Labor pledges $10bn for 100,000 first-home buyer homes; the Coalition offers mortgage-interest deductibility on loans to $650,000 and super withdrawals for deposits. Shifman calls both ‘announcements for the TikTok generation’ – big round numbers lacking rigour – and argues for decentralising growth into regional cities.
As I told The Nightly: “It’s about big, round numbers — and this is a criticism of both sides — 1.2 million homes, 100,000 homes for first-home buyers, half a million unlocked in the greenfields — none of them really have the rigour or the understanding of what it would take to get there,”
I also said: “In my view, there’s never really good enough consultation about how to actually make the policies work. It’s more about ‘we have this general direction, and then we’ll try and figure out how we make it work later’. And that’s just never effective,”
And I added: “I actually cannot fathom what they’re going to do to make that happen. I think it’s just a number that they’ve made up and haven’t really thought through the mechanics of actually delivering it.”
I went on to say: “We are the most urbanised country on the planet in terms of the proportion of people that live in a handful of cities relative to the size of the country. It’s really quite nuts, when you think about it,”
I also made the point: “A lot of what they put out there is based on wishful thinking rather than reality,”
The Nightly, 14 April 2025 — Read the full article