Lot's Wife Edition 3 2024
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HECS and Housing: united against the youth<br />
By Thomas Hall<br />
It’s no secret that Australia is in the midst of a housing crisis. With every passing day we’re<br />
one step closer to Jane Austen’s Georgian England, where you can only get a house<br />
through marriage or inheritance. Negative gearing and a capital gains tax concession for<br />
property investors are increasing demand, while planning restrictions, unsustainable<br />
immigration and government mismanagement is flatlining supply. A perfect storm. The effect<br />
of this housing quagmire impacts young people the most, locking them out of the housing<br />
market.<br />
Naturally, this issue is becoming political. Max Chandler-Mather, the housing spokesperson<br />
for the Greens and one of the only renters in federal parliament, is making significant political<br />
inroads with his rallying tiktok videos on the topic, often garnering over one million views.<br />
At the same time, another political storm is brewing, closing in on HELP loans, more<br />
commonly known as HECS. Dr Monique Ryan, the independent MP for Kooyong has<br />
amassed over 260,000 signatures on her petition to change the HECS system. HECS is<br />
indexed to inflation, which effectively means that young people are charged an annual<br />
compounding interest. This, when combined with stagnant wage growth means that the<br />
HECS debt of the youth is growing faster than they can pay it off.<br />
The Fujiwhara effect<br />
The Fujiwhara effect is a meteorological term that describes two cyclones connecting to<br />
become a larger one. Political radars seem to have failed in detecting the Fujiwhara effect<br />
between the housing and HECS crises happening right now, and the aspirational Australian<br />
youth caught in its eye.<br />
Currently the Australian government is led by people who went to university for free and<br />
bought their homes for between three to five times the average wage, thanks to the Whitlam<br />
education reforms and a housing tax system with parity. Since then, changes to capital gains<br />
tax have combined with the existing practice of negative gearing to rapidly drive up the price<br />
of housing. In <strong>2024</strong>, the median house price is over nine times the average wage, and it’s<br />
getting worse. Throw in an interminable HECS debt, and you’ve got yourself a really unfair<br />
system.<br />
The Politics<br />
The Prime Minister was right when he said that the Labor government ‘needs to do better for<br />
the younger generation’, the Coalition would do well to follow suit. There is massive political<br />
capital to be raised for either major party, here. At the moment, this area is dominated by the<br />
Greens with Chandler-Mather leading the charge. Granted, it is not unusual for young people<br />
to have a natural inclination towards the Greens but the political order is changing; people<br />
aren’t ‘growing out of it’ anymore. The pool of landowners is shrinking while the pool of<br />
renters is growing. Likewise, everyone who attended university after 1989 walked away with<br />
a massive HECS debt and so too will the students of today. So the number of people with a<br />
HECS debt will soon be the majority.<br />
It’s illogical for both major parties to effectively ignore this when their primary vote is in a<br />
steady decline. True, Bill Shorten lost the 2019 election by going after negative gearing<br />
and<br />
the CGT exemption, and Albenese pragmatically kept it out of the debate in 2022. But a lot<br />
has changed since those elections. Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese each resonated<br />
with ‘middle Australia’ in their election pitches, but it won’t take long for ‘middle Australia’<br />
to<br />
consist of renters who can’t get into the housing market. Given that ‘middle Australia’ or<br />
‘the<br />
centre’ decides the outcome of elections, the message to major political parties is clear:<br />
ignore HECS and housing at your peril.<br />
The issues of HECS and housing both go against the deeply entrenched Australian grain of<br />
fairness and aspiration. It’s not fair that younger generations are locked out of the housing<br />
market by property investors with a leg up. By the same token, it’s not fair for boomers to<br />
tell<br />
younger generations to ‘grow up’ when we talk about HECS given they went to university<br />
for<br />
free.<br />
Aspiration is under attack by a tax system that makes it easier to buy your tenth home than<br />
your first, not least because your HECS debt is handbrake on your ability to get a loan.<br />
People once dreamed of home ownership with hope that it could one day be a reality.<br />
Opportunity used to be earned but now it’s inherited, evidenced through the rise of the<br />
bank<br />
of mum and dad now funding 40% of first home buyers. The formula was to work or study<br />
hard, get a good job, start a business and grow your savings until you can afford a home.<br />
Any Australian should be able to work hard, make money and then buy a house. It shouldn’t<br />
be the case that hard working Australians are bested on auction day by lazy property<br />
investors.<br />
What can be done?<br />
The federal Labor government has hinted at HECS reform in the upcoming budget, and<br />
continues to tout policies aiming to increase housing supply, ignoring demand. True, we<br />
have a supply problem in this country but dismissing the demand issues only infantilizes the<br />
intelligence of the Australian people.<br />
As a country, we need to ensure that fairness underpins all our systems; political, taxation or<br />
otherwise. And we need to ensure that our country rewards hard work and effort, maintaining<br />
the promise of aspiration. Practically, changing how HECS is indexed, reversing the job<br />
ready graduates scheme (the one that increased the price of humanities units) and treating<br />
HECS as a tax instead of a loan (increasing borrowing capacity) would be a start. Likewise,<br />
putting an end to negative gearing and the CGT concession would quickly reduce housing<br />
demand. These reforms, while welcome, only scratch the surface.<br />
There is a political reckoning coming, and our politicians need to wise up quickly, because<br />
they’re kidding themselves if they think they can outrun the HECS and housing storm before<br />
they get wiped into oblivion.<br />
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