What I don't understand, is how little these elites care about the working middle class, paying for their own demise and the worsening prospects for the aspirational immigrants that are coming here. They are more concerned about their own virtue signalling IMO.
Put simply, the Govt is spending $11.3 b on social housing, while new and established house prices are spiralling out of control, due in a lot of ways to the increased immigration and demand.
So getting back to the worker, he/she goes to work to pay for the social housing, which they won't qualify for because they work.
Meanwhile their aspirations of owning a house are being blown out of the water, by spiralling house prices being exacerbated by immigration levels.
I guess the light at the end of the tunnel is when the worker loses their job, due to the expected rise in unemployment also exacerbated by immigration levels, at least then they will qualify for social housing as long as they have it finished in time.
Home owners may express sympathy for renters priced out of the market, but the truth is that they like owning expensive real estate – and don’t want it to get cheaper.
From the article:
The idea of housing as the main, if not the only, form of real wealth creation for ordinary people is deeply embedded in the national psyche. Superannuation is starting to rival it but is still a long way behind.
That means doing something about it requires true political leadership – that is, doing something right that’s unpopular. Study after study on the subject has concluded that the high price of housing is leading to dangerous inequality and distorting the economy and society, yet political leaders have never tackled it effectively, for obvious reasons.
The fact that one of the three least-populated countries on earth contains the world’s second-most expensive housing is a national calamity and a stunning failure of public policy. For decades, political leaders have paid lip service to housing affordability, while doing nothing that would bring prices down. In fact, most of the big political decisions have done the opposite.
For example, the capital gains tax discount in 1999 was designed by business leaders to encourage investing in their businesses, but it only led to a surge in investment in housing. Since then, there have been official inquiries and taskforces into housing affordability in 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2022. Throughout all this time, house prices kept rising, except when APRA cracked down on bank lending to investors in 2017, and when the Reserve Bank increased interest rates in 2022. Policy has been nowhere, done nothing.
When the ALP adopted its policy to modify negative gearing in 2016 and there was an opportunity for the political class to come together and actually achieve something, it was turned into another occasion for rivalry, and was later excluded from the terms of reference of yet another inquiry.
Transport infrastructure decisions have usually favoured roads – usually toll roads, not fast rail – and all the work on the latter has focused on the pie in the sky of
inter-capital city trains, rather than anything designed to increase the supply of housing.
And perhaps most important of all, decisions about the
level of immigration have been driven by the needs of business, with little thought to housing the new arrivals or to the impact on house prices.
The bottom line is that Australian capital-city housing is too expensive compared to incomes for a healthy society, and that needs to change. Merely bringing the rate of increase in house prices back to the rate of growth in incomes isn’t enough – that ratio needs to come down, so it isn’t a stretch to buy a place to live. To achieve this will require active, and serious, government intervention. It won’t be enough simply to restore the amount of housing construction to what it was before the pandemic, as the federal government is now aspiring to do.
We don’t need another inquiry or a royal commission; there’s a room full of inquiries, reports and submissions. They just need a taskforce drawn from Treasury and the housing department to go through the work that’s been done already and come up with a policy that has a clear aim and is likely to work. That would be a good start.