The Echidna: You wouldn't hire Albanese to sell your home

You can hear the echo of hammer meeting steel, of posts being driven into hard, unforgiving ground. It used to be a common Australian soundtrack. But in these gloomy times the clamour of "For Sale" signs being installed sounds more like construction work on a set of gallows.

It's loud enough to make a first-term prime minister extremely nervous.

Several prominent "For Sale" signs were pounded into the nature strips of homes near us in recent weeks and it's not just preparation for the spring selling season. No doubt they're sprouting in your neighbourhood, too - large hoardings plastered, as always, with those cult-like photographs of spray-tanned real estate agents promising buyers their own piece of heaven.

What they won't tell you is the hell forcing many of these homes on to the market.

Australia is on the edge of the so-called mortgage cliff as almost 150,000 households come off fixed-rate housing loans of 2 per cent or less to discover they need hundreds and, in many cases, thousands of extra dollars a month to keep the family home.

The Reserve Bank calculated there were about 800,000 households on fixed-rate loans by the end of last year, most of them secured during the pandemic when interest rates hit all-time lows. Now the past is brutally catching up with a sizeable chunk of them. Already hurt by significant cost-of-living increases, many have no choice but to surrender.

Fifteen months and a dozen rate rises ago Anthony Albanese was a freshly installed Prime Minister promising to build a new Australia. He was going to construct a million affordable homes within five years. He was going to drag Parliament House out of the sewer and lift the standard of political discourse. And he promised Indigenous Australians a referendum to enshrine a voice for them in the constitution.

What happened?

Albanese's housing bill is stranded in the Senate. The building of new homes is approaching its lowest level in a decade and a national cabinet housing strategy announced this week offered little short-term relief for renters paying ransoms. Meanwhile, the RBA's brutal attack on inflation has turned thousands of family homes into time bombs while surging costs trigger a string of construction company collapses.

Parliament House, to no one's surprise, has maintained its reputation as the nation's prime venue for snide one-liners, petty vendettas and superficial grandstanding.

And support for the Voice to Parliament, a once-in-a-generation proposal warmly embraced by a majority of Australians not so long ago, is dissolving as it turns into another acrid, rock-throwing spectacle in our always festering culture wars.

How did it come to this?

Chronic problems like housing and rental shortages have been decades in the making. Undoing them will take just as long. And anyone who genuinely believed parliamentary standards would lift under Labor should reduce their daily intake of hallucinogens.

But it's the Voice referendum, due to be taken to the people in the next few months, that is emerging as a visceral failure for the Albanese government. Public backing for the referendum has plunged from 63 per cent a year ago to 46 per cent, according to this week's Resolve Political Monitor poll.

With a national majority of voters and four out of six states needed for a successful ballot, the chances of Australia staging its first successful plebiscite in 46 years seems highly unlikely, guaranteeing racial division and political rancour for years to come.

Albanese has only himself to blame. He might be an adroit politician expert at navigating the cut-throat world of Labor's byzantine factions, and he was never going to be given a black eye at this week's annual Labor conference in Brisbane, despite the protests over housing.

But he's no salesman. We saw that on the hustings during last year's federal election campaign. He stiffens in front of microphones. Blinks, swallows and hesitates too often. Most of us might do the same. But he's the Prime Minister and it's his responsibility to sell the referendum and clearly articulate why a Voice is necessary.

What he's given us instead, in cahoots with the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, are hesitant and confusing messages providing perfect fodder for the "No" case.

It's clear there was no strategic marketing plan for the Voice and far too much hubris - a trait that often bedevils Labor during its infrequent terms in power.

You can't blame Albanese for the housing crisis. But if you're unfortunate enough to find yourself peering over that mortgage cliff, there's no way you'd hire him to sell your home.

HAVE YOUR SAY: Are you or someone you know considering selling your home because of rising interest rates? How would you assess the first 15 months of the Albanese government? Have you changed your mind about the Voice to Parliament? Email us: echidna@theechidna.com.au

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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:

- The buoyant jobs market may be starting to catch up with the slowdown in growth underway in the economy, with official figures showing more than 24,000 full-time jobs were lost in July. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has reported that the unemployment rate nudged higher to 3.7 per cent last month, its highest point since April, after a 24,200 fall in the number of workers with a full-time job was only partially offset by a 9600 lift in part-time work.

