A fairer housing system must be a priority this election

We’re in a housing crisis. Rental affordability in Melbourne is the worst it’s ever been and the idea of owning a home is now completely out of reach for most young people.

For those who have been able to buy a home, many people are facing crippling mortgages, and the prospect that their kids will probably never be able to afford a home.

What is often missing from the debate though, is the fact that this crisis didn’t happen for no reason. The system isn’t just broken, it’s rigged. Governments over the years have made choices and decisions that have led to the housing system we have today – and they can make choices to get us out of it, if they’re willing to have a bit of courage.

One of the biggest barriers to young people buying their first home is the enormous tax handouts that make it easier for someone to buy their fifth, sixth or seventh home, and harder to buy their first home. These tax handouts include the capital gains tax discount introduced by the Howard Liberal Government, as well as negative gearing which allow investors to claim the costs of their investment properties against their other income, using housing investments to significantly reduce their tax.

Together, negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts to property investors cost us $176 billion every 10 years.

But it doesn’t have to stay this way. We can turn things around, if governments are willing to roll back the bad decisions of the past.

The good news is there is hope – and while these two policies can only be changed at the federal level, we’ve actually already made good progress at a state level in Victoria.

In Victoria, the Greens and I have fought and won important changes to move us towards a fairer housing system.

We campaigned for and secured new rights for renters – protections that give tenants more long-term security, so they can’t be kicked out for no reason; that require minimum standards like working kitchens and bathrooms in rentals (the bare minimum!), and ability to have disputes dealt with fairly.

We also successfully pushed the government to take real steps toward regulating short-stay platforms like Airbnb, to make sure that more homes are being used as long-term homes, not hotel rooms.

And we fought for and won an expansion of the vacant homes tax – so people who leave homes empty during a housing crisis are encouraged to put them on to the long-term rental market.

But our work is far from over.

We need to phase out these unfair federal tax handouts. Doing so would not only give first-home buyers more of a fair chance, but free up billions in public funds that could be invested in directly building homes people can actually afford, or to spend on other important policies like getting dental care into Medicare.

We also need to stop the Victorian Labor Government’s ill-advised plan to demolish all our high-rise public housing towers and replace them with mostly private expensive apartments, making the housing crisis worse.

That’s why I consider this federal election one of the most consequential in recent history. We have a unique chance to elect MPs like my Greens colleagues who will make reforming the housing system a priority in the next Parliament.

Housing should be a human right, not just a way for investors to get rich. We need a housing system built for people, not for profit. More Greens in parliament will keep Dutton out and put pressure on Labor to act to fix the housing crisis. •