No Solutions: The United Australia Party and the Housing Question

20/05/2022

Peter Craig

The No Solution series analyses and critiques the policies that different parties brought to the 2022 Australian Federal Election. It seeks to highlight the issues within the proposed solutions of these parties, to demonstrate how they refuse to address the root problems of housing. The material presented critiques the flaws within these policies, and provides solutions that address the needs of the Australian population in relation to the housing crisis.

Setting The Scene

One would be right to question the housing platform of a party founded by Clive Palmer – after all, you’d imagine Clive hasn’t struggled to put a roof over his head. However, the United Australia Party is striking out to ride a populist yellow wave, and so finds itself in need of a housing policy that at least pays lip service to the countless Australians struggling to house themselves and their families. 

Of course, it’s easy to make promises about how you’ll use power that you stand no chance of winning. Even the mainstream press, which has given the UAP a free ride, mocked the absurdity of their policies. For us, though, even if there were a possibility of them becoming reality, they would come nowhere near solving the needs of working Australians.

So What Do They Propose?

A maximum of 3% interest on home loans  

The UAP’s silver bullet to solve the Australian housing crisis is to (somehow) ensure a 3% cap on mortgage rates. The mechanics of how this would occur haven’t been made clear, although there has been much discussion in the liberal press on the matter. One method would be for the federal government to subsidise the difference between the “cap” and the rates charged by private banks – which would be an incredibly expensive policy, especially coming from a party that never stops shouting about “out of control national debt”.

Regardless of how the UAP plan to implement this policy, the gains for working Australians seem close to nil. Perhaps those writing policy for the UAP aren’t aware, but interest rates have been hovering about as close as they can get to 0% for some time now, and Australia’s housing crisis has only worsened. Low interest rates encourage more borrowers to enter the market, driving up demand for homes, and driving up prices. Party leader Palmer’s response to questions on the matter is that the policy isn’t aimed at new borrowers, but to secure the homes of those who already took out loans. How exactly that is to be legislated, like most UAP policy, has not been explained in any depth, and of course there is no mention of government assistance for workers to make payments on their gigantic mortgages should they find them untenable even at 3%.

First $30,000 of a home loan to be tax deductible 

The UAP claim that this policy will “restore the Australian dream for each Australian to own their own home”, although the couple of sentences they have released on the matter doesn’t explain how. Considering that even a deposit for a home loan now far outstrips this sum across vast swathes of Australia, the worth of a $30,000 tax deduction when it comes to increasing home ownership is questionable at best. There’s also a strange contradiction between the two pillars of the UAP housing policy – if the party is so concerned about the tenability of Australian mortgages, as implied by the previously discussed 3% mortgage rate scheme, why offer a policy that will encourage more people to enter into such arrangements? Many working Australians are in fact far less concerned with the “dream” of home ownership than they are with simply having a stable roof over their heads, and not having to worry about banks or landlords removing their shelter at a moment’s notice. This could be achieved through public housing initiatives, rather than throwing yet more Australians to the wolves by locking them into mortgages they’ll be struggling to pay off for decades.

Conclusion

Like most policies released by the UAP, their plans for housing are a populist grab-bag of poorly thought out discounts that will do nothing for people who can’t afford a place to live. Instead of sound-bite driven brain farts, Australian workers need a thorough program of radical change. The UAP’s bare bones policies make no mention of public housing or any assistance for renters, and barely even scratch the surface of supply-side issues like increasing housing stock. These policies fall far short of even being referred to as half-measures, instead being empty rhetoric designed to appeal to the sort of ideologically confused petite-bourgeois voter that the UAP was banking their electoral success on.