While millions struggle to afford rent, let alone own a home, Australia’s politicians couldn’t be more removed from this reality. There is no housing crisis for them.
The register of members’ interests of the 47th parliament shows just how deeply our elected officials are invested—literally—in the housing market.
Nearly 95 percent of Australia’s 227 federal politicians own property. The total collective value of their property portfolios is at least $405 million, according to property website Domain. Fifteen MPs alone own 88 properties between them. And these are the people expected to solve the housing crisis?
Take Liberal MP Andrew Wallace. His company Wallco Property Group has been involved in more than a dozen property deals, including the $1.3 million sale of a five-unit property in Bargara, Queensland. And it’s not just the Liberals cashing in. Federal Labor MP Dr Michelle Ananda-Rajah owns seven properties across multiple states. Brendan O’Connor, another Labor MP, also owns seven properties, while Louise Miller-Frost and Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke own six each. Even the Greens, who do call for reform of property investor tax concessions, aren’t in the clear. Four out of the fifteen Greens MPs own multiple properties.
Let’s not forget Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who’s renting out his former home in Sydney’s Marrickville for $1,350 a week while living rent free at the Lodge in Canberra. As the house has no mortgage, that’s a $70,000 annual income stream (more than Australia’s median salary). According to news.com.au, Albanese recently listed his other investment property down the road in Dulwich Hill for an asking price of $1.9 million.
These politicians are active beneficiaries of the generous tax concessions on offer to property investors—the very policies that help to keep housing unaffordable for millions of people. According to Anglicare Australia’s latest <a>Widening the Gap report</a>, these tax breaks cost the government budget more than is spent on welfare. More than half of these concessions flow to the wealthiest 20 percent. 
Recent <a>research</a> by the University of New South Wales for the Australian Council of Social Services found that, far from the “mum and dad investor” image, the wealthiest 20 percent hold 82 percent of all investment property value, and own 90 times the total wealth of the poorest 20 percent. Our federal politicians sit comfortably within this cohort. The annual base salary for a federal MP is more than $233,000, and senior ministers earn well above that. The prime minister pulls in nearly $600,000 a year. 
Don’t expect our property-rich MPs to solve the housing crisis any time soon. For them, the housing crisis is nothing more than a game—and they’re the winners.

Cherish Kuehlmann

Housing crisis? Not for politicians

There has been uproar in the media in recent weeks over the Greens’ refusal to back the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF), Labor’s keynote housing policy. The ALP have launched vitriolic attacks on the Greens and their housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mathers, with Senator Penny Wong accusing him of “prioritising media attention” and suggesting that his “ego matters more than housing for women fleeing domestic violence and older women at risk of homelessness”. 
The Greens are right to block the HAFF. There is nothing in the bill that will substantially alleviate the housing crisis currently gripping the country. 
When announcing the policy, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese claimed that the HAFF will deliver $10 billion for 30,000 affordable homes over five years. But there are currently more than 160,000 people on the public housing waitlist, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute calculated that 727,300 additional dwellings would need to be built by 2036 to match demand for social housing. Albanese’s promise of 6,000 homes a year barely scratches the surface. 
It is not unprecedented for the government to build large amounts of public housing. As the Greens point out in their <a href="blank">dissenting report</a> on the HAFF, “If the federal government were to match rates of public housing construction in the 1960s, then the government would build 150,000 public homes over the next five years”. Under the 1949–1966 Robert Menzies Liberal government, 15 percent of all new housing stock was state-owned public housing. 
Labor has promised $10 billion for affordable housing, but not as direct funding. Instead, that money will be allocated to the Future Fund, a state-owned investment fund established by the John Howard Liberal government. Money will be allocated for housing grants only when the fund returns dividends on the investment. 
Government funding for housing shouldn’t be contingent on the volatility of the stock market. That $10 billion would be better spent on immediately expanding public housing, rather than gambling public money. In 2022, the <a href="blank">Future Fund</a> reported a 3.7 percent net loss on its investments. In its original form, the HAFF bill required no annual minimum spend, so not a cent would have been spent on housing in the case of a loss.
Following pressure from the Greens over the lack of guaranteed funding provisions, Labor amended the HAFF to make its $500 million annual spending cap a minimum spend instead. Still, $500 million a year won’t go very far. Based on this figure, <a href="blank">Crikey projects</a> that the HAFF may build 14,000 dwellings over five years. Even worse, the <a href="blank">Grattan Institute estimates</a> that each social housing unit costs roughly $300,000; according to this figure, the HAFF would deliver approximately 8,000 homes in five years. In short, Albanese’s promised 30,000 homes over five years aren’t guaranteed. 
The HAFF legislation outlines that grants will be allocated for “acute housing needs, social and affordable housing”. This is not the same as public housing, which is built and managed by the government—social and affordable housing can still be operated by private developers, leaving tenants vulnerable to the market.
In the instance of “affordable housing”, rent is capped at only 20 percent below the market rate. National rents for units have increased by a massive 26 percent in the past year, according to the latest <a href="blank">Domain Rent Report</a>, so houses which are today considered “affordable” were the unattainably expensive homes of twelve months ago. 
Instead of expanding their public housing stock, state governments have been demolishing existing units and handing the land to private developers to build social housing. This is set to happen with <a href="blank">the demolition of the Waterloo Estate</a> in NSW, the largest public housing complex in the country. Labor’s HAFF is a further attack on the idea that governments should provide secure public housing for those who need it. 
The Greens have rightly blocked this legislation, claiming it will worsen the housing crisis and do nothing for renters. The Greens are demanding a direct investment of $2.5 billion a year in social and affordable housing (reduced from their initial demand of $5 billion), and $1.6 billion to coordinate a national rent freeze. 
Labor recently launched a petition titled “Stop the Greens blocking affordable homes”, which claims that every day their legislation is delayed amounts to $1.3 million less spent on affordable homes. The government has ruled out rent caps by claiming that they will disincentivise housing construction, blaming housing supply as the key issue impacting affordability and posing handouts to developers as the solution. 
The latest Census indicated that in 2021 more than 1 million properties stood vacant across Australia. This means that around one in ten Australian homes sit empty, artificially reducing stock in the rental market. The housing crisis is a problem of a profit-driven market-based model, not a lack of supply. At best, the HAFF delivers barely any funding for housing. At worst, it will hand out even more funding and public land to private developers for privatised housing. 
Labor could easily deliver immediate solutions for genuinely affordable housing, given they’re in power federally and in every state and territory except Tasmania. They could implement policies to reverse and then prevent startling rent increases, further protections for renters and an immediate injection of funds for public housing with rents capped according to income. A 2021 <a href="blank">parliamentary committee on housing affordability</a> found that $290 billion would be needed over the next twenty years to address the shortfall in affordable housing. The federal government could make up that funding in just ten years if they abandon the stage three tax cuts, projected to cost $313 billion. 
The Greens’ housing proposals do not paint a complete picture of what needs to happen to fully address the crisis, but they are a start. That they have positioned themselves as an obstacle to the HAFF is a step forward for the public discussion around housing in Australia. They have also managed to draw some minor concessions out of Labor (the $500 million minimum spend and an immediate injection of up to $2 billion in housing funding for the states). If the Greens had waved the policy through, in the way they did with Labor’s 2022 Climate Change Bill, the Albanese government would have been seen to have implemented a “historic investment” in housing, and the topic would have been ticked off their to-do list while millions still struggled with increased costs.
This country needs a major overhaul of the entire housing sector to override the interests of the landlords, banks and property developers, and instead put ordinary people first. The Albanese government has demonstrated that it is utterly unwilling to do that.

