It has been a very good week for housing policy – if you only look at it through the prism of political spin.

In terms of actual concrete, sustainable action to deal with our housing crisis, there was very little to build your hopes on, let alone the shelter we need.

But, hey, Anthony Albanese and the national cabinet delivered enough announceables to merit a double episode of Utopia.

Not only was there a “National Target”, a “Scheme”, a “Program”, a “New Home Bonus”, a “principles-based, multi-year planning model”, and a little re-announcing of an “Accelerator”, the spinners added the cream of promising a “National Planning Reform Blueprint”.  

A blueprint! Sheer genius – or was that a straight steal from the Working Dog scriptwriters?

No, I’m not making any of this up. It’s all here in the Prime Minister’s media release.

Hard to take seriously

If you cut through the palaver in search of substance, all the national cabinet cabaret delivered was an aspiration to get back to building housing at much the same rate we were a few years ago.

Most importantly, there was no commitment to greater public and community housing, to dealing with our critical shortage of social housing.

The only mention of the area of greatest need was “endorsing” plans for how the states and territories will spend the $2 billion “Social Housing Accelerator” Mr Albanese announced in June under pressure from the Greens to do more.

What makes it hard to take the government’s housing commitment seriously is that it started with utter nonsense before the federal election and hasn’t moved on very far.

Labor’s twin housing election gimmicks were Treasuer Jim Chalmers’ pledge to build one million homes in five years and Mr Albanese’s signature $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund. 

Both were risible copies of what the Coalition had spent a decade doing – thinking of a big-sounding figure and announcing the hell out of it.

The “one million” dwellings line was embarrassing nonsense, as bad as Scott Morrison’s laughable “1.3 million jobs” pledge. 

Mr Morrison was actually promising weaker jobs growth than we had managed over the five years before COVID, but never mind, the chooks mostly swallowed the PR and treated it as news.

New and improved with extra sparkle

Ditto Mr Chalmers’ one million homes. Over the five years before COVID, we actually built 1.046 million homes. It was not a stretch at all.

Yet it’s proportionately beating the one million homes target that will get states a share of Mr Albanese’s $3 billion “New Home Bonus”.

So you might think announcing a New Improved With Extra Sparkle National Target of building 1.2 million homes in the five years from July 2024 was an improvement.

Well, not as much an improvement as the many headlines might have you believe.

For a start, remember that it is a “target” – one of those weasel words beloved by political spinners.

And while we haven’t quite managed to build at an annual rate of 240,000 dwellings a year before, we have come fairly close. From the March quarter of 2016 to the end of 2018, we completed an average of 55,219 dwellings a quarter compared with the 60,000 dwellings necessary to hit the 1.2 million.

The thing about that period – any period in the past decade or more – is that it includes little public housing. Even in the most recently available 12-month period, non-private homes accounted for only 1.8 per cent of completions.

To begin to make up for the shortage of social housing, that percentage has to triple.

If the states want to maximise their share of that $3 billion bonus, building public housing will be an easy way to get over the line. They have decades of neglect to make up for.

Still, the deadline for reaching the target is July, 2029 – six years and two elections away. A lot can happen in that time.