Why this is the housing fight Albanese had to have

There seemed to be some warmth in the wi-fi in Parliament House on Monday when Housing Minister Clare O’Neil caught up with Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather to try to negotiate a deal on a new program to help homebuyers get into the market. The conversation was online, with O’Neil in Canberra and Chandler-Mather in Brisbane, and by all accounts it was cordial. There was no bickering, and no shouting match – but, unfortunately, no deal.

A house divided: (Clockwise from top left) Adam Bandt, Anthony Albanese, Peter Dutton, Clare O’Neil and Max Chandler-Mather.Credit:

This wasn’t the first attempt by Labor and the Greens to find common cause on one of the biggest problems facing the country. With the housing crisis growing steadily worse, O’Neil and Chandler-Mather met four weeks ago to see if the Greens might vote for the homebuyer scheme, known as Help to Buy. That followed months of earlier talks. In the end, it turned out to be a slow trek to an impasse.

Now the time for cordial conversation is well and truly over. Labor is furious with the Greens over the delay in the Senate this week on a policy that Anthony Albanese promised at the last election. Help to Buy is only a small answer to a vast problem, given that it would help only 10,000 or so homebuyers each year, but something is better than nothing. And the Greens made sure Labor got nothing.

“It is problematic for the Greens to see Labor making any progress on housing before the election,” says one Labor figure. The closer the election, the less room for compromise.

The truth is that Labor and the Greens are dialling up the diatribes because their relations have never been worse. Labor and Green politicians used to display more goodwill when they passed each other in the corridors of Parliament House, but there is more sniping these days at this basic human level. The political rivalry is intense: the Labor primary vote has slumped, which means everyone is speculating about minority government, which means the Greens are playing for the balance of power.

No wonder the prime minister is grumpy. Albanese put his temper in the spotlight in an interview with Patricia Karvelas on ABC Radio National on Thursday morning when he complained that her questions were “not terribly clever” because she wanted to know if changes to the tax rules on negative gearing were on the agenda. He wasn’t rude or intemperate, but he wasted a big part of the interview.

In fact, questions about negative gearing are central to the debate. The Greens want Labor to reverse course on tax policy and break an election promise, which would deliver a political gift to Peter Dutton, by agreeing to scrap these concessions for property investors. There is no sign Albanese would take that leap, so why grumble about a question?

Not that Albanese has cornered the market in crabbiness. Greens leader Adam Bandt has been so enraged at his press conferences that he may one day need medical help. Dutton grew very touchy about questions on the ABC’s 7.30 program in February when the host, Sarah Ferguson, asked about his political performance.

The Senate vote this week was a manoeuvre to drag out the housing debate. The most important vote in the upper house was a vote to delay a vote.

This does not mean a double-dissolution election. While the Senate did not pass the Labor housing bill on Wednesday – subject to expert dispute about whether delay qualifies as a refusal to pass – the government would only have a trigger if it came back in December for another vote. That is not happening. The election threat was billed as drama, but it played like comic opera.

Anyone who wants a fix to the housing crisis, meanwhile, must wait longer. There is no time left for Labor to deliver any practical benefit from Help to Buy before the election, even if the law passes. Labor will be unable to deliver on the big idea it took to the last election – and it will be within its rights to blame Bandt and Dutton.

Would Help to Buy help much? As stated, it only supports 10,000 buyers a year and it has complex rules about who can qualify. It also requires the Commonwealth to take on $5.5 billion in debt to pay for some of the equity in each of the homes – a red line for those worried about federal debt.

O’Neil was refreshingly direct about this. “This bill is not the silver bullet to Australia’s housing crisis, because there isn’t a silver bullet,” she said. This is right. The only workable response to the housing shortage, whichever party is in power, is to use as many policies as possible to increase supply. The Labor strategy is to keep talking about the full list of policies, not just the one that was blocked. That includes $10 billion for the Housing Australia Future Fund, a $3 billion payment to the states to build new homes, a $2 billion payment to the states for social housing and $4.6 billion in higher payments in Commonwealth Rent Assistance, as well as the $5.5 billion for Help to Buy.

Bandt and Dutton are starting to look more alike than they would care to admit. Dutton is the conservative warrior who keeps a tight hold of the Liberals by veering to the right on every big call. Bandt is the progressive champion who veers to the left in a party room that wants an increasingly strident stance on bigger taxes, higher spending and more state ownership.

Both leaders take the safest path to keeping their jobs and mobilising their true believers at the next election. Both avoid the riskier paths taken by their former leaders – the failed attempt by ex-PM Malcolm Turnbull to unify the liberals and conservatives in the Coalition, and the experiment by former Greens leader Richard Di Natale in what he called “mainstream progressive” values. Both share a relentless derision for Albanese over the way he ends up stuck in the middle of every argument – on housing, on Gaza, on the economy.

Albanese seems at times like someone who is minding his manners at a dinner table while the guys to his left and right lunge past him to grab the food. Nobody asks politely for the salt and pepper at this political banquet – so the only response for the prime minister is to get the elbows out.

That is why Labor needed this impasse in the Senate. Labor took a hard line against the Coalition and the Greens by pushing back on every complaint about its housing policies, even at the risk of defeat in the Senate. And there were no distractions like the census dispute earlier this month: Australians watching politics from afar would have seen the government talking solely about a key factor in the cost of living.

Labor tried for an outcome, and got obstruction instead. It did not get the law it wanted, but it got the argument it needed.

David Crowe is chief political correspondent.