Australia has a new federal Housing Minister, Clare O’Neil, who is by all accounts energetic and open to new ideas.
That’s good because we are in the midst of a housing crisis along with most of the developed world, and the high price/cost of housing is leading to a general cost-of-living crunch and generational inequality.
So I have prepared a “To Do” list for her. If you could pass it on to her, that would be great.
Some of the things on the list are state responsibilities, but this is a national problem, so there should be national uniformity, best achieved through a COAG process led by the Commonwealth.
Here it is:
It’s a big hotch-potch of ideas, but they are connected by a conviction that to make housing more affordable requires dealing with both sides of the ledger – demand plus supply – as well as the psychology of it.
It would be better if there was a stated policy aim, preferably to reduce the ratio of house prices to incomes to what it was 25 years ago (three to four times versus the current seven to eight times), but I accept that would be politically difficult; no one wants to hear that housing wealth should be reduced. Better to just talk about buildi more houses and cutting taxes.
At a recent public forum, the head of the Property Council of Australia, Cath Evans, estimated that the taxation embedded in the cost of a new dwelling is between 30 and 40 per cent.
As I observed to Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas at the same forum, that’s the sort of taxation that’s imposed on something the government is trying to discourage,........