Why the housing crisis is such a 'wicked problem'

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After decades of political inaction, housing has become the defining issue of Australian politics.

At the 2025 election housing policies were the cornerstone of both Labor and the Coalition's election campaigns.

But are governments doing enough to address the root cause of the housing crisis that everyone agrees exists? That is not contested.

Today, in a special edition of Politics Now, Tom Crowley on what the government has promised on housing and what they've actually delivered and why long-term solutions to fix the crisis aren't as easy as they may seem.

Hi, I'm Patricia Carvelis. And I'm Tom Crowley.
And Tom, you're kind of the resident housing guy for me and the podcast and Australia.

Whenever there's a housing story, we kind of pull an emergency Tom Crowley lever. And this one is the biggest of all.
The housing crisis we're going to tackle today, Tom.

Well, I mean, I think, look, I'm not going to be out of a job anytime soon if I'm the housing correspondent.

Not to spoil what I'm going to say, but I think we'll be talking about this for a while longer. I'm going to try and dial up the hot takes for this one, PK.
Find some things I haven't said before.

So I'll give you a bit of forward sizzle there. We're going to make this a two-parter.
So today we're chatting all things housing specifically.

We're going to do another explainer on immigration soon, sort of demystifying some of the big elements of the immigration debate.

Because the two are often discussed together, let's go to the housing pickle we find ourselves in first.

Housing, I think, has become like the ultimate wicked political problem, particularly for federal governments in my view, because of our federation, and this is not sort of confined just to housing, because there's other areas where this is a wicked problem as well.

But the federation means that the federal government has some levers and arguably maybe should be using others, but they are limited in how much they can do.

But if you look at the current housing debate, I reckon a lot of it is falling actually at their feet. But we are at a crisis point.
It's a long crisis though.

It's been cooking for a while and now we don't know what to do. Bipartisan Bipartisan agreement in a weird way that it needs to be fixed.

So no contesting, no government digging its heels in and saying it's all good, no one's saying that. I think Albert Easy and Dutton centred their election campaigns on housing.

Labor stands up for Australian values and we're backing the great Australian dream. Today I announce that under a Labor government you'll be able to buy your first home with just a 5% deposit.

I will be a Prime Minister who restores the dream of home ownership. We will allow Australians to access up to $50,000 of their super towards a deposit for their first home.

We know that it went pretty badly for Peter Dutton. Remember him? Because he got his son involved.
Remember that? That was a bit of a weird look. I was there.
I was there. Oh, yes.
It was a fun one.

I am saving up for a house and so is... my sister Bec and a lot of my mates but as you've probably heard it's almost impossible to get in

in the current state. So, I mean, we're saving like mad, but it doesn't look like we'll get there.
So that was a thing.

And then Labor's policies that they announced, okay, their pitch, 1.2 million homes by 2029, which we'll come to because we've got, you know, you've written stories about how even...

the government's sort of experts don't think they're going to make that.

And then their 5% first home buyer guarantee scheme, which is applicable to a wider range of first home buyers than it used to be. That expanded in October.
It's been controversial.

Some experts say it's already pushing house prices up. That's contested.
Let's just park that again. But either way, it is a demand side issue thing that they've offered.

Where are we at with trying to resolve some of these wicked problems? This is a great big tide that we're trying to turn around here.

So I'm not necessarily being too cynical and gotcha when I say we haven't got to the solutions much yet.

It's just the nature of this, where we're now starting to talk seriously and look seriously about something that has built over 25 years.

So the simplest way to define the problem is that homes cost twice as much as they did 25 years ago. Twice as much when you compare it to what we earn is basically the story.

And I think it's just as simple as that. That's one dimension of the problem, that affordability.

And it's meaning that people are, in some cases, not able to buy, but more realistically, buying later. Instead of buying in your 20s, you're buying in your 30s.

Or the kind of people who are buying in the 30s are buying in their 40s and so on and so on.

And secondly, people are also not able to get the kind of homes that they feel like they should be able to get. The lovely story of the quarter acre block from a previous generation.

