We are in the midst of a housing crisis. One obvious way to alleviate this would be to build hundreds of thousands of public housing properties. But the state and federal Labor governments have refused to do this. Instead, they are offering tax cuts for the rich and handouts to private developers.
“I don’t get people stopping me in the streets and complaining that the value of their house has gone up”—so said then Prime Minister John Howard in 2003, when asked about house prices that had jumped 109 percent since 1995. Howard’s implication was that all homeowners were benefiting from the increasing cost of housing, with “ordinary mums and dads” living in properties that had made them millionaires.
There are two sides of the housing crisis in Australia.
“If you don’t like it, move out.” This is the message from landlords to tenants who can’t afford rent increases amid a housing crisis that continues to worsen.