The federal Greens are promising more direct financial support for homelessness and housing projects in the marginal seat of Richmond if they get the numbers in next year’s election.
Party spokesperson on housing and Member for Griffith Max Chandler-Mather was in the Richmond electorate last week alongside federal candidate for the seat, Mandy Nolan.
The pair was in the Tweed Shire, where The Greens are promising to build a new block of public housing apartments at a former Telstra depot site.
The Tweed Shire Council had already earmarked the depot for relocation and redevelopment, finding it ideally located for medium-density housing, in walking distance to services, transport and other amenities including the Tweed River.
A new publicly owned developer would build the thirteen-storey block of 65 apartments, Mr Chandler-Mather said.
Rent would be capped at 25% of a tenant’s income or 70% of market rent, ‘whichever is lower,’ Mr Chandler-Mather said.
‘Or they could buy one of these apartments for just over the cost of construction,’ he said, ‘saving the average first home buyer about $250,000 on the price of a home’.
The promise for more housing in the electorate comes after the party recently announced it would allocate a million dollars in funds to the Fletcher Street Cottage in the Byron Shire if it got enough votes.
The publicly owned developer Mr Chandler-Mather refers to doesn’t exist but The Greens member said the party would take the policy of establishing one to the election if Labor didn’t agree to it before then.
Greens list demands for Labor housing bill support
The party was using the concept as a bargaining point in negotiations over Labor’s housing bill, defeated recently in the senate, he said.
‘We’ve also said to Labor that we would be willing to negotiate introducing a public developer as part of a broader negotiation on housing in Parliament, where we do have the balance of power,’ Mr Mather-Chandler said.
The Labor federal government has so far said it isn’t making changes to its housing policy but recent speculation over the party’s attitude towards negative gearing reform has bolstered The Greens.
‘You’ve seen them start to come to The Greens’ push to phase out negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, ‘Mr Chandler-Mather said, ‘which are the tax handouts for property investors, denying renters the chance to buy a home by pushing up house prices’.
‘I think there’s a chance, you know,’ he said, ‘this is a broadly popular idea, establishing a government owned developer’.
Overseas inspiration for revived housing commissions
The Greens’ housing spokesperson said the federal government used to be directly involved in building homes in the 20th century.
‘Housing commissions that were rented and sold to a broad cross section of the population,’ he said.
‘There’s no reason why we can’t start doing that again, and indeed, it’s necessary if we want to start tackling the housing crisis.’
The Greens’ model of a public housing developer was based on successful schemes overseas, he said, in Singapore and in Europe.
The parliamentary budget office had figured out the costs of buying privately owned land and developing 610,000 affordable dwellings over ten years at around $28 billion, he said.
This would include swathes of land approved for residential development years and even decades ago in NSW, such as in the Tweed Shire, where thousands of homes are approved but not built owing to the state’s lack of a deadline compelling landowners to actually get houses built and sold.
An ongoing NSW parliamentary inquiry into historical development consents has so far examined only two areas of the state, the coastal areas of the north and south, but has already found around half the projects looked at to be cases ‘deliberately put to sleep’ by investor landowners, inquiry Chair Clayton Barr MP recently told Bay FM’s Community Newsroom.
Mr Barr said no government would be prepared to compensate such landowners as the money required would be in the billions.
Politics at play in Richmond election campaign
The Greens continue to campaign on a goal of winning balance of power in the next federal parliament.
Richmond is one of a handful of marginal seats across the country the party believe is in reach, despite Justine Elliot having won seven elections for Labor there.
Mandy Nolan won more than 25% of first preferences for The Greens in 2022, around 3.5 percentage points less than Ms Elliot.
Kimberly Hone came closest to Ms Elliot after preferences with 42% compared to success for Labor at nearly 58%.
The Greens haven’t stopped campaigning for the seat since Mandy Nolan first announced her candidature.
But housing is generally in the power of state government and NSW Minister for Homelessness, and Housing, Rose Jackson, recently announced five billion dollars in state funding for social housing.
The government was looking for possible suitable sites, Ms Jackson said.
The minister said she’d allocated another ‘one-off’ grant to the Fletcher Street Cottage and that the charity would eventually become eligible for long-term funding.
Mr Chandler-Mather said The Greens hosted a forum for more than 100 people in Brunswick Heads last week ‘about the housing crisis’ and ‘just how devastating’ it was in the Richmond electorate.
‘The Northern Rivers has the least affordable rentals in the country by some estimates,’ Mr Chandler-Mather said.
‘We know the housing crisis is devastating for thousands of people across the federal election of Richmond, and right now, the only candidate running with real solutions to tackle the scale of that housing crisis is the Greens candidate, Mandy Nolan,’ he said.
The Greens member said Ms Nolan was focused on finding specific sites for ‘good quality affordable homes in the electorate,’ as well as proposing to put caps on rent increases and phase out tax handouts for property investors.
‘There’s over a thousand homeless people in Richmond based on census data,’ Mr Chandler-Mather said.
The Greens party spokesperson on housing said a newly introduced public developer would build 3,600 homes in the Richmond electorate ‘in the first ten years’.
The move would ‘not only solve the homelessness crisis here,’ he said, ‘but would then allow us to house teachers and nurses and other essential workers that needed an affordable home’.
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