When we close our eyes and think about 2001 and ignore all the blonde highlights and reality TV shows and all that kind of thing, but

it's the backyard, it's the Hills hoist, it's all of that sort of national image building.

That feels like that's kind of gone as well, that people are buying homes later and the kind of homes they're looking at, just not quite what you picture when you shut your eyes.

They're the two dimensions of the problem. Picture when you shut your eyes.
I like that.

It's not quite the dream that you dreamed of, maybe. No.

I think the fundamental cause of that problem that you talk about that there's now agreement on is that we're not building as much

and not building as much of the kind of homes that people want as we used to.

So you're going to look at this historical graph going over like 70, 80 years, and it used to be that we would build more than the rate of population growth.

And the rate of population growth, it's gone up and down little bits here and there.

We're in a phase at the moment where it's a little elevated and that's a little forward sizzle for the next episode. But fundamentally, it's not in some unprecedented level compared to the past.

What's fallen is the rate at which we're building. And that is where, as you say, it ultimately comes down to the state and local governments that are responsible for zoning and planning.

And And that's why it's so much on them and why the federal government, which constitutionally just doesn't have a housing power, sort of referred to them as a bystander with deep pockets.

They do have a lot of money that they can use to try and help unlock different parts of this problem. It takes a while, it's tricky, but also in the meantime, people are angry.

People are angry that they can't get this home that they picture when they shut their eyes. And a solution that's going to take a long time,

not always what people want to hear. Politicians have this temptation to kind of offer something quick, a band-aid, I guess, in the meantime, while they're trying to tell this story of building homes.

And that's where we get these things like the 5% deposit scheme, Peter Dutton's mortgage deduction thing, which, gosh, I've even forgotten the details.

It feels like that was a lifetime ago that we were talking about that idea, but they're all versions of the same thing, right?

Which is just line the pockets of the young families that are, you know, heading off to the same old auctions where they're struggling.

But let's just give you a little bit more money to try and beat out the investor or try and beat out the baby boomer. That's the gist of it.

That's the short-term thing that governments and opposition still feel like they need to do because they recognise that this long-term thing is going to take a while.

That's the basic frame for where we are. So let's go to the 5% deposit scheme.
Now, it was very limited. The Morrison government introduced it.

And then during the campaign, Labor said we're going to expand it with some criteria to all first home buyers, essentially.

You know, you only need a 5% deposit, which of course is a lot easier because house prices are so high to accumulate.

And therefore, more people can get to that because it's so hard to get to a bigger sort of down payment, right, for a mortgage. Okay, sounds good on paper.
I reckon.

And I understand why Labor wanted to do it. Like the wicked reality is that is the house prices.
And it is impossible on the wages people are on for them to get a higher deposit.

So, you know, logically on paper, why wouldn't you expand it so that people can get in?

Look, our government absolutely understands that the housing affordability issues faced by the country are solved by housing supply.

We need to build homes, more homes more quickly and that's exactly what our government's doing.

But the Prime Minister and I are not going to look a generation of young people in the eye and tell them that we're not going to do anything to help them until these supply challenges are resolved.

They are facing a fundamental injustice here. A very different

market than this. Is the consequence, Tom? Like, are you entirely against this? And I'm asking this on a wonk level, not partisan level, because I'll reveal my view.
I can see the merit, right?

These are the house prices we have. I can see the merit of a system that allows people more opportunities to get in there.
No, I mean, I can too, right? And,

you know, there's two different types of kind of cost crunch for people buying a home. There's the deposit and and then there's the mortgage payments.

And the housing affordability problem has worsened both of them. It's like a higher entry cost and then you're paying your mortgage for longer, you're paying higher repayments.

So the housing affordability problem, you know, you see it on both fronts. But that deposit gate, I think, is a particularly prominent one for people.

And it's really this category of person who feels like, I've got a decent income, you know, combined income in a household. We're on, you know, six-figure salary.

