### No, the Greens aren’t derailing progress on housing — radically broken systems need radical solutions ###
*’The Greens are fighting like hell to address the housing crisis. That’s why they’re not pliantly waving through every dodgy housing bill the Albanese government brings to Parliament.’*
*Tom Ballard*
—
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.”
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.
### Yes, the Greens are derailing housing policy — that suits a party that will never form government ###
*’The Greens are NIMBYs. They do not believe in abundance; they believe in scarcity.’*
*Steven Hamilton*
Trust the Greens to propose “more government” as the solution to a housing emergency that is entirely the result of government failure. No matter how deep the hole, the Greens’ answer is simply to keep digging deeper.
For something so devastating and seemingly intractable, our housing emergency (that’s what we should call it — it’s well beyond a crisis) is remarkably simple: there aren’t enough houses for people to live in.
The simplicity of the problem correspondingly suggests a simple solution: we need to build more houses. Now, if you don’t probe too deeply, you might be forgiven for thinking that building more houses is precisely the Greens’ plan.
Indeed, they claim that the main objective of their “Homes for all” housing policy is to “build one million public and community homes that are high quality, sustainable and accessible”.
And that might be possible if their pathological, Malthusian de-growther mindset didn’t trip them up at the very first hurdle.
The Greens are NIMBYs.
The Greens do not believe in abundance; they believe in scarcity.
The Greens do not believe that markets, even if robustly supported by government, are capable of improving people’s lives.
The Greens do not believe that the incentives of profit-making enterprises can ever be aligned with the interests of their customers and employees, and serve only to extract rents from them like parasites.
The Greens are certainly not positive-sum economic thinkers. But they’re not even zero-sum economic thinkers. The Greens are negative-sum economic thinkers.
And so, before they even get started on achieving their laudable goal of building a million new homes, they’ve taken off the table all the forces that could be marshalled to achieve that outcome.
I am yet to meet a single credible economist who disagrees about the primary cause of our housing emergency. And that’s the role of local governments in restricting land use.
Whether it be height restrictions on new developments, heritage listings, or even just basic permitting for building or modifying an existing building, Australia’s local governments are a malignant cancer that riddles our housing market.
Reams of high-quality evidence from across the world are crystal clear that these local government regulations are the prime cause of limited supply, resulting high prices, and the flow-on effects on people’s welfare. Everywhere that these restrictions have been loosened, supply has expanded and prices have fallen.
With this one weird trick we can solve our housing emergency.
And yet nowhere in the Greens’ housing policy manifesto will you find any mention of overcoming what is the single most important barrier to expanding supply.
Indeed, the centrepiece of their plan is to establish a “Federal Housing Trust” that would see the government directly build a million public houses. But I guess the local governments that have fought tooth and nail to keep out new development will welcome all this public housing with open arms?
It would be funny if it weren’t so disingenuous. The call is coming from inside the house. The Greens themselves are the local government NIMBYs blocking the very development causing the problem that they claim so aggrieves them.
The other big force holding back the supply of new houses is the cost of construction. This has a number of causes. A big one, as economist Richard Holden noted recently, is an 18% fall in labour productivity in the construction sector over the past decade.
This in part has been driven by truly absurd conditions in enterprise bargaining agreements such as no work (but full pay) when there’s been a drop of rain. Or no work at all (but full pay) on Fridays.
And these same interests that have worked to monopolise construction supply have also lobbied the government intensively to keep out migrant workers that could help close our acute worker shortages in construction and thereby lower construction costs.
Yet, notwithstanding all of this pernicious undermining of housing affordability by this vested interest, Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather thought it appropriate to front a CFMEU rally in Brisbane recently to show his support. If it wasn’t already, it should be crystal clear where the Greens’ priorities lie.
What about the rest of their plan? It’s at most ineffective and at worst highly counterproductive. Their solution to high rents is for government to cap rents. Which is quite literally the first example we use when teaching undergraduate economics students why price controls are a bad idea. The evidence is overwhelming that such measures only make things worse. I could go on…
On housing, at least, the Greens are simply not to be taken seriously. Their plan, if implemented, would be a catastrophic disaster for our housing market. But, thankfully, they will never get the chance to implement it as they will never be a party of government. So sleep soundly on that.
_Zambayoshi_ on
The important point is that someone is calling the govt on the BS half-measures being proposed as a ‘solution’. I think that there’s zero chance of the Greens’ policies actually being adopted (I could be wrong) but at least concessions have to be made, which hopefully mean stronger measures than we would have had otherwise.
SnoopThylacine on
Sorry, title is a bit misleading since it’s a two article *opinion – counteropinion* format
tsunamisurfer35 on
Anything the Greens Housing Member says should be ignored.
They primary argument is that the proposed policy will only help 0.2% of renters and of course 99.8% get shafted.
a) there are not policies that enable 100% of renters to buy, its not possible, not even 1%. How do they expect the market to be able to churn out 50,000 just for help to buy?
b) Not all renters want to buy or could even afford the help to buy pricing.
He harps on about handouts being a problem yet advocates for the taxpayers to fund housing, aka handouts.
