Tag Archives: housing

Calling Out Older People’s Privilege

Old Does Not Equal Poor

I will look at a few examples of older people’s privilege below, but first, the basic data that might question the allocation of concessions and government support based on age (or even receipt of the age pension), rather than on need. I have previously posted that 72% of age pensioners own their own home, and around two-thirds of those homeowner pensioners have more than $100,000 in additional financial assets. Not rich, but not poor either – and those statistics say nothing of the self-funded retirees who are too rich for the age pension.

Overall, the data is clear that there is a correlation of age and wealth as many people with steady jobs accumulate wealth over a life-time. ACOSS/UNSW research shows that the average older household was 25% wealthier than the average middle-aged household, and almost four times as wealthy as the average young household.

And yet, we have policies and proposals to provide government support for older people or households that are not available to other, poorer households.

To be clear, an age pensioner who is renting a house and has only limited savings is going to be facing serious financial pressures and in need of support. But that poverty is about not having property and capital income, rather than about their age. And even then, that pension income remains significantly above the income-support and concessions provided to unemployed people of working age.

Yet lurking at the back of our minds and at the front of the social security system is a very old idea of the deserving and undeserving poor. Older people are assumed to have worked throughout their life and deserve support in their retirement, while working-age people who are unemployed or experiencing waged poverty are somehow to blame for their poverty.

This may change as compulsory superannuation opens the possibility of age pensioners being seen as undeserving losers who did not work hard enough to provide for themselves in retirement, but fortunately, we are not there (yet). And in the meantime, despite the obnoxiousness of the deserving/undeserving politics, older people’s privilege is alive and well. Here are a few examples that have come across my desk in the last few weeks.

Examples of Older People’s Privilege

Stamp Duty Promises

At this state election, the Liberal party is promising to provide a $15,000 stamp duty discount for over 55’s looking to downsize, while Labor is promising to abolish stamp duty for over 60s downsizing to a new-built dwelling. Ignoring the impact on government revenue and the fact that stamp duty overall is an unfair and inefficient tax, these tax concessions (almost by definition) go to people who can most afford to pay stamp duty – because they are getting a significant cash bonus from their downsizing. Young families going from their first home unit to a suburban house are likely to need stamp duty discounts more than an aging downsizer, but older people’s privilege prioritises the needs of age over financial position (albeit dressed up as a wider market intervention to free up supply).

The Older People’s Privilege Lobby

The election campaign platform of the state’s leading advocate body for older people, COTA (the Council on the Ageing) proposes free ambulance services for full age pensioners. Nobody wants a cost barrier to people calling an ambulance when they need it, but this proposal is a claim to older people’s privilege (mediated slightly by limiting it to full age pensioners). Age pensioners already get a 50% discount on ambulance cover insurance and ambulance fees, while people who are unemployed (with no children) and those in waged poverty receive no such discounts.

While COTA is simply lobbying for its constituency, a better public policy would be free ambulance services for all South Australians (a universal service). Short of that, the priority should surely be to extend the existing concession to all unemployed people and those in waged poverty, not an extension of an existing subsidy to aged pensioners.

Similarly, COTA’s call for the removal of the work limit for Seniors Card eligibility would see an older full-time worker in a well-paid job receive free public transport and other discounts, based simply on their age. [1] No consideration of income or need, just a claim for older people’s privilege.

Disclaimer – I am particularly grumpy here because these proposals undermine work that SACOSS did to remove unfairness and poverty premiums in the state concessions system – work that was adopted by the SA government in the 2024-25 state budget.

Propaganda in Other Interests

The final example is not an election policy, but a recent Renew Economy article expressing outrage at a proposal to charge all customers a fixed network cost, rather than the usage-based charges currently in place. While fixed charges are usually regressive, this is less the case than the current system where those with money and housing tenure can reduce their chargeable usage (e.g. by installing solar panels and batteries) and avoid paying any network costs.

For reasons outlined in previous posts, I question the data behind the article’s assertion that the fixed charge proposal takes from the poor and gives to the rich. However, in the context of this post, what is interesting is that the poster child of this injustice is a:

“pensioner in a small cottage home, who makes sure they wear their winter woollies to keep their heating bill down, and always takes short showers and who used their small surplus cash to buy solar to contain their power bill.”

This consumer here is not described simply as a person who owns their own home and has capital invested in solar panels and batteries, they are a (deserving) age pensioner. Yet the distributional impacts of energy network tariffs are mostly about technology and housing tenure, not age – but the age pensioner makes an appearance nonetheless as older people’s privilege is weaponised.

