Middle Class Thinktank Lady Says 'Look over there'

Emma Dawson has once again opened her mouth to insert both feet [archive link; friends don't let friends endorse this behaviour], coming out for the inflation of the housing bubble through the Australian Labor Political Party's First Home Guarantee – to the detriment of the houseless and renters left behind by Labor's policies so far. She's chosen to do this in the paper of the working class, the... Australian Financial Review.

First of all, she admits the Labor policy reinforces several sins in dealing with the housing market in this opinion piece.

It is true that any demand-side subsidy for home purchases will increase prices.

This is in line with Labor's policy trajectory of not making housing cheaper. This of course means saddling first home buyers with larger debts, unwieldy mortgages and, of course, only helping those at the top, property developers and banks over people who actually are in need of housing. Yet another policy that serves the middle class thinktank elite than any worker schlubbing about in a thankless union job.

In the world’s most expensive residential property market, that’s a relatively modest impact, compared to the rampant growth in land value driven by speculative investment.

Here Dawson admits the property market is already too expensive, being the most expensive. "Oh the policy just makes things worst, but modestly" is a sick joke in a world where there are real challenges to tackle – and Labor have completely ignored for more status quo bullshit.

Home prices have been growing at a pace vastly outstripping wages across the developed world since the global financial crisis. The most obvious, and rarely mentioned, reason is the subsequent, disproportionate increase in asset prices and, therefore, in the wealth of the already rich, who are hoarding that wealth in secure – and largely unproductive – assets such as land and gold in the face of continuing volatility in the global economy.

I can't see the benefit in acknowledging a problem that Labor is too timid and cowardly (else too thoroughly corrupt) to actually address such as hoards of wealth and land, this is a government that is allergic to increased taxation or reform to require land be used.

She then goes on to negate her own arguments, look at these two fragments.

Let’s make one thing clear: the First Home Guarantee is a policy unashamedly aimed at reducing inequality in the housing market. This is demonstrated by the fact that it includes special provisions for single parents, who can access the scheme with just a 2 per cent deposit. It’s a direct intervention in the market to restore the opportunity to own a home to those who don’t have family wealth to draw upon, most of whom are first- or second-generation immigrants and people from working-class backgrounds.

No single-income first home buyer is purchasing the median Australian home, let alone a family house worth over $1.4 million, with a 5 per cent deposit and government support. No bank would lend $1.33 million to a sales assistant on $71,000 a year.

So by her own measure, the policy fails, because a single parent toiling away on $71k a year in a thankless retail job, unsupported by the absent SDA, is not a target for securing permanent, safe housing? It would appear that Emma Dawson has just admitted the legislation doesn't actually "reduce inequality in the housing market," moreover, it seems like it actually just benefits rich people who actually get to have savings over a paltry rainy day fund.

She then goes on to point to a typical first home buyer not being single parents - I wonder why - buying a shitbox apartment or buying out on the fringes of society, well, that certainly fills the prospective Labor voter concerned about housing with hope. Yeah, nah.

Just to drive home her self-inclusive jibe at the commentariat, being in yet another thinktank job that literally only has the demand of providing commentary, and in her case, only supporting Labor policy to the point of spearheading Labor's attacks on the NDIS as head of Per Capita Australia, using her own then-dying husband, because the housing adjustments she made the NDIS pay for only had to be made once.

She goes on to show her Labor roots by slandering Max Chandler-Mather as a "snake oil salesman," as if what she's selling isn't poisonous and absolutely not going to help the problem, that Labor is completely captured by capitalist interests. Gary Foley's critiques of Labor under Hawke and Brian Burke continue to ring true, only now not just against land rights, but now against the basic human right of housing.

While she thinks the Greens condescend to single parents and working class people, I submit that the only condescension comes from her, while I think the Greens are setting themselves up to fail by not challenging capitalism as the prevailing economic system, they are speaking on the level about the housing crisis, something Labor absolutely refuse to do. Lowering herself to Kos Samaras' "we got voted in so we get final say" just exposes the childish tantrums these Labor freaks are reduced to when faced with the facts that they are part of the problem.

And part of the problem she is, and I'm only thankful she's no longer abusing and attacking marginalised people in poverty directly anymore, now being the head of Labor's Chifley Research Centre, failing upwards, like all entitled rich brats.