Where do the parties stand on housing: part 5 – Saul Eslake (a non-party)

Yesterday we commended the Greens for their housing policy, including their 'Better Deal for Renters'. Today we commend Saul Eslake, whose natural habitat is the big end of town, on his  outline for a better housing policy – different from, but complementary to that of the Greens – and his critique of Australia's '50 years of housing failure'.

Please follow that link to Prosper Australia – it is essential reading.

Australia's two major parties do have a housing policy, despite their silence on the subject at election time. Their longstanding mutual policy is, tragically, to treat housing not as the seat of security and comfort that is the right of every citizen, but rather as a get-richer-quick scheme. In recent years, it has become a shady adjunct to retirement incomes policy, transferring the future incomes of younger households to older households for their present consumption.

There are plenty of people in both the major parties who would dispute this, because they genuinely don't see housing this way, and regard making housing less accessible and more expensive by deliberate policy as unconscionable. On their terms, then, faced with a 50-year track record of failure, they must change their parties' housing policies.