We should should be able to afford something. We just can't get this deposit going.
And once we're in there, we can pay the mortgage payments. That's fine.
We just got to get in the door.

That's where I think this focus on the 5% deposit helps people feels very tangible.

So I think that is where, you know, this compared to other different forms of giving first-home buyers money, I can see why this has some appeal.

You know, it's kind of, it's a cheaper thing for the government to do as well because the government's essentially just providing a guarantee.

It's almost like it's kind of acting in part as a little lender or insurer itself.

And what we've seen at least so far in the scheme is that we're not seeing that many people are defaulting on these hideously risky 5% mortgages. So it's sort of all okay.

The government's not having to actually step in and fork out very often. But all of these different demand side schemes, it's just the simple point.

You know, you're giving more money to first home buyers.

I think it's quite obvious why you might be helping them, but you're not fixing anything fundamentally and that that's what this conversation keeps coming back to it's like you're not you're not fixing the problem you're just sort of giving them a little bit maybe more water in the hose if you want to put it that way and that's where the government's at so they've got the housing minister claire o'neill trying to work out how can the commonwealth find all of the levers to activate this space to make this happen so let's go to that They have to make more houses.

We know this, right?

And so they need to fundamentally change the way we make houses, the way we approve houses, having the skills to get actually this moving, to have the infrastructure pipelines focused on this rather than other infrastructure, because, you know, there's only so many workers available in a market.

Markets are tricky. You've got to actually,

who pays more? Where are the good projects?

Part of the problem has been that the good big CFMEU infrastructure projects are better than some of the little housing projects, right?

So tackling that problem involves states and territories, incentives for them. There's been some interesting research, the Grattan Institute, for instance, about how you try to move the dial there.

How are they going on it?

Things are looking maybe. There's a few, what did someone say to me in government? And I think they really believe it.
I'm going to interrogate this with you, though.

A few little green shoots, I was told. You know, there are a few little, oh, what's that? A little bit of life, sign of life? Is the drought getting broken?

Yeah, and I think the 1.2 million homes target I feel really kind of sorry for them in a sense because you know I like the aspiration you can have me back in four years and I can you know wear a big sign around my neck saying I was wrong but they're not going to get to that number they may well significantly increase the rate of construction we are seeing a little bit of an upswing

and it is, I think, reasonable to believe that between the federal government and the states, which are genuinely, you know, they're writing these rezoning plans. This is actually happening.

They're pointing to actual suburbs and actual areas and saying we're going to make it easier to build higher density homes here here here and here this is a real tangible thing that didn't exist maybe three years ago that governments are now doing will it show dividends in time to build 1.2 million homes over five years

i doubt it um but will it significantly you know, increase the number of homes that are built compared to what there might have been? You know, I think it probably will.

I mean, the 5% deposit and that kind of thing.

I think, as you say, Claire O'Neill fundamentally knows and wouldn't disagree with the idea that that's not the kind of thing that's going to fix the housing crisis.

They sort of argue that there's a case for them to do it in the short term, but the government's argument on that is basically, oh, look, treasury modelling tells us it's not going to increase prices by that much, don't worry.

But they essentially concede the point that it's not making things better. They are genuinely focused on all dimensions of the problem.
And, you know, you mentioned complicated markets.

I think that there are

two things in particular structurally that they feel like they need to fix here. And the first of them is just the blockage of the planning system.

I think if you want to look for evidence that there's a problem, look at the fact that the two types of housing that are getting built the most are the two that no one really wants.

There's the stuff that's like way out. on the very very outskirts of town like building further and further and further sprawl you know rows of houses that look the same, built really quickly.

They don't excite people. And then there's skyscrapers close to the city.
We have genuinely seen both of those be built quite rapidly over the last decade or two.

Why is it that they're the things that are getting built?

That tells you that there's a blockage in the middle suburbs where people really do want to live of going from quarter acre blocks to two and three story gentle density is what people sometimes call it,

building townhouses, fitting more homes into a city that still looks medium-rise, that's not just sort of skyscrapers, but where people can live close to where they work.

