Adam Bandt is asked about housing and says:

I want to talk about housing for a moment. Nothing is more urgent than housing. And we are at breaking point. On housing, the Greens are refusing to join in this battle of the bandaids between Labor and the Liberals. Their approach is breaking the social contract and it’s tearing the country apart. Our proposal is a serious attempt to restore and protect everyone’s economic rights, giving younger generations and renters a chance at home ownership while protecting mum-and-dad investors.

Former Treasury Secretary Ken Henry warned us that wilful acts of bastardry from successive governments – including failing to fix capital gains tax to make housing more affordable – are robbing young people of their future.

If we don’t stop the bastards, house prices will get further and further out of reach. Rents will continue to keep rising. And there will be fewer and fewer genuinely affordable places to live. And in those tales of political bastardry that Ken had Henry is talking about, perhaps the biggest bastard of them all was John Howard, former Liberal prime minister, who single-handedly put house prices out of reach of first-home buyers with the capital gains tax discount in 1999. Before he did this, in the 1980s, the average house cost about three times the average income.

Now, it has more than doubled to eight times the average income.

Why did Howard’s handout to wealthy property investors in 1999 – fully backed now by both Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton – smash first-home buyers and stressed mortgage holders a quarter of a century later? Because, when combined with negative gearing, the cost of housing increased rapidly. A wealthy property investor with a portfolio of other people’s homes can turn up at an auction and push the price up so that it’s out of reach of a renter looking to buy their first home. The investor can write rental losses off on tax while they own it and then, when they sell it, they get a tax break worth potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars from the government. How is that fair? How is that fair?