Politicians

<h2>EXPERT INSIGHT</h2>

The most pointless discussion in real estate is the one about housing affordability. It&rsquo;s pointless, not because it lacks importance or potential solutions, but because the conversation never focuses on the real issues.

Australia has been debating affordability for decades. The media discussion that&rsquo;s happening in 2021 is the same one that occurred last year, and five years ago, and 20 years ago. Go back in time as far as you like and you&rsquo;ll find acres of newsprint describing how young Australians are priced out of the market and doomed to a lifetime of renting.&nbsp;(Ironically, the past 12 months has seen record activity from first-home buyers.) But if you examine media coverage of the affordability issue over the past 10, 20 or 30 years, you will struggle to find any reference to the root causes.

That&rsquo;s why the debate is pointless. If you&rsquo;re not going to discuss the real issues, why bother? The debate is generally driven by politicians skilled at diverting blame and the reports are written by journalists who haven&rsquo;t got a clue.

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Recent decisions by the State Government in Victoria encapsulate why we have expensive housing and difficult issues for first-home buyers. They hiked taxes on investors and reduced grants for FHBs &ndash; thereby making affordability worse at both ends of the equation. More expensive housing and less government assistance. Brilliant.

But Daniel Andrews and Tim Pallas would swear they cared more about FHBs and housing affordability than anyone else in the nation.

This is standard fare from our politicians. When Gladys Berejiklian became Premier of NSW in early 2017, she used her first press conference to claim that improving affordability was top of her priorities. Four years later, most decisions by her government impacting on affordability have made it worse, not better.

It&rsquo;s a similar story with deadly Dan Andrews. He would have us believe that he lies awake at night fretting over the plight of young housing hopefuls, but in so many ways his government has made affordability worse.

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The decision by his Government to hike land tax and stamp duty on investor owners continues the age-old problem of politicians using the housing industry as a cash cow - and thereby making housing more expensive to create.

The problem of affordability can be summarised like this: it&#39;s caused by politicians at all three levels of government&nbsp;milking the housing industry for revenue. Local government does it and the Federal Government does it, but by far the worst are state governments.

Every time a state government&nbsp;needs some extra revenue, they slug developers and investors. They believe there&amp;#39;s little electoral damage&nbsp;in doing that, but ultimately it&amp;#39;s the home-buyers who pay,&nbsp;including first-home buyers.

Australia has a rental shortage crisis and politicians should be encouraging investors. But they continue to discourage investors - hence the ultra-low vacancies and rising rentals in most locations. The State Government in Victoria has made the situation worse. A memorable episode of the iconic British comedy Yes Minister involved the quintessential public servant Sir Humphrey Appleby lecturing about how governments present the appearance of caring about an issue while changing nothing.

You call for an inquiry. Let the inquiry run for a couple of years. Then recommend a Royal Commission. Another couple of years gets chewed up. At the end of the process, identify an unpopular minority to blame for the problem and scapegoat them. Nothing has changed but you&rsquo;ve created the appearance of serious action.

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It sounds farcical but Australia actually did this with housing affordability. There was a series of Federal Government inquiries and at the end of a very low process, devious politicians decided to scapegoat foreign investors as the cause of the affordability problem.

That gave politicians a licence to slug foreign investors with a series of new charges, all under the guise of improving affordability. It was an incredibly cynical exercise - a revenue-raising measure, pure and simple &ndash; and nothing changed about affordability because foreign investors were never the problem.

At the last Federal Election, the Labor Party under Bill Shorten sought to save money in the Budget (they fully expected to win) by proposing to scrap negative gearing and increase capital gains tax &ndash; but tried to dress it up as a measure to improve housing affordability. When asked &ldquo;Does this mean that the value of homes will fall under your policies?&rdquo;, Shorten claimed that it did not. The value of homes would not fall. This begged a follow-up question: &ldquo;How, then, will affordability improve?&rdquo;

Labor front-bencher Tanya Plibersek, in the lead-up to the 2019 election, claimed that the typical property investor in Australia owned 15 or 20 properties. Given that the official data shows that the typical investor owns one or two properties, this was an outrageous lie. But quite deliberate and calculated.

Federal Labor (and many sections of the media) generally portrayed property investment as something akin to a criminal activity, thereby scaring off investors already discouraged by APRA measures.

The outcome is a national rental shortage crisis.

Yes Minister was a documentary, not a comedy. And we will never resolve the housing affordability issue until we understand that the politicians are the problem.

