Prime Minister Scott Morrison was unable to convince Manasseh Sogavare of the Solomon Islands to not sign an agreement with Beijing.Credit:Nine Man from marketing
Rental crisis ‘a blind spot’ for politicians in cost of living campaign By Rachel Clun April 28, 2022 The rental crisis engulfing the country should be a wake-up call for both major parties as they fight the election campaign on cost of living issues, welfare support groups say, as data shows there are almost no affordable rentals across Australia. Anglicare’s rental affordability snapshot found less than 1 per cent of rentals were affordable for people on income support, while those on the minimum wage could afford just 2 per cent of available rentals across the country. Cate Bignold has struggled to find any housing in Bendigo, where she is about to start part-time work as a nurse, and has been forced to move back in with her mum three hours away. Anglicare Australia executive director Kasy Chambers said housing was the biggest cost facing Australians, but people on low incomes didn’t stand a chance of getting a stable roof over their head if they needed to move. “Australia’s housing crisis has reached fever pitch. No part of the country has been spared. Rents are shooting up in towns and regions, and our cities have never been more expensive,” she said. The Anglicare report surveyed 46,000 available rental listings available across the country in one weekend in March. The analysis found there were 720 affordable rentals for people earning a full-time minimum wage, and 312 rentals were affordable for someone on the age pension. For those on other income support payments, however, there were even fewer options: 51 rentals were affordable for someone on the disability support pensions, and there were just seven affordable rooms in share houses for someone on JobSeeker. On Wednesday, separate data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed rents were higher across all capital cities in the first three months of this year. Over the past 12 months, rents jumped as high as 11.3 per cent in Darwin and by 9.7 per cent in Perth. Melbourne and Sydney experienced more modest growth in recent months and are still down for the year. Anglicare Victoria chief executive Paul McDonald said this is the worst state of the rental market report in its 12-year history. “There is no available, affordable stock for anyone on Commonwealth assistance,” he said. “It’s been a blind spot politically out of Canberra for a good decade, they have been asleep at the wheel on housing policy.” A new survey reveals one in four Australians are struggling to make ends meet due to the rising cost of living. Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) chief executive Dr Cassandra Goldie said the report’s findings were alarming. “[This] should be a wake-up call to the government and all parties and candidates this election,” she said. On Wednesday morning, Labor campaign spokesman Jason Clare said there were more than two million renters in Australia, and the cost of renting was $2000 more expensive this year than it was a year ago. He said that’s why Labor has the $10 billion Australian housing future fund to build more affordable housing for people including frontline workers. “Only Labor has a plan to build more affordable housing and more social housing to make a real difference here,” he said. Despite applying for dozens of properties and having the money to pay for them, Cate Bignold has struggled to find any housing in Bendigo, where she is about to start part-time work as a nurse. It’s forced her to move back in with her mum three hours away. Bignold, who is also on the disability support pension, had to resort to a combination of couch surfing and temporary accommodation last year to complete her study and professional placement. “I really struggled with it,” she said. “It’s just so mentally draining and physically draining having to travel so much. You wake up in the morning, and you’re like, ‘what town am I supposed to be in today?’” Both Anglicare and ACOSS said without major housing policy changes, the rental situation in Australia will continue to deteriorate. “We’re calling for a big boost to affordable housing. Our shortfall is massive. We need 500,000 new social and affordable rentals across Australia,” Chambers said. “Investing in housing is the most powerful way to make the market more affordable, and boost regional communities doing it tough after the pandemic and floods.” Goldie said the next federal government must also lift income support payments and reform housing tax concessions to address structural issues.
