Proxy housing battle pits Albanese against his younger self

“Capital gains from appreciation of holding assets is taxed at half the applied rate, effectively entrenching the benefit of having and holding assets which can only exist if you’re established,” he wrote.

“There is no intergenerational justice in such preferential arrangements, and it means those seeking opportunity have to carry a higher share of the burden in direct tax today or future repayments on debt tomorrow.”

As we crest the hill towards the 2025 election, one at which Wilson may try to win back an electorate now festooned with renters, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has taken up the cudgels on home ownership.

Increasingly, the Greens pose as much a threat to Labor as the teals do to the Liberal Party.

He’s not about to embrace tampering with capital gains or negative gearing, but in his speech to the Liberal Party federal council in Canberra on Saturday, Dutton declared the Liberals’ resurrection, especially in teal seats, depended in large part on trying to reverse declining home ownership.

Dutton, like Anthony Albanese in opposition, will keep his powder dry until closer to the election but said a number of policies were being developed and could be rolled out from early next year onwards.

“Many aspiring young Australian home owners will cast their vote at the next federal election,” he said.

“As the pencil in their hand hovers over a Coalition candidate, we want the sound of jingling house keys to resonate in their minds.”

A Coalition source summarised the strategy as thus: “We won’t win the under-40s by being woke, but we will if they can buy a house.”

As events of this week showed, young people and housing will be a crowded field in the lead-up to the election and Labor could find itself stuck somewhere in the middle.

This week, the passive-aggressive tensions that have been building for years between Labor and the Greens finally erupted over the Greens’ ongoing refusal to pass the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund,

So heated were the parliamentary exchanges that on Wednesday night at the annual Midwinter Ball, Greens leader Adam Bandt was mischievously introduced by the MC as the opposition leader.

Dutton didn’t mind. He is taking great pleasure watching Albanese making veiled threats about a double dissolution election while doing battle with, arguably, his younger self – an ideological tub thumper from the Left in the form of Greens housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather.

Battle over inner-city seats

Chandler-Mather pinched Kevin Rudd’s old seat of Griffith from Labor at the election, one of three inner Brisbane seats to go Green along with Ryan and Brisbane.

Housing has become the proxy for the battle between Labor and the Greens over the progressive inner-city seats such as these. Labor wants Griffith back, and Brisbane, and wants to stop the Greens in their tracks. Preparing for the battle, Bandt declared the Greens the “party of the renters”.

Increasingly, the Greens pose as much a threat to Labor as the teals do to the Liberal Party.

Albanese once professed “I like fighting Tories, it’s what I do” but, make no mistake, the Greens annoy him even more. He loathes them. He has been fighting them off for 27 years in his seat of Grayndler, in Sydney’s inner west.

In the stand-off over the HAFF, he has come up against not just his younger self but the Greens at their opportunistic best.

Even Chandler-Mather’s colleagues acknowledge that for the Greens, the HAFF is more about the fight than the outcome.

This was made apparent by Chandler-Mather’s recent essay for socialist magazine Jacobin.

While contending refusal to pass the HAFF Bill was “the only immediate leverage” the Greens had to force action on rents, Chandler-Mather said “just as important, this parliamentary conflict helps create space for a broader campaign in civil society”.

“Allowing the HAFF to pass would demobilise the growing section of civil society that is justifiably angry about the degree of poverty and stress that exists in such a wealthy country.”

Every time the government compromises on the HAFF – which is an investment fund to provide perpetual income to build social housing – the Greens keep shifting the goal posts.

Labor agreed to make the annual disbursement from the fund a minimum $5 billion, and it tipped in $2 billion upfront to sweetened the deal. No dice. The Greens won’t budge unless Albanese somehow co-ordinates a national rent freeze, something the prime minister said was untenable and would destroy investment in rentals.

The Greens are emboldened by a Freshwater Strategies poll published in The Australian Financial Review last month.

It showed, among other things, that between December last year and May, Labor’s lead over the Coalition as the preferred manager of housing policy had fallen 11 points.

‘It is easy being Green’

While Labor led by 34 per cent to 25 per cent, the 11-point drop all went to the undecided column, not the Coalition.

Bandt believes that is tacit support for his party.

In taking on the Greens this week, Education Minister Jason Clare said Kermit the Frog was wrong.

“It is easy being Green,” he said as he lambasted the party for its populist, simplistic policy demands it can make with no risk whatsoever of ever having to deliver them.

Nonetheless, Labor is taking Chandler-Mather on because it would be wrong to underestimate him.

There is a school of thought in Labor that the Greens overreached his week by demanding more, rather than claim the $2 billion injection as a win and passing the bill.

“They’ll keep the uni students, but the bearded sandal wearers will not be impressed,” opined one Labor source.

This week’s refusal to pass the bill has given Albanese the first half of a double dissolution trigger.

The prime minister has no intention of calling an early, full Senate election should the Greens reject the bill again after three months. But he wants the option in his back pocket, more so given the political landscape threatens to become more volatile over the next 18 months.

Until now, the government has been in no rush to have an early election because it has had a friendly Senate. As of this week, that is no longer the case either.