So if everyone wants to live there, everyone's willing to pay to live there. Sounds like there should be good money to be made for a private developer in building that kind of home.

So why isn't it being made? Well, it isn't being made fundamentally because...

there are blockages. And that's the kind of thing that the government's trying to fix.
And then the other thing, the productivity of the construction workforce.

We build homes less efficiently now than 30 years ago. That's astonishing.

So the offers from the government, from the deep, you know, structural work they have to do to try and turn this around to the immediate sugar hit, if I could be blunt,

we know what they are broadly, as we've been talking about,

have to go to the perennial

capital gains tax, negative gearing, which is consistently parked by this government because we have, and I'm sure people have heard this many times on politics now, a pretty careful prime minister that doesn't like to scare the horses, so to speak,

you know, because of the history for Labor, doesn't want to burn people, a treasurer that is like really clamouring for a bit more action on some of these issues and wants to deal with the intergenerational challenges.

As we record this, not really a lot of movement on the structural tax incentive stuff. And to be fair, Tom, I'm going to say it,

not universal evidence that it will necessarily shift the dial in a sort of seismic way either. No,

I don't think it's, I don't know, I think if we're looking for any policy that's just going to be a magic wand and is going to sort of suddenly make this so much better, you know, you're just not going to find it.

Negative gearing and capital gains tax, you know, it's true to say that

those two quirks of the tax system in tandem have made it a kind of a smart thing to do for tax reasons to get into investing housing and may have contributed to there being more housing investors in the market compared to what there would be otherwise.

And if you undo it,

notwithstanding all the political questions around that, you would generally the modelling tells us see some investors decide to park their money somewhere else other than housing.

And as a result, you would see a little bit of a price correction.

And you would also, I guess more notably, you would see a redistribution of, even if the price doesn't change much, the investor sells the house and it's bought by someone who wants to live in it.

And so you do change the pattern of home ownership a little bit away from investors and back towards first home buyers. So for those reasons, you can argue this does

make a dint in the problem. And if you're trying to do everything on all fronts and you didn't care about political considerations, I think that's where this would be part of the conversation.
And

maybe, I agree with you. I don't think the Prime Minister really wants to go there.
Maybe that will change. But

the same is true of migration. We're going to come to it in the second episode.

None of these things are just the magic kind of, sometimes people sort of go, oh, what about this over here? You know, just do this and then we'll be fine.

Why are you ignoring this part of the problem? These sorts of things would help, but they're not going to fundamentally change the nature of the problem we've got.

So let's go to the coalition because they offered some pretty contentious stuff at the election. That's a while ago now, to be fair.
And things have changed, right?

Now, they haven't settled any policies, but I will tell you what's changed.

One fundamental thing that's changed, I think it's worth mentioning and isn't talked about enough, is some of the characters, the personnel have changed.

Michael Suka is a man who lost his seat, was the senior shadow cabinet-level person coming up with the housing policies that drove the agenda.

He's the one that had the tax deductibility, basically, negative gearing. If you own a new home, a new built, wasn't anything.
The whole industry, the whole expert world was like, what a dumb policy.

Yet they said they wanted to do it. That, I think, I can say with confidence is dead and buried.

We now have in Andrew Bragg, who is a senior moderate that you may have heard on other issues like net zero in the past,

pushes for sort of more moderate ideas in the Liberal Party. He's in charge of housing.
He's said some really interesting stuff. Well, I think we have to turn our weakness into our strength.

We have our lowest level of urban representation in our history.

And and given that in the past some urban representatives have been perhaps nimbies, this is an opportunity for us to go full yes in my backyard, full supply, full development in order to get to more home ownership.

And I know all sorts of people in the housing space that think, hmm, this guy's worth engaging with as a result.

One thing he's said is that their superannuation for housing policy, which was their big ticket thing, they have taken that thing to two elections, Tom, this idea.

He said at least, doesn't mean he's won the argument, but he says he doesn't think it's such a good idea.

