Page 3158 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 9 November 2021
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I do not know if members saw the recent Four Corners program on housing affordability issues around Australia. The Four Corners program pointed out that it was the Menzies government in the post-war period that transformed federal policy to encourage Australia’s home ownership revolution. Four Corners reported—I will quote it directly—that “Menzies saw it as a bulwark against communism”. That is what he thought. He applauded the instinct of people to have a little piece of land with a house and garden to call their own. So policies were put in place to assist hundreds of thousands of Australians into home ownership, and those policies worked. Our home ownership numbers went up 20 per cent in the 20 years to 1966.
Why did Menzies do that? I can tell you that one of the main reasons he did it was electoral security. At its simplest level, he did it because, if a conservative prime minister assists hundreds of thousands of Australians to jump through the home ownership hoops, once they have acquired that major asset, it will quicken their natural political shift over time from left to right. So, much of that natural drift from left to right is not related to age; it is related to the acquisition of assets. If you do not own anything, if you have no assets whatsoever, pure socialism works for you. If you do not own anything, the concept of pooling the nation’s wealth and then divvying it up and distributing it equally amongst all of the residents seems like a cracker of an idea.
As soon as you begin to acquire assets, you are not so keen on anyone taking those assets away from you. Herein lies the absolute ideological divide that punctuates some of this debate. It gets down to our vision of equality. On this side of the chamber, our vision of equality is about attempting to lift everyone up. We believe that if you give everyone the chance to get ahead—if you lift everyone’s circumstance, Mr Davis—everyone will benefit. On the other side of the chamber the vision of equality is to hold people back and to bring them down. It is no wonder that those opposite voted against the poverty taskforce, because, when it all boils down, poverty is electoral gold for them. The more people reliant on the government, the better.
At their core, Labor and the Greens do not want people to get ahead. They are frightened, they are petrified, of the concept of people getting ahead and becoming self-sufficient. When Ms Vassarotti makes her utopian claim that the Greens are going to provide a home for all, she is not talking about a home that people own. That is not what she is talking about. She is talking about a home that the government owns. She wants people to stay on the government teat forever, and to do as they are told.
So hell-bent is this government on that scenario, that it continues to reject the premise of having community housing providers play a genuine role in the solution, which again was pointed out in a release that came out today from ACTCOSS. Emma Campbell says:
ACTCOSS has welcomed the focus placed today by the ACT Opposition on the shortage of affordable housing. This follows their call for a declaration of a housing crisis and an independent review into the impact of ACT Government’s policies on rising house prices and rent levels.
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