HOUSING
Australia faces a housing crisis. But it requires a variety of approaches, instead of just building more and more homes, on what is already scarce land.
We have countless homes which lie derelict and empty, while countless Australians have no place to call home. Many investors, including foreigners, deliberately keep homes empty for speculative capital gain, while others only rent out homes occasionally on short-stay holiday platforms, like Airbnb or Stayz, which can earn them more rent in just weeks, or even days, than long-term tenants can afford over a year.
In many locations, especially in tourism hotspots, the renting out of homes on Airbnb or Stayz is depriving workers in hospitality and essential services of local places to live. It also appears that a 50% tax discount on capital gain, introduced around 1999, has bred a surge in speculative property investment - to the great detriment of people aiming at buying their first home.
While countless critics put our housing crisis down to a tax arrangement known as negative gearing, their criticism is misleading. Admittedly, most of the benefits of negative gearing go to wealthier investors who can afford to own lots of investment properties. But most landlords are not that wealthy, and they have only a single investment property, so negative gearing enables them to offer affordable rent. Its abolition could ham the supply of rental housing, as could an introduction of rent caps, which means that addressing the rental market's problems will require caution.
We need to ban foreign ownership of property, abolish the 50% tax discount on capital gain, and tackle speculative property investment which results in homes being left empty. We should crack down on land banking, whereby developers buy up land and wait indefinitely before using it at a time when they could maximise profits. Councils and other authorities should focus on filling empty properties and repurposing unused spaces, including office blocks, to increase housing supply. We should tap into what we already have, in the form of unused homes and other dwellings, before we just build more new homes.
Some people who can afford lots of properties will insist that they have the right to do what they like with them - including the right to leave them empty. I have no time for such a self-serving argument. It reminds me of the public service administrators loftily defending the public hospital with no patients in the television satire YES, MINISTER. People hoarding any unused property should be made to "use it or lose it".
We should help every Australian to own a home - instead of helping a select few to own many homes.