Labor and Liberal duelling housing policies, and a diss track – TLDR: Election 2025
The two major parties have officially launched their campaigns, with a big focus on addressing Australia's housing crisis. Guardian Australia's Krishani Dhanji walks you through the competing policies as well as other campaign moments of note in today's TLDR: Election 2025
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The Guardian
6 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘I think you and I are at war': the Australians suddenly united in grief over the Israel-Iran conflict
When Israel triggered a war last Friday after it sent a wave of airstrikes into Iran, Saina Salemi and Oscar were at work in Melbourne, sitting at arm's length away from each other at their desks. Salemi saw the news headline first. She turned to Oscar and said: 'I think you and I are at war.' 'I thought she was kidding,' Oscar, who asked for his last name to not be used, recalled. 'I didn't understand. And then we went to the news, and it had all started, and my heart just sunk immediately.' Salemi, who is 26, moved to Australia from Tehran when she was 7, and Oscar, who is 24 and from Israel, says for the past week they've shared in a grief that feels unending – but there has been a release in sharing it together. The pair became friends when they started work the same day as each other 18 months ago. Since last week, finding out what is happening overseas and if it is affecting their families has become a shared obsession. While sitting next to each other at work, they keep track of the rolling live coverage. Salemi also watches Persian news sources while Oscar watches the Hebrew channels. 'We're translating documents for each other. We're tracking where the missiles are being hit and seeing if they're close to our family members,' Oscar tells Guardian Australia, both he and Salemi speaking on the phone together from their office. 'If we find out information we want the other to know, we text each other, no matter what time of night it is,' Salemi says. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email Oscar's parents, who were visiting Israel when tensions flared are – for now – stuck there. Salemi's grandparents, aunts, and uncles live in Tehran. Their shared grief has not just been defined by doomscrolling and sharing news about loved ones. Salemi says their focus is on the civilians suffering and the governments 'making the choice' to continue it. 'My people, Palestinians and Israelis are being used as political shields for geopolitical aims,' Salemi says. Oscar says he is also battling a feeling of guilt, despite having no control over what is going on. 'I really care about her family. I feel so guilty, and even though obviously I'm not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, but nevertheless, it really pains me to just see even more suffering being inflicted.' 'I don't want people to become desensitised to what is happening in the region, and the … scale of pain that is taking place every day. It's getting worse.' By Friday, Israeli strikes on Iran had killed at least 657 people and wounded 2,037 others, according to Washington-based group Human Rights Activists. Of those dead, the group identified 263 civilians and 164 security force personnel. Iran has not given regular death tolls during the conflict and has minimised casualties in the past. In its last update, delivered last Monday, it put the death toll at 224 people and 1,277 wounded. Salemi says she has not heard from her family since the Iranian authorities blocked the internet. 'My auntie woke up in the middle of the night thinking that she was having a heart attack because the initial missile was so close to where she lived,' she says. 'I haven't heard from my family members in 36 hours, and there's a great sense of numbness when you worry that maybe that's the last time you've ever heard from your family members,' she says. Oscar says he sometimes has difficulty reaching his parents by phone to check in on how they are. He struggled with the news that a hospital – where his nan had gotten care once after she had a stroke – had been hit by an Iranian rocket. Salemi says while the bombs are falling from Israel, she also blames the Iranian regime – unpopular among many – for failing to protect its people. She points to there being no bomb shelters for people to turn to and disruptions to internet access that could help in planning escape routes with loved ones. Despite the ruling regime being unpopular, Salemi is frustrated by rhetoric from Israel's president, Benjamin Netanyahu, that Israel could support regime change. 'Regime change in Iran will come internally, at the hands of my own people,' she says. Oscar and Salemi say the war has inflamed the grief they were already feeling for the thousands of people killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza. Oscar said on top of this he is also grieving loved ones that died when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October. Since Israel and Iran began trading strikes, over 100 people in Gaza have been killed while seeking aid. 'The safety of Israel can't come from anything other than peace – lasting, negotiated peace,' Oscar says. 'I want a serious political solution and a lasting peace.' Asked if there is anything they want the Australian government to do, Salemi says it should focus on getting Australian citizens out of each conflict zone. Australia's foreign minister Penny Wong said on Friday there were about 2,000 Australians and their families in Iran and approximately 1,200 in Israel who wanted to evacuate. 'The security situation is obviously very difficult,' Wong said. ' The airspace remains closed.' Oscar says that last Friday, after Israel first struck Iran, he and Salemi sat on the steps outside their work together. They already felt it could be different to the 'tit-for-tat' strikes in past months. 'I remember I turned to her and said, 'when will this end? How much longer does this have to go on?'.'
