only people present will be home owners.
Two-thirds of national cabinet — six of its nine members, drawn from the eight state leaders and the prime minister — own two or more properties, according to their relevant state and federal disclosures. All of them own at least one property.
While roughly in line with federal politicians who own more than two properties on average, it stands in stark contrast to the one in five Australian households who own a residential property other than their own home. About a third of Australians households rent their home.
Queensland’s and Tasmania’s premiers are tied for the most properties in the national cabinet, with three each. Annastacia Palaszczuk declared owning a family home in Seventeen Mile Rocks, along with two investment properties in Sunrise Beach and Main Beach. Jeremy Rockcliff lists owning a property in Bridport along with discretionary interests in Launceston and Sassafras properties.
Other multiple property owners include Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who owns a Marrickville home and rents out a Dulwich Hill property; WA Premier Roger Cook with Wellard and North Fremantle properties; South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas with two properties in Bowden and Hyde Park; and Northern Territory Chief Minister Natasha Fyles who owns a Nightcliff family home and an investment property in Sydney.
The remaining three leaders from the east coast have declared only one property. Victorian Premier Dan Andrews declared his family home in Mulgrave, and ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr declared his Dickson residence. NSW Premier Chris Minns, too, owns one property. But uniquely among the group, Minns is the only one who disclosed renting recently while his primary residence was being renovated.
With the government’s signature affordable housing supply legislation still yet to pass, Albanese has flagged that he will use the national cabinet as a way of addressing housing affordability. Renters groups such as the National Association of Renters’ Organisations (NARO) have called for reforms such as limiting rent increase frequency and banning no-fault evictions.
“This week’s meeting is an opportunity for our leaders to make genuine progress on rental reforms,” NARO convenor Penny Carr said.
What’s the problem? Government whitefellas make the rules for those of Aboriginal descent, and there’s no conflict… is there? Hey, men used to make the rules for women all the time; what of it? The wealthy and powerful make the rules for poor people, and do the poor complain? Business lobbies make the rules for workers, able-bodied people tell the handicapped what to do. There’s no contradiction or conflict of interests in people who don’t rent making the decisions for those who do. Double standards have been a well-established practice in Australia since Cook.
Good list! Not to forget all those eager young people telling us oldies how to live. It would be un-Australian to have a renter in the room. If trouble-shooters had the facts, there wouldn’t be any trouble – and then where would we be?
The Howard tax concessions create a charmed circle of existing home owners who can become landlords. This is not about disliking tall poppies but a system rigged against new entrants.
Poor Joe Hockey had to rent a property in Canberra from his wife.
Just another grifter…
A person so lacking in moral fibre that he needed surgical procedures for a psychological failing – gluttony.
Oh the humanity. he received $220 per day for doing so.
The lifters and leaners man, big Joe. He’s leant on so many people that he’s squashed a few.
it’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating
ALP: Australian Landlords’ Party
Or ALP- another Liberal party
Lobby groups bribe politicians. When the renters can match the politicians bribes they will get the same treatment. Maybe this is at the heart of the NO to the Voice campaign? Enshrining the voice in the constitution gives the Indigenous the same access to politicians as the big bribers without them having to pay the bribes.
Now it makes sense. The bribers dont think its fair.
In other words, if you want the governments attention you should bid for it like a proper person.
Well firstly the bribes, ahem, donations, don’t even need to be that large, Australian pollies are cheap. But still, renters as a group are financially squeezed. What they do need to do is get organised. If even 25% of renters organised to collectively deny a first preference to any member of a party not committed to taking radical action on housing, they would constitute a significant threat to either major party achieving a majority. The Greens current discursive mobilisation of renters is just a whisper of the whirlwind they could create. As I note elsewhere, the Landlord class, at just 5% of the population, has money but comparatively fewer votes.
I am not sure the voice is going to give people the same access. That’s part of the problem….
‘The Voice’ is essentially a formal provision for an Indigenous lobby group. This seems entirely warranted. That the Libs don’t favour any affirmative provisions, or those who don’t pay their own way, is at least consistent. Teals are where Lib women might have been.
This is a pertinent observation of a structural inequality, though it speaks to age as much as wealth. The real change in exclusion from home ownership seems to be happening to those under 40 and especially under 30. The age of family formation, which makes it also doubtless a factor in the falling birthrate. Not to worry of course, since immigration can make up for that and is cheaper for the state than raising children to adults.
I was a bit puzzled by the stat that one in five Australians own a property other than their own home. That is, 20% of the population. Do we know where this came from?
