Labor’s $10 billion housing policy of spin and abusing the Greens won’t play like it used to

“Making the perfect the enemy of the good…” Who had “Tanya Plibersek” and 5.44pm February 15 in the sweep for when Labor would trot that one out? It’s a time tunnel to 2009 and the CPRS arguments. What were the other hits from that time? “I Got A Feeling”, “Poker Face” and “Meet Me Halfway”… and “don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good”. The Black Eyed Peas and The Be Good Tanyas*, playing the hits.

This is Labor’s full-scale attack on the Greens for abstaining in the House on voting up the government’s new housing program, ahead of possibly voting against it in the Senate, which would take it down. Labor is mobilising on this, with Julian Hill, member for Bruce, thundering (well, he doesn’t thunder, more observing archly), “Green party hypocrisy is astounding. Pretending to care about affordable housing, but…” Etc, etc.

Annika Wells, member for Lilley, joined in with, “It’s hard to be smug, weak and wrong at the same time, but last night the Greens…” Etc, etc. And Education Minister Jason Clare, a sort of Joker-fied Julian Hill, used the housing plan’s domestic violence provisions to remark, “Unbelievable. The Liberals and the Greens are threatening to block funding to build homes for women and children fleeing domestic violence.” And on it goes.

And will go. Labor is running hard on its housing program — sorry, its $10 BILLION HOUSING PROGRAM — which sounds like a major social democratic big build, really impressive. And it would be if it were true. But it’s a $500 million housing fund, money that will come from sticking $10 billion into the Future Fund and using the sharemarket investment returns to fund house building.

Labor claims this will deliver 30,000 new dwellings over five years, and will accompany its “1 million new homes“, announced last year as part of Jimbonomics New Thought, which involves the redirection of superfund money to housing investment. The Greens argue that the $500 million housing fund will deliver only 3% of the new housing we are going to need in this decade. 

Labor is being dishonest about the Greens’ criticism. The mainstream media is reporting the “$10 billion housing fund” po-faced. The Greens, it appears to me, are being a little cute in suggesting the larger chunk of the housing deficit should be filled from public build — and if one applies that, then the Jim’ll Build It Scheme comes out as ludicrously wanting. And Jimbo is presenting the “1 million homes” scheme as if it were mandated superfund spending. In fact, it will simply offer some incentives for super funds to switch their investment, with no guarantee they will do so. 

You know what? With the Coalition nowhere in particular, it would be really great if Labor and the Greens could have an honest debate about an issue like housing policy. Labor could make the point that without vastly expanding public spending on an already sickly national bottom line, this is the best way to increase social housing stock — and that the superannuation plan is meant to do most of the heavy lifting on increasing overall housing supply. 

The Greens could then counter that the increased cost deficit would be worth it to spend some serious money to make inroads into the particular shortfall of social and public housing, and the general shortfall overall. It could acknowledge that the government has a cunning superannuation plan to fill the private sector provision gap, but also point out that without coercive powers, it’s another Jimbo thought bubble about values-led impactful investment. Wouldn’t it be great to have that debate, with some cost-benefit stuff, rather than Labor’s nonsense rhetoric and the Greens’ mild spin?

But Labor would be desperate not to have that debate. Because there’s an easy place to find the X amount of dwellings the Greens say the government should directly build over five to 10 years, and that’s from cancelling the stage three tax cuts. That presumably won’t happen before the 2025 election, and Labor is equally keen not to extend the deficit. So the housing gap will widen, and will be filled with breast-beating rhetoric about how Labor gets things done, perfect enemy of the stop me if you’ve heard this…

Well, it worked in 2009, and it may work now, to a degree. But it’s not going to work the same way or forever. This figure of 10 billi— 10 BILLION is cynical game-playing with the hopes of many, many desperate people who looked to Labor for some sort of hope, and wanted something a bit more than 30,000 of the 700,000 new homes needed. 

This sleazy, too-clever-by-half spin is worse, in some ways, than the brute oafishness of the Coalition in its decadent phase. It combines Labor’s narcissism as the people’s champion, with dishonesty, and a desire to put in a political solution that will hold until the next election, to cover the absence of any real solutions to this decades-in-the-making crisis. 

The mainstream media is taking Labor’s side against the Greens, in the same way it took the Greens’ side “against” Senator Lidia Thorpe — always deny the leftward-most element’s legitimacy. But it’s pretty soft. And 15 years on from the CPRS PR stitch-up of the Greens by Labor and the MSM, the latter have a lot less power than they once did. Labor is not going to be able to spin this PR move nearly as easily as it did the CPRS. 

