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clock Created with Sketch. 08/01/25
09:09
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Originally posted by Infose:
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"I look around and see lifestyles and housing aspirations way beyond anything like average in my generation,.."Decades of bipartisan support for ‘the market’ to provide necessary housing locked Australians into a system dependent on extraordinary housing inflation to sustain itself until it became unsustainable. It has delivered the present catastrophe of soaring rents, unaffordable prices and insufficient building just as population growth is taking off again. The last time Australia was in a similar situation of a housing shortage and rapidly growing population, no less a figure than Sir Robert Menzies knew ‘the market’ could not be left to deal with the problem; that it required large-scale government involvement to make housing affordable Dr Cameron Murray – one of the minority of economists thinking outside the real estate lobby’s square – has published a timely reminder that it was public housing that created the Australian Dream. It wasn’t the free market that boosted home ownership from 46 per cent to 72 per cent between 1947 and 1966 but direct government intervention. Menzies had a grand political plan in turbo-charging housing. He saw home owners as more likely to vote conservative and thus transparently skewed federal funding towards helping people buy. Dr Murray quotes a 1949 Menzies campaign speech: “Except in relation to the Territories and War Service Homes, the direct responsibility for housing is with the state governments. But the Commonwealth must accept large obligations of assistance. There is already a Commonwealth-States Housing Agreement. We will seek its amendment so as to permit and aid ‘little capitalists’ to own their own homes.
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"That mentality became perverted by Menzies’ successors into wanting legions of little (and not-so-little) capitalists to own other people’s homes – to develop a base of landlords at the expense of home ownership and allowing public housing to stagnate. From then-prime minister John Howard declaring he didn’t have people complaining about the increase in the value of their homes to then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull campaigning hard for the landlord vote that just got him over the line in 2016, public housing went nowhere. And it did little or no better under Labor prime ministers and state premiers of either stripe."
