AFFORDABLE HOUSING

My Priorities

Prioritise immigrants with construction industry trade

Build more social and affordable housing

Support Build to Rent legislation and provide stability for renters

Create a level playing field for home buyers by reviewing negative gearing and CGT

The Government has taken some steps towards addressing housing challenges, but not enough.

I regularly hear from young constituents with good jobs who struggle to see how they will ever become homeowners. People of all ages are struggling to afford payments on their modest rental. We need to treat housing as a home and not an investment product.

House prices have increased from 3-4 times average incomes to 7-8 times since 2000. This has been driven by policy settings from both sides of politics over the last 20 years- rising property prices are politically popular, but exacerbate inequality.

Increasing housing supply is essential and more needs to be done to achieve it.

In response to the scale of this crisis and the number of people affected, we held two Community Housing Forums attended by 180 constituents.

We brought together a mix of renters, homeowners and mortgage holders from across the Curtin community. Together we identified the top three issues and top three goals for housing in Curtin. At our second forum a panel of experts evaluated these community policy ideas and other policy suggestions as well.

These forums showed support for a broad range of solutions that the Federal Government could implement, including building more social housing, incentivising build to rent, taxing vacant dwellings, reviewing tax incentives for property investors, prioritising key trades in immigration to help build houses faster and encouraging down-sizing. 

At a State level, our forums suggested the WA Government should work with the Federal Government to unlock funding for social and affordable housing, replace stamp duty with land tax, streamline approval processes and strengthen renters’ rights. 

None of these individually will solve the current housing predicament, but all will contribute to making it more achievable to own or rent an affordable home.

I have discussed the solutions proposed with the new Federal Minister for Housing and shared our summary report with her.

I also held a Good Infill forum to discuss the role of medium density housing in addressing the housing shortage, and discuss how infill can be done well, to create liveable, walkable communities featuring urban greening and tree canopy.  While planning is a state and local issue, a clear theme came out of our various forums – people want different branches of government to work better together in the long term interests of all.