Editor’s view: Labor’s blunders fuel housing crisis

Palaszczuk government ministers are either being delusional or deliberately misleading when it comes to their response to the housing crisis.

We fear it is likely the latter, but we are worried it is the former.

The latest evidence of this came on Saturday after The Courier-Mail revealedthe state’s rental market is now a Hunger Games-style battle where desperate Queenslanders are applying unsuccessfully for literally hundreds of properties – and caravan parks are booked out as families move there permanently.

Housing Minister Meaghan Scanlon’s response? To simply laud her own government for the money it has promised to spend over the next four years on new social housing – papering over the fact that work has started on just 1/20th of the promised 13,500 properties (it will be at least 2027 until all are built) and ignoring the findings by the state’s auditor-general that the Palaszczuk government has totally failed to keep up with demand over the eight years it has been in office.

Ms Scanlon’s spin reminds us of Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s misleading tweet the day the damning auditor-general’s report was released, where she ignored the basic realities of inflation to boast: “No Queensland government in 77 years has invested this much in social housing.”

The outrage over that misguided boast led directly to The Courier-Mail’s Hitting Home campaign last year that in turn saw the Premier convene a Housing Summit to work with stakeholders, experts and the industry to come up with solutions.

But since the summit the average price of a Brisbane rental has soared $56 a week or $2900 a year, a figure that dwarfs the government’s key cost of living measure, the $550 rebate on household power bills.

The problem is getting much worse, there is no end in sight and there are concerns there simply is no plan beyond that extra spend to deliver 13,500 new social homes over the next four years.

Now this might surprise some members of this government, but because this is not communist Russia, housing built by the state cannot be the sole solution to a challenge most starkly illustrated by the fact 300,000 Queenslanders are living with unmet housing needs.

And that brings us to the second big reason this government must wear more than some of the blame for the crisis – its demonisation both of the landlords whose investment makes private rentals possible, and of the industry that it will have to rely on if the housing crisis is to be eased: property developers.

On landlords, there is now hard data that shows property investors have pulled out of plans to invest in Queensland after the Premier’s bizarre thought bubble in March, where she said her government was considering capping rents.

A rent cap might, on the surface, sound like a good idea, but of course tighter supply in a market always sees prices increase – and so scaring off landlords actually leads to higher rents. Who knew.

Certainly it seems no lessons have been learned from last year’s debacle, where Treasurer Cameron Dick was forced to embarrassingly dump his ill-fated land tax grab on interstate investors after The Courier-Mail exposed its potential impact on rents.

The government has also been determined to make life harder for landlords through its new rental laws that tip the balance towards tenants in terms of what they can do with the property they live in.

Again, something that sounds OK in theory, but it has had a series of unintended consequences that could have been avoided if ministers would be willing to just engage with the industry.

But industry engagement is not a Palaszczuk government strength.

One sector it flatly refuses to even talk to is property developers. That is due to its politically motivated nuclear response to the Crime and Corruption Commission’s Belcarra probe into dodgy relationships between some local councillors and property developers.

The result has been that since 2018 no government minister or councillor anywhere in the state will talk to developers. Is it just a coincidence that the housing crisis has emerged since then? We will only ever be able to speculate.

Minister Scanlon has also blamed unnamed councils for holding up housing projects. Perhaps this is the case in some instances, but it is the state government itself that is currently holding up the rubber-stamping of the Brisbane City Council’s new rules to unlock more homes in South Brisbane.

Deputy Premier (and Planning Minister) Steven Miles is considering making the inclusion of affordable housing mandatory in every new build in the precinct – a demand the industry warns will act as another brake on investment.

This is a government that also lacks courage. It not only blames everyone else for its problems (see the examples above), but it meekly gives in to the standover tactics now routinely being engaged in by construction union the CFMEU.

The result is the astonishing fact that the cost of construction labour in Queensland is now the most expensive in Australia.

That is great for the tradies who are CFMEU members, but those wages lead directly to higher prices for the fewer and fewer properties now being built in a post-Covid world where the price of materials has also recently soared.

Meanwhile, the government has not even considered the impact its “big build” of homes, hospitals and stadiums will have on the supply of construction workers. And again, it will be families buying a place to live that will wear that cost personally.