Not because he doesn't think you should get access to your super, because fundamentally, ideologically, he does, I think, think you should have access to your super to do stuff.

That's a liberal kind of concept. But he doesn't like the idea of being able to get more money.
therefore pushing up house prices. So that is, I reckon, a big shift from the coalition.

Not a little one. One that we should be talking about more, because ideologically, that's a huge shift as they try to pitch to younger people potentially,

you know, going into the next election cycle. Are you with me? Do you think that's right? Yeah.
No, I agree. And I think it's going to be really interesting to see where he goes.

The Michael Sukar-Peter Dutton housing pledge, I think it was quite cynical in the end.

It was kind of a housing pledge that was pretending to be pitched at young people, but it was really pitched with one eye to older people who already own their homes, saying, you know, don't worry, we're not going to change anything too radical here.

I'll tell a quick story from my time on the campaign bus. This was my first time ever on the campaign bus with Peter Dutton, and it was this housing week.

We'd landed in Melbourne in the middle of the city, and we drove out, and we just drove and drove and drove and drove to the back of Bacchus Marsh, which when I was growing up in Melbourne, Bacchus Marsh was a country town.

Now it's kind of defined as like an outer suburb of Melbourne. Which is wild for those of us who are old enough to remember.

We drove right out to the back of this to kind of an empty field that was being bulldozed for rows of this kind of, you know, same-looking new housing.

We set up in this kind of patch of mud on a hill looking out over these homes for this press conference.

And Michael Sukar, like a good real estate agent, he kind of turns around, gestures out to the landscape and he says, this is the Australian dream that we're selling to young Australians.

And I remember, in a moment of weakness, looking around and going,

this?

You sure?

um and and and i think that like you know that was kind of ultimately what the electorate thought and and by the way on the way back to the city of melbourne after this we we were in the bus for like an hour and a half we got stuck in traffic it took forever to get back into the city so far away which tells the story doesn't it in terms of being able to access the jobs this isn't a snobby this isn't a nice place guys i just want to be clear for our listeners no no no absolutely not it's about the the the proximity from work right how do you go to your work Absolutely.

How do you get the kids from school and childcare if you're in that scenario? And families, you know, will buy a home like that when that's the only option that's presented to them.

It was just so obvious, I think, given how far away we were from Melbourne, that there are limits to that.

that you can't expect people to be driving 90 minutes, two hours to get to their work in the middle of town and then back every day and expect that that's a vision of Australian dream that young people are going to like when they look at these middle suburbs and they go, well, no, I'd like to live there.

And, you know, I think unless you're willing to tackle that question of can we have two, three, four stories more often in some of those middle suburbs, then you know, you're not ultimately going to be selling something.

And by the way, you could make exactly the same point if you'd gone to the top of sort of like a 50-story building in the city and made the same argument.

I think young people look at both of those things and go, That's not really what I'm after. It's these middle suburbs.

And that's where I think Andrew Bragg has shifted from talking to kind of people in the old leafy blue-blood liberal electorates who aren't voting for them anymore and instead talking to young people and saying, well, can we, in a very liberal, private, free market way, basically make our whole thing, we're just going to let private developers come in and just build, build, build everywhere they can, and then you can own your own home.

And it's sort of aspirational, but it's a message for people in their 30s. I think

that's the framing that he's got in his mind.

And that I think, you know, some others in his party, you know, he can sometimes be on the outer with some of his colleagues, but I think think he is being quite persuasive and making some headway on this argument that making a compelling housing case to people in their 30s is key to how the Liberal Party might become competitive again.

Demographics is everything. I mean, even if you look at across...

the different aspirants,

you know, people who want to lead the Liberal Party, you look at someone like Andrew Hastie, for instance, and when I spoke to him for Four Corners, like that was one of his main things, like young people, Gen Z, we need to connect with them.

And I think that is the thing the Liberal Party is currently trying to do, right?

Once you get people over that hump into home ownership, you know, they think about their finances and their lives in a really different way.

And that's the kind of person that the Liberal Party is used to speaking to. Let's talk about the Greens who really pitched themselves as the party of renters at the last election.

