What might be Malcolm Turnbull’s worst nightmare, apart from losing the election? Scraping back as a minority government, with Tony Windsor in balance of power.
The default position for politicians is to sound concerned about housing affordability, but do nothing. This can be explained by the idea of ‘policy capture’, in this case by industry interests.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has warned that Labor’s negative gearing policy would deliver “massive shocks” to the residential housing market and drive all investors away. Does that claim stack up?
Curbing negative gearing will help get empty housing onto the market. This could go some way to bringing life back to relatively dense urban centres that are oddly lacking intensity of public life.
Politics has its own purgatory, as Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott might have reflected when they sat on the same table at the Howard government’s 20th anniversary dinner on Wednesday.
On Monday, a scarifying account of Tony Abbott’s prime ministership appears in the bookshops. By journalist Niki Savva, The Road to Ruin: How Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin Destroyed Their Own Government…
The Turnbull government desperately needs a circuit breaker. It is in an appalling mess over tax policy and it can’t afford to wait until the budget to have it sorted out.
What if there was a middle option between retention and abolition that made negative gearing work better? There are multiple ways to improve accountability for this $8 billion-a-year tax concession.
The problem is there are already too many buyers willing to pay high prices, and negative gearing is designed to create more buyers willing to pay more.