ACT Greens' housing plan may be overly ambitious but ideas are worth exploring

There once was a time that the Greens stood for matters environmental, I don’t recognise this party or any of their hare brained ideas anymore.
Housing every single person in the ACT is NOT the function of local government.

housing is not the role of government. Reducing the red tape and compliance costs of building housing definitely is something they should be doing. releasing land at a faster rate would also help reduce the cost of new housing. Once again the Greens show they have no idea how an actual economy works.

Housing market is indeed broken. Broken by populist policies, excessive tax and red tape to finance bankrupt communist housing utopia. Canberra housing market worked far better when Greens MLAs rented and bought their first homes before they become MLAs. Housing market was like a well working car in hands of drunk drivers who “fixed” it by overloading it with tax, then reshaped its body with tenancy legislation hammer, dropping regulation spanners and various red tapes in its engine, throwing out extra passenger seats with 120 m2 building limit, wrecking out and selling parts (land and public houses) for profit, overfilling its tank with “infill policies”, rewiring electric on “outcome based planning approach” and then blaming the manufacturer as it can’t drive. Oh well the car isn’t working despite our relentless works to improve it. So much effort and such a bad car! How about we just buy another toy with $5-9 billions at your expense folks? Give or take a billion or two, why count public money when we see another mirage in the horizon? – Yep, it’s great idea worth exploring.

Rather than The Greens creating ideologically driven housing solutions, just maybe if the Albanese government reduced our record immigration numbers, we’d have less demand on our housing stocks?

Maybe if the local ALP/Greens reduced things like Land Tax and other costs that flow through into the cost of housing, we need less ideological solutions?

“ACT Greens’ housing plan may be overly ambitious…”

Ian, I believe the term you are looking for there is delusional.

Not ambitious enough but far better than the do nothing major parties bending over backwards for vested interests, and donors.

The state governments have undoubted power to fix rents and to fix the price of land. They decide how land shall be used and subdivided. They can themselves acquire, resume and sub-divide land or set up local government bodies to do so. A person purchasing a house from the War Service Homes Division of the Housing Commission saves £500 on the cost of the land alone. This very clearly indicates the advantage which can be gained from government acquiring and subdividing land instead of allowing private persons to exploit such subdivisions. (Gough Whitlam, May 1958)

The best thing that the Greens, locally and nationally, could do to begin dealing with the housing shortage would be to rediscover their sadly long-abandoned belief in an environmentally sustainable population figure for Australia – which was put in the mid-teens (i.e. about 10m. less than we now have) when that issue was last regarded as a politically correct subject for discussion.

Without that, their bleating and hand-wringing on housing is simply not plausible, particularly when the better-placed Greens are safely tucked away in heritage-listed areas while they are telling everyone else that their streets and suburbs have to be infilled, and in some cases greatly densified, to make room for an over-the-top rate of immigration-driven population growth.

The other thing the Greens could do would be to tell us much more about their ideas to find savings (mentioned in Claire Fenwicke’s 5 April article on this subject) to help meet the costs of an ambitious increase in public housing effort. The Greens are responsible for more than their fair share of wasteful, tokenistic ACT government spending – if they really are serious about public housing, they should be prepared to sacrifice most of that spending to help the homeless and vulnerable.

Be nice if Mr Bushnell could use his investigative journalism skills to question the Greens why they sold off all those public housing sites to use the asset recycling money to build light rail stage 1 instead of replacement public housing.

Maybe he could also investigate why so much ACT public housing sites were sold off to high rise property developers.

If it’s really about housing Canberra’s disadvantaged people, maybe he should be questioning why the Greens reduced the number of public housing dwellings. It’s a bit hard for them to be arguing for more housing theoretically when they’ve taken away public houses.

A Green: School, university, political staffer, politician. Somewhere in there was a part time job, not paid for by the taxpayer, or not, if you count extinction rebellion as employment. Doyens of the business world, perfectly suited to the intricate financial acumen required to make a complex program work.
Pass

Lmao

Greens: let’s raise costs for Landlords, freeze rents (!), retrospectively impose punitive energy efficiency standards on existing rentals, impose eviction moratoriums, create prohibitive environmental requirements for new builds, remove key ownership rights for landlords, and actively discourage infill projects with unnecessary red tape and taxes

Also Greens: why is nobody building any houses?