That’s because of two factors. The first is that Gen Z and younger millennials just aren’t reading the MSM, not even slightly. And the second is that they are really angry, and getting angrier by the day. If Labor hasn’t understood that, and I suspect it hasn’t, fully, it may be in for a rude shock. Not immediately, but not in the distant future either. Having posed as the party of mainstream youf in 2022, against the sclerotic Coalition and the supposedly elite Greens, nothing Labor has promised is delivering for the people whom economist Alison Pennington is calling “Generation F’d“. 

The wave of strikes and organising in places like Amazon, Starbucks, etc (more in the US than here; perversely, it’s harder to organise a union in the US but easier to strike when they have), and the growing anger around the ludicrous housing situation here, is a product of a certain passage of time. There are now enough people who can see that these conditions are not merely a way-station in their life, renting and scratching for cash, doing McJobs, in your 20s.

Instead, they now see this as the unchanging condition of their lives, within capitalism that no one seems to have an idea of how to kick-start again (Jimbo Thought notwithstanding), with no one in power willing to state that, and with a series of misleading stats — unemployment, as currently measured — being deployed to suggest that everything’s alright. 

To that extent, social class being may be reestablishing itself as a primary category, with climate change its equal but other cultural causes falling to third place (in part, because many of them, like same-sex marriage, have been won). If that’s so, then it offers the Greens an opportunity to fuse those two issues in a very tight dyad — for example, that lack of housing is because of high unit cost and poor urban planning as much as other factors, which directly contribute to climate change. 

By decoupling (without renouncing) the lead cultural policies from climate change policies, and reconnecting the personal economic issues and the macro issues, the Greens could make an end-run around Labor, while it remains stuck on the old trope of the Greens having their heads in the clouds. This would be particularly so by targeting Labor’s absolute lack of ambition and imagination on these matters, and its fatal tendency to resort to a type of spin increasingly ineffective on a post-truth generation. 

That suggests what is required (which the Greens have partly delivered) is a “Green audacity”, which argues for solving the housing crisis by advocating state housing building on a mass scale, targeted at all income levels, with various buy-in models (to preserve investment and maintenance) and consequent changes in urban development and planning, which reverse the old 1960s-1990s relationship between Green politics and low-density development and replace it with a green new deal and scales of economy and ecology. This would make visible the degree to which capitalism is now a rent-seeking machine, steering us to terrible building and development options (steered there by Great Helmsman Jim).

Thus, amazingly, we are not going to get out of this mess by demolishing a Victorian house in Albert Park to build three flats. We need to use vacant, urban, industrial land, to build high-quality, stylish, architect-designed blocks high and dense, with some existing buildings left for place and history continuity. It involves developing outer-suburban hubs as city centres, rather than the McMansion non-places private developers are being allowed to build, and connecting them with short-length, high-speed rail. And of course, it brings the unit cost of new dwellings way down. 

Many in the coming generation, it seems, are ready to abandon the house-and-garden model — have long abandoned it — and even the low-rise apartment model, for a European-style of life, in which top-quality high-building and density reduces unequal access to centrality and the cosmopolitan city. Not only because tastes have changed, but also because they will now do anything, anything, to have a chance to own a property that can be paid off, and to gain the life security arising from it. 

Politically, this is not for the faint-hearted, since the history of residential tower blocks and high-build is mixed, to say the least. But I’m talking very concrete proposals. I’m talking sketches, models, 3D immersive experiences as to what this could be. In any case, if the UK is any guide, people will eventually be clamouring to buy into the Housing Commission highrises, or centrality, with their terrible look thus becoming, by reclassing, a sort of East Germany retrochic.

Will we throw out public housing tenants to do that, when the time comes? Gee, I wonder… We not only need audacious policies, we need protest, a rally for “affordable housing now”, with Greens MPs and others up the front of it. This might be the issue that could jump people from cultural politics into political-economic politics.

The plain fact is that this housing debate is substituting a housing policy question for what is a demography policy question. We are either going to taper down immigration and freeze or lower the population (we’re not), or we’re going to keep the spigot open, to become a country whose population is merely small, rather than miniscule, in the East Asian area.

Given that we all know we’re going to do that, we’re going to need to have a really major capitals-and-regions development plan, something with multipartisan support that can project decades into the future, and merely be subject to variation with the politics of changing governments. Ideally that would see “audacious” height and densification as simply a step along the way, to the creation of new mid-size communities, combining farming, making, thinking and living in new ways. 

But I’ll take whatever vision I can get at this point. I suspect there are a lot of people, watching their future fall away, who will agree. And will go where the vision is. Rather than approaching housing policy with a lump in the stomach over impossible options, we could see the possibilities within it, to live a new and better way. It’s exciting. It’s attractive. It’s a love story, baby, just say yes (No 3, 2009). 

*now this is perfection.