Why Labor’s housing plan’s a dud

Given rocketing materials and labour costs, there’s nothing in Labor’s new housing plan to directly help builders, while the real challenge will be exploding immigration numbers.

Reality check. Indeed, a series of humungous reality checks over that so-called plan to build 1.2m houses over the next five years.

First off and most fundamentally, ‘the government’ ain’t going to build them – neither federal nor any of the states – despite gushing headlines and breathless newscasts suggesting the opposite.

No, private builders have to do it; and there’s nothing in ‘the plan’ to give builders anything directly to actually help them build all those extra houses. It’s the lack of tradies and rocketing materials and labour costs that are hindering home building and sending hundreds of builders across Australia broke.

No, ‘the plan’ is all and only about ‘encouraging’ state governments to cut the red tape and get out of the way of new building. If you believe that’s going to happen, I’ve got a certain bridge to sell you.

For starters, even the ‘incentive’ money is pathetic - $3.5bn spread over the five years, and over the whole country. It’s a long, long time since there was any currency in the saying “a billion here, a billion there, and soon you’re talking serious money”.

And in this case, it’s not even a single devalued billion – just $700m each year.

Utterly pathetic, when you spread that over 8 state and territory budgets. For example, that might add $200m to NSW’s $100,000m-plus of annual revenue. And how much extra will a state have to spend – on infrastructure: roads, schools, hospitals and the rest; and services: nurses, teachers etc – to accommodate not just the extra houses but the extra people in them.

It is impossible to deny that this was just straight out cynical in-house Labor party grandstanding – with seven of the nine around the table Labor leaders – immediately ahead of the National Conference. The real elephant that was in the room, and which all those co-called leaders refused to see, is the massive immigration-driven population explosion – likely to add up to two million people over those five years.

If we added instead only, say, 800,000 permanent immigrants - and. just as crucially, actually started to exert some control over the even more right out-of-control so-called temporary migration: students, back-backers, special visa-holders and the like – we wouldn’t need the 1.2m houses (and all the extra infrastructure, and all the extra services costs). Indeed, we wouldn’t even need an extra one million. Here’s where the mindlessness comes full-circle and at some point in our future is really going to implode.

We have to ramp up the number of migrants to provide the workers to build the houses and infrastructure we need for those very same migrants – and with them all jostling in a series of consequent queues.

So, if we are going to aim for even more houses (and infrastructure), we will need even more migrants to catch up with the backlogs; and then even more migrants after that to catch up with their increased backlogs. With house builders having to fight with infrastructure builders for workers and materials.

While at the same time service delivery across the board gets further and further behind. And we have a government embarked on destroying our electricity system. This is not going to end well.

Originally published as Why Labor’s housing plan’s a dud