Daniel Andrews and Tim Pallas would swear they cared more about FHBs and housing affordability than anyone else in the nation, standard politician bunk

terryryder

How state governments smash housing affordability: Terry Ryder

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GUEST OBSERVATION
Politicians in many countries around the world claim to be experiencing a “housing crisis”. But how do they define it, who is affected, and what is the cause?
These are critical questions. Exploring them can help us understand why much of the evidence from research is not carried through into political discourse and policy.
In the wake of the growing global “crisification” of housing, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02673037.2019.1697801" target="_blank">our research</a> evaluated political speeches in Hansard connected to the housing crisis in New Zealand over three terms of the centre-right National Party government (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_National_Government_of_New_Zealand" target="_blank">2008-17</a>). We sought to better understand how the issue became visible in politics and then trace this through to policy. We found the term “housing crisis” was rarely used before 2013.
Our aim was to provide deeper insights into why the problem appears to be resisting resolution. While the research took place in New Zealand, the findings have wider relevance for other countries grappling with this issue of “housing crisis”.
Tracing the rise of the housing crisis
Crises are truth claims. They are invoked, they define, they blame and, in doing so, they privilege certain ideologies or policy “solutions” over others.
If the problem is seen as due to “red tape”, too much immigration or unfair taxes, then these all require very different interventions. Some responses will be more effective than others. Some may have more in common with long-held political ideology than a body of scientific evidence.
The chart below shows the emergence, frequency and party-oriented nature of housing being framed in terms of a “crisis”.
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311241/original/file-20200121-117943-1pmrh05.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt=""> 
Frequency of the ‘housing crisis’ framing by year and political party. Author provided
From being used only two times during the first term of National government (2008-11), the term was used 105 times in the second (2011-14) and 205 times in the third (2014-17). (The lack of use in 2014 appears more related to parliament being distracted by an election year than the profile of the issue.)
You can also see it’s almost exclusively opposition parties, in particular Labour and the Greens, that use the crisis framing. MPs from the ruling National Party used the term only five times, and then mainly in response to previous speakers to resist the charge.
A contest to frame the issue
Turning to the content of debate, the following table provides an overview of the strength and focus of the framing themes used.
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/312709/original/file-20200130-154320-qaf3ab.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="">
Author provided
Even though the governing party resisted the crisis terminology, a very consistent narrative dominated housing debates. It was that the reason for poor affordability was an inefficient and overly bureaucratic planning system that stifled the release of development land. It was a problem of supply, the reasoning went: more land should logically lead to more houses to meet demand, which should make housing more affordable.
In some ways the subordinate counterframing attempts by opposition parties provide an insight into the complexity of the housing crisis. In contrast, the government framing appears both easier to communicate and “solve”.
The episodic and missing frames are of particular interest as they help demonstrate what perspectives and voices were not represented in any meaningful manner.
Even though the National government did not accept the framing as a crisis, the high profile of the political discourse led to a suite of legislative and policy initiatives. These documents strongly reflect the dominant narrative. For example, the Resource Management Act, the main planning legislation in New Zealand, receives repeated blame for high house prices as part of the justification for measures aimed at increasing the supply of land.
What does this mean for evidence and policy?
A key finding is that the crisis claim from opposition parties did not just lead to a contest over whether this was correct, or even its meaning. It also opened up a new political space for the ruling party to promote long-standing ideas about the preferred relationship between the state, private sector and market.
Researchers recognise housing as a multifaceted public policy problem and draw upon multiple streams of evidence. However, the political framing of housing as a crisis and its links to policy was much more simple, siloed and ideological. Although wider political discourse did acknowledge the complexity of housing issues, the nature of politics and the balance of power meant the cause was reduced to a simple effective message – poor land supply and an inefficient planning system – which informed the policy responses.
This gap between evidence and politics may also help explain how various urban and environmental crises have become less of a one-off event and more of a modern lived condition that may never be “solved” but rather redistributed politically.
In reality, the various frames show how there is not just a singular “housing crisis”. There may be a supply crisis, a demand crisis, a quality crisis, a distribution crisis, a credit crisis, a rental crisis, and so on. All of these issues differ between local, national and international contexts.
Lastly, if political power and existing ideological perspectives are so central to the framing and response to a crisis, then this raises questions for how researchers can better integrate research into politics and policy. While topics such as liveability, sustainability, density, connectivity, justice and quality are well represented in research, the data show this is not carried through into political discourse. Perhaps by focusing on the reasons for this gap we can better understand policy failure and the role of power and ideology in perpetuating the housing crisis.<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/128861/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;">
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/iain-white-95947" target="_blank">Iain White</a>, Professor of Environmental Planning, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-waikato-781" target="_blank">University of Waikato</a>
This article is republished from <a href="http://theconversation.com" target="_blank">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/housing-crisis-what-crisis-how-politicians-talk-about-housing-and-why-it-matters-128861" target="_blank">original article</a>.
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j.ballantyne1990-6AQqhLzZaK

What housing crisis? How politicians talk about housing and why it matters

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The Queensland Deputy Premier Jackie Trad has been referred to State Parliament's ethics committee over her failure to declare the purchase of a house in Woolloongabba.
The speaker Curtis Pitt tabled his decision on Friday, stating it would be "prudent" to refer the Deputy Premier to the ethics committee.
Trad had previously been referred to the the Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) which found no evidence of corrupt or dishonest conduct in the Deputy Premier’s late disclosure and lodgement of paperwork relating to the purchase.
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The house, purchased by Ms Trad's husband within the Cross River Rail corridor for $695,000, was not properly declared by Ms Trad within the required timeframe.
The Cross River Rail portfolio was removed from her ministerial responsibility following the controversy.
The house was recently on-sold.
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The CCC referred back the matter to the Parliament for consideration by the ethics committee.
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<div class="_1665V undefined">
The Speaker recognised Ms Trad's public apologies but noted no apology had been made to the House.
</div>
</div>
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