CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
As Australia reaches boiling point of a housing crisis, the Albanese Government is screaming into a pillow today – with the news that the Greens and the Coalition will team up in the Senate to obstruct Labor’s newest housing bill.
The ‘Create More Slumlords’ bill aims to cut taxes for developers who boost housing supply with a ‘built to rent’ model.
The bill would allow the people who caused the housing crisis to claim a larger tax deduction for depreciation of their buildings, and will also slash the overall tax rate from 30 per cent to 15 per cent.
The ‘built to rent’ model is already popular other countries that are yet to solve their own housing crisises, such as the UK, US and Canada.
The government says the tax incentive could lead to the supply of 150,000 rentable homes, which instead of being sold by developers, will be rented out by developers, who are well known for having the interests of the wider community at heart.
Proposed housing complexes would only be eligible for the tax cuts if they have 50 or more homes for rent, and if leases are available for at least three years.
At least 10 per cent of the homes have “affordable” rent (which means renters pay no more than three-quarters of the market rates).
While the developer lobby groups flinch at at words like ‘affordable’ of ‘social’ – it seems that this is yet another government incentive aimed at making slumlords richer. Given the fact that the conditions of these tax incentives would mean that a complex of fifty Built-To-Rent flats would only require five dwellings restrict to ‘affordable’ leases. Which again, would only be coming in at three-quarters of the market rate, which for any capital city one-bedroom apartment takes the weekly rent from $1200 a week to $900 a week. Which is the majority of the average Australians weekly pay check.
The Coalition have vowed to vote against this bill because they don’t believe developers should have to settle for renting a perfectly good high-rise apartment block, especially when they can rattle every flat off for over a million each. The Greens say even the built-to-rent model will be unaffordable for the average Australian and therefore a waste of the same kind of tax loopholes that created this mess to begin with.
