Despite declaring that housing affordability would be a key priority of her government, the new NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has squibbed the challenge of any real action to improve the lot of first home buyers and renters in New South Wales.
Berejiklian was unanimously elected premier on January 23 after former leader Mike Baird resigned in the face of widespread opposition to his neoliberal policies.
She immediately named housing affordability as “the biggest concern people have across the state”.
Yet she refused to support calls for cuts to tax concessions such as negative gearing, which currently favour wealthy people purchasing houses as an investment over new home buyers, or the reintroduction of measures such as an inheritance tax. As the former state Treasurer, Berejiklian had resisted calls to abolish stamp duty on property purchases in favour of a broad-based land tax.
Berejiklian merely said that “housing supply” was “the best way to address housing affordability”. This repeats the mantra of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Treasurer Scott Morrison, but does nothing to really tackle the issue of the outrageous cost of housing in Australia's major cities.
Sydney has been rated the second most unaffordable city for housing in the world, behind Hong Kong. At the end of 2016, the Domain Group revealed that Sydney's median house price had climbed more than 10% to a record $1,124,000.
As a letter in the January 25 Sydney Morning Herald pointed out: “The federal government needs to address negative gearing and the favourable capital gains tax treatment both to take the heat out of the housing market and encourage investment in more productive enterprise.
“The state needs to reform the Residential Tenancy Act to increase tenants’ security of tenure, so making long-term renting a viable option for lower and middle-income earners (as it is in Europe), rather than struggling to meet mortgage repayments that place them under severe financial stress."
As well, instead of forcibly evicting public housing tenants and selling off their homes, as the Baird government did to the Millers Point residents and others, the state government needs to radically increase the construction and supply of public housing to meet the huge waiting list for public housing in NSW.
It should also act to mandate the inclusion of a significant proportion of genuinely “affordable housing” in all new property developments.
These are just some of the immediate measures which are essential to begin to tackle the housing crisis in NSW.
Like the article? Subscribe to Green Left now! You can also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.