Housing is quickly becoming the most potent political issue facing the Albanese government.
Labor is being squeezed from both sides: by the Greens over the issue of renters’ rights; and by the Coalition over housing affordability and mortgage costs.
It is starting to bite electorally. Housing affordability, whether it is renting or buying, is now the most significant drag for Labor from an issues perspective.
A recent poll published in The Australian shows that housing is now the government’s worst-performing issue with a net satisfaction rating of minus 58.
Just like Kevin Rudd was fighting on two fronts over climate change, Anthony Albanese is being attacked from both sides over the housing supply crisis.
And history shows it never usually ends well for governments forced to fight multiple battles over a centrepiece policy.
In the case of housing – a lack of it and the soaring costs – it has the potential to be more scarring for the government than the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was for Rudd, considering the backdrop of current economic conditions.
Labor is in no-man’s land on this issue, while every housing measure or indicator is going backwards: housing starts down 7 per cent; first-home buyers at their lowest level; and rents up by 11 per cent.
The Prime Minister’s promise of one million new homes in the next five years is looking more and more like a pipe dream every day.
With his $10bn housing fund stalled in the Senate, Albanese is now going to the states and territories for political assistance as Labor finds itself on the wrong side of the answer.
The Greens have become well skilled in identifying cohorts of disaffected voters and going after them. They are showing no sign of budging.
The minor party has identified renters as their target. It already has direct access to many of them, as most younger voters are renters – and renters who may never seek to buy a house. The Greens believe they can win them over by promising crazy stuff such as capping their rents. And it appears to be succeeding.
It becomes an appealing notion for this group and it explains why the Greens are being so belligerent over the housing bill and their refusal to back it without unrealistic commitments from Labor to slap a national rent freeze over the private property market.
The Greens are eating into Labor’s territory and it is making the Labor left nervous.
On the other side, mortgage holders are beginning to switch from frustration to anger at a dozen interest rate rises in almost as many months, with the Labor government having presided over 11 of them.
The Coalition has identified aspirational homeowners as being at the heart of a Liberal revival. Opposition housing spokesman Michael Sukkar described them as the new forgotten people.
Peter Dutton is also seeking to own the other cohort of renters – renters who are seeking to buy.
There is a rich irony in Albanese enlisting the states to solve the problem at national cabinet next week, in the face of Greens opposition to the Housing Australia Future Fund.
The danger in this approach is that it signals that the commonwealth has lost control of the problem.
But it also ignores the reality that much of the reason the country is facing a housing crisis is because of the states and territories.
Addicted to housing revenue at one level, and enslaved to nimbyism on another, the states have proven incapable of fixing a supply issue that is of their own creation.
If the solution was as easy as getting the premiers around a table, then it would have been done a long time ago.