I looked at the ABS figures for 2020-21 for Australians with an interest in a rental property. They calculate 1,188,588 people fall into this category with most, 845,267 having only one interest. Given that the adult population is approximately 21m this makes this group just under 5% of the adult population not 20%. The Crikey figure is likely differently calculated. It may include those with holiday houses they don’t rent out and those with commercial property. Even so, I don’t see how that inclusion could approach 20% of the population. The figure is important, if 33+% and rising are renting as opposed to 20% landlords, that is a stark division and a politically somewhat balanced conflict of interest. If, on the other hand, it is 33%+ versus just 5% the political equation is quite different. If the latter ratio is correct, it speaks volumes to how an economic inequality can and is being used to overpower a seemingly superior electoral one.
https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/taxation-statistics-2020-21/resource/7f5d4873-e8b2-4a3e-b586-d16623c41731#
Speaking to a friend whose offspring is an engineer who works for an engineering company where all the other engineers are migrants. Basicly Australia has not been educating enough professional engineers for our future development. Reduced investment in our future resolved by bringing in overseas labour. As a consequence of bringing in overseas labour it has contributed to housing shortages made worse by economic policies which have attracted the landlord classes.
I have an invalid pensioner living with me who would be on the streets otherwise. I see and encounter homeless daily. I wish I could do more but I know I am not doing enough.
I am absolutely disgusted by the lack of vision of our political classes on this one.
On engineers, it’s neither simple nor solid state, working age passed the ‘demographic sweet spot’ over a decade ago vs. most population growth is due to temporary ‘migration’ churnover esp. students, and growth of the over 70s in the permanent population, thanks to the baby boomer bubble/bomb in transition to retirement.
Interesting how the focus is upon renters or rentals, yet the housing ‘elephant in the room’ for pas generation since Howard, has been the egregious lack of investment in public or social housing via state governments and no relaxation in zoning laws by local government; seems about supporting established and detached home property prices.
On engineers, it’s neither simple nor solid state, working age passed the ‘demographic sweet spot’ over a decade ago vs. most population growth is due to temporary ‘migration’ churnover esp. students, and growth of the over 70s in the permanent population, thanks to the baby boomer bubble/bomb in transition to retirement.
Interesting how the focus is upon renters or rentals, yet the housing ‘elephant in the room’ for pas generation, has been the lack of investment in public or social housing via state governments and no relaxation in zoning laws by local government; seems about supporting established and detached home property prices?
Yes, a 750,000 shortfall in affordable housing across Australia since Howard stopped funding public housing (and no federal government since has re-started it and the states have actually sold off public housing to pay for maintenance on the rest). And Albanese plans to subsidise (not build) 30,000 affordable properties. The man is a joke, especially since he benefited from public housing as a kid. Would he have got where he is today if he and his mum had been sleeping in a car?
Good try, but you have misinterpreted my comment, i.e. not blaming Albanese, but all MPs and levels of govt., FIRE sector, media, baby boomer bubble and our religious obsession with property or ‘house’ ownership, for the past generation+; backgrounded by demographic decline and ditto in median house values.
I’m agreeing with you! The suburban house I own would now cost more than twice as much, relative to wages, as when I bought it in 1978. Why should that be? The property is largely unchanged, and the house is older. I agree – too many people have a vested interest in speculative property value increases rather than seeing houses as shelter.
But the single biggest problem at the lower end of the housing situation is the cessation of public housing building because both state and federal governments have swallowed the neoliberalism kool-aid. And Albanese is doing nothing to address this. For someone who personally benefited from public housing, that is disgusting.
Yes and no, it’s not up to Albanese to run state public/social housing and nothing stopping Labor members lobbying the ALP for overall action, versus blaming lobbyists etc.
Personally, when looking at house prices, one prefers to use real value i.e. CPI and all costs over time, using 7% pa discount rate, i.e. price needs to double each decade to simply tread water, if lucky…
The lack of public housing is certainly a major cause, but zoning is a furphy. Developers regularly sit on years, if not decades, of supply of residential land and approved projects.
There is zero incentive for the private industry to do anything that might reduce house prices. Hence the need for public housing.
And, of course, any talk of even lightly tapping the brakes on demand is verboten, for the same reason – too much money to be made.
Regional towns can be an issue, especially sea change locations where much rental capacity has been removed e.g. cabins and permanent caravans (but ok for short term rentals?); zoning precludes replacement of lost capacity and provision of services for new high density and/or micro builds.
Can you give details of what the various types of ‘demand’ are; it’s not one uniform blob?
Correct.
Immigration is not part of some conspiracy to drive up house prices.
It’s the reality of living in a world of more people who are more interconnected than at any period in human history where some countries like Australia have ageing populations and some countries have younger populations.
What we absolutely must do is face up to that REALITY (and not feed the narrative that immigrants i.e. the people caring for our grandparents, are responsible for making housing unaffordable for the grandkids.
The people who made housing unaffordable for the grandkids are the parents who then blame immigrants….
It’s not about “blaming” individual immigrants, it’s about properly managing immigration policy.
