Of all the problems the Albanese government faces as it enters its second year, housing looms as the most wicked: both devilishly complex and capable of unleashing the nation’s darker angels.
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, seemingly flagged in his budget-in-reply that he intends to exploit the systems failure that is our housing market to drive an immigration panic, just as Australia reopens its labour market in earnest after the pandemic pause.
Dutton will receive ballast from the dawning realisation, currently being tapped and refined by the Greens, that property has become a form of inherited privilege where the barriers of entry are too high – as are the rewards for those who make their way in.
The doomsday scenario for the government is that these groups unify, driving Australia into a cycle of nativist distrust anchored in the economic disenfranchisement of younger people.
This week’s Guardian Essential poll shows the scope of the challenge the government faces. No other issue is so sharply framed along generational lines.
The failure in the housing market is so profound that it has become a blank canvas, the perfect score for a dog-whistle symphony.
Already-high property prices continue to rise, delivering a massive dividend to older generations. Those currently with mortgages bear an unfair load of the battle to manage inflation while those who are renting are hit with a double whammy of higher rents and rising market entry-level prices.
Social housing waiting lists – already way too long to be considered a queue (can you come back to us in a decade?) – continue to grow, while precious homes either lie fallow as crude units of capital growth or listed on Airbnb for a premium rate.
A cash-strapped government can do nothing more than offer Band-Aid solutions for a structural problem that perversely sees those already in the market have their growing wealth subsidised by taxpayers while those in desperate need are told there is not enough to go around.
In this context it is true that post-pandemic immigration increases, originally set by the Morrison government, will put greater pressure on those people currently locked out of the market, while continuing to grow the value of property for those already in.
We’ve seen this movie before – a cynical populist pitch to the right harnessing the totally legitimate concerns of those on the wrong side of the “free” market.
“Turn back the boats” was the heroic bait and switch perpetrated on the Australian public first by John Howard and later a conga line of pale imitations, from Tony Abbott all the way to Scott Morrison. It too tapped a genuine and justified backlash against global capital.
In 2001 it was resentment at the impact of the global trade in labour that was sending what had once been good, stable jobs offshore. Research we were doing for the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union at the time suggested Australians wanted government to rebuild some economic walls: “fair trade, not free trade” as the former Labor senator Doug Cameron would chant.
Howard no doubt had access to these insights too but chose a different tack: a series of performative and dehumanising turnbacks of desperate asylum seekers trapped in a global people-smuggling trade, an unsurprising consequence of people fleeing war and tyranny.
This simultaneously weaponised discontent against globalisation while providing cover for the expansion of the business and skilled migration intakes and the ongoing reduction of tariffs.
Now we have déjà vu. In a classic pincer move, ageing nativists and younger Greens can now both turn on the government, with the current battle to get its modest housing fund through the parliament a proxy for this fledgling alliance.
The Greens amplify the despair of younger renters by pointing out a fund of this modesty in a system in this state of disrepair will barely touch the sides. Despite the housing Australia future fund model being their invention, the Coalition votes no because it’s their default, and why would they spend money on poor people anyway?
In the midst of this noise it is hardly surprising there is broad support for “border control” measures like capping immigration until there is sufficient housing and further restrictions on foreign ownership.
The Greens would recoil at being implicated in Dutton’s shenanigans; indeed, their voters are less likely to respond to the nativist siren’s song, but weaponising housing has stark consequences. Dutton has flagged his strategy, and running in parallel with his increasingly shrill anti-voice rhetoric, he is actively inviting Australians to turn in on themselves.
Social cohesion requires nuance on how the left approaches housing. It shouldn’t be about pulling punches but ensuring you land in the right place.
Rather than fighting each other at the margins, progressives have the chance to lead a national risk mitigation effort based in genuine systemic reform.
The good news is there are some new and transformative ideas ready to be tested, iterated and scaled. And when we put them to the public, there is an openness to most of them.
There is strong support for placing limits to speculative accumulation, capping the number of properties people can hold, or at the very least, the number that they can receive taxpayer subsidies for owning.
There are new land ownership models currently under development, such as the shared equity scheme being championed by serial social entrepreneur Evan Thornley. This would get landlords out of direct ownership of rental properties – where indivisible greed or incompetence affect tenants directly – in favour of pooled investment that helps more people into the market.
There are also ambitious new ways of thinking about social housing, linking other service-delivery silos such as aged care, childcare and disability supports to create better and more cohesive communities.
And there is the ongoing and necessary conversation about the tax concessions going to those already in the market, including a cold, hard calculation on how these billions could be better spent.
Pointedly, if we are to address a looming intergenerational showdown, we may need to question why Australia is one of the few developed nation’s that does not have an inheritance tax.
Fun fact: Australia did have death duties until the 1970s when Joh Bjelke-Petersen dropped his to lure people north and other governments dropped theirs to stop the flight of capital. So we entrenched intergenerational privilege because we didn’t want old people to go to Queensland!
Of course, a “death tax” is far too dangerous for any sane politician to countenance right now knowing the backlash of fear and loathing it would provoke, and it will probably remain so until the alternative of maintaining the dysfunctional status quo becomes worse.
But thanks to Dutton and his cynical modus operandi, that moment may be closer than we realise.
Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company
