Party posturing on housing could send us to an early election

The government, the Greens and those in need of social housing have all won from the Greens combining with the Coalition and right-wingers in the Senate to block Labor’s silly Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF).

The Greens are pretending they’ve only deferred voting on legislation establishing the fund until later in the year, but Adam Bandt has boxed himself into a corner with his insistence the government must somehow force the state and territory governments into imposing rent caps before he’ll let the legislation through. Anything less than that and Bandt will yet again be charged with talking tough and then caving in to the government.

In any event, it’s in the interests of the Greens to keep blocking the bill, thus fostering the impression that housing remains an intractable problem — one they can use to sell themselves to younger voters, the victims of generations of housing policy failure. Meantime their MPs, like Max Chandler-Mather, assure their affluent, progressive inner-city electorates that there’ll be no extra housing in their backyards, thanks very much.

Not that Labor can complain too much. It will be handed a double dissolution trigger. Better yet, it will be on a promise Labor took to the 2022 election. With the RBA and governor Philip Lowe apparently determined to send the economy into recession, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will appreciate having the flexibility of not having to wait until 2025 to face voters, especially if he can claim voters have already given him a mandate on the bill being blocked.

The only real loser is the Coalition. When it’s not losing members in self-inflicted disasters, it appears determined under Opposition Leader Peter Dutton to demonstrate it thinks voters simply got it wrong at the last election and will come to their senses next time without the Liberals or the Nationals doing anything especially different. The result is persistent polling suggesting a substantial swing to the government. It also omits the Coalition from the national discussion about housing, beyond the Liberals’ prescription that developers just need to be allowed to do what they like — except, of course, in Liberal electorates.

One unexpected winner is social housing tenants. On the weekend the government announced $2 billion in social housing funding, to be allocated per capita across the states — $600 million to NSW, $500 million to Victoria, $400 million to Queensland, $135 million to South Australia, $200 million in Western Australia and $50 million each in Tasmania and the territories. The funding is to be spent over the next two years.

The Commonwealth funding is a significant addition to the Victorian, Queensland and Tasmanian governments’ recent ramp-ups of social housing spending. In NSW, where social housing spending has been stagnant for a decade, it will have a noticeable impact. But only if the states don’t repeat their response to the Rudd-era social housing stimulus and cut their own spending to offset the cheques that have arrived from Canberra.

The $2 billion spend demonstrates how naff the HAFF actually is. To do something about social housing — which has flow-on benefits through to the broader housing market by taking pressure off the bottom tier of the housing and rental markets — you don’t need a future fund, you just need to allocate funding from the budget. Yes, this means it notionally adds to the budget deficit, but it also avoids the management fees wasted in the operation of yet another billion-dollar fund that has itself been created from borrowed money in the first place (which the $10 billion HAFF is).

But the HAFF does allow the government to wave around a $10 billion figure as part of its solution to housing. It seems, post-pandemic, billion-dollar policy proposals no longer cut it for politicians eager to get voters’ attention — it has to be 11 digits or nothing. We might be hearing about them in an election campaign that arrives sooner than we’d all expected.