OPINION
Poet A. D. Hope famously described Australia as a land of “five cities, like five teeming sores”. If Anthony Albanese has his way, it will be teeming sores from sea to shining sea. What little of Australia that isn’t buried under a “forest of windfarms” or “endless arrays of solar panels disappearing like a mirage into the desert” will be carpeted with mile upon mile of drab, Soviet-style high density housing.
Hyperbole? Just a little, maybe. But, taking the Albanese government’s policies as a whole, it’s not entirely far-fetched either. As even “Net Zero” advocate, former Chief Scientist Alan Finkel admits, such a policy would necessitate “carpeting” the landscape with wind farms, solar panels, and massive transmission lines. Add to that, a million migrants and counting over the next three years, in the midst of a crisis.
And a government that says it’s here to help…
Landlords will be banned from raising rents more than once a year and $3.5bn poured into state, territory and local government coffers, under a national cabinet housing strategy giving premiers and chief ministers more influence over migration and the flow of skilled workers.
“Skilled workers”, my arse. The “skilled” stream — which in reality, often really means cheap labour — accounts for less than half of the millions of migrants packing into Australia under successive governments obsessed with turbo-charging mass migration. The majority of migrants flood into the country under the “family reunion” scheme — making Australia the nursing home of the Third World.
All those new people need new houses — creating the housing crisis gripping Australia.
Albanese and his cronies are about to put the housing crisis on steroids.
Anthony Albanese, who described the package as the “most significant reforms to housing policy in a generation”, said the federal government would establish a performance-based $3bn fund to increase the national housing accord target to 1.2 million new homes.
Under pressure from the Greens and social services advocates to strengthen renters’ rights, national cabinet agreed to move towards limiting rent increases to once a year, protecting tenants from no-fault evictions and limiting break-lease fees.
So, investors will flee the rental market altogether, making the crisis even worse. Those who stay will simply slam tenants with bigger-than-ever rent increases every year.
And the few scraps of arable land not paved over for “renewables” will be turned into dreary housing projects.
After decades of failure by federal, state and local governments to streamline onerous approvals, zoning and land-use rules, Mr Albanese unveiled a national planning reform blueprint to overhaul outdated planning restrictions that had crunched supply […]
The planning reforms – if delivered – would be a game changer for developers and property investors, with faster approvals, bigger land releases and strategic zoning decisions focused on medium and high-density housing.
The Australian
The only upside to all this is that Albanese is making the same mistakes as Jacinda Ardern. Airy-fairy, half-arsed policies are all well and good — until a politician is stupid enough to commit to specific targets.
Anthony Albanese has made big and bold promises to solve Australia’s generational housing and rental crisis, headlined by key performance indicators that if not achieved spells trouble for Labor.
Under pressure from the Greens and Coalition on his left and right flanks, the Prime Minister has made a virtue in government of setting clear targets on everything from housing and emissions to domestic violence and renewables.
The Australian
But, as Ardern learned, setting specific, grandiose targets and then failing hopelessly to meet them, is a recipe for embarrassment. Albanese is out to make Kiwibuild look like a model of policy achievement.
“The original plan … was for one million new homes. An additional 200,000 homes with $3bn allows for an incentive of $15,000 per additional home over and above the one million that had previously been agreed to.”
So, 1.2 million homes in five years. That’s 240,000 homes every year. 658 homes a day. To date, new home builds peaked at less than 200,000 per year in 2020. But that was an exceptional year — since then, builds have plunged to less than half that.
HIA deputy managing director Jocelyn Martin said the government’s target of 1.2 million homes over five years was ambitious but needed “if we are going to meet current and future demands for housing and keep housing affordable“.
The Australian
And when they inevitably fail to appear, Albanese will be mincemeat for any halfway decent opposition.