It's the state and territory governments more than the federal government which are going to decide renters ability to attain & retain housing in the near future

 

In Australia there is evidence to suggest that by 2022 there were est. 640,000 Australian households whose housing needs were not being met. 

These households are either experiencing homelessness, in overcrowded homes or spending over 30% of their income on rent.

This unmet housing need is projected to increase to 940,000 households in 2041.

In a November 2022 the Community Housing Industry Association released a report noting the unmet need in states/territories/regions by number and percentage of all households. 

CHIA, Nov 2022, “Quantifying Australia’s unmet housing need: A national snapshot”, p.2

On 29 June 2022 The Guardian reported:

The public housing waiting list across all jurisdictions rose by more than 8,000 households last year, from 155,141 to 163,508. Most of the increase was among households considered “in greatest need”. While for the last nine years social housing stock remained static at est. 4.2% of all housing stock.

The National Cabinet meeting last Friday, 28 April 2023, ended with these joint announcements by the Prime Minister and state & territories leaders, according to ABC News:

• National cabinet has endorsed $2.2b in measures to strengthen Medicare

• The announcements include expanding the nursing workforce to improve access to primary care and incentives for doctors to stay open for longer hours

• Housing ministers will develop a proposal outlining ways to strengthen renters rights, which will be dealt with by national cabinet later in the year

• Work will be undertaken to improve the migration system through increased visa processing capacity and expanding pathways to permanent residency for skilled workers. [my yellow highlighting]

What is clear is that although there may be the intention that a guiding statement on renters rights will eventually be produced by the National Cabinet, it will be left to individual states and territories to decide how and to what degree renters rights will be strengthened.

As for the built-to-rent component of any national plan to increase housing stock, Master Builders Australia sent out a media release immediately after this National Cabinet meeting welcoming a national approach to reforms to address the housing crisis which stated in part:

Master Builders Australia CEO Denita Wawn said the decision to tackle infrastructure investment, planning reforms to increase housing supply and affordability alongside sustainable growth across states and territories is an important signal for the industry.

“Industry will work closely with the Planning Ministers and National Cabinet to ensure all options are on the table and there are no unintended consequences of other reforms that may dampen this effort,” said Ms Wawn.

The Commonwealth Government also announced a series of other measures to boost investment for increasing housing supply including: increasing the depreciation rate [from 2% to 4%] for eligible new build-to-rent projects, and reducing the withholding tax rate for eligible fund payments for managed investment trusts to foreign residents on income from newly constructed residential build-to-rent properties.

However, Master Builders Australia went on to make an ambit claim for further reform:

“More needs to be done to speed up the delivery of new housing in the medium and high-density part of the market over the short term. Government efforts to expand the stock of build-to-rent will provide welcome support.

“The challenge will be to make sure that we put downward pressure on building and construction costs to increase output.

“Builders continue to face regulatory burdens and prolonged delays in approvals for building applications, occupation certificates and land titles. Additionally, land shortages in the wrong places, high developer charges and inflexible planning laws are restricting opportunities to meet demand, speed up project timelines, and minimise costs to both builders and their clients,” Ms Wawn said.

Master Builders’ Delivering the housing needs for all Australians recommends policies around housing supply, workforce, supply chain risk and cost pressures, simplifying regulatory settings that support investment in housing and business productivity.

The Property Council of Australia is also in favour of what it classes on its website News & Research page as the emerging build-to-rent sector.

It sees this sector as having the potential to deliver 150,000 new build-to-rent homes into the rental market in the next 10 years (by 2043) and says of a report it commissioned from Ernst Young and published on 4 April 2023:

.. estimates that the current size of the build-to-rent sector in Australia is $16.87 billion (this equates to roughly 0.2 per cent of the total value of the residential housing sector), with the expectation that this value will continue to grow in the coming years. If it reached just 3 per cent of the residential market, it could be worth $290 billion.

In comparison, the build-to-rent sector comprises of 5.4 per cent of the total value of the residential sector in the UK and 12 per cent in the US.

