Housing

"Affordable" housing deja vu:

It was spruiked as a scheme to allow low and middle-income earners to purchase their first home in Canberra, but almost five years after signing on, some participants are yet to move in.

Instead, some buyers say they have been left stranded as they grapple with incomplete works while locked in contractual disputes with the builder.

[…]

Last month, Ms Lawther brought an independent assessor to her practical completion inspection, resulting in them both being told to leave the property due to unauthorised access.

In a subsequent email, the builder advised independent inspectors would not be allowed on site prior to handover because the homes had already been inspected and passed by the certifier.

[…]

Earlier in the process, buyers said they were shocked to discover their homes had not been built from brick, despite it being the only external material on the inclusions list.

Instead, the Suburban Land Agency endorsed the use of foam cladding, but admitted the builder had failed to properly communicate the change with the buyers. 

I don't usually follow the Federal Budget nonsense, as it's generally a lot of content-free platitudes and political horse race analysis, but my friend and colleague Kev seemed certain that the Albanese government (of all people) were taking a step in the right direction. So my cynicism led me to seek out business lobby press releases, half-expecting to find smoking guns all over the place. I was wrong. Of course the business lobby are not going to announce "This is fine!" They are professional whingers. To them, it's always the end of the world. However this one sunny exception stood out:

AFIA is also assessing announced changes to negative gearing, set to be limited to new residential property builds, and the decision to replace the 50 per cent CGT discount with cost base indexation and a minimum 30 per cent tax from July 2027, applying to all existing CGT assets.

“In terms of our housing markets, it is pleasing to see the government balance these major tax reforms with complementary supply-side measures – establishing a $2 billion local infrastructure fund and putting $227 million towards accelerating environment and planning approvals.”

"Supply side measures" means public subsidies (such as the 5% Deposit Scheme and the Help to Buy Scheme) to maintain the steady supply of borrowers that are the bread and butter of the finance industry, and critical to keeping property prices inflating at the pretty constant rate of the last quarter century.

Well, what a surprise!

Saul Eslake, an independent economist, said the scheme had likely been used by people who would have bought homes anyway while inflating their debt.

“The way it was expanded by Albanese goes to the heart of why we have the housing problems that we have,” Eslake said.

“Whenever governments do things that allow people to spend more on housing than they would have otherwise, they end up spending more on housing.”

A borrower with $50,000 in savings, if required to make a 20% deposit, would only have been able to borrow $200,000. Under the 5% deposit scheme, they would be able to borrow $1m

Recent polling has shown her party One Nation have pulled ahead of both Labor and the Coalition in popularity, largely thanks to her penchant for making sweeping and often inaccurate statements scapegoating minorities for the real crises at play in modern Australia.

Like most of Hanson’s stunts, it has garnered a lot of media attention. That’s both good and bad — good because it’s important to know what Hanson is espousing, but bad because it gives her the notoriety and airtime she so clearly seeks.

Here, we combat that approach by fact-checking her speech and debunking a handful of the incorrect claims she made throughout it.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has used her first-ever address to the National Press Club to launch a broad attack on the rights and existence of trans people, describing the movement for trans equality as a “militant force” that must be “confronted” and a “subversive transgender ideology” that must be “dismantled”.

In the 17 June speech in Canberra, Hanson claimed that “almost every instrument of government” was dedicated to what she described as a “transgender ideology which seeks to redefine humanity”. She also pledged to remove Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner and argued that transgender “propaganda” was being imposed on children in school.

Hanson used military-like languge to imply transgender people and their supporters are an attacking army (like ‘militant’, ‘force’, ‘insurgency’), language to imply disease (like ‘infecting’), and also used out-of-date language (such as ‘transgenderism’).

“But now I want to turn to one very, very important social and cultural issue facing this country. I refer firstly to the transgender insurgency. The transgender ideology has penetrated almost every regulatory authority and it is supported by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Dr Anna Cody, who in government I would sack. So too, the head of the Human Rights Commission, Hugh de Kretser.”