Class, not Age

The reality of all these examples (and a thousand others) is that those with a need for government support need that support because they lack income and wealth, not because of their age. Of course, some older people have low incomes because they are marginalised in the labour market by age-discrimination, but in terms of government supports, this could be equally or better dealt with by reference to employment status than age. And as the stats at the top of this article suggest, many other older households have comfortable incomes and wealth.

Age is simply not a good determinant of wealth or of need. As Piketty made famous, the fundamental driver of inequality is capital accumulation. This is true in the big picture of Piketty, but also in the modest capital of owning a home (or solar power).

When we invoke older people’s privilege to continue to provide (or lobby for) supports based on age rather than need, we are making poorly targeted policy, masking the fundamental inequality of class processes, and perpetuating an antiquated view of the deserving and undeserving poor.

Let’s talk about class (income and wealth) and need, not age.

[1] The SA Senior’s card is currently available to all residents over the age of 60 who work less than 20 hours per week. There are no income limits.

Silly Housing Stats: the Comparison of Rent Prices and Why It Matters

In previous posts I have highlighted a range of dodgy housing statistics, or the silly misuse of rental data. I argued that the “asking rent” statistics are inflated, unreliable and only capture a small portion of the market. While state government data based on rental bonds is a better indicator of the rent prices for new tenancies, that data says nothing about the rents paid by existing renters – data which itself is rare and unreliable. But there is more at stake in the comparison of rent prices data than just statistical accuracy.

The comparison of rent prices

The table below shows the difference between the data sets on median rent in metropolitan Adelaide in the March quarter this year. Again, the estimates of asking rents are way above the actual median price of new rentals (in the SA Housing Trust data). But those new rental prices are themselves way above the actual median of all rents in Adelaide in the quarter. That median for all renters is represented by the bottom three lines of the table – the first two using and updating the census data from 2021, while the bottom line utilises a recently released rare ABS data set of the base prices in the CPI for private rentals across the state (that is, without public housing and the Commonwealth Rent Assistance, which is usually included and lowers the standard CPI number).

Table showing comparison of rent prices in the different sources for median rent in Adelaide, March Quarter 2025. Core Logic asking rent = $622, SQM = $614, Proptrack = $580, SAHT Bond data = $530, Census (updated) = $487 or $424, CPI private rental = $475.

The table provides pretty clear evidence as to why it is silly to pretend that the price of new rentals is what all renters are paying.

Time Series

Similar patterns and issues emerge when we consider changes over time. Again, the recent ABS data set is particularly useful here because it is focused only on the private rental market. This provides a more accurate comparison of rent prices with the bond data on new private rentals, while the exclusion of CRA enables a direct comparison of market prices (rather than the prices paid by consumers – as in the usual CPI data). The graph below and shows the comparison for South Australia as a whole, but also includes the standard Adelaide rental CPI (which includes public housing and CRA).

Unsurprisingly, the graph shows that since 2020 rents in the private rental market have increased much more rapidly than the standard CPI Adelaide rent figures (which include public housing and CRA). Perhaps more interestingly, the graph also shows that the prices of new rentals (from the bond data) have gone up by more than the Private Rental Market CPI which accounts for existing rentals. The new rental prices are more volatile than the CPI data, and the trend is not uniform – the median price of new rentals increased faster than all rents in the 18 months prior to December 2021, and in most June and December quarters in subsequent years. The gap closed in other quarters, although the overall difference is perhaps under-estimated by the fall in median rent bonds in the March quarter this year – which may or may not be sustained.

Line graph showing comparison of rent prices from June 2020 to March 2025: Adelaide CPI rentals (23% rise), the CPI private rental rise (38%) and the rental bond data for new tenancies (42%).

What the graph does suggest though, is that in the short term the changes in rent prices for new rentals may not be a good reflection of what is happening in the rent market as a whole. Further, in the long term, the focus on new rentals tends to exaggerate the increase in rental prices across the whole private rental market.

What is a stake in the comparison of rent prices

These differences matter. In the previous posts I suggested that the differences in data sources matter because mis-use of data leads to silly statements that detract from the credibility of important advocacy on housing policy. However, the data differences also matter because statistics don’t simply reflect reality (either accurately or inaccurately) – they shape it.

The asking rent data is produced by commercial organisations largely for the use of property interests who are likely to pay for the detailed analysis, so the higher prices in the asking rent data provides good news for their target audience. But more importantly, it inflates landlord expectation across the market. If you are a landlord charging $480 for rent, and then you read stories of median rents of $620 a week, you might feel justified in increasing rents.

