Albo creates housing shortage, buys $4.3m house

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The worst PM of our lifetimes is cashing in:

Anthony Albanese should be congratulated. As the son of a single mother, Albanese grew up in struggle street, reached the highest office in the land, and did well along the way in terms of accumulating asset wealth.

Nothing was handed to him and, in isolation, it’s a story of success to which all should aspire.

The flipside, of course, is that the prime minister does not live in isolation and revelations he and his fiancee Jodie Haydon are in the process of dropping $4.3 million on a beach house on the NSW Central Coast raises that hackneyed allegation of “poor optics”.

Hardly hackneyed. This is the corruption at the core of Canberra policymaking.

Everything Canberra does seeks to achieve one outcome above all others: higher house prices.

So-called affordability measures such as shared-equity, build-to-rent, HAFF etc, are all designed to make housing more expensive while pretending the opposite.

The other political parties are no better. The LNP wants cheaper loans and super for housing. The Greens want immigration higher than its unmanageably high rate.

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There is an enormous conflict of interest between the MPs of Canberra and the housing sector.

The MPs buy property hand over fist while only producing policies that inflate their assets.

The price for this is a dysfunctional society in which successive generations are disenfranchised from basic human rights as their social contract is torn up.

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The nation’s industrial capability is gutted.

And over-migration wrecks living standards in perpetuity.

Albo shouldn’t be congratulated. He should be marched to the gallows.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.