Hanson continued to comment on transgender people in sport, and who should be allowed in what bathrooms, before launching into LGBTQIA+ organisations being involved in regulatory bodies.

“We cannot be a multicultural society,” she told the packed club.

“We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella.”

Hanson also made a broadside attack on transgender rights, pledging to sack Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner and claiming “almost every instrument of government [is] dedicated to a transgender ideology which seeks to redefine humanity”.

The report, released tonight, recommends scrapping rules that force developers to include a minimum number of car park spaces when building housing.

The "Wasted Space" report found that upwards of 40 per cent of car parks were left empty each night in apartments in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.

"State and local governments typically require new housing to include off-street parking — often much more than residents want, needlessly driving up the price of housing," the report said.

The report found these parking minimums increased construction costs by $70,000 for a two-bedroom Sydney apartment.

Home ownership is falling fast among poorer Australians who are approaching retirement. Between 1981 and 2021, home ownership rates among the poorest 40 per cent of 45-54 year-olds fell from 68 per cent to just 54 per cent.

Most older working Australians who rent do not have sufficient savings to keep paying rent in retirement. The poorest 40 per cent of renting households aged 55-64 have less than $40,000 in net financial wealth.

Commonwealth Rent Assistance, which supplements the Age Pension for poorer retirees who rent, is far too low.

The government has lifted the maximum rate of Rent Assistance by 27 per cent – over and above inflation – in the past two budgets. But even after these increases, a single retiree who relies solely on income support can afford to rent just 4 per cent of one-bedroom homes in Sydney, 13 per cent in Brisbane, and 14 per cent in Melbourne.

And the rents paid by people who get Rent Assistance have increased nearly 1.5 times faster than the maximum rate of the payment since 2001.

Sounds familiar, in practical effect at least.

Most Vancouver renters were long ago priced out of the detached home market. Then they were priced out of the condo market. And now, the city’s zoning laws mandate that most new rental housing gets built in undesirable locations, unfairly exposing apartment-dwellers to the increased health risks that come from living on busy, arterial roads.

One of the legitimate purposes of zoning is to separate incompatible uses: to keep noxious factories and their emissions as far away from people’s homes and lungs as possible, for example. But zoning that bans apartments anywhere except busy streets does the opposite: it boosts the number of people exposed to health risks. On top of that, because renters typically have lower-incomes than owners, those increased risks fall disproportionately on those with less.

There’s a deeper political dynamic here, one that former Vancouver City Councilor Gordon Price has called The Grand Bargain:

From Expo 86 to the 2010 Olympics [Vancouver] has accommodated growth pressures on a small fraction of the city’s land, while avoiding the political unpleasantness of significant rezonings in built-out neighbourhoods, whether on the West Side, the East Side or even the West End.

Under this Grand Bargain, new housing is concentrated on busy streets, or on old industrial sites, while little to no change is permitted in neighborhoods of detached homes

Key findings

• The housing sub-function of the Federal Budget was $3.5 billion in 2021/22, but this did not include key housing support measures such as Commonwealth Rent Assistance and property tax concessions. With these included, actual 2021-2022 federal expenditure on housing is estimated at $27 billion.
• The share of federal housing spending going to the lowest 20% of income earners declined from 44% in 1993 to 23% in 2023, while the share going to the top 20% increased from 9% to 43%.
• In the last decade alone, the share going to the top 20% of earners has increased by over a third.
• The share of total federal housing expenditure going to property investors rose from 16.5% in 1993-94 to 61.4% in 2021-22.
• Investor tax concessions have grown from $1.5 billion in 2000 to an estimated $17 billion in 2024, effectively operating as a shadow housing policy with a significant impact on the market.
• In 2023-2024, federal investor tax breaks will be worth almost five times the amount spent by the Federal Government on social housing and homelessness services through the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement and the $2billion Social Housing Accelerator Fund, announced in 2023.
• Strategic expenditure on social housing and homelessness services, which are negotiated between the Federal and State/Territory Governments, once made up well over half of total federal housing spending. Now just 7% of total federal housing expenditure goes toward these programs.