Obviously there are objective factors driving some increases in rents (e.g. interest rate increases – a theme I will return to in a future post), but unless we want to pretend that landlords are the rational automatons of first-year neoclassical economic textbooks, we should expect subjective judgements to have a role in economic decision-making. How much of a role is the stuff of economic debates from Marx to Keynes to neoliberalism. But at a minimum, I think it is fairly safe to suggest that having industry analysts advertising data about market rents that are well above the actual median rent is unlikely to help renters.

Silly Housing Statistics 2: I am Priced Out of a renting a beachside house

In my last post I suggested that the claim that Melbourne rents were cheaper than Adelaide was a silly statistic – basically not true, and obviously so. That was the first of a series of posts on silly housing statistics and highlighted a problem with commercially-produced housing statistics. This week’s silly housing statistic comes from my world of not-for-profit advocacy for better housing.

A leading body in this NFP advocacy is the Everybody’s Home campaign which is a coalition claiming over 500 organisations, businesses and councils, and more than 43,000 individuals across Australia, aiming to tackle the systemic drivers of housing insecurity and inequality.

Last year they produced their Priced Out report which included a common, silly statistic used by our sector. I pick this report as an exemplar because of the organisation’s prominence and the importance of the recommendations in the report (which I support), but also because the methodology is repeated across other reports.

The Priced Out Statistics

The report uses SQM Research’s data on asking rents as its key statistics.[1] As I argued in my previous post, these are probably an inflated starting point for rent, and at times the Priced Out report slips into the language of representing these asking rents as all rents (rather than just new tenancies). But this is not the really silly statistic in the report. That comes in the key table (excerpted below) which compares the income of various low-income households with the SQM weekly rental data, and then calculates the percentage of income that would be required to pay the rent on a housing unit. All the results are well over the usual housing stress measure of rent above 30% of income.

Table 2 from the Priced Out report showing national comparison of various weekly incomes, average weekly rents and percentage of income required for rent.

These results would be concerning, but for the fact they are silly housing statistics. They are an asymmetric comparison of a very low income with a median rental price. It is an apples-to-oranges comparison resulting in the grand claim that people on low-income households can’t afford houses that are affordable for someone on twice their income.

Think about it: I can’t afford a beachside house, but I could if I had twice the income. That does not mean that I am at risk of homelessness or even in housing stress. It simply means that I need to have a house that is affordable on my income. The comparator to a market average does not give me data on that. Arguably, the relevant comparator for someone in the bottom 20% of the income spectrum is whether they can afford the cheapest 20% of houses, not the median market price.

It would be theoretically possible for all people in the lowest income bands to afford housing if the rental market spread reflected the income spread. Obviously it doesn’t, which is why the work of Everybody’s Home is so important – I just wish they wouldn’t use silly housing statistics to make otherwise good arguments.

Similar but better options

In my SACOSS role I have done similar income-rent comparisons, but the comparison is to median rent in the cheapest suburbs. In the September Quarter of 2024 the median rent for a 2-bedroom unit in the cheapest suburbs in Adelaide was $60 p.w. below the figure across the city as a whole. By my calculation, an Age Pensioner would require 60% of their income to rent a 2-bedroom unit in the cheaper suburbs of Adelaide, while the Everybody’s Home report puts the Adelaide figure at 74%. Similarly, the Priced Out estimate of 101% of a single JobSeeker’s income for a housing unit is reduced to 82% using the SACOSS methodology – still alarming, and grossly unaffordable, but a more accurate and defensible statistic.

However, the SACOSS methodology is arbitrary (defining the cheapest suburbs as the bottom half) and clunky (in that it is a median of suburb medians rather than a true median of cheapest suburbs).

A far better alternative is provided by the annual Anglicare Rental Affordability Snapshot. Its methodology is simple (but no doubt resource-intensive for them), but for me, it is probably the best of the NFP housing reports. It simply surveys all the rental properties listed online on a given weekend and compares them to the established income-types (Minimum wage, JobSeeker, Pension etc) to see how many are affordable (using the standard 30% of income measure). There remains the issue (discussed in my previous post) of non-advertised rentals, but there is no comparison in the Snapshot to a median price or to properties which would never be expected to be in the price range. It is a scrape to see if any rentals are affordable. Sadly, the answer is usually that there are none or next to none.

This is not a silly housing statistic – it is a damning one! And again, it shows why we need well researched advocacy for changes to the housing system.

