Labor’s priorities become obvious when you compare its plan to help aspiring homebuyers with its massive immigration agenda.
If you delve even slightly into the much-hyped 2026-27 Budget, you’ll find that the Albanese government’s promise to restore “intergenerational equity” amounts to precisely nothing.
The big-ticket items in the Budget are changes to capital gains taxes and negative gearing.
It is argued that changes are needed to these settings because they have distorted incentives and the relative reward for investing in certain asset classes like property above others.
Albanese has pledged to slow house price growth by two per cent, which he claims will help an additional 75,000 Australians buy their first home over the next decade.
But these numbers mean little without context. With context, they mean even less.
In the 1990s, it took an average household six years to save a 20 per cent deposit for a house.
Today, it takes more than 12 years.
And while at the turn of the century the average first home buyer took on around $160,000 of debt to buy their home, today they take on an average of over $600,000 to do so.
Today, it takes twice as long to save to go into almost four times as much debt to buy a much smaller home.
Slightly slowing down the runaway growth in house prices means nothing to a generation of Australians who have been locked out of housing entirely.
In the early 1980s, 53 per cent of 25 to 29 year olds and close to 70 per cent of 30 to 34 year olds owned their own home.
By 2021 these figures had declined to just 36 per cent and 50 per cent, respectively.
The government’s aim to help an extra 7,500 Australians go into all this debt each year sounds like a good idea, but it will fail to budge these ownership numbers.
Each month around 10,000 Australians buy their first home, and still ownership rates have been dropping drastically.
Home ownership is the bedrock of Australia’s social and economic health, but it has been tarnished by successive governments who have run excessive migration programs.
Migration levels have been running too high in recent years, which has driven up the cost of housing dramatically.
n August 2023 the National Cabinet agreed to launch the National Housing Accord, under which the government aimed to see 1.2 million new dwellings built between July 1 2024 and June 30 2029.
The National Housing Accord has comprehensively failed, with new dwelling completions some 100,000 behind schedule and with mentions of the plan stripped from this year’s Budget.
We clearly cannot just build our way out of the housing crisis.
Until Australia returns to a more sensible migration program, young Australians will remain locked out of the housing market.
The Budget states that the “key reason housing has become less affordable is that housing supply has not kept pace with rising demand from both homeowners and investors, pushing up prices.”
That is true. But it takes time to increase supply, which requires changes to zoning and other regulatory restrictions and physically building more houses and apartments.
The fastest, most straightforward way to tackle declining house prices and declining homeownership is to adjust the other side of the equation: to reduce demand by cutting migration levels.
Since it was first elected in 2022, the Albanese government has welcomed more than 1.4 million new migrants.
Contrast the government’s plan to try and help 75,000 additional Australians buy a first home with a plan announced in the Budget to welcome almost one million more migrants over the next four years, and you start to see where their priorities really lie.
If the Albanese government really wants to get more Australians into their own home and to repair some of the social and economic damage that has been caused by locking young Australians out of the opportunities their parents and grandparents had, then they must cut migration levels quickly and drastically.
