CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
With the 2025 Federal Election in the rear view, Australians are taking great pleasure in a new political landscape completely devoid of the relentless culture wars that lost the Liberal Party 40 seats.
The climate change denialism, pointless Welcome To Country debates, and weird calls to end WFH options have all been put to bed.
Unfortunately for the bolstered Labor Government, this also means they now have to do some of the things they promised to do.
Otherwise, they’ll probably end up bleeding a few of their own seats to the cashed Independent candidates that have so far only been focused on annihilating the safe Coalition seats.
The first item on the agenda, above all else, is housing.
Enough time as passed since the delusions of Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey for the political class to admit that there is actually a very urgent problem at hand.
Namely, the fact that young Australians simply cannot afford to get into a manipulated property market that has been ravaged by low-effort boomer opportunists who rely on scarcity to boost the price of their nest eggs.
While the limp opposition have always dismissed this issue as a ‘supply issue’ – there has never really been any efforts to build more houses because the same people that argue this would hate to live next to a unit block.
But Labor has conceded that we ned more homes and fast, on top of whatever else they can do to rein in an entire generation of post-war millionaire investors who have never once considered that their greedy wealth-hoarding is robbing their own children of a future.
With very few Australians under 40 being able to escape the rental market without the unfair leg up from a family inheritance, Labor has had to act – and promised to support the build of 1.2m homes, and 55,000 social and affordable homes, by June 2029.
How they will do this is now what is being debated. Do they make it a rule that its’ perfectly acceptable to bypass the concerns of corrupt local councils and NIMBY community groups? Is it time to bridge all of the major train stations and seize unkempt parcels of crown land.
Is medium density the answer? Or do we keep sprawling into the bushlands with rushed mcmansions 2 hours from the CBD.
Some would say the answer has been there all along, but developers are just hoping nobody realises.
The iconic Australian red brick six pack. They are already part of the suburban landscape. We just need one new art deco unit block on every city street and we will surpass the government’s target by several million.
This may be an issue for investors who continue to reap exorbitant rental incomes from the scarcity of housing options. It might also mean that the average Australian home probably won’t keep increasing in value by $400,000 every year.
Drastically increasing supply with a low-fi exposed brick 6-pack template also means that property will be forced to settle with only being able to flog two floors of units, none of which can be marketed as ‘luxury’. Would they even bother with such a humble pursuit?
It’s not known what the government will do, other than blame horse racing enthusiasts for refusing to hand over one Western Sydney race track to be turned into skyscrapers.
Or, we could just keep building suburbs named Northriverlakesvale.