Rental crisis in marginal Gilmore seat has homeless people calling for more action ahead of election ABC South East NSW / By Fatima Olumee and Jessica Clifford Posted 40 minutes ago Perry has been living at North Head Campground in Moruya since 2015.(ABC South East: Fatima Olumee) After seven years of living in the back of his van, Perry is determined to be content. The 61-year-old lives in a campground on the South Coast of New South Wales, and he's not the only one. North Head Campground in Moruya was originally a hotspot for holiday-makers, but now it is populated with dozens of families experiencing homelessness. For Perry, it is a refuge. "I live week to week and I could not survive without the pension," he says. Homelessness plagues marginal NSW South Coast seat ahead of Federal Election He shudders to think what would happen to locals sleeping rough if North Head did not exist. "If it wasn't for this place there'd be a lot of sorry souls, a lot of sadness, and there would be deaths for sure," he said. Perry is one of more than 100,000 voters living in the marginal federal electorate of Gilmore, a crucial NSW seat in the upcoming election. Data from the University of NSW revealed 70 per cent of voters in this electorate were experiencing rental stress. "I know a family that's moving out here right now and they're setting their tents up as we speak," Perry said. "They'll be here until they can find a house and that's going to be a long, long, long time." Perry sleeps in the back of his car and stores his personal items in a tent.(ABC South East: Fatima Olumee) Shae Lee Sackender is another Gilmore resident struggling to secure housing after her landlord decided to move back into her rental home. She lives in West Nowra with her partner and two kids. They are being evicted next month. "Every day we're waking up to at least six to seven unsuccessful applications," she said. "It's just so difficult because we go to open houses and we see how many people are struggling down here at the moment because at least 40 to 60 people show up to inspections." Shae Sackender and her family are on the brink of homelessness.(Supplied) Ms Sackender and her family are on the brink of homelessness. "We might have to put our items in storage, re-surrender our dogs to the shelter, and have to stay in our car. Try to apply for houses and hope that we get one," she said. A recent report by UNSW and the Australian Council of Social Service showed that regional rents nationally are now 18 per cent higher than two years ago. That was why Liberal candidate for Gilmore, Andrew Constance, said the Coalition was committed to getting people out of the rental market through buyer schemes. "That first home guarantee where you only require a 2.5 per cent deposit becomes very important so that you start to ease the pressure on the rental market," he said. Andrew Constance says the Coalition is committed to getting people out of the rental market.(ABC Illawarra: Tim Fernandez) But Mr Constance said issues with the rental market would not be fixed for a long time. "Dealing with rental assistance and supply issues is the key challenge for everybody in this space, but it's a challenge which is going to take a little bit of time to address given that the homes just simply aren't available," he said. The federal government has also allocated $1.6 billion annually for states and territories from the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement to improve Australians' access to secure and affordable housing. But spokesperson for housing advocacy service Everybody's Home, Kate Colvin, said that was not enough. "They're budgeting to spend the same amount in 2022-23 as they spent in 2012-13, but since that time Australia's population has grown 13 per cent. So it's just not keeping pace with population growth," she said. Meanwhile, the Opposition has promised to deliver $10 billion for 30,000 new social and affordable housing properties in its first five years in government if elected. But sitting Gilmore MP and Labor candidate Fiona Phillips has been grilled on what will be done by her party for those without a place to live right now. "We have a huge [increased need] for affordable and social housing. It is going to take some time to kick that off," she said. "But certainly I'm having those discussions with the shadow minister about what we can do right now to help as well." Housing advocate Kate Colvin said Labor's promised $10 billion in funding still was not enough to meet demand.
There are thousands of houses in Australia laying empty. The majority of Australians live near the coast and that's where the empty houses are. Holiday homes and investment properties, there are no disincentives for owning empty houses.
Sounds like here in the San Francisco area. I read that 10-15% on the homes/condos are vacant in San Francisco itself. I remember when I was in Madrid like 10 years ago someone there told me that lots of wealthy non-Spaniards owned homes in Madrid and they were always empty from day 1. Looks like Australia is ahead of the curve on what's about to transpire in the West. It's starting to feel like a modern 1930s revival of hoovervilles.
