A housing pitch and a net zero brawl

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Hey, Jules and Jez here.

Join us as we unpack the news of the week on Not Stupid.

You would just see these people who were radically in the minority, year after year, standing out with their little hand-drawn signs because they believe in something.

And it's funny, isn't it?

Because we have leaned on these people historically to achieve the rights and equalities we now enjoy and take for granted.

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Parliament is back and the government wants you to know it's doing everything it can to meet the housing crisis head on.

But will what they're floating stand the test?

Well, I can give you a little hint.

The Housing Australia website has already crashed with one of the offers.

And Barnaby Joyce wants to debate net zero again.

The government is more than happy to help.

They are so happy to give the parliament time to debate Barnaby Joyce's ideas.

What's the political play here?

Welcome to Politics Now.

Hi, I'm Patricia Carvallis, joining you from Parliament House, Canberra.

And I'm Jacob Grieber.

Welcome to Parliament House in Canberra.

Here we are in the studios.

We are.

It's good to have you in person.

Love it here.

I'm so excited.

It's all housing and I quite like the housing conversation.

So the pitch today, out of the roundtables, they wanted to look like they were ready and rolling, that it wasn't just, you know, a talk fest, an announcement that the 5% deposit scheme that was announced in the election will start earlier than planned, so in October.

So that's three months earlier.

And at the same time, they made all these announcements to pause changes to the National Construction Code.

So a lot of busy work, Jacob.

Is it meaningful?

Yes, it is.

It definitely makes it easier for people to get into the housing market.

They won't need quite as much for their deposit.

The government's picking up that portion of it, cost of insuring a mortgage for people with low deposits.

And those people are often struggling to, you know, they scrape and pull together every dollar to get that 20% deposit.

If you're below that 20% mark, you tend to cost more from a bank's point of view because you're riskier.

So the government's going to step in there and help out.

And that comes, of course, on top of this plan to freeze the building code that the Housing Minister has been talking about for weeks and weeks and weeks.

She got sort of a nice tick off from the roundtable last week.

We've discovered regulation hurts in the housing sector.

We've discovered it.

But let me put this to you.

The coalition has been cranky because they had a plan to pause it for 10 years before the election government said it would lead to shoddy houses.

Now they've changed their minds.

Now, the Prime Minister made the point, Jacob, that it's not the same.

And he's right.

It's a four-year pause, not a 10-year pause, right?

Six years difference.

Okay.

It is different.

I mean it is different.

But the concept is the same.

That's right.

The concept's the same.

And sitting underneath it, of course, is this

implied criticism of the code that

people find it very easy to add new regulations.

It's very hard to take them away if they're redundant or actually there's a cost-benefit analysis of done of whatever regulation.

I mean, we don't want these things falling down on people, obviously.

And there are problems with

famous developments in Sydney with cracked walls and all the rest of it.

It's sometimes not clear that more regulation would fix that.

That is actually shunks or whatever else might be causing it.

So yeah, it's an active debate about how much you regulate.

You don't often have those debates in the political realm.

It's much easier just to add another regulation on top of whatever problem you're trying to hit.

Oh, yeah.

And it's wild how many pages that thing is.

I mean, if you're a builder trying to navigate that, It's actually insane.

Yeah.

Well, look, I have some personal experience of it.

For a tiny, very modest project that I'm doing at my home to put a Pagola on, you would think we are building the Sydney Harbour Bridge over our house.

It's a paperwork nightmare.

And I won't bore the listeners about it, but I've just got the tiniest, tiniest taste.

of what it must be like for builders doing big projects or for anyone renovating their home or or building a new home.

It's wild.

It's absolutely wild.

It is.

So it needed some reform.

The government's moving in that direction.

Of course, the overall reason they need to do this is they have this giant agenda, which is 1.2 million homes in five years that its own Treasury Department says it won't meet, right?

So they need to do some things to accelerate it.

Big question is, are all these things together enough to accelerate it?

And then at the same time, you know, there is Treasury modelling on the 5% deposit going back to that one, which shows it will have an impact on house prices.

The government says it's just a small impact, but it is on the

will accelerate demand and we

will accelerate demand.

It's an issue with the code.

It's an issue.

And the debate about the building code and also the need to just get more money, more capital into building, whether it comes from the government, whether it comes from super funds or other private investors, that's all about getting more houses built.

That helps with supply.

