OPINION: Accelerating housing unaffordability – both rental and purchases – is the consequence of a larger system of relationships in which we all are complicit: the financialisation of everything.
However, unlike the “nothing to see here” response to problems in the financial industries, aged care sector, casinos, and many more industries, knowledge of and solutions to housing unaffordability are well understood but stubbornly resisted.
The problem of housing unaffordability persists largely because the balance of political interests favours continuity of the underlying causes.
Effective solutions can only be achieved through the ballot box.
From this review, there are two topics that warrant further exploration. The first is the role of truth in politics and the second is the significance of land to affordable housing.
Lying and the persistence of housing unaffordability
Hannah Arendt’s 1971 essay “On lying and politics” was prompted by the release of the Pentagon Papers – a large cache of previously top-secret US Defence Department documents that charted the real failures of American adventurism during the Vietnam war.
Commencing with a meditation on the nature of truth and its correspondence with contingent and non-contingent realities, she then enlarged conventional definitions of political lying to include the work of public relations managers in government and their closely related enablers, “problem solvers… men of great self-confidence who seem rarely to doubt their ability to prevail”.
The bulk of the essay explored the “credibility gap” between the copious and accurate evidence from the intelligence agencies on the one hand, and on the other, the political use of that information by politicians pursuing public support for the war.
As the war progressed, and the harms it visited on all participants escalated, this gap widened to a chasm that led finally, in the relatively open society of America, to its exposure followed by the collapse of public support and deep scars in the polity that still persist.
The current housing affordability crisis…is presented as an intractable problem even though effective remedies have been known for years.
(An aside: though it eerily shadows America’s Vietnam folly, the current Ukraine conflict is unlikely to be resolved by such a collapse because the principal belligerent controls its instruments of truth-telling so very tightly.)
Hang on, we are exploring housing unaffordability so why are we looking at Arendt’s essay about the Vietnam war?
The reason is simple. Her analysis defines the gap between evidence – and the pathway to action that it implies – and the public presentation of that evidence as amounting to lying.
At core, this is the very essence of the current housing affordability crisis, which is presented as an intractable problem even though effective remedies have been known for years.
Those that fail to address the problem effectively – through their deflection, inaction, disregard, or through the ballot box – are the moral equal of Arendt’s reviled “problem solvers”.
Arendt is not alone in exploring the facts and consequences arising from this type of lying.
Following the Trump years, Brexit, the Ukraine invasion, and various commissions of inquiry in Australia, we are full to nauseous surfeit from a daily diet of political lying – so why should we be alarmed about steadily rising housing unaffordability?
Well, there are two longer-term consequences that are little remarked upon in this context.
The first concerns the evaporation of boundaries between the internal conditions of nations and their projections of power.
Concerns for human rights have long seen nations delving into the internal affairs of others, but the intensified competition between democratic and autocratic modes of governance has significantly broadened these inquiries in recent years. At the same time, Australia’s regional standing and expectation as an exemplar and defender of democratic values has also increased.
Yet, as Amitav Acharya points out, a nation’s failure to resolve deep internal fractures and weaknesses compromises externally facing claims of moral, political, social, economic and military superiority.
Put simply, if we won’t solve deep internal problems, like housing affordability, why should any other nation take our concerns about democracy seriously?
The second concerns demography. Nicholas Eberstadt surveys the domain summarised by the adage “demography is destiny”.
By his account, the USA is likely to maintain its international leadership because its population and high education standards are being maintained, in contrast to China’s rapid approach to the “demographic cliff” thanks to Mao, and the prospect that it will grow old before it gets rich.
Unlike Japan, where its disinclination to accept outsiders points to a destiny more dire than China’s, Australia’s growth is due largely to immigration.
The accelerating retirement of boomers requires economic productivity from others, likely a mix of immigrants and subsequent generations. Yet if they continue to face significant headwinds like housing unaffordability then this nation is headed towards another kind of cliff.
Looming election and the persistence of housing unaffordability
The apparently noxious political clout of the for-profit development industry in NSW is well illustrated by it being banned from donating to state political parties; a feature it shares with the casino industry.
For those that benefit most from existing conditions of housing supply and its subsequent financialisation it is crucial to maintain existing policy settings.
Certainly, Jennie Leong and Abigail Boyd (members of The Greens in the NSW Parliament) claim that most current or proposed affordable housing policy is little more than ineffective window dressing.
The Sydney Morning Herald editorial, similarly describes both the Labor and Liberal housing affordability measures as offering only marginal benefit at best.
It recommends that “as the March election gets closer, voters would be wise to put both parties’ policies for first home buyers under the microscope and lobby hard for meaningful change”.
But how might policies be put “under the microscope” most effectively?
It is suggested here that the best comparison to make is not what each party offers but what they exclude.
If solutions to housing affordability have been known for so long then, collectively, they provide an ideal checklist for this microscopic analysis.
For those items on these checklists not proposed by political aspirants, the simple question needs to be put to them – why not?
Any prevarication would mark the respondent as one of Arendt’s liars, not deserving a vote.
This is part 2 of Mike Brown’s series on unaffordable housing. More to come.