Imagine you have a friend who is morbidly obese.
They come to you and confess: “I can’t keep living like this, I’ve decided to take action.”
Then they explain their plan:
“There are two things I will not do: diet or exercise.
“However, I’ve been researching on the internet and I’ve come up with two amazing solutions: first, I’m going to drink 100ml of castor oil each night, which an ad I read promises will ‘burn my fat like a blowtorch’. And I’ve also bought some electrode pulsing pads that I saw on The Morning Show. All I have to do is stick one to each of my butt cheeks and they simulate running a marathon, all while I sit on the couch and watch Larry on the telly.”
Okay, so what I’ve just described is like both of the major parties’ policies on tackling housing affordability.
The fact is that neither Labor nor the Coalition wants to do anything that will cause house prices to fall … and become more affordable.
Why not?
Well, think of it from a politician’s point of view: a third of voters own their own home outright, another third are paying their home off, while the final third rent. In other words, the overwhelming majority of voters want to see their homes rise in value.
So that means that politicians need to play a game of legislative limbo and come up with pole-dancing property policies that really don’t achieve anything.
And the closest match to those pulsating electrode pads has to be the Government’s signature housing policy, the Help to Buy Scheme, which encourages low-income earners with just a 2% deposit to buy a home. Now I don’t need your vote, so I’ll tell you this is a dumb idea: broke people shouldn’t buy homes.
So I know what you’re thinking …
You’re thinking it’s easy for me to take potshots at obese people, and politicians (or both, hello Clive Palmer!), yet it’s much harder to come up with anything constructive myself.
So let me give it a go.
The biggest losers from our housing dumpster fire, ironically, are not voters.
It’s Aussie kids.
Specifically, more than 76,000 Aussie children under the age of 18 who sought help from homelessness services in 2022–23. Almost 16,000 of these kids were alone – unaccompanied by a parent or caregiver. The other 60,000 kids sought help with their family, according to Homelessness Australia.
Know this: the long-term trauma of a childhood spent without a stable roof over your head, of constantly moving schools, and absorbing the impact of Mum or Dad being constantly stressed about where they will live, is real and it’s long lasting.
Now this is something the Government can fix … but again, politically, it’s not really a vote-winner.
Many years ago politicians decided it was a better vote-grabber to give tax breaks to investors to provide private rentals, rather than build more public housing.
It hasn’t worked.
Who’s going to vote for the people who don’t get a vote?
Tread Your Own Path!