The Guardian
4 days ago
- The Guardian
Are Labor's proposed superannuation tax changes a super big deal?
Labor is proposing to double the earnings tax on superannuation balances above $3m, bringing the total tax rate to 30%. Guardian Australia's Matilda Boseley explains who the change would (and wouldn't) affect and how the current super tax breaks overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest people in Australia
The Guardian
4 days ago
- The Guardian
Building our way out of social housing unaffordability may no longer be possible
Few would deny that social and affordable housing is in short supply in Australia. The 'social' part of this refers to homes rented out by public housing departments and not-for-profit community housing providers to very low-income Australians, usually at 25% of the tenant's income. But, as highlighted by Guardian Australia, the growing class of 'affordable rental housing' is less clearly defined. In general terms, it is a product that targets the growing population of low-to-moderate-income workers earning above the rock bottom income eligibility thresholds for a social tenancy, but who are hard-pressed to find a suitable home in the private market. The main problem this product seeks to solve is that our private rental sector has been 'going upmarket' for decades. That is, generating fewer and fewer homes affordable to people in the lowest two-fifths of the income spectrum – including those in the second income quintile, ineligible for social housing. Census-based evidence shows that, as a result, Australia's national shortfall of affordable and available private rental dwellings for renters in the second income quintile almost doubled in the 15 years to 2021 – up from 87,000 dwellings to 152,000 dwellings. The problem has been exacerbated by a quarter of a century of negligible social housing growth, even as need for such accommodation has shot up thanks to rising population and inequality. Thus, as a share of our national housing stock, social housing has declined from more than 6% in the 1990s to barely 4% today. State and territory governments have been rationing remaining tenancies ever more tightly as a result, more or less restricting these to households reliant on social security payments. This is why the low-income workers essential to the operation of the modern urban economy nowadays have next to no chance of a public or community housing tenancy. It is also one reason that Australian governments have taken a growing interest in enabling an 'affordable rental housing' product that could make it possible for people in this situation to live reasonably near their work. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email At a big picture level, this is a problem that, according to conventional wisdom, can be tackled by expanding overall housing supply. But it is doubtful that 'building our way out of housing unaffordability' is even possible. And, without major complementary actions, it is unimaginable that such a strategy could significantly moderate market rents in the short-to-medium-term future. At least in the meantime, there is a case for governments to enable affordable rental housing construction as well as invest in expanding social housing. They can do this in one of two ways. The first is by directly subsidising housebuilding – such as under federal programs, including the Housing Australia Future Fund (Haff), which promises 20,000 new affordable rental homes by 2029. The second approach is the deployment of land-use planning or tax powers to require or incentivise private providers to include affordable rental units within market-price housing developments. The New South Wales and Victorian state governments, for example, have recently introduced or beefed up 'density bonus' schemes allowing developers to build higher and bigger, provided that projects include units renting at below-market prices. Using tax powers, the federal government has adopted a similar approach for Build to Rent projects. Under schemes of this type, affordable rents are typically defined relative to comparable market rents – often capped at 75-80% of local norms. When operated in high price areas like Sydney's Bondi, such a formula of course produces rents that sound outrageous outside that local context. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion Such homes might possibly assist the junior teachers, nurses and police officers so beloved of ministerial media statements, and there is an arguable case for policymaker attention to such housing needs. But this model is liable to produce rents far out of reach for low-income essential workers. And such units are, anyway, often required to be made available for only 10-15 years. But while it would be hard to justify directly funding 'affordable housing' of this kind, such homes are, in fact, generally produced through planning or tax concessions that represent only indirect government support. It is to be hoped that, on equity grounds, the directly subsidised affordable rental housing to be generated under the Haff and other ongoing federal programs will be subsidised sufficiently to produce units genuinely affordable to the low-income worker (or second income quintile) cohort. Equally, equity considerations dictate that the bulk of government financial support for social and affordable housing should be devoted to the former. It is only through expanding our minimal remaining stock of deeply subsidised housing that we can similarly expand access to secure and affordable homes for the most disadvantaged Australians. The bigger picture here is that, despite the expanded social and affordable housing investment committed under the Albanese government, Australia is still spending nowhere near enough to decisively reverse decades of neglect in this area. The case for phasing down private landlord tax breaks, with the resulting additional revenue redirected to expanding such investment, remains compelling. Hal Pawson is a professor of housing research and policy at the University of NSW and associate director of the UNSW City Futures Research Centre. He is the lead author of the Australian Homelessness Monitor series