This is a little bit of one of those old measures that only just the problem with those sort of demand side measures is they tend to the benefits flow to the wrong people, if you like.

Well, the famous one, of course, is the first home buyers grants.

The John Howard one.

And then the states had versions of it.

I always call them the.

Did you ever use it?

I may well have.

Yes, indeed, I did take advantage of it.

I was lucky enough to be able to take advantage of it.

But it is essentially,

I used to call it the baby baby boomer sellers grant because

they were the ones who got the benefit of it.

They did.

They got a little top-up, didn't they?

They got a little nice price there.

Nice little top-up.

Yeah, that's right.

It's interesting to see how the opposition is playing this.

Andrew Bragg has come out and said this 5% deposit scheme, which already existed but in a very limited way and was a coalition thing actually that they started, but the way the government wants to expand it basically gives

support to the children of billionaires,

which is available to billionaires or the children of billionaires if they want to use a government program.

I think we're getting to a point where Australia is becoming a ridiculous nation where the taxpayer is underwriting mortgage insurance schemes for high five to Andrew Bragg for this kind of over-the-top rhetoric.

The children of billionaires.

It's like class war.

They have feelings too, because they do.

Billionaires have feelings too.

I've got to say.

And their children.

Let's interrogate it, though.

What he's making the point about is that it's not, you know, it's essentially not means tested or it's not based on your income level, your, sorry, your, you know, your family wealth or whatever.

It's a tricky one, though.

I mean, you might be the child of billionaires, so to speak, but you're an independent person operating in the world.

There's been a general drift away from means testing measures really in the last, really since the pandemic.

And i think bragg might have a point here like do we really need to give support to to the top end but the overall picture right now since the pandemic when government had to really move fast so they simplified all kinds of grants

they had to get money out the door so they said you know what worrying about whether

a tiny percentage of the recipients are wealthy enough not to get not to deserve them or not to need them perhaps is a better word because that's such a small cost

and then you need a lot of bureaucrats to administer it, to check the fine print.

So, with a lot of entitlements now, they tend to be available to everyone.

It did used to be that we always means tested these things.

And I think

we've, as a sort of overall political statement, we've moved away from that.

This is another example of that.

So, you're going to get these kinds of criticisms.

I do wonder, though, if you're the child of billionaires, are you going to do all that paperwork?

You're not going to do that.

That's a lot of paperwork.

Like, I don't know.

I don't know.

I wouldn't be.

When you're bidding for your first

Wolseley Road sort of student digs.

Yeah, I don't see it, but I take the point he's trying to make, which is a bit broader.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is, you know, we've got to think about who we're giving this support to.

And we do have to think about who we're giving this support to.

I'm talking about having the same sort of debate with childcare, you know, the universal childcare thing.

A lot of money will go into communities that are very, very well off to meet that ultimate goal if that's the way it goes.

And again, it's another one of these ones where we just won't means test because there's a broader benefit to society of, in this case, having kids looked after from an early age.

Now, also on the agenda today, curiouser and curious,

is a rare decision allowing a rare on-the-floor debate.

Barnaby Joyce's very own bill to rid us of net zero by 2050.

This is officially a private member's bill.

Private members.

It's so good of the government.

He's a private guy.

It's so good good of the government for the sake of democracy, transparency, open debate

to bring sunlight to this bill from this humble opposition backbencher

who's just put his own ideas forward.

The government's decided, yes,

we want to have a debate on the floor about this.

And we're actually going to do it over several days by the looks of it.

It's that good, Patricia.

What is going on here?

Well.

What is going on here?

Well, it's pretty obvious, isn't it?

The government sees

a very exciting political opportunity to paint the coalition as bitterly divided on this key policy, as out of step with mainstream thinking on this key policy after the thumping election loss for the coalition.

And, you know, that's just too delicious.

Now, I personally wonder if that can maybe backfire giving too much time to something like this when really people want you to get on with your work.

They probably, if they they were here and arguing their points honestly, you know, without sort of talking points, would say, well, we're still doing the housing stuff, so we're still busy doing things.

So ultimately, we can have our cake and eat it too.

Let's not forget one key thing.

Over the weekend, the Queensland LNP conference on Friday voted to abandon net zero.

That follows WA.

I think it follows South Australia too, doesn't it?

So we've got lots of big member-based, says a lot about the membership,

grassroots liberal and national when it comes to the Combination Party in Queensland pushing for this.

So it creates a bit of momentum.