[1] The SQM methodology is more complicated than a simple data scrape, but still relies largely on real estate agent data (the limitations of which are in my last post). Curiously, they also claim their results closely align with ABS CPI rental data – which in the next post I will argue is a government-produced silly housing statistic!

Silly Housing Statistics: Is it more expensive to rent in Adelaide than in Melbourne?

This is the first of a series of articles on “silly housing statistics”, highlighting how bizarre claims are made with inaccurate or mis-used statistics. We begin with the claim made at the end of January that Adelaide rents had surpassed those in Melbourne for the first time. The story came from housing market analysts PropTrack and was covered in the Advertiser (see below) and elsewhere.

An example of a silly housing statistic - photo of the story from the Adelaide Advertiser, 31 January 2025, headed "Rent costs more here than in Melbourne"

Now I like a “killer stat” – a statistic which sums up an issue and grabs attention for a policy argument. I try to get such stats in most reports I write, but I also try to get the statistics right! So, is the claim about Adelaide and Melbourne rents right?

Turns out, the answer is complicated – and a bit of a primer on housing data.

A Silly Housing Statistic

The PropTrack data says that Adelaide’s median weekly rent in the December quarter of 2024 was $580, although this figure for the “asking” or advertised rent was considerably above the official government data on the median amounts actually agreed and paid – which was $550 per week. (The differences here are discussed further below).

Unfortunately, the official Victorian government data won’t come out until the middle of the year (which is why commercial data like PropTrack gets the headlines!). However, the PropTrack data suggests no change in the Melbourne median rent in the December Quarter – which if applied to the official data from the September Quarter would put the median rent at $560 p.w. – that is, above the Adelaide median.

We might also get a hint of the silliness of the “Adelaide more expensive than Melbourne” claim from another commercial data source. The SQM analysis for mid-quarter (12 November) showed Adelaide median rent at $609 per week, but Melbourne at $627 – both significantly higher than the PropTrack figures, but with Melbourne clearly higher than Adelaide.

But really, all these are silly statistics because the comparison is meaningless without also considering the mix of housing in the data. For instance, if rental houses are more expensive than units, then if one market has a greater proportion of houses than the other, its median rent price will be higher even if the comparable prices are lower. That is particularly relevant here because, at least in the September Quarter, only 40% of Melbourne rentals that quarter were houses by comparison with 55% of Adelaide rentals. That would make the overall median rental in Adelaide relatively higher, even if the rent for particular property types is lower.

Similarly, we would need to add location into the housing mix because if the majority of available rentals are in inner-city locations the median price would be higher than if the majority were in outer suburbs.

A further level of complexity here is provided by the government data for the September Quarter. It shows that Melbourne rental prices for units were significantly above Adelaide prices, but $25 a week lower for a 3-bedroom home. The housing mix clearly matters to the overall average – although it should be noted that the SQM data for September showed both Adelaide house and unit prices significantly below those in Melbourne.

A Silly Endeavour?

It is all a bit messy, and in that sense, the silliness of the Adelaide-Melbourne statistic is as much about making the simplistic comparison in the first place as it is about the conclusion of which jurisdiction is more expensive.

But even if you can sort through the comparison issues, there are also some pretty big questions about the usefulness of the base data.

The sad truth is that, despite a flood of housing data, there is actually no data that usefully gives average rents paid in each city, and no real basis from which we can say which city is more expensive – or more generally, what is happening “for renters”.

Navigating Rents, Rent Prices and Asking Rent Data

The first issue is that, all of the above data is in fact not comparing rents in Melbourne and Adelaide – it is comparing rent prices for new tenancies. But new tenancies are less than 10% of the total rental market (my calculation from SA bond data and 2021 census data). So it is simply a misrepresentation (and a silly housing statistic) to say, as in the Tiser headline, that these numbers refer to “rents”.

That said, there may be good reasons to focus on price of new tenancies. These prices represent the current market price faced by people looking to rent, and it is arguably a lead indicator which other rentals will follow. However, even with this focus, and even if what was being measured was accurately described (which it is usually not), there would still be problems.

There are two key data sources of data on rental prices for new tenancies: official state government data based on rental bonds paid, and the “asking rent” (i.e. advertised rent prices) data which is produced by a range of commercial firms (e.g. PropTrack, CoreLogic, SQM) that scrape real estate sites on the web to produce data and spruik their analytical tools.