Now, you know, there's different analysis of how they went, but I think it's fair to say while there is some nuance badly, you'd have to say, at least in terms of retaining lower house seats, which was an inroad they had, including, I think, the worst of it, losing their leader for them, Adam Band, at the seat of Melbourne, where they were so entrenched.

And I've got to say, own it, totally own it. I was in the camp of that is now a lifelong Greens seat.
You know, that is quite an achievement. It really is for the Labour Party to have that seat.

So let's talk about how they pitch all of this. Party of Renters, how they're going with all of that.
Pretty quiet, aren't it, aren't they?

I mean, they care about it still, but I don't think they know where to stand on it since they lost. Max Chandler Maple

and my generation, who for the first time are probably going to be worse off than our parents. I feel that acutely.

I have friends who've been kicked out of their homes because they can't afford the rent or have given up on ever being able to buy a home. And it hurts me a lot, actually, to see that.

I find it really hard.

But the reality is that I still feel hope because I feel like we've shifted the national conversation over the last few years. I feel like we'll be going into an election.
Yeah, no, no.

I mean, he was such a kind of a lightning rod figure for this.

And they've been treading a lot softer on this stuff for pretty much since the last election.

I just, as you were asking that question, I was thinking, when is the last time that I heard something knock out from the Greens on this? And I couldn't really answer the question.

There's fertile ground for them in speaking to the people who don't own homes yet and aren't actively thinking about it. I think that's got to be their main...

target is the people, you know, young people in these kind of inner-city electorates, they're renting and they want more security in their rentals. They want better tenancy.

They want a better experience. Just, you know, forget about trying to own a home.
The Greens have sort of had this.

natural kind of actually ideological antipathy in some ways, or at least some people in the Greens do to Commonwealth rent assistance.

And sometimes they kind of say, oh, increasing Commonwealth rent assistance, you're just lining the pockets of landlords. You know, that's not really the solution.

And that's where Max and others went to things like rent freezes and some of these big bang ideas. I think the challenge for the Greens is kind of this is such a deep problem.

It is such a hard thing to shift. When you're standing where the Greens are, you can always kind of say, well, why don't we shift it with extremely radical flip the table over kind of ideas?

And maybe at some point on both the left and the right, where immigration is a kind of a parallel for this, maybe at some point people are angry enough to flip the table over and get impatient at this kind of slowly, slowly build more homes kind of labor-liberal propositions.

But I think what 2025 showed us is that they weren't there yet and they weren't ready to buy that kind of

abandon all hope, you know, try something radical and new.

It landed flat, at least this time. Then there's, of course, the crossbench.
And crossbench, well, it's in the title.

That's not one thing, is it? Because there's lots of different tendencies within it. But, you know, let's go tealish.

They are broadly more reform-y, right? Like more, let's look at the tax arrangements. You look at someone like Allegra Spender.

And there is an appetite there to keep housing on the agenda and talk about the intergenerational theft, which I love to, you know, really try to ham up because I think there is an intergenerational issue.

But again, it's probably not yet been their big focus, but you know, there are some sounds coming from them.

Yeah, but I think the kind of electorates that they represent, they are inherently a bit conflicted.

And I think not quite so much at a federal level, but I did notice that even at a New South Wales state level, so Jackie Scrooby, who's sort of a teal type from the kind of the northern suburbs of Sydney, who was kind of leading the charge at a,

I think you can call it a NIMBY rally because people were literally holding signs that say,

don't make where we are. I can't remember exactly what the suburb is.
We don't want to be DY. We don't want to look down the road where there are apartments.
Not here. That's not our suburb.

And exactly just that kind of residents who will say, oh, no, it's not about no to housing. We want more housing.
We just don't want it here.

That is part of the constituency for both the Greens and the crossbenchers

that kind of tears them in both directions. This is not going to go away.
We're going to keep talking about it and putting a focus on it. But just final thoughts from you.

