Jenna Price | Adam Bandt, Greens housing demands aren't going to help

Phew. Now I've got that out of my system I'll reveal I have my own short-term solution to the housing crisis which usually includes forcing all my children and their children to move back into the old family home so I can be surrounded by chaos and babies. Entirely self-serving.

While this is a lovely concept, especially for the babies who get to be handed from warm arms to warm arms - especially for the grandmas - it is neither possible nor practical for the nation.

Speaking of practicalities, let's look at the housing policy of the Greens, flourished by Adam Bandt at the National Press Club on Wednesday.

Bandt is extremely right about one thing: we're in a housing and rental crisis. But his party's strange refusal to pass Labor's planned $10 billion fund for investment in social and affordable housing unless it's combined with other major reforms is wedgery at its worst.

Greens have been blamed in the past for refusing to endorse the good because they wanted perfect. There are a million interpretations (none of them loving) about what happened in 2009 when the Greens voted against the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Believe me, I get the desire for the best possible outcome. But we have to start somewhere. Look I'll be honest, that money is not even the mortar between the bricks when it comes to housing.

Let's compare that to the Medical Research Future Fund which is a $20 billion investment and it's only a sidekick for the NHMRC which has a billion dollars to spend each year and no-one blinks.

We have got to a place in Australian where health (a basic human right) is ranked as much more important than housing (also a basic human right) because we've had SuperBoomers in charge of governments for decades now and they never had to worry about housing, only their ailing, failing bodies.

Now the next few paragraphs are stuff you know in your heart but let's go through it together anyway. Anglicare released its 14th annual annual rental affordability snapshot on Thursday.

Findings horrific: the situation the absolute worst for people on government income support. Of course it is. That budget (the one Tuesday week for which we all have many, many expectations) better have an extraordinary helping hand for renters.

And Anglicare found the situation was the worst for single people, of course, just four properties out of the more than 45,000 that were affordable and suitable on the snapshot weekend for a single person on JobSeeker, all of them rooms in share houses.

Not a single property was affordable for a young person living on youth allowance.

This is pretty much all word-for-word from the report. I don't need to add more drama other than this: a single parent seeking safe and secure housing for themselves and their child would be competing with others for the 0.1 per cent of listings affordable to them.

If their child is over eight, and they have been moved off Parenting Payment to JobSeeker, only six properties are affordable across the country.

As I've said before, Per Capita's Australian Housing Monitor says two-thirds of prospective Australian home buyers believe the only way they will be able to afford a property is if they receive an inheritance from their parents.

While the survey shows 85 per cent of non-home owners hope to buy, just one-quarter think they will ever have the financial resources to do so.

Help. Anyhow, the Greens are calling for various excitements and are handing out pamphlets at various open for inspections. What do we want? Rent freezes! When do we want them? Now!

But surely the way forward for everyone is to work together for more, much more.

I don't mind attention-seeking stunts (sometimes politicians need them to get attention for serious serious issues) but I could not find a single academic to support the Greens policy.

I asked Ben Phillips, principal research fellow at the Centre for Social Research and Methods at ANU what he thought about the approach of the Greens to fixing our housing crisis. The rent freezes, the removal of negative gearing, no capital gains discount.

"All this at a time where there's a shortage of rental properties. It's just not credible and no thinking about implications for the rental market which are likely to be very negative," he says.

Hal Pawson, professor of housing and research at UNSW, says the policies are "pretty unusual". He's also surprised at the way Bandt highlighted owners of multiple properties, or as Bandt called them, "property moguls".

Pawson says they are a very small number in Australia. He says we need to stop no-fault evictions across Australia stat. There are ways to support renters, he says, without using "the biggest club in the pack".

And Michael Fotheringham, managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), is utterly baffled by the statements of various Greens members that the "experts" are on side with its policies.

"No they aren't. The experts are on side with the findings of the inquiry into the Housing Australia Future Fund bill ... the intention of the Greens approach is clearly positive here but there are some conceptual leaps in the logic which don't quite connect."

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"The risk in Greens reps going around to open inspections handing out rent freeze promotional material is that it risks creating panic among agents and investors, triggering much bigger rises to get ahead of a two-year freeze," he says.

The pandemic showed a pause in rent increases triggers a rebound at the end of it - that's a significant part of the current crisis. It's not a long-term solution.

Maybe states and territories could copy the ACT example: "Have caps on the size of increases each year, tied to CPI. ACT uses 110 per cent of CPI, which balances the needs of investors and landlords. This type of approach is the norm in mature rental markets across the developed world," says Fotheringham.

Emma Baker, professor of housing at the University of Adelaide, says it's good to have a a variety of voices asking what's possible when it comes to housing. And she emphasises the amount we spend on medical research.

"Is $10 billion enough to solve a pretty big problem?"

No. But as she says, it's a start.

We need more houses and fewer wedges if we want to have enough housing across the nation.