Questions about the Victorian Socialists' housing policy

Let's go through the points one by one from the policy listed here.

• Tackle homelessness and the housing shortfall by providing commonwealth funding for quality, carbon-neutral public housing, with the goal of building one million new public housing units over the next decade.
• Establish a public builder to undertake the construction of these one million new homes.

Sounds great, nothing to fault here, but the builder will be expensive to set up and I am skeptical the government can spin up an at-scale building company in this time. You also need to front loads of money to fund the development of these houses, unless you're getting people to buy off the plan. But then you're locking in the cost price to build a house at the beginning, you have no wiggle room if things go wrong. The public builder becomes a critical part of your strategy. What if it fails?

Furthermore, massive spending must come from somewhere. Printing money leads to inflation and higher import tax (lower AUD exchange rate). If you're not borrowing money, how much will you increase other taxes by (ie income tax) to fund this? What will this cost the bottom 50% of earners? If you're expecting to tax the top 50%, how do you think you'll do a better job at circumventing tax evasion than we do currently? Basically: where is the money coming from, and are you decently certain that it won't come out of poorer people's pockets (ie income tax, consumption tax)?

• Impose a five-year freeze on rent increases and cap subsequent increases at whichever is lower, at the time, out of the Consumer Price Index and the Wage Price Index.

Wouldn't this drive a huge rent increase before the freeze comes into effect?
Also, long term, there is evidence that rent caps worsen the rental crisis. Chiefly, that this will negatively impact construction of new housing by the private sector. What are the odds of actually establishing a public building that will construct a million homes in a decade? If you can't meet this goal and you subcontract, you're going to outsource to the private sector eventually. Why not favour simpler policy that focuses the private sector on more building? The building industry currently benefits from speculation by reducing the rate of house building because they'll make more money by producing fewer houses (just like how realestate companies benefit by holding properties off the market).

• Scrap negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount for all investment properties.

Great! But this is not enough to discourage speculation and therefore won't stop people from holding properties vacant. If I was a landlord planning to not use or improve property, and I saw the party's additionally proposed 12 month vacancy property seizing policy, I'd just rent/Airbnb out the house every 12 months.

• Establish a National Rental Inspectorate tasked with developing and enforcing a set of legally binding minimum rental standards covering amenity, safety, energy efficiency, and thermal comfort.

Fantastic, but this will cost a lot of money to run. Will the capital gains tax discount be enough to fund this? I don't see any other revenue raising discussed in your housing policy.

• Implement a new system of mandatory ‘rentworthy checks’, administered by the National Rental Inspectorate, to be completed each time a property is advertised for rent and once every two years in between.

Great idea. This discourages flipping tenants to increase the rent, which is good. Though this sounds like a tax on rentals with new tenants, so then how will you stop this from being handed onto tenants? Rent bidding is illegal in VIC and NSW but anecdotally is still in common practice. Will you be able to stop this from silently increasing the costs for renters, especially if it's charged universally to all landlords? See tax incidence.

I believe a theme of my questions about your policies is "how enforceable is it?"

• Conduct an annual housing audit to identify properties left vacant. Properties found to have been left empty for 12 months without a valid reason will be seized and allocated to people on the public housing waiting list.

I think this is highly dodgeable without lots of money in the agency enforcing it.

• Introduce a new national planning framework with mandatory ‘inclusionary zoning’ so that in all Australian states and territories developers will be compelled to include a minimum of 30 percent public housing in all major new developments.

Great in principle, but how will you force developers to do this? A common strategy they use is "running out of money" when they're supposed to build the public housing. How will you stop developers from filibusting you?