Help to Buy ...
If you can beat the queue
The government is now (somewhat implausibly) threatening a double dissolution over its “Help to Buy” legisation, in which the government would take an equity stake in homes, thereby helping buyers with the deposit.
150 people queuing for a rental inspection in Sydney (RealEstate.com)
As always with Albanese, the government has refused to negotiate with the Greens and is waving the “bloody shirt” of the 2009 vote on carbon emissions, ignoring the successful (until Abbott scrapped it) CPRS of 2010. An obvious, but so far not much discussed, question is whether the scheme is good enough to justify Greens support.
Because the scheme requires complementary state legislation, I was invited to appear before a Queensland Parliament committee on the subject. I didn’t have time for a full submission, so I sent an email covering the main points, which were
subsidies to home buyers are generally undesirable, since their main impact is to benefit existing homeowners.
The fact that eligibility is limited to 2000 places a year gives the scheme an undesirable lottery character
The top priority for public expenditure should be the construction of more social housing
I expanded on this a bit in my evidence (transcript) and gave some supplementary evidence on the need for social housing.
Summing up, the Greens should hold their ground on this. If they can’t get any useful concessions on housing policy, they should vote against this typically half-baked Labor thought bubble.
Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon
Read my newsletter
Build to Rent is more defensible, I think, and the Greens' starting position (100 % affordable) is too strong. A negotiated outcome would be good here, but no sign that Albo is interested.
I did a bit of modelling of likely outcomes of a double dissolution election, and my estimate is that Labor would have a better than even chance of losing seats in both houses. There are ALP functionaries who can do this sort of calculation, and those ALP functionaries know that there are Greens functionaries who can also do these calculations. I would be surprised if the talk of a double dissolution was anything more than performativity on Labor's part.