Outside of doing Wordle every day, one of my other daily routines is to watch Alan Kohler’s financial report on the ABC news. This is a strange routine that I’ve taken up because I’m not an investor, outside of my super I don’t own any shares and I also tend to glaze over when presented with graphs and numbers. There’s something about the way Alan presents his reports that is very approachable.
Perhaps it’s his wry humour or straightforward prose or maybe it’s just very dumbed down from the actual long-winded, number-driven reports he has to read before he summarises things down to the brass tacks for us ‘hoi polloi’. They’re also very short, and for my modern, distracted mind, a short concise report is all I can concentrate on. If all reports were an Alan Kohler report, I’d probably even watch the question time report coming out of Parliament House!
Anyway, so much do I enjoy these little soundbites coming out of the world of finance, that when I saw he had written Issue 92 of the Quarterly Essay titled The Great Divide - Australia’s Housing Mess and How to Fix It, I had to get a copy. Given I have way too many books already (most are still in boxes from my last house relocation), I thought that the best thing was to borrow a copy from the library. Good luck to that, I requested a copy and then promptly discovered I was 9th in line out of 13. Looks like there’s a bunch more Alan Kohler fans out there!
So off I trod to Collins and, lucky enough, they still had a copy. This was the second Quarterly Essay I’ve purchased. The first was by local renewables guru, Saul Griffith. I might just be showing my age but it’s very strange for me to read essays as well as be engaged with economics. Even the word brings back awful memories of last-minute late-night essay cramming from my Uni days. If only we had chatGPT back then!
Let me get to the point. If you want to get a hold on how our current housing crisis came about – READ THIS ESSAY! Kohler’s take on the Australian housing crisis makes it super succinct. Whilst it took me a couple of sittings to read, it’s brass tacks – nice and easy plain English with the odd graph thrown in. Before I had read the article, my thoughts on the housing crisis were primarily focussed on two things: arcane planning laws favouring the quarter acre, and everyday punters’ fervour for the Australian Dream. Both being in a perpetual loop, spiralling into the great countryside forcing our cities to stretch ever outward creating sprawling metropolises, requiring vast road networks and lacking in services.
Whilst Alan divulges that these two factors are certainly at play, the crisis is a multi-headed beast, and the somewhat ‘darker’ factor he elucidates on is politics. Politics to win elections, or as Menzies coined it, creating “little capitalists” who will rejoice in their Australian Dream, contribute to a strong economy AND vote Liberal. You see, in Menzies strategic political minds, renters were labour voting “feckless transients” – a posit that their own research was unable to prove. In Kohler’s eyes, it was the Menzies government that destroyed public housing by moving it from the Minister of Works and Housing and plonking it into Social Services, where it remains today. Kohler states: “It doesn’t belong there: housing is not welfare, it’s an economic right.”
Whether you want to agree with Kohler’s arguments or not, Australia was a signatory to a little document called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDoHR). Article 25 of the UDoHR recognises the right to housing as part of the right to an adequate standard of living. I know it’s easy to forget things we sign. I’m pretty sure I’ve signed away the rights to my face, fingerprints, my online history and likely that of my kids just by accepting terms and conditions of various social media platforms. But, I would take the signing of the UDoHR as an imperative that the Federal government needs to take seriously.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 122,494 people were estimated to be experiencing homelessness at the time of the 2021 Census. This has a massive detrimental impact on society as a whole, let alone the economy. Perhaps it’s time to take housing out of the social services cabinet and put it back into the works portfolio where it belongs.
PS. I donated my copy of the essay to the Wollongong Library. Hopefully that reduces the waiting list!
