Cave-in on housing gets Greens out of a tight spot — one of their own making

The Greens’ decision to wave through Labor’s ill-conceived housing fund this week for an extra billion dollars clearly caused ructions within the ranks.

The Australian Financial Review’s Phil Coorey reported that Greens colleagues forced housing spokesman and arch-NIMBY Max Chandler-Mather into doing a deal with Labor to end the housing stalemate (and, doubtless coincidentally, take away the possibility of giving Prime Minister Anthony Albanese a double-dissolution trigger on an election commitment to build lots of houses) — a claim disputed by the Greens, who insist Chandler-Mather led the process within the partyroom.

Credit where it’s due, Chandler-Mather has played a clever hand in his housing role, lifting his profile from accidental MP, and got up Labor’s nose plenty along the way. But he and leader Adam Bandt painted themselves into a very tight corner with their rigid insistence that nothing short of a national rental cap would move them to support Labor’s bill to set up a permanent housing fund.

Having given way to Labor on emissions targets last year and the safeguard mechanism earlier this year, the Greens needed an issue on which to differentiate themselves, and housing served its purposes perfectly, even if the affluent urban electorates that send Greens MPs to Parliament don’t want higher-density housing or social housing.

But the more they insisted that only rent controls, entirely beyond the capacity of any prime minister to deliver, would see the fund pass, the more they set themselves up as the fall guys for a government campaign on their opposition to building social and affordable housing.

So in the end they did a deal, though it’s surprising they secured only an extra $1 billion, and not on an ongoing basis. But Bandt is rightly factoring in the $2 billion Albanese threw into the pot in June to sweeten the deal then. Clearly quite a few Greens are underwhelmed: prominent Brisbane Green Jonathan Sriranganathan attacked Bandt on Twitter for failing to extract enough concessions.

What this ignores is that Bandt and Chandler-Mather were at a dead end on the rent cap front; the only direction housing was going to go in from here was for Labor to portray the Greens as joining the Coalition in blocking the construction of more social housing, with the media more and more febrile about an early election. So they cut their losses, took some pocket change and called it a win.

The net result is good — the federal government is now in the game of funding social housing long term courtesy of Labor, but the Greens have got more money into the pool that will lead to more housing sooner.

The only risks, as we’ve argued before, are the waste of fund management fees operating a housing fund derived from borrowings, when the government could simply have committed $500 million a year to social housing from the budget, and the possibility the states will simply scale back their social housing investment as funding from the Commonwealth ramps up. 

Perhaps state-based Greens can play watchdog on that.

Did Labor play the Greens just right? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.

Update: This article has been amended to add that the claim that Chandler-Mather was pressured by colleagues to conclude a deal with the government is contested by the Greens.