My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Wednesday28 February 2024

Affordable housing is possible

The Greens plan to reduce house prices through their proposal to axe tax concessions for investors to make housing more affordable for renters and first home buyers, the party’s housing spokesperson, Max Chandler-Mather, has said.

Today I will focus on this proposal from The Greens, given PM Albanese’s irritated dismissal of it, as though it was a juvenile student politics stunt. Closer examination shows it to be an economically sound proposal that could have very beneficial results for both renters and first home buyers. Perhaps Albanese is haunted by the role similar proposals from Bill Shorten fuelled the Murdoch media inspired defeat of Labor’s 2019 federal election campaign. It’s the only logical explanation I can find for such a hysterical response to the Greens very sensible proposals.

I should also note that part of the cause our housing affordability crisis is that government regulations treat housing as a commodity for financial gain rather than what it really is: a basic human right. The sooner this situation is reversed the better off renters and first home buyers will be.

In an episode of the Guardian’s Australian Politics podcast, Chandler-Mather argues projected price reductions in the order of 2.5% are “not much” and preventing further rises of 10 or 20% would be desirable.

The Greens say they will use their balance of power position in the Senate to push for Labor to pare back negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts in return for supporting the government’s Help to Buy shared equity scheme.

Negative gearing allows investors to claim tax deductions on rental property losses, while the capital gains tax discount halves the amount of excise paid by people who sell assets that have been owned for 12 months or more.

Costings of the Greens’ policies by the independent Parliamentary Budget Office in April 2023 suggested they might cause “house prices [to] fall and rents [to] rise” although the extent of the impact would “be influenced by how many renters would be able to switch to owning property”.

Asked if the Greens wanted cheaper house prices so that more renters can become owner-occupiers, Chandler-Mather told the Guardian Australia: “Yeah, absolutely.”

Chandler-Mather said that modelling including by the Grattan Institute “pointed out changes might see a 2.5% drop in house prices”. “Now that’s not much, right … in the context of big house prices.

“But it is a lot when you consider the fact, well, that means that house prices don’t go up by another 10 or 20% next year.”

The proposals have also received support from well-respected institutions. In 2016 the Grattan Institute estimated abolishing negative gearing and halving the capital gains tax discount to 25% would leave house prices roughly 2% lower than otherwise, favouring would-be homeowners over investors.

Chandler-Mather said “the problem with our housing market is we have a tax system that basically continues to force house prices up, often far in excess of wages”.

“Since about 2000, house prices have gone up more than double wages every year.”

“That’s crazy. So slowing that down, at the very least, is a good thing. Because when you’re saving up for a deposit and house prices are increasing faster than you can even save up for a deposit that … is one of the most demoralising things you can possibly experience.”

Chandler-Mather said that “big decreases” were not desirable because of “people who don’t want to fall into negative equity”, owing more to the bank than their property is worth.

“But just moderating the system, calming it down, I think, is a good thing,” he said.

Chandler-Mather rejected the suggestion phasing out negative gearing could increase rents, arguing that “generally landlords are charging as much rent as they can get away with” the Guardian Australia’s Paul Karp reported.

The member for Griffith conceded that “some … might be charging a little bit less but in aggregate terms, that’s just not really how the rental market works”.

Chandler-Mather said the Greens still want the federal government to incentivise states and territories to freeze rents for two years, a call rejected by Labor premiers last year during housing future fund negotiations.

The Greens went to the 2022 election proposing to build 1m public houses over five years, allowing cheaper access to housing with payments to allow occupants to take up to 75% of the equity in the home.

Chandler-Mather said this was “broadly” still a “good idea” but there would be “some tweaks” to its housing offering before the next election. Hopefully these will help return housing to being a basic human right rather than a profit making commodity.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 20 February 2024

The disappearing Liberal Party

The beginning of the parliamentary year encouraged me to look at the state of our major political parties. Like many commentators I noted that Albanese and the Labor Party have a reinvigorated look and energy to them. They have successfully stared down the Stage 3 tax cuts modification ‘broken promise’ furphy that the Liberals had the gall to throw their way. I make that note because the ‘broken promise’ award must surely belong to the Liberals’ Howard and Abbott.

Labor also got off to a flying start with the successful passage of its IR legislation, which included the ‘right to disconnect’, put forward by the Greens and sensibly adopted by Labor.

When Peter Dutton told the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson that the Liberals were the most united political party in recent history, “more united than ever”, he could easily have included the entire Coalition. That’s because the Liberal Party is pretty much synonymous with the Nationals these days. Today I’ll devote my column to examining how this very worrying situation has come to be.