The Greens are right to fight Labor on housing

I was arrested by New South Wales Police at midnight last Friday after organising a protest for housing justice. 
The cops came to my house and detained me on a charge of “aggravated trespass”. I was taken into custody before being released at 4am. The charge is serious—a guilty verdict carries a maximum penalty of twelve months in prison and/or a $13,200 fine. It is an intimidation tactic by the police.
The student protest earlier that day rallied outside the Reserve Bank of Australia in Martin Place, demanding immediate measures to ease the housing crisis, including rent caps and higher taxes on corporations to pay for public housing. 
Low-income renters and struggling homeowners are feeling the worst effects of the housing crisis. Landlords are jacking up rents or refusing to open their investment properties to renters at all. More than 164,000 properties in the Greater Sydney area sit empty while <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/29/social-housing-stock-barely-changes-as-waiting-lists-blow-out-and-rental-stress-doubles-across-australia">163,000 people are on social housing waitlists</a> across the state. Meanwhile, the Big Four banks have raked in record profits from interest on ballooning household debt. 
Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe recently told a Senate estimates hearing that “the country is better off from having strong, resilient, effective banks”. Better off for who? For the rich and powerful who are benefitting in this crisis—the bosses, the bank owners, the wealthy landlords, and the federal and state governments who back them up.
This is not an isolated attack on our democratic right to protest. In 2022, the Perrottet Liberal government passed the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/inconvenience-now-major-crime-nsw">Roads and Crimes Legislation Amendment Bill</a> with the support of the ALP. The new laws make it a serious crime to protest on major roads or near major facilities. 
Climate activist <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/fighting-climate-justice-interview-activist-violet-coco">Violet Coco</a> was last year sentenced to fifteen months in jail, eight without parole, for merely blocking one lane of traffic on Sydney Harbour Bridge for 25 minutes. (She has been released from custody pending an appeal.) 
Attacks on democracy need to be publicly opposed and fought. The laws are a threat to anyone trying to fight for a better world.
We will keep up the campaign against the banks, the government and the landlords. Housing should be a human right, not a commodity. 
Join the next protest organised by the National Union of Students and “GET A ROOM: Students for Affordable Housing”: <a href="https://fb.me/e/25ZB1c4rJ">Friday 24 February, 5:30pm at Sydney Town Hall</a>.
Cherish Kuehlmann is the UNSW Student Representative Council education officer.

Housing crisis? Not for politicians

The Greens are right to fight Labor on housing

I was arrested for protesting the housing crisis

Other Media

Shop

Conferences

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us