Labor and the Greens remain in a standoff on housing, with the Albanese government accusing the self-described “party of renters” of holding legislation hostage. Meanwhile the crisis worsens with property prices and rents through the roof and an enormous backlog in social housing demand.
Are the Greens really derailing progress on housing? To debate that question in today’s Friday Fight, we have economist Steven Hamilton arguing the affirmative and comedian Tom Ballard arguing the negative.
Don’t forget to vote for your debate winner in the poll at the bottom of this article!
Are the Greens derailing progress on housing? In a word: no.
Quite the opposite. The Australian Greens (or, in Labor-ese, “tHe gReENs pOLitIcAl pArtY”) are actually fighting like hell to meaningfully address the housing crisis; that’s precisely why they’re not pliantly waving through every dodgy housing bill the Albanese government brings to Parliament. While the ALP remains committed to a housing policy agenda that keeps house prices rising, tinkers around the edges or actively makes things worse, the Greens are trying to pressure the government to support serious reforms which will actually do something about our cooked housing market, and make a difference in people’s lives.
Take last year’s parliamentary fight over Labor’s Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF). The Greens had various issues with the policy — the fund’s spending was capped at $500 million per year, its ambition to build just 30,000 homes over five years was pretty weak when Australia has a massive public housing waitlist, it did nothing for renters, etc — but said they’d be willing pass the bill in the Senate if the government engaged in negotiations to secure their support.
For such heresy, Greens MPs were dismissed as economic illiterates who wanted to kill and eat the homeless. But they stuck to their guns, and look what happened: the HAFF’s $500 million spending cap became a guarantee, Labor suddenly announced an additional $3 billion in direct funding for public and community housing, and the Greens helped to pass the still-flawed-but-definitely-improved HAFF into law in September.
Far from “derailing” progress on housing, the Greens made the case for something better, held out for it, and won. Thanks to the party’s campaigning, ordinary Australians in desperate need of a secure home will be better off than if the Greens had caved at the first sign of trouble.
One year later, the parliamentary battle is focussed on two other crappy elements of Labor’s housing plan: its Help to Buy shared equity scheme and its Build to Rent legislation. The Greens have said Help to Buy will be available to just 0.2% of Australia’s 5.5 million renters. For everyone else, it’ll just do what all the other failed demand-side policies have done and push house prices up, which is kind of the opposite of what we’re going for. The government has been warned about this risk by a number of economic experts and its own Productivity Commission, but doesn’t seem particularly bothered.
Meanwhile, the Build to Rent policy involves giving tax concessions to private property developers in the hope that it will inspire them to suddenly become super nice and build lots of “affordable” rental apartments. Unfortunately — according to various economic experts and even figures from the Property Council — this plan will just see greedy developers receive tax handouts as a reward for building apartments they were going to build anyway, and allow greedy corporate landlords to jack up rents to maximise their profits, because we know that’s what they love to do.
These are flawed, milquetoast policies that won’t even touch sides of the housing shitshow. So once again, the Greens have used their democratic power in the Senate to delay the passage of these bills, but said they’re more than willing to reconsider if Labor works with them to pass any policies that would actually make a structural difference in favour of renters and first-home buyers, like capping rent increases, directly building public homes through a public property developer, or phasing out the rorts of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount.
Of course, everyone knows that Labor would NEVER EVER consider such policies… unless of course, maybe they would. As my comrade Emerald Moon posted this week, “Greens policies are always radical/stupid/impossible, until Labor realises their (former) voters like them.”
So no, the Greens are not the ones standing in the way of progressive housing policy right now. If you’re really after a political organisation that’s consistently failed to do what’s needed on housing justice, I’d suggest you take a look at the one that’s accepted more than $37 million in property industry donations over the past two decades, that’s led by 23 people who own 61 properties between them, and that went to the 2022 election spouting nonsense like “negative gearing is a good thing”.
Yes, the Greens are taking a far more radical approach to fighting housing inequality than Australian politics has seen in a very long time. But our housing system is radically broken — so something radically different is precisely what we need.
Read the opposing argument by Steven Hamilton.
