The Coalition’s Senate leader, Simon Birmingham, described the acrimonious housing debate as a “lovers’ tiff” between Labor and the Greens.
The truth is, there has been no love lost between the pair for quite some time now.
As the Albanese government and the Greens struck deals on the national reconstruction fund and the safeguard mechanism to reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions, the housing Australia future fund bill has been the unloved orphan of the legislative agenda.
In March the Greens housing spokesperson, Max Chandler-Mather, won his party’s backing not to support the bill in its current form, delaying the vote until at least budget week in May.
The idea was to force Labor back to the bargaining table, where the Greens had asked for a national rent freeze and a grandiose $5bn a year of direct spending on housing rather than the $10bn future fund model, with annual payouts of up to $500m.
This was just a starting position, but Labor did not court the minor party and its 11 Senate votes as hard on housing as it had on climate.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, incensed the Greens by telling reporters that Labor is “happy to have” an argument about blocking the $10bn fund and 30,000 new social and affordable houses “between now and the next election”.
But from the government’s perspective, it was the Greens who had delayed in order to buy themselves more time to campaign on the housing issue, as the minor party courts the votes of renters fed up with double-digit rent rises in capital cities.
The Albanese government began a process of reviewing renters’ rights in national cabinet, which could develop in the second half of the year into a handbrake – if not a freeze – on rents.
It pledged an extra $2bn of financing for social and affordable housing. In the budget, it raised the maximum rate of rent assistance by 15%.
While these measures were unable to win Greens support, they collected support from elsewhere in a bid to isolate the minor party.
Last week the government won the support of the Jacqui Lambie Network and all eight state and territory housing ministers.
This week, the housing minister, Julie Collins, finally agreed to index the $500m maximum payout from 2029, eventually winning independent senator David Pocock over to a last-ditch push on Thursday to put the bill to a vote.
But despite lining up most of their ducks in a row, the government’s bid failed, with the Coalition, Greens, One Nation and the United Australia party’s Ralph Babet rejecting a guillotine to force a vote at 1pm on Thursday.
The Greens, for so long accused of making the perfect the enemy of the good over policies including the Rudd government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme, are in an excruciating position.
Cave, and they signal that there’s almost no government bill they won’t pass eventually, diminishing their negotiating power despite holding a formidable 11 Senate votes.
Hold out, and they can be accused of being so uncompromising they are harming the people they are trying to help.
Senator Jacqui Lambie was in that territory when she made an impassioned plea to the Greens: “Please, for you people over here, that think you have a social conscience? Do you really want to keep playing with people’s lives? Do you really?”
The sad truth is that perhaps the housing issue will be the biggest sticking point between the Greens and Labor because they’ve found an issue on which their bases want them to continue fighting their respective corners.
Without deals on climate, we’re all doomed by global heating. But on housing, the Greens can play to the angry renters and Labor can play to middle-of-the-road voters who view the Greens as too extreme.
Of course, there is more the government could do. Even if it is wedded to the future fund model and takes it to another election, it could always spend $500m a year directly on housing in the meantime.
Collins told Guardian’s Australian Politics podcast that the question of interim funding was “jumping ahead” and the government wanted to try to pass the future fund first. The Australian Financial Review ominously suggested the bill could be a double-dissolution trigger.
On Wednesday the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, was asked about plan B if the bill goes down, and responded that the government has “got three parts to plan A”, citing other measures including build-to-rent tax incentives.
On the future fund, he said it “beggars belief” that parliament could block it at a time of “incredibly low vacancy rates [and] incredibly high rents”.
It’s fair enough for both parties to go as hard as they can, but at a certain point, it’s beginning to sound like both Labor and the Greens are arguing the same thing: “Do as we say or the housing gets it.”
