"It will be greeted with despair by those would be first home...

"Second was a labor genius called Jason Clare who claimed that next to no-one would be able to use it"

Are you aware of the average super balance of various age and gender segments of the population? You require the funds in the first place to access it. That excludes a significant proportion of would be first home buyers.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-16/coalition-superannuation-housing-policy-reaction/101068810

Lowest earners may miss out

Brendan Coates from the Grattan institute agreed that while the scheme would increase house prices in the short term, the long-term impact would be modest.

But he said it would only help people who were already likely to buy a house to spend more.

"Because what you have in super is proportionate to the income that you earn," Mr Coates said.

"A lot of low-income earners, people for whom getting into the housing market is a struggle, this scheme may not benefit a lot of them all that much, because they don't actually accumulate that much super."

Mr Coates said the poorest 20 per cent of 35- to 44-year-olds had a median super balance of zero, and for the next 20 per cent the balance was $15,000.

Super scheme tossed around before

The policy of allowing people to access their super has been tossed around for years without much luck.

It was floated back in 2017 when Scott Morrison was treasurer and dismissed by then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who in 2021 called it "the craziest idea I've heard".

Economist Saul Eslake said the Coalition scheme would do nothing to address the root causes of housing affordability.

"My initial reaction was that I wanted to scream that this reckless inflation of house prices must stop," he said.

"Anything which allows Australians to pay more for housing than they otherwise would, which this scheme undoubtedly does, results primarily in more expensive housing, rather than in more people owning that housing."

"It will be greeted with despair by those would be first home buyers who will see it rightly as pushing their dreams further out of their reach than they already are."