Australian Institute for Progress

31/10/2025

Some of the happy attendees at our Sir Thomas McIlwraith Lecture. Each year generous members contribute toward a scholarship fund so that we can introduce a new generation to Sir Thomas, and an inspiring guest speaker, in this case Steve Baxter of Shark Tank fame.

01/05/2025

The Greens' landlord taxes will ultimately be a tax on your ability to save for a house. $83 a week higher rent, or $4,316 that could be saved on a housing deposit. Can you afford the Greens?

01/05/2025

With house prices out of reach for most young people we need more affordable houses for rent, not fewer. Can you afford the Greens?

01/05/2025

In San Francisco when they capped rental increases 15% of houses were withdrawn from the rental pool. When the Greens cap rent increases in Australia that would mean 450,000 houses out of the rental pool. That's around 3 years worth of housing supply. That's a recipe for huge numbers of permanently homeless.

01/05/2025

If you double capital gains tax and stop landlords deducting their expenses from income, then renters will eventually pay the tax. Economics 101.

25/04/2025

There is no end of bad, but superficially attractive policy being promoted in this election. One of the worst is from the Greens. A ban on negative gearing, doubling capital gains tax, and capping rent increases to 2% per annum. This is meant to get Australians into housing, in fact it will push up capital city rents by an additional $83 a week, on top of rent increases that would occur anyway. This is the result of modelling that we commissioned. https://aip.asn.au/2025/04/greens-tax-demands-to-hike-capital-city-rents-83-a-week-modelling/

If you're a renter and vote Greens, you're making it harder to survive, have a reasonable lifestyle, or save a deposit for that house. Will Labor go along with these policies? There is already plenty of evidence that they like the sound of them with Treasury last year modelling how much the tax measures might raise.

Greens tax demands to hike capital city rents $83 a week: modelling Posted on April 22, 2025 by Graham Young in Housing, News, Publications · Tags: Capital Gains Tax, Greens, Negative gearing, rent caps The Greens balance of power demands to abolish Negative Gearing and double Capital Gains Tax on ...

22/04/2025

Greens tax demands will hike capital city rents $83 a week, on top of normal rent rises. That is the finding of modelling that we commisssioned https://aip.asn.au/2025/04/greens-tax-demands-to-hike-capital-city-rents-83-a-week-modelling/

This would be a catastrophe for renters, who tend to skew younger and therefore tend to vote Greens. Voting Greens would be an act of self-harm for these Australians.

Problem is the Greens don't understand how economies work. They want to abolish negative gearing, double Capital Gains Tax and cap rentals. They actively want to drive landlords out of the market on the theory that it will make home ownership more available.

But home ownership is out of the reach of most young people at the moment, unless they have access to the bank of mum and dad for a deposit, and even then mortgage repayments will kill them. So they are stuck in the rental market. But if you need to rent, you need to not only have a dwelling available, but someone, who is called a landlord, has to own it.

By restricting the supply of rental properties their policies will actually drive up rents on the people with least capacity to pay. The modelling works on comparing returns before and after implementation of the taxes, and calculates the rental income required to reestablish equilibrium.

The price controls add an additional layer of complexity, but research work from San Francisco suggests that they could see 15% of rental properties (450,000 in total) withdrawn from the market. 450,000 properties would house one million people, which is roughly the net number of immigrants who have come to Australia in the last two years, and which is turbocharging the housing crisis.

The secret to fixing the rental crisis, and the home ownership crisis is a greater supply of housing, but the Greens get in the way here as well by opposing developments.

Young Australians need to send the Greens a message that these policies are wrong. The future will be pretty bleak for them if they continue to be locked out of homeownership, and stretched on the rack of escalating renets.

Greens tax demands to hike capital city rents $83 a week: modelling Posted on April 22, 2025 by Graham Young in Housing, News, Publications · Tags: Capital Gains Tax, Greens, Negative gearing, rent caps The Greens balance of power demands to abolish Negative Gearing and double Capital Gains Tax on ...