The Housing Industry Association also issued a media release on 28 April 2023 welcoming the National Cabinet’s agreement today to support a range of reforms to address housing supply, stating:

HIA’s Deputy Managing Director – Industry and Policy, Jocelyn Martin said the decision to tackle planning reforms to increase housing supply and affordability ultimately leads to more affordable rental accommodation and provides the capacity to deliver social housing without impacting housing supply more broadly.

On the part of federal and state governments there appears to be an aversion to their having direct ownership of any project building social housing and, on the part of finance and construction industries – along with property developers and investors – there appears to be a similar aversion to such a direct supply of social housing by the first two tiers of government.

Perhaps the smell of desperation in the air – with 243 construction businesses put into insolvency by the Australian Securities & Investment Commission (ASIC) in March 2023 alone, joining an unspecified number of other construction, registered property investment and/or property development corporations within the January to March 1,879 businesses-strong insolvency list – has the National Cabinet seeking to resuscitate more than one bird with its housing funding commitments. 

Note: Searchable ASIC list can be found at

https://publishednotices.asic.gov.au/browsesearch-notices/

All these government and non-government actors appear to be suggesting that: after relaxing planning laws; increasing investment opportunities along with potential profits for all classes of investors; and the possibility for individuals, partnerships & corporations to access grants & other benefits in the proposed $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund; then market forces will inevitably push rental costs down once housing supply increases even though the most optimistic rendition of proposed supply is unlikely to fully meet the nation's unmet secure residential housing need.

My admittedly jaded personal response to the idea that residential rents will significantly reduce over the next 10 years……

via GIPHY

I'm hoping that time will prove me wrong.

Global oil and gas industries make a combined US$4 billion in profit a day (or US$1 trillion annually) & have done so for the past 50 years. That obscene wealth is thought to be how these industries induce politicians & governments to only pay lip service to the urgency of a world-wide climate emergency which is now lived experience

 

“It’s a huge amount of money,” he said. “You can buy every politician, every system with all this money, and I think this happened. It protects [producers] from political interference that may limit their activities.....The rents captured by exploiting the natural resources are unearned. It’s real, pure profit. They captured 1% of all the wealth in the world without doing anything for it.”

[Prof Aviel Verbruggen, one of the lead authors of a 2012 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report & current Emeritus Professor Energy and Environmental Economics, University of Antwerp, Belgium, quoted in The Guardian, 21 July 2022]

Crikey, 8 December 2022, reprinted in Crikey Holiday Read, 5 January 2023:

‘Short of dictatorships, we are world leaders’: Australia’s record on criminalising environmental protest

MAEVE MCGREGOR

'The jailing of peaceful protesters is chilling for anyone who cares about our democracy — we need to restore and protect the right to protest before it’s too late.'

“After the High Court’s decision on the Franklin River on 1 July 1983,” said Bob Brown to Crikey, referring to the famous Tasmanian dam case during which he was arrested, “I stated we had entered a new era of environmentalism and that it would never be so hard as it was in the Franklin campaign.”

“I was totally wrong.”

Nearly 40 years on since the historic victory — in which the Commonwealth government succeeded in stopping the large hydroelectric Franklin Dam being built in Tasmania — the founder and former leader of the Greens was once again arrested, but this time under newly introduced laws that carry $13,000 fines or two years’ imprisonment for protests on a forestry site. The same laws also impose $45,000 fines on organisations, such as the Bob Brown Foundation, which lend support to such protests.

Far from heralding a new dawn for environmental justice, Brown said, the Franklin campaign had proved something of an aberration.

“We now have a situation across Australia where environmentalists are jailed and environmental exploiters are protected and subsidised,” he said of his arrest a few weeks ago.

“Instead of increasing environmental protection, we have laws that do the reverse — laws which foster the self-made environmental tragedy of this planet.”…..

Criminalising climate activism

The larger and more pressing dilemma, Brown said, — and one which belongs to the current age — is the growing tendency of government to criminalise peaceful protest, while climate breakdown and mass extinction envelop the world, forever sealing its fate.

