Housing Affordability

Related policy

Background

Housing is a fundamental need and human right. Perversely, homes are now treated as an investment asset by governments rather than a shelter in which to live and/or raise a family.

Importantly, we need to primarily focus on the root cause of Australia's housing affordability crisis, being government-engineered hyper-demand, rather than chase our tails with ever-increasing and environmentally destructive hyper-supply.

Full background at bottom of page.

Policy

Achieve greater housing affordability for home buyers and renters, while striving for relatively stable house prices.

Policy Methods (Federal)

To help achieve this Sustainable Australia Party will:

  • Remove the 50 per cent discount of capital gains tax on taxable Australian property (non-principal place of residence), with existing arrangements to be grandfathered(1)
  • Abolish negative gearing on taxable Australian property, with existing arrangements to be grandfathered(1)

“The [Reserve] Bank has always held the view that the combination of negative gearing and concessional capital gains tax combines to encourage essentially speculative investment in property...You don’t increase affordability by giving people more money to spend on housing." MacroBusiness

  • Stabilise Australia’s population size as soon as practicable (also see Population & Immigration (Australia) policy)
  • Ban further foreign ownership and limit future foreign investment to a maximum of 25 per cent of any Australian residential housing or commercial property, or land for residential housing or commercial development
  • Increase Foreign Investment Review Board scrutiny of and penalties for breaches of foreign purchase rules
  • Manage bank lending practices to better control the supply of housing credit, including appropriate loan serviceability (interest rate) buffers, and the banning of interest-only housing loans and those above a loan to value ratio (LVR) of 90 per cent
  • Phase out provisions allowing Self-Managed Superannuation Funds to borrow for investment in real estate

Policy Methods (State)

To help achieve this Sustainable Australia Party will:

  • Ensure a minimum 10% affordable housing(2) is integrated into new significant residential developments through a process of inclusionary zoning
  • Significantly increase investment in social housing, through both public(3) and community(4) housing, as a proportion of total housing development
  • Reform tenancy laws to offer greater renters’ rights including:
    • Longer standard rental tenure
    • Longer notice for eviction
    • Greater ability to keep pets
    • Greater ability to make minor renovations including picture hangers
    • Removal of ‘no-fault’ termination from residential leases so that tenants have more security and stability. This will mean there will only be four situations in which a tenant can be removed from their home:
      1. Sale of the property
      2. Major renovations
      3. Failure to meet tenancy conditions including rent payments
      4. Owner wants to move in to their property
  • Support a ‘Right to Rent’ plan allowing homeowners whose homes have been foreclosed due to major market corrections to stay in their homes at a fair market rent for up to five years
  • Give owners corporations and local governments more right to impose restrictions on short-stay (less than 30 days) rental accommodation
  • Where the federal government does not immediately ban further foreign ownership, increase state taxes on future foreign purchases of residential and commercial land/property as follows:
    • 10% stamp duty surcharge (above standard rate)
    • 10% annual land tax
    • 10% annual vacancy tax (on property’s full capital improved value)
  • Offer residential property buyers the option of paying current stamp duties or an annual land tax(5)
  • Expand existing anti-money laundering legislation (Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Terrorism Financing Act 2006) to accountants, lawyers and real estate agents to help prevent foreign and local crime-related money from entering the real estate market

"Australia’s hot property market is an attractive haven for criminals, with estimates that billions of dollars of dirty money is being laundered through residential property." MacroBusiness

"AUSTRAC has warned that laundering the proceeds of crime through property purchases can drive up prices and keep legitimate buyers out of the market…" MacroBusiness

  • When the above Federal and State policies are implemented:
    • Abolish first home buyer grants
    • Allow Australians to access a portion of their superannuation to put a deposit on their first home
  • Where environmentally appropriate, create a 'Natural and sustainable housing' permit framework to allow for tiny houses, off-grid houses, and houses built from natural methods

Background

Housing is a fundamental need and human right. Perversely, homes are now treated as an investment asset by governments rather than a shelter in which to live and/or raise a family.

Importantly, we need to primarily focus on the root cause of Australia's housing affordability crisis, being government-engineered hyper-demand, rather than chase our tails with ever-increasing and environmentally destructive hyper-supply.

Dearer residential property and land does not create national wealth. It simply creates a society of haves and have-nots, increases the cost of living and doing business, and retards the capacity of individuals, families and banks to invest in wealth-generating small businesses and other economic enterprises. This collectively starves the broader Australian economy of capital.

"Land is a key input cost for most businesses. So when costs are inflated, it reduces the competitiveness of industry, making it harder for Australia to compete abroad. The associated higher housing costs also places upward pressure on wages. For decades, resource allocation has been channelled away from the tradable sector and infrastructure investment towards the financial sector, as home buyers have taken on ever-bigger mortgages as they chased house prices higher...Australia’s housing obsession has also starved productive sectors of the economy of credit. At the heart of the problem are Australia’s unique mix of tax concessions." MacroBusiness

Importantly, we have a one-off opportunity to greatly lower population growth / demand, and still ensure a sustainable housing industry with healthy construction opportunities over several decades. But we must act now if we are to transition the construction industry to a sustainable footing.

Under our policies, Australia would still grow from its present ~26 million to stabilise under 30 million by 2050. We have inbuilt growth in the system due to natural increases (excess of births over deaths) being currently at around 150,000 per year. This will add up to 3 million over the next few decades before stabilising by 2050. At an average of 2.6 people per household in Australia, that growth still requires well over 1 million houses to be built – or around 10 Canberras! Also, due to extreme housing unaffordability, many adults are sharing or living with parents and others, but could create a new household to be constructed if affordability improved via more stable house prices.

Further, an ageing population is also an economic opportunity for housing construction, estimated to require an increase in one-person households in NSW alone of around 70 per cent, or 260,000, by 2040. That would extrapolate to another 1 million homes nationally.

Finally, if housing (land) affordability improves, people will have more money to spend on improvements (architecture, painting, landscape gardening, etc). This will all keep the housing construction industry busy, while shielding them from the ever-increasing business costs (including road congestion) that come with rapid population growth.

With Australia’s population still growing and ageing, under our policies we will still need much more housing. This is a once-off opportunity for a sustainable transition and to protect the industry and broader economy from a very big construction crash down the track.

Footnotes:

  1. This would only relate to capital gains and negative gearing after the policy comes into legislation. Capital gains and negative gearing made before the legislation could still be discounted.
  2. Affordable housing is defined as housing that is provided at a rental price point that is affordable to low and moderate income tennants (based on median household income statistics), at or below 30% gross household income.
  3. Government owned and operated affordable housing with rent capped at 25-30 per cent of household income.
  4. Not-for-profit owned and operated affordable housing with rent capped at 25-30 per cent of household income.
  5. State stamp duties are typically around 5%, whereas an annual land tax would likely be around .5%. A choice would benefit some buyers and the economy in several ways: With a lower total purchase price, the land tax option would improve housing affordability (market entry) for first home buyers, improve labour mobility by encouraging workers to relocate closer to employment, and encourage some people (e.g. empty nesters and short-to-medium-term movers) to more cost-effectively move to housing that better suits their needs.