“David Littleproud and Barnaby Joyce whipping up the regional “reckless renewables” crowd were in keeping with Peter Dutton’s earlier performance as a whale-hugging conspiracy theorist over offshore wind farms” wrote Michael Pascoe in The New Daily. These show where both coalition parties’ first loyalties lie: renewables bad, fossil fuels good.

Politics is indeed a game of numbers, as the ABC’s Nemesis documentary keeps reminding us, so it’s worth underlining the Coalition numbers to make my case.

Out of the 151 members of the House of Representatives, 25 are from the Liberal Party. That’s just 16.6 per cent. Then there are nine National Party members and 21 from the LNP, which is Queensland’s unique merged Liberal and National Party.

And that’s without bothering to consider where the hearts of many of the 25 Liberals lie. Nominal Liberals Andrew Hastie (WA) and Tony Pasin (SA), for example, were prepared to cross the floor to defeat Malcolm Turnbull’s National Energy Guarantee, pointing them towards the Nationals. 

A majority of the LNP members choose to sit in the Liberal Party room in Canberra with leader Peter Dutton. But party labels may mean little. Always judge politicians by what they do, not what they claim, the old saying goes. For example, Peter Dutton and Ted O’Brien have more in common with Matt Canavan and David Littleproud than Liberals such as Paul Fletcher

The result is that the old adage of the National Party sometimes being the tail that wags the Liberal dog may no longer apply. The combined forces of the LNP and National Party are the dog, the Liberal Party is the obedient tail and the few remaining “moderate” Liberals barely fleas on that tail.

Following these numbers to view the official Opposition first and foremost as the LNP makes the Opposition’s march to the right more comprehensible.

“Dutton’s increasingly Trumpy performances might cause the occasional wince at a gathering of Sydney or Melbourne Liberal supporters, but it brings cheers and head nodding in LNP/NP country” wrote Pascoe.

Where Trump uses “they say” to float any number of falsehoods, Dutton is fond of “people I talk to”.

Marching to the LNP beat makes it look like the Coalition has given up on the better-educated city seats lost to Teals.

This could also mean more current Liberal seats could turn Teal at the next election, perhaps Paul Fletcher’s for a start, whether or not he runs and if the seat will still exist.

One wonders how much longer can Bridget Archer and Julian Leeser suffer the LNP ethos? And the Greens winning what was the blue-ribbon Brisbane seat of Ryan is a further warning as the LNP heats up the energy culture war it has never stopped fighting.

Concentrating on the base, concentrating on outrage and division and never letting facts get in the way of a good headline, is the Trump formula, right down to Sky News mimicking its Fox News model.

So the spectacle of Barnaby Joyce grandstanding about renewables isn’t a National Party oddity, it isn’t just Barnaby being Barnaby. The rally was pure Coalition.

The LNP/National Opposition is going all in. The old Liberal Party isn’t getting a say. The LNP really is the dog wagging the Liberal tail.

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 13 February 2024

Teacher shortages caused by poor pay and working conditions, system failures and lack of funding

The global teacher shortage, the effects of which were felt in Australia as school returned recently, can be put down to poor pay, loss of professional esteem, and the rise of administrative work.

A conflict of interest note here: it was just such a teacher shortage that brought me to Australia in 1970. “Come and teach in the sun” said an advertising billboard featuring a young man clad in speedos, an academic gown and mortar board, and carrying a pile of books. Most of that image turned  out to be true, and I have never regretted my move.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare labelled the teacher shortage in Australia a “crisis”. “We don’t have enough teachers in Australia, that’s just the truth of it. This is the most important job in the world. We don’t have enough,” she told The New Daily.

“When we say we’ve got problems with teachers, these problems are not of teachers,”  said Dr Rachel Wilson from the University of Technology Sydney.

“They are about how we organise and support them, and we need the right data and systems to do that.”

Wilson believes the shortages seen internationally are due to low pay and low esteem.

“Compounding the problem has been the rise in the amount of work teachers are expected to do and the failure of governments to plan effectively”, wrote Ash Cant in The New Daily (TND).

Specifically in Australia, the long hours they are expected to work has also contributed to the problem, which was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but existed long before it.

Due to all this, teachers are leaving the profession prematurely and finding work in other industries.

Correna Haythorpe, federal president of the Australian Education Union, said “Over the past decade, public schools have been denied the funding that they need.

All jurisdictions in Australia find themselves in the same predicament, but New South Wales is particularly suffering.

“For well over a decade, our public school system in NSW has been under increasing pressure, courtesy of the policy failings of the previous state government,” NSW Teachers Federation president Henry Rajendra told TND.

“One of those policy settings was the wage cap that artificially suppressed teachers wages.

“Second was an increase in the workloads of teachers to unmanageable levels and third, the escalation in the number of the exponential growth in insecure employment that has led to instability.