It does put Susan Lee in a wicked position though, and it's pretty embarrassing for the coalition who think that there's good politics, some of them, to extract from moving away from net zero.

Some of them really believe that, but I scratch my head and wonder, when you look at the resolve polling, for instance, today that's out, which shows people do want an ambitious 2035 target which the government has to settle on because they actually have to come up with a new target like they've got work to do and the coalition seems to me to be on a different planet on this I mean really not not operating in in the reality of where the market's moving so some of this is obviously there's an internal national party leadership dynamic as well Barnaby's wanting to do this he seemed to be doing this because it undermines the leader David Littleproud who by the way voted in favour of that LNP Queensland motion.

So he's that, isn't it?

He is now voting down net zero, which is a big shift.

The National Party was actually the only coalition party up until it still is actually officially on the books today that supports net zero by 2050.

The Liberal Party has it under review.

So there's a slight nuance and subtle difference there between the two partners.

Look, I think the most interesting thing about this is, I don't know about you, but where I sit in my newsroom in Parliament House,

there's a TV panel above my head with four news stations on it.

It just runs permanently.

There's one in the bottom right-hand corner that at about 5 p.m.

every single day, almost without fail, has some sort of story about the terrible cost and burden of net zero.

The banner's headline is there every day.

It's a constant message coming out of that particular screen.

Now, that is affecting, I think, that base that you were talking about, very much so.

And the government might be just a little bit playing just a little bit of a risk by

giving that a platform in parliament.

But as you said, they've judged that this hurts Susan Lee more than that risk.

And so it's worth it.

And that's a

maybe correct, maybe.

Clearly this broadly across the electorate, I do think is settled.

I do.

But where the opposition is, particularly in regional areas, of course, not all, but is intense.

So it's a very uneven story and it moves it sort of moves almost literally with the weather yes you know what I mean like so it in I'm sure if we polled people in South Australia today you would get a really strong perspective that might be different to someone in Sydney at the moment where it's been relatively calm on that front.

Sure, but they had all that rain the other week.

But yeah, it's different.

But yeah, it was intense though.

And I think there's a real awareness that things are changing.

So people do want climate.

They do want action on climate.

The polls seem to show that universally.

We saw that in the electorates that the Liberal Party really struggled to win back.

I mean, they tried so hard in a whole bunch of them

and couldn't get there.

Those seats kind of now look like they've gone for good, as far as for good means in politics.

Sort of for good.

Sort of for good.

And so the government obviously is happy to elevate this this debate.

Do you know the other reason?

Here's the other real reason.

Takes the heat off them.

It takes the heat off what the government's target is going to be for 2035.

There's a big debate going on now about what it should be.

We have a 2030 target.

We're struggling to get to that.

The 2035 target is a big deal, no matter where they land.

It's a big, big policy.

Let's explain to our listeners why it matters other than obviously it matters because climate change matters, and we're part of the world and agreement.

So, we have to reveal where we're going September-ish.

And then, of course, there's the November COP

meeting in Brazil.

USL climate meeting.

That's right.

So, 2035 targets.

The UN boss has said they need to be ambitious.

So, Australia also is bidding for the next COP conference in Adelaide.

We want that so bad.

We're taking on Turkey.

We need to be kind of looking like we're taking this pretty seriously.

There's a range, but it's pretty broad.

There's a push by some that we go more modest because, of course, the impact on industry and the cost.

And then

if you look at, yeah, back to the environmental crisis we face, which is real and existential, there's a real push for us to be very ambitious and to not shirk it.

Remember, the government has promised it will take climate change seriously.

So it is, you're right, under enormous pressure on these issues.

So there are the groups that are saying it needs to be a big number, a big bold number.

The scientists say, well, for us to quote unquote carry our load, you know, our fair share in the global economy of emissions, we need to hit a certain number.

But there's this huge grey zone in the middle where the government can, I mean,

here's the, to go back to my point about why they're happy for this Barnaby Joyce bill to be debated.

If the government can say, look, that's what those guys are doing or not doing, they can put out a number and it'll look much, much better.

It'll be miles better than anything the coalition's proposing, even if in real terms it's actually pretty lame.

And you know why it'll be better?

This quote.

The PM taking a swing this morning in an interview against

his opposition.

He's very aware of the politics always, the Prime Minister.

If you get rid of net zero, you're saying climate change is not real.

And that's what it's a proxy debate for.