As we saw above, there are data differences between the companies even on what the asking rent was, but the asking rents may also not be the price the property is rented at (which is what is captured in the official data). For instance, rent-bidding may mean actual prices go beyond the advertised price, but landlords may also wildly overestimate the rent they can get (the Tiser headline could also have read “Adelaide landlords more optimistic than Melbourne counterparts”!).

Further, web sites like realestate.com.au and the other commercial sources are dominated by advertisements from real estate agents, but real estate agents only manage about two-thirds of Adelaide’s private rental properties. The other third may not be advertised or captured by the web-scraping data, and rents tend to be below the real estate agent’s “market price” (see Census GCP4GADE – Table 40).

The difference between asking and actual rents is clear in the table below. It compares rental bond data for Adelaide metropolitan area for each quarter last year with the SQM asking price data for the week in the middle of each quarter. The SQM data (from their National Vacancy Rate reports) is used because it is well-respected and accessible, but as the table shows, the asking price data is 6% to 17% higher than the median rents actually paid by new tenants.

Data table comparing SQM Adelaide rents with rental bond data for units and houses for each quarter of 2024.

Silly Housing Statistics

So, in summary, the data behind the fairly counter-intuitive claim that Adelaide median rents have surpassed those in Melbourne refers to only a fraction of rents being paid across the market, and is inaccurate even in relation to new rentals because it only relates to advertised prices rather than the rent prices actually agreed and paid.

This makes the headline claim about Adelaide prices surpassing Melbourne a particularly silly statistic – and the media’s uncritical reporting of it even sillier.

However, our beloved Tiser is not alone here. A lot of media and even so-called expert commentary, either blindly or lazily, blurs the differences or makes leaps from asking price to rent prices to rents in general. The result is analysis which is inaccurate, over-generalised or at least questionable given the limitations of the data.

Beware the silly housing statistic.

Compare the Pair: Income Inequality on the Same Income

Can a homeowner really be $30,000 a year better off than a renter with the same income?

We are all familiar with superannuation ads asking us to “compare the pair”: two otherwise similar workers in different superannuation funds getting very different financial outcomes. Today I want to do a similar exercise for the extended incomes of two people on identical wages, with the only substantive different in their lives being that one owns their own home, while the other one rents.

The different financial outcomes that result go beyond just the amount of rent that one of the pair pays. Nor are they based on lifestyle or consumption differences, clever investment strategies, complex tax minimisation planning (beyond a basic voluntary superannuation contribution), or any other scheme beloved of financial planners. As such, and with everything else about their lives the same, the compare the pair exercise enables us to draw some interesting conclusions about the role of housing and taxation in inequality.

Compare the Pair

Renter-Greg and homeowner-occupier-Greg both work as professionals in suburban Adelaide and earned $100,000 last financial year. They both live alone, but are neighbours in the same set of home units. Renter-Greg pays $350 a week in rent, while home-owner-Greg is an owner-occupier who paid off their mortgage six years ago. Ever since paying off the mortgage, homeowner-Greg has been making voluntary superannuation contributions equivalent to renter-Greg’s weekly rent – leaving both with the same weekly consumption expenditure (neither saves or invests any further or has any other source of income).

You get the picture: a standard simplified model where all other factors are equal so any differences in financial outcomes are only the result of different housing costs and the ability of homeowner-Greg to put money into superannuation. Of course, the ability to buy a home and invest in super may be conditioned by all sorts of social factors, but the model could also simply be viewed as a comparison of potential financial outcomes of the same person with different housing tenure.

As the table below shows, the bottom line is that homeowner-Greg is nearly $30,000 a year better off than renter-Greg, despite them having the same employment income.

TABLE 1: Comparing the Pair, 2023-23

Compare the Pair: Table showing renter and homeowner comparison, with homeowner $3k better off after tax, then earning $18,200 in imputed rental income, and $8,565 in return on extra superannuation contributions.

(a) Tax is calculated using the ATO simple tax calculator, with homeowner tax based on income tax on $81,800 salary and 15% of $18,200 voluntary super contribution.

(b) Income from voluntary super contributions does not include the voluntary contributions themselves, only the income on the accumulated balance of these contributions, calculated using an industry average rate of return (9.2% for the 2022-23 year, and 5.8% for each preceding year).

Explanation

The first step in comparing the pair is simple enough and is just based on salary income and tax. As can be seen above, homeowner-Greg has a higher disposable income because of the tax concessions on voluntary superannuation contributions.

