James Morrow: Greens housing demands expose Labor’s own property problem

Greens demands to socialise the housing market will be overriden by Labor’s plan to enrich its business and union mates while writing the middle class out of property dreams, write James Morrow.

There is an old test people do sometimes to determine how clever their dog is.

The idea is that you drape a tea towel over Fido’s head to obscure his vision and the quicker he realises why the lights went out and shakes it off, the more likely the animal is to be accepted into doggy Mensa.

A similar game can be played with voters.

Only instead of tea towels, you tell them the latest Greens policy and count the number of nanoseconds before they say words to the effect of “that’s the daftest thing I’ve ever heard, are you sure you’re all right to drive?”

Because the almost touching thing about the Greens is that they don’t let anything – not history, not economics, not human nature – stand in the way of their relentless push to turn Australia into a socialist basket case.

Molly the Dog might have better ideas on how to fix housing than the Greens.

Just check out their latest plan to solve the housing crisis.

Slap a cap on rents and demand billions to be spent on public housing for the masses.

As the old saying goes “what could go wrong?”

This, in essence, was the demand thrown down by the Greens on Sunday as their condition for supporting Labor’s Housing Affordability Future Fund (also a daft idea, but for reasons we’ll get to in a moment).

Australian Greens Max Chandler-Mather holds a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

To go back to the tea towel test, it’s the sort of idea that sounds great for about a moment until the questions start coming.

Such as when, in the history of human economics, has forcing people to charge less than market rates for something led to more of it being on the market?

When it comes to housing, the evidence is thin on the ground.

The Greens claimed Sunday that rent caps have worked in the US state of New Jersey, though there is no evidence that there is a state-wide rent cap in that state (landlords are allowed increases of up to 7.9 per cent this year).

Economists who have studied much more comparable markets like New York and London say pretty much without exception that rent control in those cities is never more than a short term fix that does little to keep housing affordable for low and middle-income tenants.

There are other questions too.

Like, how is all this public housing they want supposed to be built in an era of rising costs and ongoing supply chain issues?

Oddly, the Greens seem less keen on talking about the demand side of the housing problem, i.e. record immigration. Picture: AAP Image/Brendan Esposito)

As with NSW Labor’s demand that housing densities be radically increased in well off neighbourhoods, unless you want to start talking about compulsory acquisition, the whole scheme runs smack into the reality that land prices in desirable areas are very, very high indeed.

And why are the same Greens who once upon a time couldn’t be shut up on the subject of population and sustainability now ignoring Labor’s wholesale opening of the immigration spigot that will dump somewhere between 500,000 and one million likely renters into the market over the next few years?

Honestly, this is the sort of thing that is worthy of Bud Lite levels of mockery.

Especially as the Greens are a political party that, when it comes to power at the LGA level, demands that no one put up so much as a back shed lest it disturb heritage or amenity or whatever their excuse is this week.

Max Chandler-Mather, the party’s housing spokesman no less, is currently backing a fight against an 850 home development to be built on the site of a former army barracks in his hometown of Brisbane.

A general view of Meriton Apartments in Zetland, Sydney. Rent or own, is this the future of Sydney? Picture: NCA Newswire / Gaye Gerard

Really, what else would you expect of a party whose corflutes, come election time, are so frequently seen attached to the iron lace terraces of tastefully renovated ex-workers houses that now trade somewhere around the $3 million mark?

Funny as this is, it is also a huge headache for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Both he and the Greens are keen to stir up class and generational warfare against “Boomer landlords”, who serve the same rhetorical purpose as land-holding kulaks did for Stalin.

This is not to say that either Albo or Adam Bandt are Stalinists, but rather that for both men a property-holding middle class that isn’t dependent on government makes a hell of a compelling scapegoat.

The problem is that while the Greens want to eliminate the middle man (er, person) and turn the state into everyone’s landlord, Labor is clever enough to realise it wins by putting as many middle men as possible into the mix.

That is the cynical genius of Labor’s housing policies.

By creating massive pots of money (the Housing Australia Future Fund) and income streams (huge tax-advantaged “build to rent” estates) to solve the problem, Labor not only intends to chase ordinary kulaks out of the investment property market but also bind banks, businesses and unions even more tightly to the ALP.

It may not solve the problem and will push the country that much further backwards to pre-reform era corporatism.

But for Labor, the hope is it keeps them out of the doghouse.