If you want housing affordability, then raze Canberra because it is not coming otherwise.
Labor has a suite of policies stuck in the senate designed to inflate the bubble:
- Corporatising rents to embed price inflation.
- Shared equity ponzi scheme to dive prices crazy.
- Building far too few houses.
These come on top of its wildly out-of-control immigration policy to spike demand.
The Greens are not much better:
- Scrap negative gearing and freeze rents to crash private housing construction.
- Drive demand crazy with even higher immigration.
- Force the RBA to slash interest rates regardless of inflation.
- Build far too few houses.
The LNP is already competing with these two via its super for housing proposal. Now it wants to throw credit fuel on the bonfire:
The Coalition is considering stripping the prudential regulator of some of its powers to regulate mortgage borrowing, and overhauling credit laws that MPs fear are locking first homebuyers out of the property market.
The opposition launched a Senate inquiry into mortgage regulations in August, fuelled by concerns that rules aimed at reducing the riskiest forms of borrowing had gone too far and made banks too cautious about lending to first homebuyers.
Housing has become a major battleground for the main parties, as record prices, an acute shortage of rental properties and high interest rates combine to significantly reduce affordability.
Of particular concern among Coalition MPs is APRA’s mortgage serviceability test, which assesses whether a prospective borrower would be able to afford loan repayments if the RBA raised the cash rate by 3 percentage points above its current level of 4.35 per cent.
Some MPs also want to scrap responsible lending laws which put the onus on the banks to verify borrowers’ ability to make mortgage repayments, a requirement critics have called overly conservative.
While he said APRA had done a good job, Senator Bragg said the regulator had been given a lot of delegated authority that was “exercised in the dark” away from parliament.
Andrew Bragg is a loose-credit cavalier. He was at the Financial Services Council during the last great bubble blowoff that culminated in the long-forgotten Hayne Royal Commission.
How can this be characterised as a “housing affordability” debate when every single platform is designed to make housing less affordable?
There is only one housing affordability policy that will work in the long run: slash immigration well under 100k to:
- reduce demand;
- reduce rents;
- cut interest rates to increase mortgage affordability.
Capital values prices will rise initially but so will construction volumes to prevent a blowoff.
Canberra is only interested in gaslighting first-home buyers.