In August, Victoria’s opposition united with the Andrews government to pass laws comparable to Tasmania’s, running roughshod over a chorus of concerns voiced by civil liberties groups, unions and environmentalists.

Three years earlier, in 2019, the Queensland government rushed through sweeping limits on the right to protest, underpinned by unsubstantiated claims of “extremist” conduct by environmentalists. The resulting legislation expanded police search powers and criminalised “dangerous locking devices” — such as superglue or anything activists might use to secure themselves to pavement or buildings — as a means to silence dissent.

And in New South Wales, concerns about traffic disruption were similarly seized upon following climate protests in Sydney and Port Botany earlier this year to hurry the introduction of two-year jail terms and $22,000 fines for “illegal protests”.

The laws, which criminalise “illegal protests” on rail lines, bridges, tunnels and — most contentiously — public roads, were passed within two days with the unqualified support of the Labor opposition mere weeks after the government flagged a crackdown on environmentalists.

Though seemingly aimed at “anarchist protesters”, as NSW Attorney-General Mark Speakman put it, the breadth of the provisions suggests otherwise.

“Because the provisions are so loosely drafted, so imprecise, the laws can apply to almost any situation of people being on a road,” said Coco’s lawyer, Mark Davis.

“The Roads Minister Natalie Ward didn’t know herself if ‘public road’ meant ‘major road’ or any and every road. It’s a disgrace. It gives police an unlimited, utterly arbitrary discretion to arrest anyone on a road protesting about anything, not just climate.

“Short of some prominent dictatorships, we are world leaders with this kind of legislation. And the courts, or at least one court, has shown us the gun is loaded and they’re willing to fire it.”

Disruption and democracy

Against the backdrop of this legislation, now the subject of constitutional challenge, environmental demonstrators across Australia have regularly been denied bail or otherwise forced to contend with disproportionate bail conditions, while those residing in New South Wales have had espionage activities undertaken against them by a new police unit, Strike Force Guard.

In a statement to Crikey on Wednesday, New South Wales Deputy Premier and Minister for Police Paul Toole defended the laws.

“Illegal protests that disrupt everyday life, whether it’s transport networks, freight chains, production lines or commuters trying to get to work or school, will not be tolerated,” he said.

It was a sentiment shared by Premier Dominic Perrottet, who days earlier labelled Coco’s 15-month prison sentence “pleasing to see”, adding “if protesters want to put our way of life at risk, then they should have the book thrown at them”.

In answer, the famous physicist and climate scientist Bill Hare said, via Twitter, that the inconvenience occasioned by “protest is not comparable to [the] catastrophic risk to [the] environment and serious damage to our way of life caused by fossil fuel emissions”.

Hare — the lead author for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, for which the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — added that Perrottet’s statement was one of the “most regressive, anti-democratic statements” he could recall in Australia “for a long time”. [my yellow highlighting]

It’s a view which throws the shifting definition of what is deemed lawful dissent into sharp relief, Ray Yoshida of the Australian Democracy Network told Crikey.

“It’s doublespeak for the NSW government to say they support protests as long as they don’t break the law, and then pass new laws that shrink the space for people to act,” he said.

“The jailing of peaceful protesters is chilling for anyone who cares about our democracy — we need to restore and protect the right to protest before it’s too late.”

Had such laws existed at the time of many of Australia’s historic environmental wins — from the Franklin River to the Kakadu and Jabiluka blockades — many, perhaps all, would have met with failure.

“There’s no doubt these laws would certainly have had an adverse impact on bringing to the public’s attention the Franklin Dam issue and, for that matter, a range of issues that have been brought to prominence in the public’s mind because of protests,” Greg Barns SC of the Australian Lawyers Alliance said.

He added people too often overlooked the hundreds of arrests which occurred during the Franklin River campaign, but under ordinary trespass laws that impose lesser penalties.

“The reason [the new laws] are unnecessary is because there are already ample laws on the statute books, such as laws relating to trespass, criminal damage, that deal with these types of situations if people break the law,” he said.

