Coalition's housing plan isn't about the needy - and that's the point

*sigh*

If the author wasn’t so stridently anti-Liberal, he might balance the article by acknowledging that ANY new housing supply puts downward pressure on prices.

Even if these houses are expensive, each one that is purchased frees up a more affordable house for someone else

This is just criticism along party lines.

Yes. Thx. All so true. Plus… ten years ago I was designing a new course in Climate Change Communications. I was concerned that, for students here at least, there wasn’t so much clear indication in the everyday world of what was going on. Now it’s 2024 and anyone with eyes and ears perceives the changes happening all around them. Why do I mention this? Because governments and just about everyone else discuss housing (and the like of 30 year mortgages) as if climate change isn’t already happening, and won’t get worse over the short-medium term. Yet housing is already in trouble, for all kinds of climate based reasons, insurance in general, and increased intensity of climate related events such as floods, fires affecting this. And building in the hotter areas of e.g. Sydney, which tend to be the edge areas, with only limited consideration of heat and such on housing is just asking for trouble (yet the coalition explicitly rejects improving building standards along exactly these lines). Climate’s a huge housing problem in the US, with weird patterns of internal climate migration. At the same time as Wall St in moving in on housing with dire consequences. With some echoes here. So yes, concerning everything you describe here, and more, we are desperate for sensible, responsive policies. What we’re getting instead is “just say anything” politics with zero responsibility, reality, or it seems even basic understanding.

Sure, apartments and townhouses are often the cheapest entry point into the housing market for purchasers, but the need for housing isn’t just a need for singles and couples.
Families need bedrooms for the kids, backyards to play in etc. High-density 2 bedroom apartments just doesn’t work for families.
The cost of housing isn’t entitely about NG & CGT. (Admittedly CGT is generous), but these tax concessions are have been around for a long time.
Talk of repealing them is folly. Just ask Bill Shorten.
Housing is a balance between supply and demand. Our population is growing faster than we are building houses and increased demand increases the cost of housing, whether that be purchasing or renting.
To make things worse, various State & Territory jurisdictions have introduced taxes on rental properties such as Land Tax, and naturally when you increase the cost of ownership, those costs work their way through into the cost of rent paid on the properties by tenants.

“The Coalition’s $5 billion housing policy pitched at aspirational suburban voters is pure politics.”

Claire O’Neil was quick to claim that Labor are already doing (under a $1.5 billion initiative) what the Liberals are proposing, so if appealing to “aspirational suburban voters” is now a sin of some sort, both major parties are guilty of it.

The more interesting aspect of this is that what Labor says it is already doing, and what the Liberals are proposing to do more of, has distinct echoes of Whitlam government housing programs.

Mention of a government now almost half a century in the rear vision mirror is also a reminder that, in an era where technology enables many jobs to be done at least in part at home, the regionalisation and decentralisation ideas of that government would be worth revisiting as an alternative to expanding the outer suburbs and/or further congesting and slumifying the inner suburbs of the major cities.

Easy answer, stop importing people we DONT need FGS.

Meanwhile, on the housing demand side, Australia will register about 1.5m net migration over 2022-2025.

Six times higher than the historical average, not at all what voters want, and making a joke of either party’s limp gestures for “housing affordability”.