It’s easy to see red over Greens’ plan for housing
You don’t have to go far to get to the heart of Greens hypocrisy but, when it comes to housing policy, the turd is on your shoe before you even step on it. They jump up and down about homelessness and housing affordability but, at the first chance to do anything about it, they kill it off for their rich inner-city mates.
They pretend to be a party for the young while running a protection racket for superannuated Boomers.
It is, frankly, shameless – and a more intelligent political party would at least have the wherewithal to hide their shame. The Greens, however, are dumb enough to leave it for all to see in the hope that the people who vote for them are dumb enough to swallow it.
Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather was a billboard of this when he went on Insiders on Sunday to attack federal Labor’s first homebuyers’ assistance scheme for being “inflationary”.
Who knew the Greens were so concerned about preserving the purity of free-market economics? No doubt they will now oppose the raising of welfare payments, tax cuts for low income workers and any increase in the minimum wage.
Because guess what? Any financial assistance to struggling people carries a risk of being inflationary.
But that seems beyond the ken of Mr Chandler-Mather (why do they all have hyphenated surnames?) who said in one long blurted-out thought bubble that it was inflationary but also wasn’t big enough. But the Greens might support it anyway.
Yet even as they condemn the Help to Buy scheme for interfering with economic forces, the Greens also want to completely tear up the economic fabric and institute a command-and-control economy on the housing market: imposing rental freezes, cutting negative gearing and unleashing some imagined reservoir of limitless public housing.
Of course if everything goes according to plan like it did in the USSR, then that’s just fine and we’ll all live in a Soviet utopia.
But on the off chance that Mr Chandler-Mather and the multipleproperty-owning Greens Treasury spokesman Nick McKim aren’t the economic geniuses they think they are, the results would be far more disastrous than the crisis we now find ourselves in.
Because by all available evidence, the Greens don’t understand even the most basic premise of economics: supply and demand.
The federal treasury secretary told Senate estimates just last week that supply was the biggest problem but, whenever a government tries to increase housing supply, the Greens and their NIMBY mates oppose it.
Indeed, Mr Chandler-Mather has opposed the construction of 1300 new homes in his own Brisbane electorate.
Meanwhile, back on Insiders, Mr Chandler-Mather took issue with the fact that new housing was built by developers who want a profit.
Presumably the Greens want properties developed by non developers and then sold at a loss.
Maybe they really are perfect for the job.
Certainly, Balmain MP Kobi Shetty would be up for it. On Valentine’s Day, she condemned the local Labor council and state government over a rezoning plan to allow more housing in Sydney’s inner west.
“It was incredibly disappointing to see inner west Labor councillors ignore community concerns and instead choose to prioritise developer profit under what is a fundamentally unsustainable, poorly planned rezoning proposal,” she said.
And what does a sustainable and well-planned rezoning proposal look like? One that is in someone else’s electorate, presumably.
Homelessness NSW CEO Dominique Rowe has let fly with both barrels at this kind of attitude.
“None of these councils have the guts to say what they really mean, which is: ‘The housing crisis is not our problem and we are not interested in being part of the solution’,’’ she wrote.
She might as well have been talking about the Greens.
Oh, of course they’re not opposed to property development, just property development by property developers.
Of course they’re not opposed to higher density, just higher density in their suburb.
And so people go homeless, renters struggle to make ends meet and young people are locked out of the property market because the Greens want to harangue people with juvenile socialist dogma about “profits” while blocking practical proposals.
As always with ideologues, when it comes to a choice between ideology and actually helping people, the manifesto wins every time.
And what is manifestly clear is their contempt for struggling Australians.