Albanese should remember courage on housing cuts both ways
It takes a certain audacity to be both attacker and conciliator, except perhaps in politics, where this is often just part of the job, a dark art of the profession. This week we saw federal Housing Minister Clare O'Neil take on both roles.
In an interview with The Age, the minister offered a defence of Labor's housing policies and its struggles to hit its targets, and in the process undertook a thinly veiled attack on the states.
'Planning laws at the state level are being used much too much to protect existing residents, and not enough to address the fact that we've got millions of people who are in housing distress. We need more housing of all kinds, and medium-density housing in the middle-ring suburbs is obviously going to be a really important part of the mix,' she said.
This pivot on planning was noted in The Age's reporting as a notable shift. Three years ago, when federal Labor pledged in its budget to build 1 million properties between 2024 and mid-2029 (since upgraded to 1.2 million) it had very different avenues of action.
It is likely to fall almost 300,000 short of the later target, according to the recent report State of the Housing System from the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council. In fact, new housing supply was at its lowest point in a decade and woefully trailing demand.
So what then of Labor's policies? At the recent election, it said it would guarantee 5 per cent deposits of all first home buyers to ease the burden of lenders' mortgage insurance. It would also provide $10 billion to equity programs with state government and private developers to build 100,000 homes for first-time buyers. In June 2023, Albanese announced a $2 billion fund called the Social Housing Accelerator. This was at a time when the Greens were blocking moves in the Senate related to Labor's $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund.
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Having fought loudly for various of these measures against the opposition and the Greens, the government now appears to be crab-walking towards the last refuge of scoundrels in our Federation – blame-shifting.
There were signs of this shift last week too when Andrew Leigh, assistant minister for productivity, competition, charities and treasury, gave a speech noting 'many of the levers lie with the states. And the systems need to change'. He launched a stinging attack on North Sydney Council in particular.
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