In a desperate last-ditch attempt to get its troubled Housing Bills through Parliament, the Albanese Labor Government has been forced to cut yet another deal with the Greens.
The agreement by the Government to allocate an additional $1 billion towards the Coalition’s highly successful National Housing Infrastructure Facility just reiterates again that investments of this kind should be made directly, not through Labor’s convoluted HAFF money-go-round.
Once again the Coalition will not be supporting the establishment of the HAFF, which is merely $10 billion in additional Commonwealth Government borrowing that cannot guarantee and will not deliver a single home before the next election.
Let’s be clear – Labor’s housing legislation does nothing to ease the supply pressures on first homeowners seeking buy their first home and get into the property market.
It will only see Australia’s housing crisis worsen with added inflationary pressures on the economy, ultimately leading to higher interest rates and more difficulty for those Australians looking to enter the housing market.
Despite all of this, Labor is still planning to bring 1.5 million migrants to Australia over the next five years, with no plan on how to house them, on top of our growing population.
Sadly, on every housing measure things are only getting worse under Labor. First home buyers are at their lowest levels since the Gillard Government, new house starts have dropped by 6.6 per cent and new house approvals are 13.0 per cent lower compared to this time last year.
Labor still can’t say how many houses this Fund will build, where the houses will be located or when the Fund will first make a return, and the Leader of the Greens even conceded today, “Labor’s HAFF won’t fix the housing crisis”.
It’s clear that today’s announcement is nothing more than a political stunt which is typical of a government reliant on Greens preferences in order to be re-elected, and more disappointingly, a government that is completely out of touch with Australians facing real hardships and painful cost of living pressures.