- Curators at the National Museum may well be gnashing their teeth at having missed one of the motoring finds of the year, which this week fell fortuitously into the hands of a private Canberra car collector. The extraordinary, priceless part of Australia's motoring heritage is one of the original London-Sydney marathon vehicles, a 1968 5-litre V8 Ford Falcon GT, taken off the assembly line at Broadmeadows and custom-built to compete in one of the world's last great transcontinental motor races.

- The Matildas semi-final clash against England has become the most watched television program since records began. The hype around the "Tillies" led to 11.15 million people tuning in to watch a historic clash at Sydney's Stadium Australia on August 16. The 3-1 loss had a national average audience on Channel 7 and 7plus of 7.13 million, making it the most-watched program since OzTAM's audience measurement system began in 2001.

THEY SAID IT: "All politics is marketing. And in marketing there are but two variables: product and salesmanship." - Tim Dorsey

YOU SAID IT: The national cabinet's housing blueprint won't put homes on the ground immediately. And the Greens stalling the Housing Australia Future Fund in the Senate wouldn't help either.

"Don't let any government near construction," writes Ross. "When she was minister for Aboriginal affairs, Jenny Macklin proudly announced they had built six houses at Wadeye for $3.6 million dollars or $600,000 per house. An experienced builder in Darwin said that he could get nice homes prefabricated in Indonesia, shipped and erected with local labour at Wadeye for $100,000 per house. That is 36 houses instead of six. Go figure."

Jennifer writes: "Those of us living in Canberra know how some of the controls on landlords (including increased freedom for tenants to do what they like with their rental properties), have led many investors to leave the market to invest more safely elsewhere. The shortage of housing is the fault of the local, state and territory governments not listening to, or looking after, all of their residents, instead concentrating on businesses and industry groups. If they were listening they'd have known what was needed long ago. It's been very clear for ages. The quickest way to increase housing is to encourage long-term rental contracts and restrict short-term or overnight ones. To increase housing over time, build more that is affordable, including social housing. Simple really."

"I don't think there should be a rental freeze," writes Jane. "The Greens need to see what all the people in the know have said. I really think that every time they block the bill, they are sending the date of actually having houses for people further and further down the track. We need places for people to live in now, not in the future."

Murray writes: "Australia's immigration rate is way too high as successive governments have used high migration as a supposed means of keeping our economy growing. This is a false economy. We need to look at our education system, reintroduce more emphasis on the basics like reading, writing and arithmetic, remove the emphasis on a university education and encourage our teenagers to think about TAFE-based training and fund it accordingly. Government subsidies should be paid directly to trainees, not to employers or consultant firms, so they receive a decent living wage as an incentive to train. Yes, we will still need backpackers and something like the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility initiative, but start training our own people and this will greatly reduce the need for skilled migration. High immigration will only make the housing crisis that much worse."

"Today I see that from September 1 houses built in NSW will cost $40,000 more to 'greenpaint' them with double-glazed windows, etc," writes Garry J. "So maybe the NSW government could pay for that so the already unaffordable houses for anyone on less than $200,000 after tax (combined) could be affordable for them. And why when most future households will have jut 3.4 people in them do we need more than three bedrooms when they already include outsize kitchen/family rooms/theatre rooms, etc?"

Bob writes: "It's becoming increasingly obvious that some of our politicians are deficient in even simple arithmetic. Either that, or they don't understand big numbers. The Housing Australia Future Fund proposes to build 30,000 affordable houses costing a paltry $10 billion. That's only $333,333 each. Where do you get one of those in today's environment? Albo must have some large parcels of land, enormous quantities of cheap building materials, and an army of cheap tradies, all tucked away somewhere, waiting for the nod to proceed."

"The HAFF is the biggest joke in decades," writes Lynda, "nonsense legislation for Labor to be proud of, saying they're attempting to address the housing crisis. And that's saying something, given, when the Liberals are in government, they are never known for their capacity to address the human right of shelter for all citizens. Homelessness and insecure housing will still tragically exist, even if the Labor government somehow gets it through both houses. Secondly, if PM Albanese calls an early election, it will be his decision. The luxury, he alone is afforded. So don't try and pin the general annoyance and consensus of an early election being called because the Greens are working for Labor to provide more. It is not a reflection on the Greens if the PM decides to call an early election."