Canion dot Blog

Late-stage capitalism is destroying a basic human right - being able to live in a house - as housing affordability for renting and buying across Australia has been smashed in recent years.

A report produced by Anglicare Australia highlights with cold hard facts something that is already clear in the community: Australian housing is unaffordable. I note a few quotes from ABC News’ story covering the release of the paper that highlight the challenge facing our nation.

There is not a single property across Australia – or even a room in a shared house – that’s affordable for someone on youth allowance, according to a new report from support organisation Anglicare Australia.

Not one property! Not even a crappy place in a crappy suburb. Nothing. And good luck convincing a renter to let you rent their property and establish a share house. That isn’t going to happen. You’re stuffed.

In Western Australia, the housing market has lost all dynamism. It has ground to a halt, with just a couple of thousand properties on the market in a city of around 1.8 million people. If people can’t be certain of being able to find a house to buy a house, they’re not going to try to sell the one they’re in. So we end up with a malfunctioning market. Just as the employment market needs dynamism to ensure productivity—people leaving old jobs and entering new ones—so the housing market needs a pipeline of properties on a continual basis.

Housing unaffordability has killed the market, and is leaving a wake of homelessness as a result.

The solution isn’t unknown. It has been known for a long while. But conservatism and vested interest holds back change, which is hardly a surprising situation.

“an overhaul of the tax regime” is needed – including the capital gains tax discount being phased out over a period of 10 years and negative gearing deductions to be phased out for new investors in the private market.

It has been evident for many years that the ‘investor class’ are leveraging what is not a loophole, but designed policy, in the form of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount to profit from housing. Buying and owning multiple homes has become an investment game for those who can afford it, pushing up prices and pushing out people who need a home to simply live in. The increasing price pressure means rents go up in lockstep, further punishing those who can’t afford a ride on this particular gravy train.

A previous Federal Election saw Bill Shorten as Opposition Leader run an aggressive campaign to end the current negative gearing tax policies. Confronted with a scare campaign from the conservative side of politics, he lost the election. That’s scared away current politicians from making changes that are necessary for the greater good, never mind the wake of economic and social destruction that might be left in its wake.

Talking with a friend today. The topic of interest rates came up, as they do in any recent conversation within the Australian context.

My friend asked a poignant and sensible question, “why doesn’t the Government adjust the rate of the Goods & Services Tax (GST)?” It is a broad-based consumption tax. If consumption is getting out of hand and creating an inflationary spike, then why not add a disincentive to consumers by raising the price of consumption?

With interest rates variations it’s the mortgage belt who carry all the pain. They represent about 25% of households. Yet rising interest rates enrich those with existing savings, enabling greater consumption. Wouldn’t it be better to share the load equitably across any and all of those who spend?

The downside to this strategy is that the GST is regressive. It hits everybody with the same cost. For those with lesser incomes, the proportion of income the tax takes is greater. It’s not an equitable solution, because now low income earners are bearing a greater proportion of the pain.

From a political point of view, it’s easier to blame the independent Reserve Bank for pain and suffering. Why place the crosshairs on your own government by changing fiscal policy? “Monetary policy delivered by the independent Reserve Bank, that’s who to blame!”, is the relieving Government cry!

Whether it’s the GST, or a more equitable adjustment to the broader taxation platform, the Australian Government needs to do something. Since its election, the Albanese Labor Government seems content to sit on the sidelines, apart from some modest targeted tinkering. It withdrew funding for some capital works projects, that at least in WA have now been funded by the State Government, so that attempt at withdrawing money and inflationary pressure from the system didn’t work. Some modest efforts to encourage growth in housing supply have been delivered.

Small target strategy, however, seems to remain the prevailing preference in Canberra.

I would like to see the Government take some real, tangible action. Let’s look at negative gearing. Let’s look at tax breaks that make no sense. Let’s recalibrate towards equality and away from the neo-liberalist agenda.

I elect a government to do things: not to watch the RBA use its only blunt instrument.

Get to work, Labor.

I’m happy to see pressure mounting on the RBA. Not so much even for the decision to lift rates, but on it’s myopic approach to analysis. The economy has changed; it has become more integrated, and duopolies and oligopolies rule the Australian markets. A fundamental lack of competition is allowing the growth of profits, and the RBA currently seems unwilling to accept this as a line of thinking.

Bernard Keane, writing for Crikey, knocks it out of the park on the Reserve Bank of Australia’s approach to inflation.

It’s hard to choose a few highlights from Keane’s article; the entire piece is worthy of reading.

The RBA wants to wish the entire profit-inflation debate away, seemingly enraged at the suggestion that gouging by firms with high levels of market power is a greater spur to inflation than the traditional villain: greedy workers demanding pay rises driving a wage-price spiral.

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the OECD weighed into the debate, devoting a section of its latest global economic forecasts to the issue. Its data specifically on Australia shows unit profits massively outweighing unit labour costs as a source of inflation.

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this bout of profit-driven inflation comes at the end of a near-decade of wage suppression, and a historic shift — especially since 2017 — from wages to profit share of income nationally. Merely preserving, let alone strengthening, profit margins in a period of high inflation perpetuates that shift from workers to business.

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Neoliberals have a blind spot when it comes to market concentration: the core idea that unfettered markets work more efficiently than highly regulated markets means a relative antipathy to effective competition laws designed to protect the very mechanism by which markets work efficiently.