As rental crisis bites, Veronica knows what she’ll have to cut back on — food By business reporter Daniel Ziffer Posted 7 hours ago https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04...amid-surging-rents-stagnant-incomes/101013334 Veronica Silva is packing up her belongings and beloved books to move more than 60 kilometres further away from her family and friends.(ABC News: Steve Keen) Veronica Silva is being turfed out of the home she has rented for a decade. Key points: More than 500,000 people left Australia during the pandemic Despite that, the number of rental vacancies is at a record low Properties have been sold and taken out of the rental market "It's just too hard. I'm crying myself to sleep most nights … it's just stress," the great-grandmother says. A hotel housekeeper for 40 years, Ms Silva says six of her neighbours are also being kicked out of their Gold Coast homes amid the expiry of a scheme giving landlords a subsidy for providing affordable rental housing. "I'm going to miss all these people that are around me," she laments. "They all have at one stage or another touched my life and made it better. And I've got to go and do that again. At 78 … I can't. "I'll end up locking myself in that house and not coming out. That's what's going to happen to me." On the surface, Australia's rental crisis does not make sense. More than 500,000 people left the country during the pandemic, and closed national borders prevented immigration and tourism. That should have freed up housing and pushed down rents across the nation. But after brewing for decades, the rental crisis is truly here. Record low vacancies, rents surging Ms Silva is at the sharpest end of a growing calamity. The rate of vacant rental properties is at record lows. The proportion of homes considered affordable for pensioners like Ms Silva is even smaller. Having secured a property, Ms Silva, who uses a motorised wheelchair, will now live 60 kilometres further away from her family and pay $70 a week more from her fixed income. Asked what she will cut out of her budget to make that work, the answer is blunt: "Food." Property firm REA Group uses its popular realestate.com.au website to mine information about the rental market. REA Group data shows the number of properties available for rent is at its lowest since 2003.(ABC Illawarra: Tim Fernandez) Its quarterly PropTrack Rental Report has found weekly rental prices have shot up, rising 4.7 per cent over the year to March, the strongest annual rate of rental growth recorded since before 2015. That is because of a lack of stock. The total number of properties available for rent in March 2022 was the lowest since August 2003, falling 4 per cent in March 2022 to be 24 per cent lower than a year earlier. In March there were fewer than 130,000 total rental listings available. That is a huge 24.9 per cent lower than the decade average, which was about 170,000. There are simply fewer homes for people to try to rent. "Basically, since 2014, when banks started to be allowed to charge higher interest rates to investors, we've seen a lot of investors leaving the market," said Cameron Kusher, executive manager of economic research and author of the report. Cameron Kusher cannot see an easy solution to Australia's housing crisis.(ABC News: Lucas Hill) "When the pandemic hit, that selling by investors was supercharged." With international borders reopened and migrants returning to our shores, Mr Kusher anticipates a further tightening in the rental market, with rents to rise the most in Sydney and Melbourne. The capitals are the largest rental markets in Australia and the ones that had seen a brief drop in rents earlier in the pandemic, largely centred in a few central areas of those cities. "The lack of supply has been exacerbated by many former landlords selling their investment properties," Mr Kusher explains. "With most of this stock having been purchased by owner-occupiers, it has reduced the overall supply of stock in the rental market." Using its own Realestate.com.au data, PropTrack estimates that around 20 per cent of current transactions involve a landlord selling their property, while only around 8 per cent are bought by new investors on the other side of the transaction. That means about 12 per cent of properties being sold at the moment are moving from the rental stock to being owner-occupied. PropTrack said that would be roughly 50,000 a year if that trend is maintained. "Of course, those shifts reduce rental demand," says PropTrack economist Paul Ryan, "but it tends to be wealthier renters who are able to move into ownership." That would mean wealthier households buying homes formerly rented by people on lower incomes. Second homes on the rise But, while first home buyer numbers did rise, property purchases by people who want to live in the home — termed owner-occupiers — have not taken much pressure off the rental market. Mr Kusher offers several reasons why. "A lot of people sold their investment properties because they wanted to upgrade their owner-occupied property into something bigger, nicer and in a better location," he says. That also led to purchases of "second homes" in coastal and regional areas, as people cooped up in the city looked for boltholes. Additionally, lockdowns gave people who would normally spend big on discretionary items, such as restaurants, overseas travel and expensive clothing, enforced savings that allowed them to buy holiday houses. With borders shut, many landlords took properties off short-stay accommodation websites and rented them long term. As borders open, some areas are seeing a surge of rental properties converting back to short-stay accommodation. "But the other big factor was rental demand moved from where it was usually very strong — inner-city areas of Sydney and Melbourne, our capital city areas – to a lot of these regional markets," he says. "And it doesn't take a big increase in rental demand to make a significant dent in rental supply in country areas." Although there was a much-noted surge in people moving to regional and coastal areas, a big factor in the housing squeeze was that greater numbers of people stayed. Work-from-home mandates and an explosion in online services meant people who would normally leave the country for the city — to work and study — stayed put. As locked-down city residents moved in, rents in the country shot up. Kate Colvin says "the pandemic's exposed that there's just not enough low-cost rentals". (ABC News: Billy Draper) "A whole lot of people from the city have moved to regional areas. They can work from home. They enjoy the lifestyle of a regional area and they've really pushed up the price of rents and house prices," says Kate Colvin, spokesperson for Everybody's Home, which campaigns for more affordable housing. "So the regional housing markets have just been absolutely crunched and the consequence has been that people who are on a lower income, in particular, have just found it impossible to find a place to rent they can afford." 'Fever pitch' Anglicare Australia's annual Rental Affordability Snapshot report examined 45,992 rental listings and looked for ones costing less than a third of people's income. Any higher and a person is considered to be in "housing stress". Just 2 per cent were affordable for a person earning a full-time minimum wage. That's 720 rental properties across the whole nation. Less than 1 per cent (312 properties) would be affordable for someone on the age pension and only 51 rentals were affordable for a person on the disability support pension. Launching the report, Anglicare Australia executive director Kasy Chambers says rents are rocketing in cities, towns and regional areas. Kasy Chambers says people on low incomes "don't stand a chance". "We keep hearing that this election is about living costs, but housing is the biggest cost facing Australians," she argues. "People on low incomes don't stand a chance. "Australia's housing crisis has reached fever pitch. No part of the country has been spared." Others in the field underline the urgency. Cassandra Goldie, chief executive of the Australian Council of Social Service, calls the situation a "crushing pincer movement of rising rents and stagnant incomes" for people on low incomes. Functionally, the vacancy rate in the private rental market is zero, which National Shelter chief executive Emma Greenhalgh calls a "national housing emergency". Not enough supply Lamenting the situation, chief executive of the Property Council of Australia, Ken Morrison describes a simple economic mantra: supply and demand. "We actually didn't have a supply of housing including rental product that we needed coming into the pandemic," he argues. A seven-month parliamentary inquiry recently looked at how to improve housing supply and affordability across the country. Chair Jason Falinksi, a Liberal Party MP, says the report was filled with practical ways to "cut the Gordian knot of oppressive regulation, muddle-headed central planning, officious big state regulation and the skinning of new home buyers via a myriad of taxes and charges designed to raise funds not living standards". Other members of the committee rubbished the report on its release for having "a pre-conceived view" about the problems and solutions, and for not involving state governments despite their key role in planning and development decisions. The issues cross jurisdictions between federal, state and local governments and can pit the economic interests of property investors, people with mortgages and those renting against each other. There are also complex interactions. Record-low interest rates have allowed people to borrow more money, fuelling higher house prices. At the same time, they've contributed to low interest rates on savings, prompting some people to enter the housing market as investors, generating rental properties. No one level of government can fix all the issues. But ignoring the problem won't help either, according to Ms Colvin. "It's the critical issue that underpins our lives," she says. "We all live in a home. "A home is critical to our kind of ability to go to work, to raise a family, it's the foundation of family life, really, and it's the biggest contributor to cost of living." Veronica is not alone Veronica Silva says six of her neighbours are being evicted because the National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS) no longer applies to their homes. That's just on her street. In the suburb, the number is much higher. Willow Vale, home to Ms Silva for the past decade, will lose 22 homes supported by the scheme this year. Four more expire next year. Veronica Silva is getting booted out of the property she has rented for a decade.(ABC News: Steve Keen) The scheme started in 2008 and was designed to increase the supply of new and affordable rental dwellings by providing an annual payment — for up to 10 years — that bridged the gap between what people could afford and what the property could get on the open market. Landlords are paid to make available affordable rentals, at least 20 per cent below market rates. But for many, the decade of support is up. Data from the National Affordable Housing Providers Association (the peak body of NRAS providers) shows the nation will lose 22,160 NRAS properties in the next two years, 8,038 of them in Queensland. For Ms Silva it means moving much further from her family, including 16 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. "I can't describe how I feel. It's devastating. It's depressing," she says.
