‘Deeply unfair’: Property investors come under fire by Greens spokesman

Greens spokesman on housing and homelessness Max Chandler-Mather has labelled Australia’s disparity in home ownership “deeply unfair”.

On Monday evening, ABC’s QandA panellists were questioned on whether it was fair that some members of Australian society owned multiple homes while others did not have a bed to sleep in.

The questioned posed by high school student Isabelle prompted Mr Chandler-Mather to call on the federal government to phase out negative gearing and capital gains tax, factors he said were allowing investors to “hoover up homes”.

“What’s really unfair is the federal government hands out billions of dollars in tax handouts, to property investors who own multiple homes,” he said.

“What that means is if you are a first homebuyer going to an auction, you’re going to that auction and you’re losing to a property investor.

“Because they can use negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount to bid up the price of housing and screw over first home buyers.

“It’s deeply, deeply unfair.”

Mr Chandler said it was both “politically popular” and “politically necessary” to stop negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts.

NSW minister for housing and homelessness Rose Jackson said there was “very little” that was fair about the current housing market and noted the housing situation was being caused by more than simply a supply or tax issue.

“I come from Sydney and in Sydney we have a situation where 70,000 30 to 40 year olds left our city in the last few years and only 35,000 arrived,” she said.

“We are losing a generation of young people in the great city of Sydney and housing is a core reason for that, so very little about our housing market is fair at the moment.

“We have to change and we have to build more homes.”

Ms Jackson said to solve the country’s housing crisis, all levels of government must work together but said she was of the view that the “problem” could not be solved from the “confines of the housing market” we were currently in.

“We’ve got ourselves into such a dysfunctional quagmire and mess that everyone does have to come to the table and certainly that includes state governments … we’ve got work to do, but so does the Commonwealth and so does local government,” she said.

“We’ve got to acknowledge that if there was a lever to pull or a button to press, and it was that easy, we would have done it.

“There’s a lot of work to do to get our housing market back to somewhere resembling a fair distribution of housing.”