Not just, you know, net zero as if it's just this kind of scientific concept or, you know, industry-based concept.

It is a proxy for if you take climate change seriously, you're any

normal operating government or opposition in the world, in the developed world particularly,

then you have to be moving towards the market.

And look, and I've heard nationals who are not happy with the direction that Barnaby Joyce and Matt Canavan are taking taking this

said to me,

the other thing people hear when you say you're against net zero is that you're against the environment.

That's the other thing that their own polling and their own conversations reveal about that particular stance.

And their big theory, and this is their wild theory, is that, you know, you watch, people are going to keep turning against it.

They're going to keep turning against it.

And look, it depends how it gets rolled out.

That's not impossible.

I've watched politics swing, so have you.

That's the thing about watching so many electoral cycles.

You're going to have terrible energy blackouts that last for months, months, months.

So they're not wrong in thinking that, but it does ignore the fact that even with politics changing because people might feel viscerally upset because lots of things might happen like that.

I feel like it still misses the sort of big demographic shifts we've had as a nation.

I just don't think we're, I don't think it's Tony Abbott's time anymore.

I think they're living in the past.

There is a different Australia where there's a lot of...

10 million new voters on the roll in this election, isn't there?

It's an important memo to get.

And the other thing, too, is, I mean, there is a cost associated with whichever path you take.

If you do the path we're on, it's a very, very expensive business, decarbonising the electricity grid, for instance.

But if we decided, you know what, this climate stuff, it's all a load of bunkum.

We don't need to worry about what the rest of the world thinks of us.

We're only 1.

something percent of global emissions.

We're going to go back to the old way.

We're going to do coal.

Okay, we're going to do coal-fired power.

Well, guess what?

Our power stations are ancient, they're crumbling, they're held together with gaffer tape.

Good luck with that.

Replacing those is also very, very, very expensive.

Either way you go, it's expensive.

Right.

So you're going to pay.

And that's where I think if the government can prosecute that argument well,

again, I'm not sure they have, but if they can, then we're in a territory where people think, I have to pay either way.

I'd rather the cleaner cleaner version, right?

Especially with the demographic shift of people really believing deeply that climate change is happening.

So I still think that

the people raising questions are probably on the losing side, long-term, even, of this broader debate.

I think the last thought on it, though, is there is still an unresolved thing about,

yes, people worry about climate change.

You mentioned that resolve poll, quite striking, those numbers.

44%

want to reduce emissions by between 65 and 75%.

18 want a slightly less ambitious target.

So the bulk of people say, yes, we've got to do more.

How much are they prepared to pay?

Or do they want someone else to pay?

Well, yeah, look, I'm glad

that big caveat.

When you ask that question,

it taps out really quickly at a low dollar amount.

Polling is always

flawed because of the sort of, you know, if you ask people, they'll say lots of things, yeah.

But then the material reality of actually having to fund that.

But back to your other point, because it was the best one you've made.

Sorry, but you win, which is we pay either way.

Yes.

And anyone who can explain that well,

I think you're getting to a position where people don't like that we're paying either way.

They do want the government to help them transition through that period, but they also,

I don't think their natural inclination, Jacob, looking at the environment around us, is to back the horse, which is the stinkier horse.

The polluting horse.

It's not, is it?

And here's the other tip.

You know why the government has to do things like the capacity investment scheme, big, horrible, opaque, bureaucratic thing, basically a massive, massive government underwriting scheme for renewable energy?

It's because those big players who are building those batteries, building those wind farms, building those solar panels, are worried that the price of electricity in future is going to be too low.

for their business to be viable because this technology is driving down those costs so quickly what a future You've just really painted a very different reality if it's going to get there one day.

Jacob, love hanging out with you on a Monday.

It's going to be a big week.

It's parliamentary ball this week too.

So lots of shenanigans to come on Wednesday night.

Huge week in Canberra.

And it'll be interesting to see.

It's a crock all sort of pick that.

Always.

Always.

Always.

I live to please.

It's easy for blokes.

It's just a penguin suit.

Well, it's easy for blokes who don't take their beauty seriously.

And I'm sure for you, you're working very hard on that.

Absolutely.

Because that's your nature.

The only thing I'm thinking of is I was thinking that.

Raph Epstein is back with me tomorrow to unpack our political day.

And remember, party room Thursday.

Mel Clark and I will try and answer your questions at the partyroom at ABC.net.au.

See you, Jacob.

Take care.

See ya.