5 Comments
[Paywall link](https://archive.md/gbh48)
### No, the Greens aren’t derailing progress on housing — radically broken systems need radical solutions ###
*’The Greens are fighting like hell to address the housing crisis. That’s why they’re not pliantly waving through every dodgy housing bill the Albanese government brings to Parliament.’*
*Tom Ballard*
—
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.”
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.
[Paywall link](https://archive.md/xDzFF)
### Yes, the Greens are derailing housing policy — that suits a party that will never form government ###
*’The Greens are NIMBYs. They do not believe in abundance; they believe in scarcity.’*
*Steven Hamilton*
Trust the Greens to propose “more government” as the solution to a housing emergency that is entirely the result of government failure. No matter how deep the hole, the Greens’ answer is simply to keep digging deeper.
For something so devastating and seemingly intractable, our housing emergency (that’s what we should call it — it’s well beyond a crisis) is remarkably simple: there aren’t enough houses for people to live in.
The simplicity of the problem correspondingly suggests a simple solution: we need to build more houses. Now, if you don’t probe too deeply, you might be forgiven for thinking that building more houses is precisely the Greens’ plan.
Indeed, they claim that the main objective of their “Homes for all” housing policy is to “build one million public and community homes that are high quality, sustainable and accessible”.
And that might be possible if their pathological, Malthusian de-growther mindset didn’t trip them up at the very first hurdle.
The Greens are NIMBYs.
The Greens do not believe in abundance; they believe in scarcity.
The Greens do not believe that markets, even if robustly supported by government, are capable of improving people’s lives.
The Greens do not believe that the incentives of profit-making enterprises can ever be aligned with the interests of their customers and employees, and serve only to extract rents from them like parasites.
The Greens are certainly not positive-sum economic thinkers. But they’re not even zero-sum economic thinkers. The Greens are negative-sum economic thinkers.
And so, before they even get started on achieving their laudable goal of building a million new homes, they’ve taken off the table all the forces that could be marshalled to achieve that outcome.
I am yet to meet a single credible economist who disagrees about the primary cause of our housing emergency. And that’s the role of local governments in restricting land use.
Whether it be height restrictions on new developments, heritage listings, or even just basic permitting for building or modifying an existing building, Australia’s local governments are a malignant cancer that riddles our housing market.
Reams of high-quality evidence from across the world are crystal clear that these local government regulations are the prime cause of limited supply, resulting high prices, and the flow-on effects on people’s welfare. Everywhere that these restrictions have been loosened, supply has expanded and prices have fallen.
With this one weird trick we can solve our housing emergency.
And yet nowhere in the Greens’ housing policy manifesto will you find any mention of overcoming what is the single most important barrier to expanding supply.
Indeed, the centrepiece of their plan is to establish a “Federal Housing Trust” that would see the government directly build a million public houses. But I guess the local governments that have fought tooth and nail to keep out new development will welcome all this public housing with open arms?
It would be funny if it weren’t so disingenuous. The call is coming from inside the house. The Greens themselves are the local government NIMBYs blocking the very development causing the problem that they claim so aggrieves them.
The other big force holding back the supply of new houses is the cost of construction. This has a number of causes. A big one, as economist Richard Holden noted recently, is an 18% fall in labour productivity in the construction sector over the past decade.
This in part has been driven by truly absurd conditions in enterprise bargaining agreements such as no work (but full pay) when there’s been a drop of rain. Or no work at all (but full pay) on Fridays.
And these same interests that have worked to monopolise construction supply have also lobbied the government intensively to keep out migrant workers that could help close our acute worker shortages in construction and thereby lower construction costs.
Yet, notwithstanding all of this pernicious undermining of housing affordability by this vested interest, Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather thought it appropriate to front a CFMEU rally in Brisbane recently to show his support. If it wasn’t already, it should be crystal clear where the Greens’ priorities lie.
What about the rest of their plan? It’s at most ineffective and at worst highly counterproductive. Their solution to high rents is for government to cap rents. Which is quite literally the first example we use when teaching undergraduate economics students why price controls are a bad idea. The evidence is overwhelming that such measures only make things worse. I could go on…
On housing, at least, the Greens are simply not to be taken seriously. Their plan, if implemented, would be a catastrophic disaster for our housing market. But, thankfully, they will never get the chance to implement it as they will never be a party of government. So sleep soundly on that.
The important point is that someone is calling the govt on the BS half-measures being proposed as a ‘solution’. I think that there’s zero chance of the Greens’ policies actually being adopted (I could be wrong) but at least concessions have to be made, which hopefully mean stronger measures than we would have had otherwise.
Sorry, title is a bit misleading since it’s a two article *opinion – counteropinion* format
Anything the Greens Housing Member says should be ignored.
They primary argument is that the proposed policy will only help 0.2% of renters and of course 99.8% get shafted.
a) there are not policies that enable 100% of renters to buy, its not possible, not even 1%. How do they expect the market to be able to churn out 50,000 just for help to buy?
b) Not all renters want to buy or could even afford the help to buy pricing.
He harps on about handouts being a problem yet advocates for the taxpayers to fund housing, aka handouts.