I haven’t read the article and I’m not Australian but throwing a random guess out: isn’t there a political issue about the conservative liberals stopping the labor party from rolling out a low income housing program that has historically paid for itself before?
No - our government is generally able to get things done. There might be vocal disagreement by the opposition party, but they can rarely block things. Also on this particular issue everyone agrees something needs to be done… it’s just not clear what can be done.
Social housing for low income people is an entirely different issue. This article is talking about high income families who still can’t afford a home.
If you want to buy a typical family home in a major city, the loan repayments are higher than the entire income of even the highest paid jobs a young person can get (lawyer, etc). Even if a husband and wife both work full time, the amount of money is not even close to within reach.
No bank will let you take out a loan for that much money unless you’re covering a large portion of the purchase by selling another home that you bought 20 years ago. How is someone who graduated from law school in 2023 supposed to have bought a home 20 years ago?
I’m young and was able to buy a home recently… but I was only able to do that by choosing to live in an unusually small home on the outskirts of a regional city (the nearest “proper” city is a thousand miles away…). And also I got in before the pandemic - property values have gone up by 1.5x in the last two years in my suburb. I don’t think we could afford it now. We also have a kid now, so we can’t work full time… even at the price we paid two years ago, the bank wouldn’t give us a loan anymore now that we’re not able to both work full time.
Honestly, the Labour party is not truly interested in doing this. In USA politics (assuming you’re familiar with it) the left and right are further apart than in Australian politics.
We have the Greens party which is the left leaning party and the Nationals which are the right. Labour and Liberal are on opposite sides of the middle and they team up with the Greens and the Nationals (respectively) to make up the numbers.
It’s more talking about regular private housing than public or social housing. Social housing itself is more of a semi-private thing too, and is more of a band-aid than a real fix.
Massive investment in proper government funded public housing would be one solution, along with a substantial improvement in renters rights. And the article is suggesting removing some concessions that encourage housing as investment, which would help and the public might accept (but previous elections have suggested otherwise).