People need places to live. Lots more people needs lots more places to live. We have not – and probably can not – build enough places to live to keep up with the lots more people that current policy allows. And that’s before considering all the other stuff that people need like hospitals, schools, roads, buses, etc, etc.
It is very difficult to build more houses, along with the other stuff, more quickly. It’s relatively easy to dial back immigration to allow housing – along with all the other infrastructure people require to live – to catch up.
Immigration is not a root cause of overpriced housing, however, very high immigration dramatically exacerbates the problem.
Immigration rates are what they are.
Why is it only entire planets/continents/countries where people have concerns about overcrowding and not trains/cinemas/pubs/shopping centres?
Do you think it’s got something to do with perception v reality?
Voting patterns consistently show the people most concerned about immigration are:
a) older and therefore not competing with immigrants for jobs and housing but are relying on immigrants for aged care;
b) people living in remote areas including places with shrinking populations.
It wasn’t New York and London that voted for Trump and Brexit but Wyoming and Sunderland.
Now a key part of facing up to reality is to plan accordingly.
Another myth is that Australia has a supply issue. It doesn’t have a supply issue. There’s actually enough dwellings for the number of households – according to the ABS there’s approx 11m “dwellings” for 25m people or capacity for an average household size of 2.2 people v an actual average household size of 2.5.
The issue is there’s not, and never will be, enough houses for each Australian to own multiple priorities.
We could fix Australia’s housing tomorrow without a single brick by:
a) freezing rents and requiring landlords to offer long term, secure leases;
b) restricting banks from lending more than 4 times a person’a Australian salary which would immediately end property speculation and foreign investors;
c) ending negative gearing;
d) taxing empty land;
e) requiring employers to permit employees to work remotely which would facilitate decentralisation;
f) turning increasingly redundant commercial and retail space into housing and other useful space.
Or we could feed the narrative that this entire continent with a population of half the size of Britain and a fifth the size of Japan’s can’t cope.
No, immigration rates are what we choose them to be.
We have all but absolute control over immigration. It is a core function of Government.
What ? Those are places people notice overcrowding all the time. Also roads, schools, hospitals, holiday destinations…
Voting patterns aren’t really a good indicator given the two major parties are neoliberal and therefore pro-high-immigration by default, and the Greens don’t want to even talk about it in case they get wedged.
Looking at “voting patterns” you would be led to believe people wanted s**t public services and everything privatised – but as them directly and they hate it.
It would be correct to say immigration is not a primary vote decider, but you could say the same about most things.
Literally my entire argument.
Reality is we can’t – or won’t – build enough (houses, schools, hospitals, et al) to accommodate 300k+ new arrivals each year. Heck, we’d probably struggle to build enough to handle half that number.
So we should “plan accordingly” and allow fewer.
This hypothetical statistical operation means nothing because people are not pieces on a gameboard that can be arbitrarily shuffled around to make everything fit nice together. Dwellings may be poorly located, unsuitable for task, unliveable, etc, etc. People may be unable to move, unwilling to move, etc.
There is a shortage. You can tell because both purchase prices and rents are ridiculously high, and increasing.
Firstly, this is a straw man. Secondly, few people with additional properties leave them empty, so – broadly speaking – owning multiple properties is not a major problem from the perspective of a housing shortage.
No we couldn’t.
Though there are certainly ideas there that stand on their own merits and would also go towards making the shortage less severe, none of them are going to fix it in any useful timeframe.
This is just another misdirection.
The size of the continent isn’t really relevant. What is relevant is our ability to absorb relatively huge amounts of people quickly.
Plus, of course, the question that always go unanswered: why ? Why do this ?
Also, Japan’s is an interesting choice of example given its population has been declining for over a decade. Which, if you were to believe the neoliberal MOAR PEOPLE ALWAYS brigade should have the place looking like a zombie apocalypse. Meanwhile in reality they enjoy some of the highest living standards in the world.
You win.
Oh actually you don’t because the reality is that….immigration rates are in fact what they are (unless Pauline Hanson becomes Prime Minister).
The reality is not a single mainstream politician on the planet is proposing cutting immigration despite it being a vote winner.
Currently the number of people working v not working e.g. old, young and otherwise incapacitated is 4:1 and without immigration that ratio would drop to 2:1.
And it’s got nothing to do with “neo-liberalism” (and in fact ironically countries that embraced neo-liberalism saw a fall in birth rates due to increased consumerism….). We could have socialism but we’d still need boots on the ground – doctors, nurses, aged care workers, police officers, people to fight extreme weather events, people to roll out renewables, insulation, nuclear plants…in fact never in human history have we needed more people to do actual jobs (shame so many become management consultants!)
Not sure why those 6 ideas wouldn’t work immediately. I’m pretty sure freezing rents is the most direct way to, erm, freeze rents…
PS Japan has a population of 120m people! We’re freaking out about 25m. Does that not make you really embarrassed?