The Australian city where house prices are growing by Olympic proportions By Sarah Webb April 28, 2022 — 10.07am https://www.smh.com.au/property/new...g-by-olympic-proportions-20220427-p5aggm.html Talking points Domain chief of research and economics Dr Nicola Powell said a unique cocktail of ingredients was behind the surge, which unlike Sydney and Melbourne was far from fizzling out. First-home buyers and those looking to upgrade are feeling the pinch, with many painfully wedged between soaring property purchase prices and record-high rents. On the Sunshine Coast, median house prices cracked the million-dollar mark after a 29.8 per cent annual surge, pushing them to $1,023,750. On the Gold Coast, house medians saw a 25 per cent 12-month hike to $950,000. Brisbane is now the fastest-growing capital city property market in Australia, after house and unit medians skyrocketed 32.1 per cent and 9.3 per cent respectively in just one year. Domain’s House Price Report for the March quarter revealed house prices in the Sunshine State capital rose a remarkable $553 per day to a record $831,346 – the steepest annual upswing in 18 years. Units jumped $37,299 to a record $437,034 median, their llect their sharpest annual rise in 14 years........
Just my thoughts..... Usually a large country with ample natural resourses would prosper. There are even countries without many natural resources which prosper, think Singapore, Gibralta, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium... etc. Australia would rank as a country with one of the highest natural resouces per capita, yet, the country is broke, the working class are especially struggling with a very high cost of living. Usually, imo, when a country with ample natural resources is broke, with high cost of living, where the working class are on struggle street, it can often be a sign that country's rulers are corrupt to the eyeballs or incompetent to the eyeballs. Think, some South American countries..... ......just sayin'.....
‘I don’t accept it’: John Howard dismisses housing crisis Former Liberal prime minister John Howard has thrown out the notion that Australia is facing a housing crisis, telling reporters that it is not an election issue. Rohan Smith April 28, 2022 https://www.news.com.au/national/fe...s/news-story/73e99daebb827d4b9735c7923bbab8af John Howard: Everybody was ‘in favour’ of recession Former prime minister John Howard says “everybody was in favour” of the recession experienced in Australia to “fight the pandemic”. Mr Howard said the election was a choice on economic management. “We had to go into debt in order to rescue an economy..... Former prime minister John Howard has dismissed the crippling housing crisis while speaking to reporters in Brisbane on Thursday. As the cost of housing skyrockets, Mr Howard said, simply: “I don’t accept there is a housing crisis.” He went on: “The cost of housing in this country is much higher than we would like, but a lot of the reasons for housing being expensive in Australia has been baked into the system over the years. “And may I say, because of planning and other decisions made by state and local governments to push up the cost of housing.” The former Liberal leader dismissed cost of living concerns as something that has always existed......