“What [Coco’s] sentence shows is that these new laws are draconian. Her sentence is a draconian penalty allowed for by a draconian law.”

Why now?

Given ours is the age of looming, if not inevitable, climate disaster, all of this poses the inevitable question: why the crackdown on environmentalists?

In Brown’s view, it’s no accident of history the techniques used by campaigners in the past are being targeted by government. It’s a phenomenon, he said, which conversely owes its existence to “state capture” by the fossil fuel and logging industries.

“The extractive industries, who want to convert nature into profits, can no longer win the argument with the public on the environment, so they have to ‘take out’ the environmentalists,” he said.

“These laws are meant to kill environmental activism and frighten people into silence.”

In this connection, there’s little denying climate anxiety, and concomitant calls for climate action pose a risk to such corporations.

A recent analysis of World Bank data undertaken by Belgian energy and environmental economist Aviel Verbruggen, a former lead author of an IPCC report, found the oil and gas industry had delivered more than $4 billion in profit every day for the past 50 years.

Following the report’s release, Verbruggen said: “You can buy every politician, every system with all this money, and I think this happened here. It protects [polluters] from political interference that may limit their activities.”

While Brown doesn’t believe any Australian politicians have been bribed or “bought”, so to speak, he said the lobbying power of the industry was obvious, both on a domestic and global level.

“By and large, [our politicians] are just suborned by this lobbying tour de force, which is not being matched by the non-governmental sector, which is the guardian of the environment,” he said.

“The striking similarity between Australian [anti-protest] legislation and the UK’s legislation is a clue which indicates we’ve got a global corporate governance.”

To buttress this view, Brown pointed to the $700 billion in taxpayer subsidies received by oil and gas companies globally in 2021.

Viewed in this context, he said, the anti-protest laws were self-evidently designed to shatter the unity underpinning the rise of collective, society-wide pressure to move on climate action.

Environmental Justice Australia ecosystems lawyer Natalie Hogan agreed the laws were a “politically motivated crackdown on legitimate political expression”, and ones that illustrated the efficacy of environmental campaigns.

“These protests provide very important community oversight,” she said in reference to the illegal logging in Victorian forests exposed by environmental demonstrators and citizen science groups in recent years.

“It seems very inconsistent to [tell Victorians] native logging will end by 2030, and then introduce laws that disproportionately criminalise or penalise people engaged in legitimate protests or citizen science in forests.”

Others, however, believe the anti-protest laws represent yet another skirmish on the law-and-order politics theme.

“Banging the law-and-order drum has been fashionable for over 20 years,” Greg Barns said. “I think that’s the issue at play here — it just so happens to be climate change in this instance.”

“The irony is that it will probably have the impact of emboldening protesters to take more extreme action because they see the laws as unjust.”

The future of protests

Not everyone has cast doubt on the deterrent effect of the laws, though. Coco’s lawyer Davis said the laws — which he defined as a “knee-jerk response to tabloid media” — would achieve their desired result.

“Of course it will work — who would be insane enough to organise any sort of free protest? You can go to jail for a long time. It’s nuts,” he said.

Either way, Davis added, it’s clear such laws were placing the limits of Australia’s reputation as a liberal democracy under extraordinary pressure.

“You cannot be a fully functional democracy if you cannot voice dissent to the government power,” he said. “It’s simply impossible.”

“To be on a road, to use a road, is intrinsic to the right to protest and the fact that’s now seen as somehow radical tells you about the cultural shift we’re witnessing.”

Brown, for his part, believes it would be foolish to bet on a decline in environmental protest, notwithstanding the laws, given the climate predicament confronting the globe.....

“But ultimately responsibility for [change will] fall to voters..... 

“These laws will only continue to get worse if people don’t vote for the environment.”

After all, he said, dealing with global warming and the extinction crisis is, and always has been, about the balance of power.

BACKGROUND

North Coast Voices, Monday, 2 January 2023,

Who is undermining Australia’s climate change mitigation goals? Listing lobbyists contracted to act on behalf of fossil fuel industries.