Australia spends more on tax breaks for landlords than social housing, homelessness and rent assistance combined
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/29/australia-tax-breaks-landlords-more-spending-than-social-housing-homelessness-rent-assistance-combined
17 Comments
Most politicians are landlords themselves
“The analysis comes as new data from the Productivity Commission reveals the share of homes dedicated to social housing has dropped to a record low 3.6%, from 5.7% in the 1990s.”
Anthony “I grew up in Social Housing” Albanese.
Social housing made up 15% of the homes being built in the 70s. At the moment? Its 2%. The fuck.
You would think with albanese upbringing this would be an easy optics win by Labor trying to fix this but I guess it’s not enough of a vote winner they don’t care.
The landed gentry is back…. fuck!
Can’t spend what you never had to begin with.
It’s like saying that the government ‘spent’ more on not taxing the low income threshold
If minimum income tax was 25%
And there are 7 million people working full time job let’s say 18k
That’s 31,500,000,000 the government is spending !!! 🤡🤡🤡🤡
This data is available, it has been for decades. It is a simple search away for anyone with a curiosity that lasts more than 10 seconds. Yet most people still believe government assistance programs are where most of the budget goes.
The same people who get their jimmies rustled over someone whose fallen on hard times relying on government safety nets will scream bloody murder when negative gearing or franken credits are touched.
We all pay into this support system to help those who are down, or even one day ourselves. Sometimes it feels like we forget we’re humans with compassion.
No fucking shit! Now do lost revenue from billionaire corp tax avoidance (legalised evasion).
Not specifically commenting on this issue but I’m getting sick of articles being phrased like this. Did you know Australia spends more on tax breaks to let you keep any of your income at all… they’re not spending anything…
Social housing these days is mostly run by “not for profit ” companies with a CEO whose wage is paid by poor people. In the 90’s people in Social housing could keep their rent assistance as SH was meant to help low income people get ahead , these days the rent assistance pays for CEO’s andinvestors. Thanks conservative governments for stripping poor people of chances and lining the pockets of people who need it the least.
So. How do we unscramble the egg? Bill Shorten lost an election, and lost it BIG, when he tried to modify negative gearing.
The electorate gave the ALP a very strong very firm “No, we don’t want that”.
What’s next, then?
Apparently the Vic government is spending more on a road tunnel than the Fed government spent on tax breaks for landlords.
HAFF holds over $10b of funding for new social housing.
Turning that funding into completed dwellings, (in the shortest amount of time), is the problem.
Is anything under a 100% tax rate a tax break?
This is a pretty stupid way of putting this. The tax foregone will be far less if you remove the tax break.
It’s like raising a tax on anything else and assuming the yield is going to stay the same once the tax kicks in – it turns out people start making efforts to avoid the activities the tax affects.
I’d bet that removing things like NG would directly result in other externalities like higher rents too.
Sounds about right. Our one true skill as a nation is throwing money down the drain.
It’s like this on purpose.
You can see in China, they buy modular housing and will put up an apartment block over a few weeks. They just drop each apartment in with a crane and stack them all together. House ownership rates are incredibly high and renting is ridiculously cheap.
The Australian government could fix the housing crisis if they wanted to, they don’t want to. For a “progressive” government, Labor sure like selling off our publicly owned land to private investors, giving developers and landlords incentives to hoard housing for profit, and decimating the public housing system to the point even emergency housing takes years.
Greens at least have a plan in place to invest in public housing but barely anyone votes for them so they can only try negotiate with Labor to have slightly less bad policies.
There was one Australian Institute podcast episode talking about bravery in politics. I’d love to see Labour fight for historic reforms, legislation and policies that they were known for back in the day for which we still benefit from today.