Greens housing push a blueprint to squeeze supply

For all their claims to support renters battling to find homes, the Greens’ campaign against the Albanese government’s $10bn Housing Australia Future Fund would devastate the nation’s housing supply and hurt working-class mum-and-dad property investors saving for their future. The issue may not be worth triggering a double dissolution but Anthony Albanese is right to stand firm against what is still a minor protest movement. From the comfort of the crossbench where the minor party will never have to make any real decisions, the Greens’ attitude reeks of arrogance. Not for the first time, they are trying to dictate government actions far beyond their limited electoral support.

A two-year freeze on rental increases and scrapping legitimate tax breaks for private investors are top of the Greens’ hit list, Joe Kelly reports on Thursday. As well as a blueprint for driving investors out of the sector, further squeezing rental housing supply, dictating what owners can and cannot charge for their own properties smacks of the central planning diktats of politbureaus. Rents have soared. But so have the loan repayments of landlords. Some who value good long-term tenants have held rents down. Others have not. Either way, it is their property and their choice.

Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather claims “if Labor spent as much on public housing as they are on tax breaks for property investors, Australia could build over 100,000 public homes a year and tackle the housing crisis within a decade”. Not if the supply of privately owned properties to rent dried up, as it would. In 1985, the Hawke-Keating government disallowed negative gearing of interest expenses on properties bought after July that year. But it fully restored it in 1987 partly to increase investment in the sector and the availability of rental properties, especially in Sydney. Government housing authorities in Australia have a poor record of delivery. Reducing the availability of private rental housing in favour of building up the government sector would carry a heavy risk of reducing overall supply, driving up rents even further.

The opposition’s intention to vote down the legislation in the Senate is grounded in more sensible objections. Opposition housing spokesman Michael Sukkar said the Coalition did not support Labor spending $10bn to capitalise a fund with uncertain returns and no guaranteed revenue stream. Neither can the government say how many houses the fund would build, or where, or when the fund would make a return, Mr Sukkar said.

The Greens’ attitude to the proposed HAFF reform smacks of their manic desire to force the government’s hand to impose vastly higher taxes and higher spending in general. It is too irresponsible to be taken seriously. The minor party has threatened to sink Labor’s planned strengthening of the petroleum resource rent tax in the Senate unless the $2.4bn in extra revenue from the measure can be doubled. As the Prime Minister told parliament, the minor party had embraced a “we want more, therefore we will have nothing” attitude towards legislation. Nor does the minor party’s condemnation of the government’s relatively significant increase in JobSeeker as “paltry” make sense. After indexation changes, a JobSeeker recipient with no dependants would receive an increase of $56 a fortnight. Housing Minister Julie Collins has reintroduced the housing legislation to HAFF that would provide $500m each year to be spent on social and affordable housing – a figure the Greens demand be increased fivefold to $2.5bn a year. Ms Collins wants opponents of the legislation “to stand with us now to deliver that safety and security a home provides”. That may be an overstatement. What matters most is that the government not cave in to unrealistic demands to make it happen