This is standard neoliberal “national budgets are like household budgets” rhetoric.
The pure number of workers is not relevant. What’s relevant is whether or not there are enough resources and workers to produce enough stuff to either support ourselves, or trade with others for the things we cannot produce.
Literally, the cause of increasing living standards is the ability to produce more stuff with fewer people because of higher productivity. Do you think the world could be fed using the farming techniques and technology of a millennia ago ? Do you think cars could be produced by the container ship load if they were manually assembled ?
The industrial revolution was a long time ago. The days of only being able to produce more stuff by throwing more people at a problem have passed.
What ? Did you even read that after you wrote it ?
‘The need for high immigration (because of reduced birth rates) has nothing to do with neoliberalism, which, “ironically”, has reduced birth rates’.
High immigration is supply-side, free-market-extremist economics.
WTF has “socialism” (whatever you might mean by that word) got to do with either this conversation ?
And you’ve summed up a key part there yourself with “shame so many become management consultants”. Ie: the “bull**** jobs” problem.
(Hilariously hypocritical that you’re adamant housing is just a redistribution problem, but even though people are working in useless jobs like “management consultant” we must have MOAR PEOPLE to fill those useless jobs rather that them doing more useful jobs.)
Freezing rents won’t magically make more rental properties appear overnight.
Similarly none of those other steps are going to make the tens-to-hundreds of thousands of additional and appropriate houses necessary *right now* suddenly appear. They would incentivise increased supply over time (assuming capacity to actually construct it exists), but even that doesn’t mean much if the additional supply is chewed up by the practically infinite demand of poorly managed immigration.
Japan has had a declining population for over a decade while maintaining some of the highest standards of living on the planet, but you are insisting if we aren’t growing our population at one of (possibly even THE) highest rates in the OECD (while doing nothing except assuming magical free markets will solve the resultant problems), we’re doomed. Aren’t you embarrassed ?
It’s usually decades, Smithy. Developers land bank for a decade or two.
The main issue is that supply can never, ever, ever hope to keep up with demand when people are demanding not just one home but a home and a few investment properties…..
Supply kept up with demand until 20-odd years ago.
But since then supply has not increased much, if at all, but demand has jumped dramatically.
Most investment properties are not left vacant.
There was a direct intervention in the housing market by the government and the banks that turbo charged investment properties including with loose lending, low interest rates, favourable negative gearing, and weak rental laws.
Yes, and ? Total number of dwelling completions has been largely unchanged in Australia for half a century. There are some outlier periods, but new housing supply has been basically static for decades.
One in five households (21%) owned one or more residential properties other than their usual residence.
Not individuals.
There are approx 10 million households in Australia.
So about 2 million households own one or more properties in addition to their PPoR.
Likely most of those will only have the second property in one person’s name, this roughly lines up with the ~1.2m figure you quoted above.
(It is a bit unclear whether people who owned a property but rented their PPoR would be included in this, but I imagine there’s only a rounding error’s worth of them anyway.)
This doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me, especially since a substantial fraction of those probably bought the second house 30+ years ago when they were still affordable. My wife is 44 and she’d bought and paid off her first home by 23 (price: $65k).
Thanks, good point. In electoral terms we might say each of these household is worth 2 voters, that is still just under 10% of the voting population with a vested interest in the landlord cause. Renters are in a good position to flex their electoral weight. Though expect the money and time being put into landlord spin to go up in response, we are already seeing it, both in terms of positioning themselves as victims and ludicrous economic arguments of their value add. Given that most are parasitic, having bought existing property, not added to the stock or substantially refurbished, they add little at all, just beneficiaries of a system stacked for them.
WARNING: Personal anecdote.
I knew numerous people in Australia with investment properties, I know of 1 person in Ireland and 1 person in England.
That’s not to say there aren’t multiple property owners in those countries, but it’s not a national obsession.
Britain’s property market is even more dysfunctional than Australia’s, so this piqued my curiosity enough to look it up.
There’s a lot of data here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-private-landlord-survey-2021-main-report/english-private-landlord-survey-2021-main-report–2
Relevant to the question:
Landlords who operated as individuals had smaller portfolios than those that operated as companies or organisations.
Similar stats for Australia:
https://propertyupdate.com.au/how-many-australians-own-an-investment-property/
~71% of landlords hold a single property.
~27% of landlords hold 2-4 properties.
~2% of landlords hold five or more properties.
These numbers are probably more comparable to the “landlords operating as individuals”, above.
The following states 11.2% of the (I assume adult, in context) population owns multiple properties:
https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/game-of-homes-the-rise-of-multiple-property-ownership-in-great-britain/
So at a glance it would appear multiple property ownership is at similar levels in the UK, and amongst multiple property owners, they own higher numbers of properties.