As we go into 2026 and, you know, the parliament will come back and everyone will refocus, do you think it will be a big issue? I'll tell you what I think, yes. Obviously, the answer is yes.

That's what we're talking about it. But I'll say this.
I've spoken to people so senior.

like so senior in the Albanese government, off the record as you do, and all of them tell me this is our biggest thing to nail. We know this.

And I'm surprised by how much they say that, like that that's the one that they identify. That's how big it is.
Yeah. Here's the problem.

I don't think we are going to fix this. That's my bold marker on the table.
If by fix we mean go back to 2001.

Go back to the quarter acre block that you can afford by the end of your 20s if you save diligently. Doesn't exist.

I don't think returning to the old old social contract, if that's what we're conditioning voters to expect, then governments are setting themselves up to be really disappointed and to disappoint people because that's just not the frame that we're in when you consider that houses relative to incomes have become twice as expensive over a generation.

It's going to take a generation or more to get back to that if you were going to get back to that.

Instead, I think what governments, who are not stupid, and I think they actually realize what I've just said is true.

What they're instead, I think, trying to do is go, well, can we first stem the damage a little bit in terms of price?

Can we give young families space to raise their kids and feel like their life is on the right track?

Can we stop it from getting even worse than where it is today to the point where that's just not possible?

And can we maybe rethink the quarter acre block, but not to the point where we have people living in homes that are, you know, dreadful and small, but can we kind of find this gentle density answer, some kind of middle road, some version of here is where you can live, here is where you can set up your life and family in a new and modern way for a bigger city and a bigger country, but that gives you a sense that you're kind of tethered, that you have the kind of the home as the financial and

living foundation of your life.

If you're putting yourself in the mind of a labor minister who's thinking, gosh, this is going to create some real trouble for us, I think the challenge in the next year or two is to just give people the sense that

things are getting moving, things are happening, that it's just starting to shift.

I think if we just, if it's two years' time and the housing market is still just kind of going up and up and up and up and going kind of bananas,

people are going to be really angry and they are going to get closer and closer to throwing the table over. So I think that the challenge is really to just kind of, you know.

get the wheels greased, get construction moving quickly enough that people start to see some progress and then start to feel it at auctions.

The government just has to be able to kind of do whatever it can on all fronts to make people feel like they can keep their heads above water

while we slowly start to turn this tide. Life is finite without making this existential and deep.
Like our years are limited, my friend. People don't have time to wait, Tom.

This is what they're trying to appeal to. And I think, you know, it's a bit like climate and it's a bit like a lot of issues.

I do worry that we set the expectations at such a high level that people are kind of destined to feel disappointed in what governments, particularly the federal government, are able to deliver.

But selling a message that things are going to start to get better rather than getting worse. I think it's about that direction of travel.

If they can just kind of point the needle from down to up, maybe that's where they should kind of aim to get by the time we roll to the next election.

Yeah, I think your expectation management point is a really good one. And I absolutely agree with you that we are never going back to that old normal.

It is finished, it is done, but it is the obligation of governments to try to shift things to a better footing, but we do need to temper expectations.

And unfortunately for the Labor government, our political cycles are quite short.

We are now, what, like, we've got, you know, just a couple of years till the next election now, which is not a long time.

And if you do the maths on how long it takes to change some of this stuff, they will go into the next election not being able to say they solved this. That's the truth.

So they need to manage how they explain it. And I think they know what they want to be able to say, which is, you're right, we haven't fixed it, but God, we're making some progress finally, guys.

That's what they want to be able to say. I reckon, though, they might even struggle to say that.

And that is the wicked problem for them, because that needs to be said or people will not take them seriously, Tom. That's it for politics now today.

Thank you so much, Tom, for joining me for part one of a two-part deep dive into some deep policy questions. It's been good fun.

I'm looking forward to getting stuck into migration, maybe even thornier. Perhaps.
I think that absolutely there are other elements there. So look out for our immigration episode as well.

If you have a question, of course, send a short voice note to the partyroom at abc.net.au, Fran, and I will answer it. See ya.