The biggest risk for a government making something an issue is that then they're often expected to follow through on it. And for some reason the Turnbull government has decided that housing affordability is one of the hills upon which it should die.
See, your friend and Treasurer Scott Morrison knows that you, The Average Australian, are concerned about housing prices in Australia. Not just buying houses but the slow march of increasing rents, which is driving working people to homelessness while social housing is being sold off at a rate of knots, as happened with the Sirius apartments in Millers Point since poor people certainly don't deserve views of Sydney Harbour.
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Sukkar: Get a 'highly paid job'
Michael Sukkar, a Coalition MP assigned with the job of tackling Australia's housing affordability problems, offers his advice on how to get on the property ladder.
"We're working on a package for the budget. It will deal with the challenges in housing affordability from those who are reliant on social housing in our community, all the way through to those who are trying to break in to the first home ownership market," Morrison told Sky News on Sunday. And housing is a legitimate problem that needs swift and decisive action.
So it's odd that the Turnbull government has chosen to take it on, since they have deliberately chosen to rule out any of the things they have the power to actually do - like change negative gearing or capital gains advantages - in favour of things which are state and local government responsibilities, like selling off public land and approving developments.
![Treasurer Scott Morrison: "I was pleased to see the support for trade in the G20 communique."](/web/20170404114503im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/n/w/i/f/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gurg33.png/1489912860009.jpg)
In fact, it sounds awfully like Morrison's plan will be focussed largely on making stern noises while dodging any actual responsibility.
What's worse is that while the Coalition NSW government are obediently making their housing plan more confusingly complex, the Victorian Labor government of Daniel Andrews has rather inconveniently taken up the housing affordability challenge, thereby putting the Victorian Liberals in the invidious position of either supporting their local opponents or defying their federal colleagues.
The federal government is clinging to the fiction that the problem is that there's not enough housing and that we need to hastily build more. The Victorian government, conversely, is removing stamp duty for first home buyers and levelling a tax on those who own property that sits empty.
And that might actually work, since the problem in Sydney and Melbourne doesn't appear to be a lack of properties - it's that a huge number of them are empty. Last year a UNSW study conservatively concluded that around 90,000 Sydney properties are unoccupied, as are around 83,000 properties in Melbourne.
The federal government's problem with making housing more affordable is that it becomes, by definition, cheaper. And that's not something that the federal government wants to see happen for some very understandable reasons.
Back in the Howard era Australians were encouraged to invest in housing as a form of wealth creation, partially as a way of addressing rental strain and mainly as a way to ensure people had assets and therefore didn't go selfishly claiming pensions later on. That's when the negative gearing and capital gains exemptions were introduced that made buying property such a sweet deal.
So now there are a lot of Australians who have put their retirement eggs in the basket marked "leveraging the hell out of my mortgage to buy more investment properties" for the last couple of decades and who will be therefore disadvantaged if the value of housing drops.
And then there's pure self interest at work too, since between a third and half of all our representatives have investment properties - the PM himself owns seven properties, for example. How keen would you say that our parliamentary representatives are to make their portfolios drop in value, especially for something as stupid as the greater good?
Also, as well we know thanks to the efforts of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, the NSW Liberals are so beloved by property developers that the party went to some effort to find a way of accepting donations from them despite those donations being completely illegal. If they suddenly become the party that makes property less lucrative, there'd be no donations to justify the creation of opaque entities like the Free Enterprise Foundation.
This vicious situation where housing is basically a casino game has led to the rise of the "rentvestor" - people who own properties in places they'd never live but rent in the nicer locations they could never afford, allowing them to enjoy all the stress of being a mortgage-holding landlord as interest rates creep back to normal while also experiencing the giddy thrill of powerlessness as a tenant.
Will housing become more affordable in Australia? Absolutely! And it could happen one of two ways.
This complex web of legislation can be gently and strategically unpicked via careful bipartisan cooperation across our different spheres of government in concert with the private sector in an effort to create a sane, universally beneficial housing system at all levels.
Alternatively, we can choose to leave things be until the housing bubble bursts and plunges Australia into a crippling recession.
And since this is politics in 2017, we can assume that Plan A is already off the table.
Get your tickets now for the Double Disillusionists podcast live at Giant Dwarf on Tuesday 7 March - tomorrow! - with Dom Knight and Andrew P Street joined by special guests Van Badham (The Guardian), Michael Hing (Triple J/SBS's The Feed) and Canberra insider Alice Workman (BuzzFeed)!
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