4 ways to bring down rent and build homes faster than Labor's $10 billion housing fund

• His first budget, in October, and his second, this month, contained a suite of measures designed to stop rents going “through the roof”.
• By far the biggest of those – the blockbuster – was a A$10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund to finance social and affordable housing.

$10 billion, but off-budget and largely unspent

• The $10 billion (or whatever that goes into the fund) isn’t actually “spent” as far as the budget is concerned.
• It doesn’t come off the budget surplus, or add to the budget deficit, because it remains in the government’s hands.
• When Labor came up with the idea of the Housing Australia Future Fund in 2021, it looked a surer bet.

Limits on how quickly new homes can be built

• A truly bizarre and long-established fact of Australian home building is that it never gets done more quickly.
• The number of houses under construction varies wildly; at times it has been low, late last year it reached an all-time high.
• But the number of houses completed seems to chug along at the same rate regardless.

1. Boost rent assistance

• The “largest increase in more than 30 years” in Commonwealth Rent Assistance amounts to $16 per week.
• Chalmers might well have been concerned that a bigger increase in rent assistance would have pushed up rents, but there’s a way of dealing with that.

2. Limit rent increases

• In most states, increases in the prices we can be charged for electricity, gas and water are limited by regulation.
• In the Australian Capital Territory, increases in rents are limited by regulation.
• The maximum permitted increase is 110% of the most recent annual increase in Canberra rents reported to the Bureau of Statistics.

3. Bribe states and councils to rezone land

Another option is to provide incentive payments to state and local governments that free up their planning systems and build more housing. Conditional payments are not novel. The Commonwealth provided special payments to states that fell in line with its deregulation agenda for about a decade from the mid-1990s.

4. Restrict negative gearing to new builds

• Negative gearing and the concessional rate of capital gains tax that accompanies it drive Australians into becoming landlords.
• Limiting negative gearing to newly-built homes – as Labor promised in 2019 – would get them to fund new builds.