The rise of One Nation (ON) in the polls comes off the back of four decades of neoliberalism delivering declining wages, less union strength and a worsening housing crisis.
ON, with the help of the establishment media, has positioned itself as the alternative to the Liberal-Labor duopoly on housing, saying sharp cuts to immigration will solve the crisis. This is scapegoating, designed to ramp up racism when the cost of living crisis is adding to the ordinary people’s alienation with the major parties.
What would a durable response to the housing crisis involve?
It is well established that house prices and rents are out of control, having risen by substantially more than the rate of wage rises for more than a quarter century.
Negative gearing and the 50% capital gains tax discount, a Howard Coalition government “reform” in 2000 incentivised people on above average incomes, and especially the wealthiest 5-10%, to use property investment as a way of reducing the amount of tax they would otherwise have to pay.
However, arguably, an even bigger contribution to housing inaffordability has been the move away from state investment in public housing.
The state and federal government public housing funding arrangement from after World War II until the late 1980s led to the percentage of public housing steadily rising to a peak of around 5% of overall housing.
But successive state and federal governments from the 1990s have reduced the stock of public housing as a percentage of overall housing stock. This accelerated from 2000 onwards.
According to public housing advocacy group AHURi, public housing is now less than 3% of overall housing stock. This stands in stark contrast to the Netherlands (29.1%), Austria (24%), Scotland (24%), Denmark (21%), Sweden (17%), England (17%) and France (16%).
To exacerbate matters, NSW and Victorian Labor governments are forcibly evicting tenants and demolishing public housing, rather than refurbishing and adding to the existing stock.
Labor’s 2023 Housing Australia Housing Australia Future Fund is completely inadequate, with an annual budget of just $500 million. The federal Labor government is failing to hit its market-based targets for new, mostly private, housing construction by a wide margin.
Immigrants have not been responsible for a decades long backlog of under-investment in public housing, and cutting immigration will worsen skills shortages (including in construction) while doing nothing to address the shortage of public housing.
Expand public housing stock
To begin to expand public housing stock to become a higher percentage of overall dwellings requires hundreds of thousands of dwellings to be built.
Such a “big build” would be deflationary by putting downward pressure on house prices and rents, alongside Labor’s modest changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing. This would reduce the amount of money workers have to spend on rent and mortgage repayments (which, in turn, trickles directly up into the bank accounts of big landlords and banks). This money would in turn be freed up for other products and services.
A recent Green institute report noted that the Anthony Albanese government is building less public homes per million people than any federal government since World War II. Compare this to the post-war years, when governments were responsible for building 18% of all dwellings.
The Green Institute calls for the re-establishment of a publicly-owned housing developer and an immediate build of 360,000 homes over a five years, followed by 50,000 dwellings a year thereafter.
A 2023 report prepared by Oxford economics on behalf of construction union the Construction, Forestry, Mining Employees Union called for a 40% super profits tax to fund construction of 53,000 social and affordable dwellings a year. It said then there was a shortfall of 729,000 social and affordable dwellings, which would grow to close to a million dwellings by 2040 if action was not taken.
The Albanese government’s decision to place the CFMEU under administration has effectively silenced its advocacy on housing.
The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) has called for prefabricated housing to be part of the solution. Notably, this could create pathways to create jobs in prefabricated housing construction and logistics in areas traditionally reliant on thermal coal mining and burning, like the Hunter and Latrobe Valleys. The AMWU has been a leading voice within the union movement to call for alternative jobs for workers in traditional coal-producing regions as the world reduces its use of coal.
What could it look like?
A public housing “big build” could consist of larger developments located near train stations and infrastructure, plus low rise apartments and prefabricated dwellings in suburbs and rural areas.
Home owners in suburbia could be incentivised to sell properties to the public housing developer for conversion from single houses with large backyards into multi unit developments.
By adding density to the suburbs, a big build could help address urban sprawl. Student housing, aged-care facilities, publicly-owned childcare centres, shelters for women and children fleeing gendered violence and boosting the stock of Aboriginal community controlled housing could all be part of the program.
A public housing big build would create a solid pipeline of quality union construction jobs and a solid pipeline of apprentices, helping address the construction industry skills shortage which currently sits at 300,000 workers.
In the lead-up to the Victorian election, it would be useful for all those who support public housing to unite behind a call for such a “big build”. It would put the heat on ON’s attempt to blame immigrants for a crisis that continues only because the establishment parties have refused to fund public housing.
A robust campaign for public housing could help take the wind out of the sails of ON and convince those who short-shortsightedly believe that ON offers any lasting solutions for the workers movement.