When we include housing costs, the difference is starker. As noted in a previous post, accounting for housing-costs in income comparisons is common in poverty research (which is usually based on after-housing incomes), while the national accounts also recognise the value of housing ownership by including a value for rent that owner-occupiers are deemed to pay themselves in their measure of the size of the economy. The value of this imputed rent is added to homeowner-Greg’s income (because the value of this free housing service is income-in-kind). The result is a further increase in income inequality, with homeowner-Greg’s after-housing income being 28% higher than renter-Greg’s income.

The next step is to account for the extra income homeowner-Greg receives from being able to make a voluntary superannuation contribution. When this investment income is included, homeowner-Greg’s extended income is nearly $30,000 higher in the year than renter-Greg’s. Again, this is based solely on home ownership and the ability to invest the money saved on housing costs in superannuation.

Alternatives

A significant part of the difference in financial outcomes above comes from the superannuation investment. If homeowner-Greg just put the savings into a standard bank account, they would not get the benefit of the tax concession and would have lower returns on accumulated savings. However, with a relatively modest interest (2% ->3%), they would still get some $2,600 more income than renter-Greg in the 2022-23 financial year.

Of course, homeowner-Greg could also just spend the money not going on rent rather than invest it, which would mean less difference in the long-term, but significantly higher weekly consumption and standard of living than renter-Greg on the same income.

There is one final calculation that could be made to include the value of the capital-gain on the house in homeowner-Greg’s annual income. Home unit prices in Greg’s neighbourhood increased by 8.8% in 2022-23, so homeowner Greg would have “earned” $39,600 in capital gains on his $450,000 unit (average unit price). That would bring the difference between renter-Greg and homeowner-Greg’s income to $68,650, or more than two-thirds of their starting income (gross salary). I have argued previously that capital gains are an important driver of inequality which are overlooked in most data, but there is also an argument to exclude capital gains for owner-occupied housing. This is because unlike pure financial investments, where capital gains are a key return, owner-occupied homes are not simply an investment product. They fulfill a basic need (housing), and while a capital gain may be realised upon sale, most people selling are buying another house in the same inflated market – so they are really simply swapping one house for another, not gaining wealth through the capital gain.

The arguments here are complex, and excluding capital gains on the owner-occupied residence probably underestimates the differences between renters and homeowners. However, the compare-the-pair data above shows that even on the conservative estimate, homeowner-Greg’s extended income is 39% higher than renter-Greg, despite doing a similar job for the same pay.

Conclusion and Implications for Analysis

The most obvious conclusion from this data is that it pays, literally, to be a homeowner. However, it is also important to note that the capital income from accumulated voluntary super payments, and therefore the extended income differences between home-owners and renters, will grow over time as investment income increases with capital gains and further contributions.

The compare the pair exercise also has broader political economy implications. It provides further evidence that the standard statistics on income inequality which deal only with money income hide significant inequalities between people/households who appear to have similar incomes.

Further it supports the argument put by Lisa Adkins and others that capital gains and capital income, rather than employment income (which in the Gregs’ case is identical) are the preeminent drivers of inequality.

It is also evident in the comparison above that the tax system is failing its redistribution function. In this case the tax system not only does not tax aspects of tax capital income, the concessional tax arrangements applying to superannuation promote the inequality between these two people on the same money income.

Implications for Advocacy

Finally, this compare-the-pair exercise raises questions for my own work at SACOSS and the approach of many anti-poverty advocates who have traditionally focused on championing rental affordability and renters’ rights. This focus undoubtedly supports those likely to be most disadvantaged in the housing market. However, the data above shows that the fact of them renting puts renters on the wrong side of increasing inequality – which might suggest merit in the traditional conservative focus of getting people into home ownership.

Put another way, an anti-poverty agenda would direct policy (and money) to supporting rental affordability, while an equality agenda might direct policy and resources to enabling more people to own their own home.

Of course this is a false dichotomy. Policies such as increasing Commonwealth Rent Assistance address both poverty and inequality issues, while some people will never be able to afford to buy a house so “the Australian dream” policy options are limited (and expensive).

However, the analysis does highlight the fact that even if we secure tenants’ rights so we become Europeanised and life-long renting is becomes a potentially desired option (rather than a forced option), renters will still be disadvantaged. Perhaps most challenging, this analysis also applies to those in public housing, who will be better off than they would be in the private rental market, but will nonetheless be falling behind homeowners on similar incomes.

Clearly, while current policy directions to increase renters’ rights and the provision of rental housing are absolutely necessary, we also need to change tax and other policies to reduce the difference in financial outcomes between renters and homeowners.

Greg Ogle's After Dinner Political Economy

An occasional blog on Australian political economy theory and issues