What they said would happen is happening. The farming rep from Victoria’s Mallee on the radio on Tuesday morning was immensely stoic. We work around the heat, she said, we get up early, check the livestock, close up businesses and stay inside after 2:30 pm. But what happens if this goes on for several days? The interviewer asked. We cook, was the blunt reply. No other words for it.
Bevin Liu today caught up with Sweltering Cities’ Emma Bacon speaking from Melbourne, and it was personal as well as professional for her – making sure she was working in the office where there was aircon but also wondering how to make it home tonight. When the temperatures got to these levels a few years ago, the train tracks buckled. But Bacon was concerned about the extremely poor cooling for some houses and apartments that face west or east. And while the Victorian government introduced mandates for rental properties to be brought up to minimum standards, landlords are bucking the moves.
The Mallee in Victoria, by the way, got to 48.9 degrees at 3.36 pm on Tuesday, and Mildura was at 48.4 degrees at 3.08 pm. Fires continued…of course.
Meanwhile the battle for homes continues
While Melbourne home prices fall and will soon attract an influx of people that Sydney will no doubt be very happy to help with, the Housing Industry Association begged the government on Tuesday not to change negative gearing and capital gains tax in this year’s tax review.
We know exactly how powerful the HIA and its buddies at the Master Builders Australia are, but here’s a plea to the PM Albo: please listen to some of the best brains in Australia who say we need to change both those things, at speed, if you don’t want to consign our young to a lifetime of misery at the hands of landlords (who are always the last to tighten their belts at time of crisis). Or lose them altogether as the interstate migration continues apace.
What you could do Albo is stop plumping up the coffers of the private sector and redirect those funds to building public housing instead.
In an impassioned media release we got on Tuesday, Tim Reardon, chief economist at the HIA, pointed to a new report from the crowd that wants nothing to change, The Taxation of Housing and its Impact on Supply
“You don’t fix a housing shortage by taxing housing harder…and you certainly don’t make homes more affordable by destabilising the tax settings that support new home construction,” he said.
Except you do. Check out what Victoria has done – bigger taxes for landlords, landlords jump ship, making buying a house more far more affordable for renters.
Supply of rentals goes down, but this is where a smart, forward-looking government steps in and builds public housing, which can be rented or bought, just like they did in the olden days. All those brilliant skills visible today in good quality public housing can come back.
Readon blames taxes for the huge increase in building costs that happened at a time when taxes (outside of Victoria) didn’t change, nor the planning regime anywhere, for that matter (for those who keep blaming planning – we’re looking at you, NSW Premier Chris Minns). And still prices went up. We’ll say it again: maybe it’s the cost of money, maybe it’s the cost of labour and materials. Both skyrocketed after Covid and stayed there.
Seriously, aren’t we over the blatant untruths being told to our faces?
It’s insulting.
Readon concludes: “More homes will only be built if governments stop treating housing as a revenue base and start treating it as essential infrastructure.”
Maybe the housing industry should stop seeing the public purse as a revenue base and source of capitalist welfare.
Take a look at the other side of the picture, via a brilliant article this week from Julie Lawson and Liam Davies in an analysis that rips out the wool that’s been plastered to our eyes – that and the obfuscation we’re fed on a daily basis.
The inherent structures of the housing industry entirely favour the private sector at the public’s expense, they say.
“Commonwealth Rent Assistance now exceeds $5–6 billion a year, directed almost entirely to households renting in the private market.
“At the same time, tax concessions, particularly negative gearing and the discount on capital gains tax, cost the Commonwealth around $10–15 billion annually.”
As for the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF), by mid-2025, HAFF completions were in the hundreds, not the thousands required to meet the target of 40,000 homes by 2029.
And many community housing, they say, “function merely as contracted managers rather than as long-term asset stewards”.
The truth is out there, but it’s constantly sidelined and left out of the clever and tightly administered by the people who spin them.
Guess what Joe O’Donoghue’s Future Sydney discovered last week? The size of the communications team at the NSW Planning Department is bigger than the planning team.
Wow!
Meanwhile, as the celebrations and protests continued for Australia/Invasion Day, four bright Indigenous architects were celebrated in the mainstream press. Among them, Jefa Greenaway is remembered fondly for breaking ground in the sector for us with his brilliant presentation a few years ago at our Tomorrowland event at the Baker McKenzie offices in Sydney.
Jefa, a Wailwan and Kamilaroi man, with his wife Catherine Drosinos, founded his eponymous firm Greenaway Architects, told The Sydney Morning Herald, that “Indigenous architecture can be defined experientially and spatially”.
He’s working on some major commissions, including work at Adelaide University, and the “landmark National First Nations College at the University of Technology Sydney – Australia’s first purpose-built and Indigenous-led college for First Nations students.”
Craig Kerslake is another of our favourites who’s also featured at our housing events. He’s a Wiradjuri man and managing director of Nguluway DesignInc.
Craig left us with the indelible insight into how we design our houses – backwards! He was quoting a very smart Auntie adviser. Instead of bedrooms at the front of the house where the road can make it noisy for sleeping, how about bedrooms to the back where it’s quiet and place the more social/interfacing areas to the front so you can say g’day to someone passing by? Makes sense.
His company has now been appointed executive Indigenous architect on the Waterloo Renewal Project, south of Redfern.
Others in the story included Marni Reti, a Palawa and Ng?ti Wai woman and an associate at Kaunitz Yeung Architecture and Jack Gillmer-Lilley, associate and First Nations lead at SJB Architects.
Good to see we can be out and proud about these great Indigenous talents!
So much to learn, so little time.