The housing numbers that show why we’re locked into an endless conflict

Every now and then, you encounter something that is simultaneously predictable, intuitive and completely shocking. For me this week, it was a Newspoll revealing what Australians want to happen to house prices. The result is one of those that can be manipulated towards a thousand different conclusions. But whichever of those you choose, it points us in a sobering direction. These results suggest we are, at least for quite some time, stuffed.

First, the results. When asked about house prices in their area, 34 per cent said they would like to see them outstrip inflation in the next three years. Thirty per cent said they wanted prices to remain steady, and the same proportion again wanted them to decrease. Only 6 per cent had no preference. This leaves you with your choice of headline. “House price increases are the most popular Australian hope” is one. “Majority oppose house price rises” is another. “Majority oppose house price falls” is yet another. All technically true, which underscores two facts. First, that almost everyone has a view (name another issue on which only 6 per cent have no preference). And second, we are hopelessly divided in those views.

That is, we do not merely disagree on which policy to pursue. We don’t agree on the end we are trying to achieve. Mostly, this falls along the lines of self-interest in utterly predictable ways: those who’ve bought a house mostly want prices to rise, and renters mostly want them to fall. Exactly as you’d expect, but also exactly the wrong situation for government.

This is a picture of an electorate digging in to protect private interests, not looking to be ushered towards a common good. It suggests instead that any reform – or lack of it – is flammable without our whole attitude towards housing being reformed first. That will take time, and a government with both extraordinary political skill and extraordinary political capital. The Albanese government clearly has the last of these. Only history will tell whether it has enough of the first two.

This would be worrying enough if this were a run-of-the-mill policy problem. But in this case, the stakes are extremely high. Perhaps nothing so tears at the fabric of a society as a sense for a large number of people that housing is precarious. This is not a story of people being unable to take overseas holidays, or missing out on life’s finery. It’s a story of people feeling serious insecurity on their most elemental need: shelter. And it’s the story of another cohort for whom it is something fundamentally different: a repository of wealth, akin to a bank account.

When people feel so insecure about something so essential, everything frays. It’s true that some of this can be offset through strong friendships and community, but the research is clear: this kind of economic distress has deep psychological effects that ripple throughout society. It leaves people feeling isolated, left out, and perhaps most importantly, like they don’t belong. The more people who find themselves here, alienated from each other and the institutions that are purportedly there to serve them, the more febrile politics is sure to become. More people become disillusioned with our defining institutions. Bonds with fellow citizens begin to wither. Politics becomes zero sum.

That sets a more radical politics in motion, because radicalism proceeds precisely from the notion that conventional, mainstream politics has failed and cannot provide solutions. We’ve only recently wrung our hands about anti-immigration protests across the country, led by far-right organisers, but which drew in a much wider range of people. Migration may have been the major theme, but instructively, a broad grab bag of grievances coalesced around it. Most prominent among them, to believe the reported words of so many protesters, was the cost of housing. There is nothing coincidental about this. This was at heart a populist protest, alleging a system rigged by elites and career politicians. Few things are so instinctively emblematic of the “system” as housing.

There is no neat way through this now. To want house prices to outpace inflation is to want housing to become less affordable. To want something else is to want investments to underperform. Worse, to want prices to fall is to want mortgage holders to face potential ruin should they ever default on their payments: owing debt that is larger than the value of their asset. This is perhaps why, when the major parties offer policies to help first-home buyers enter the market, they choose ones that drive up prices. Whether in the form of grants, or shared equity schemes or allowing people to draw on their superannuation, all of it aims to allow people to make higher bids. Anything else is impossible to sell. Housing has become too overpriced to fail.

So embedded is this instinct that it even prevails among those who have little to gain from it. In this week’s poll, 73 per cent of those who already own their home outright want house prices to increase or at least hold. To what end? An inflated market might mean a higher sale, but it also means the next house they buy will cost more. That’s not a win. Indeed, once you factor in higher stamp duty, it’s most likely a loss. The real winners in this scenario are investors, not home owners. But home owners apparently want the illusion of these spoils.

So we stand antagonistic and irreconcilable. And inconveniently right now, no political party embodies these divisions as clearly as Labor, whose voters’ views are, in this poll, split roughly in line with the nation as a whole. This means that if the Albanese government is going to preside over a more sustainable view of housing, it will have to win the argument with itself. Such arguments are anything but simple, as the Coalition’s endless infighting over climate policy suggests. How much harder when there’s no clear majority view, where winners and losers are inevitable, and where some of those losers must necessarily be your own.

Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.

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