Stimulus packages
It's been a fairly drab election campaign to date, with each policy announced seemingly being matched in short order by the other side of politics.
For example, the opposition announcement of a $1,200 tax cut for about half of all taxpayers to target the country’s middle-income earners, was immediately countered with an automatic $1,000 instant tax deduction for work expenses by the government.
And on it goes.
With so little of any interest to pick between the two major parties, the electorate will most likely stick with the status quo.
On housing, the Coalition announced over the weekend that it would make mortgages tax deductible for first homebuyers buying new homes.
Not to be outdone, Labor spent the remainder of the weekend pulling together an announcement that all first homebuyers will be able to buy new homes with a 5 per cent deposit effective from January 2026, with no Lenders Mortgage Insurance to be applied.
Source: ALP
More demand-side measures.
And on it goes…
Housing supply plans
On the supply side for housing, Labor announced that 100,000 homes will be built specifically for first homebuyers over the coming 8 years.
Whether anything of that nature actually comes to fruition is a whole other matter entirely.
At the previous election the ALP pledged to reduce energy bills by $275 for each household, only for prices to scream higher over the past few years, leading the pledge to be quietly shelved.
A further promise to deliver 1 million well-located new homes over 5 years - since upgraded to 1.2 million homes - is also miles off track with little-to-no prospect of either target being met.
The offbeat $10 billion 'Housing Australia Future Fund' (HAFF) brain explosion hasn't delivered any newly-built homes at all so far, and with the stock market having wild conniptions over recent weeks, it likely hasn't generated the requisite investment returns either.
A broader conundrum is whether the government building 100,000 homes for first homebuyers over 8 years is enough to move the needle at all, given the apparent lack of resolve to reduce immigration numbers meaningfully.
Unless there's a change of course, there will be at least 3+ million more people in the country by the end of the 8-year period, so in that scenario 12,000 homes per year won't make much of a dent...and that’s even if they are built.
There's also a question of whether the government taking more of a command approach to housing construction might divert scarce labour, materials, and land supply away from the private sector, but that’s an open question subject to the vagaries of the construction cycle.
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