Knocks us over with a feather. Australians who voted no to the Voice, and no to the Liberal Party but yes to One Nation, have also polled yes to falling house prices. These things could all be connected to the Yellow Brick Road that leads us back to the glorious sensible centre, once pilloried as boring, in today’s crazy world, a radical breakthrough.
But then middle of the road is what Australians excel at.
The other thing Aussies are good at is innovation. Usually, we come up with the goods, do the hard work and send the proceeds off to another country to commercialise. With One Nation, the pattern is reversed. We’re importing the politics from Mar-a-Lago and the social media bots from Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” playbook. Taking our turn to be the zone of course.
But never fear, the sensible middle (or its close cousin) has been tasered but its heart is showing signs of life.
If it approved falling house prices – in Australia, where housing is as close to a national religion as we’re likely to get – then anything is possible.
Even reloving our planet.
The cohort who took the questionnaire made the connection between a bit of pain now and a better future for our kids.
Increasingly, we’re picking up a bit more noise around social housing too, which, if we had a friendly billionaire behind us, we would take on as a major campaign, until 30 per cent of all housing was social (to buy or rent) and watch prices fall even further.
Something has made the Feds realise that this needs to be their most important mandate. That what happens in housing has created the Orange Peril. That it’s the biggest driver of cost of living pressures and the biggest destabilser of populations and by virtue (or vice) of this, of radical politics.
So good on ‘em for having a crack and the very clever Machiavellian trope of creating a disturbance “over there”, with capital gains taxes on poor little business and startups while the while the real action was somewhere else.
Maybe they took a look at that Petri dish of social experiments, Victoria, and saw that when taxes went up on property, prices did actually in real life fall. Eat your heart out YIMBYs – you don’t have to rely on a zillion new apartments to get property prices to fall, though we grant you these days call for a mix of housing, not so much any longer for abundant housing, (but shame you never used the words affordable or social housing or we would have been 100 per cent in your court!)
This week we heard price falls could reach 10 per cent in Melbourne, and close to that in Sydney. That’s actually still a token gesture compared to the ridiculous price hikes post Covid. And the fear of the unknown – immigration – has wielded its sword and been cut. So watch even more hot air come out of the market.
But we still need those billionaires to help seed the same fear of housing poverty as the anti-immigration billionaires seeded. So we can get governments around the nation to go big on social housing. Check out Adrian Harrington’s piece this week on why social housing is the most valuable national infrastructure we can have!
We also need billionaires who might relish a bit of fisticuffs with the squillionaires throwing star dust at One Nation and all anti-planetary things.
Because we need money. A lot of money to match those endless rivers of funds undoing decades of hard work.
If you’re confused about the launch of the new political party this week Community Strong Australia, with Zali Steggall and Allegra Spender, think no further. Goodwill and phenomenal work alone will not get you far.
The teals in Australia and all the other independents are doing it really tough. They work their butts off to get elected and then find they have to work even harder once they’re in.
In recent times the Feds slashed funding for their staff to bare bones so these dedicated pollies barely get time to sniff if they hope to develop policy and meet the expectations of their constituents.
New rules will soon threaten them further. This is a message that’s not well understood. Proposed legislative changes mean the will be severe discrepancies between independents and political parties.
The latter will be able to spend $90 million a year but the cap for electorates will be $800,000.
The Electoral Reform Act introduced annual expenditure caps, limiting political parties to spending $90 million on federal electoral expenditure, including a cap of $800,000 for each electoral division. Independent candidates are limited to spending $800,000, and electoral expenditure for capped entities (such as third parties) will be limited to $11.25 million (including $100,000 per division). Spending caps for Senate elections have a separate formula and differ for each state and territory.
You can see the attraction of teaming up.
So far there is just a handful of billionaires supporting the teal agenda: among them Simon Holmes à Court, Scott Farquar, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Twiggy Forest.
Several independents have promised their constituents that they will remain un-partied.
But there are growing sets of eyes directed towards Senator David Pocock and hoping he changes his mind. He’s phenomenally popular, down to earth and speaks to the sporty spirit that unpins Aussie’s favourite co-ordinating principle.
He would be a great adjacent force to the teal-style independents. We certainly need some strong leadership to fight for our collective future.
Given time, Poccock might just decide he needs a bigger platform and he might go much further than anyone thought.
It might be a wild and unintended consequence of the reforms under way, but hey, it’s a wild world out there. And a bit of wild can go either way.
– Tina Perinotto