Thanks to a historic agreement with Chris Minns’ government last year, NSW teachers are now paid better than their peers in other parts of Australia, something Rajendra is grateful for.

However, he believes there is still a need to examine teacher salaries relative to other professions, so they are competitive and people don’t prematurely leave the profession for better pay.

As Wilson points to the economic benefits of having a literate and numerate society, there are benefits on a smaller scale which often get overlooked.

Beyond the need for better salaries and more assistance to relieve the administration burden, the teaching profession needs to be more attractive.

Although it might be a misconception that teachers get amazing holidays (they don’t, many work through them) and great hours (their job isn’t done when the final bell rings) . There are also clear issues thanks to bureaucratic failures.

Of course, when teachers are supported in their job, it is an very rewarding career, though keeping true to my ‘Conflict of interest’ declaration I’d left the school classroom by 1976. However, I continued to work in education at university level until retirement, in a very, very rewarding job.

Like medicine or nursing, teaching is a service profession. As “corny” as it sounds, Acquaro said teachers have the ability to change a student’s life.

“It’s not just being a teacher in a school, in the classroom – you’re part of the school community,” she said. “And I think that is really quite special.”

My Daily Advertiser Op Ed column for Tuesday 6 February 2024

Antoinette Lattouf sacking shows the ideological damage to ABC by Coalition governments

The dispute between the ABC and Antoinette Lattouf, the casual radio presenter it recently sacked, ostensibly for disobeying a managerial directive, encapsulates several problems that have troubled our national broadcaster in recent years.

“If the ABC is under pressure in challenging times, it’s also rare that it isn’t. If there are internal debates about objectivity, social media use and how to address ailing traffic and an ageing demographic, then there is, at least, some consensus about the handling of the Lattouf dispute: “A masterclass in what not to do” wrote The Saturday Paper.

So let’s see if this argument holds water. The ABC’s guidelines to all staff on their use of social media come down to this: Don’t use it in ways that damage the ABC’s interests or undermine the individual’s professional capacity.

“Journalists and presenters are singled out as “high-risk” staff and there are extra rules for them. The overarching rule is to treat personal content with the “same care as if being published or distributed on an ABC platform”, noted The New Daily.

In November 2023, when roughly 300 journalists signed a petition calling for greater scrutiny of the way the Australian media was covering the Gaza war, and in some newsrooms the signatories were banned from covering it.

When she was appointed to her temporary ABC job, Lattouf was instructed not to post on “controversial” issues. This is vague and imprecise. It makes no allowance for reasonable subjective differences. It allows “controversial” to mean whatever the ABC decides it means.

After the ABC employed her, she reposted on Instagram a Human Rights Watch report saying Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war. Yet the ABC itself had just reported on this very item of news.

According to her statement of claim in the case for unlawful termination she has brought against the ABC in the Fair Work Commission, it was for this that she was sacked.

She is also claiming she was sacked for her political views. Leading up to her sacking, a lobby group called Lawyers for Israel had conducted an intense campaign of WhatsApp messages to the ABC seeking to have her removed and containing the threat of legal action if she was not. This smacks of the weaponisation of antisemitism.

This raises the issues of the ABC’s preparedness to stand up for its staff in the face of external attack, about which the ABC Alumni group has expressed concern.

The ABC has responded to Lattouf by saying her sacking had nothing to do with her race – she is of Lebanese descent – and was all about her breaching a managerial instruction not to post on social media about “controversial” issues.

The ABC has said the decision to sack her was not influenced by external pressure, although it did not directly refer to the Lawyers for Israel campaign. ABC staff are not convinced and want greater transparency around the complaints process.

Nor has there been an explanation from the ABC about why the posting by Lattouf of the Human Rights Watch report was regarded as a sackable offence when the ABC had itself twice run stories about it.

What does it say about the state of mind inside the management of the ABC that it was thought reasonable to issue a generalised blanket instruction to a presenter to not post anything “controversial” on social media?

It suggests one panicked by the prospect that somebody somewhere might take offence at something somebody at the ABC might post on a controversial matter.

It suggests a state of mind induced by two decades of cumulative intimidation, hostility, board-stacking and financial punishment inflicted on the ABC by successive Liberal-National federal governments.

What was seen between 1996 and 2022, except for the period 2007-2013 when Labor was in office, was not episodic. It was systematic, sustained and ideological attack by the Liberal/Nationals coalition against our public broadcaster, motivated by their hatred of any sort of public, as opposed to privately owned organisation. It was and is neo-liberalism laid bare.

The consequences are now there for all to see, further demonstrated by a move to the right by programs such as The Insiders and Q+A.