ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A young French Quarter professional has had the fright of her life over the weekend after waking from a dream where she was sounding a lot like her father when it came to explaining what is to blame for the nationwide housing crunch.
Though the government is mashing people into our cities and towns at the highest rate in history, that is not fuelling the supply/demand problem that renters are suffering at the moment.
That’s according to Emily Freya, who does something progressive in an office with a computer in exchange for money to give her landlord.
“We are in this situation because of repeated and sustained government policy failures over the past two decades,” she said.
“It started with Hawke and Keating. They sowed the seeds. Howard and Costello kept the seeds watered. The assorted Labor Governments between 2007 and 2013 make sure to throw some fertiliser on those terrible policies and this past government has harvested the fruits of the property market,”
“Now this Labor Government is burning the paddock and getting it ready to sow an even bigger crop.”
Which is why, in her own words, Emily said she felt so scared when she had a nightmare that suggested she thought of another idea why everything is fucked at the moment.
“I had a dream I was at the pub with all my friends and someone complained about not being able to find a place to rent. I just started talking, saying things like,’There’s too much immigration for the private rental market to sustain’ and ‘Maybe we need to stop letting so many people coming here until the infrastructure is built to maintain a dignified existence for everyone’ and ‘Perhaps the government could find a cool new way to grow the economy that isn’t based entirely on digging shit out of the ground, property speculation and mass immigration?’ all of which are terrible and wrong,”
“Before we start blaming immigrants, we should point the finger at short-term rentals. There’s 300 000 of them in Australia. If the Federal Government had the sack to clamp down on it, it’d do a lot of good to ease the crisis,”
“There’s also a $7bn tax hole that comes from people not declaring income from short-term rentals, which is enough to pay for one of those new submarines. So yeah, it’s a tricky one,”
“I mean, it’s not tricky. It’s the government’s fault.”
More to come.
