Greens v Labor: how do voters really feel about the housing debate?

Alex Fein is a researcher and strategist with Redbridge Group

There has been considerable argument among the very engaged about whether the Greens are onto a winning strategy when it comes to housing.

Before I delve into what the research is telling us about this debate, I want to point out that Australia’s housing policy settings warranted special mention in a book (by an American) that looks at the entirety of human material history.

Peter Zeihan’s The End of The World Is Just The Beginning, is one of those Jared Diamond-style deep historical dives that spans all of human history, looking for meaningful patterns. And amidst its discussion of human progress from the stone age to now, Australian housing policy was cited as an example of a nation prepared to inflict unnecessary damage on itself.

Australia is headed for a series of demographic cliffs as young people postpone - or give up entirely on - settling down and having families. They struggle with cost of living, they’re crushed by HECS debt, they can’t afford housing, and they wonder what any of this matters on a dying planet, anyway.

At first blush, this seems like the perfect environment for the Greens - and specifically, its Queensland housing firebrand, Max Chandler-Mather, who has garnered the attention of everyone interested in Australian politics. And therein lies the rub: most people - particularly many of those people needed to win seats in key areas - aren’t all that interested in Australian politics.

I’ve written previously about how the Greens might miss this moment - at a time when housing and cost of living pressures should be delivering seismic shifts in the electorate, and about how there is a significant and accelerating trend of news avoidance. These things are very much related. 

The broad switch-off from politics is exacerbated by social media platforms which are often algorithmically hostile to hard news and/or activism.

And our research, in which we ask people about what they know of the housing debate (both in and outside of Parliament), means that we are seeing the consequences of these factors play out in real time.

Very few people out there have heard of Max Chandler-Mather and only slightly more are aware of the Greens/ALP contretemps over the HAFF.

A few inner-city residents have seen Greens posters about freezing/capping rents (that they vaguely remember). Still, most - especially younger - people have precisely zero idea that any of this is going on.

And when they do find out (as the conversations go in those directions in focus groups), many become concerned - even the renters. Voters know this is a wickedly complex problem. They worry that there will be unintended consequences if only one aspect of housing - such as a rent freeze - is tackled.

They fear that such reforms will induce landlords to sell up, which would just tip renters back into the Hunger Games-style situation of trying to find a place to live in the current rental market

The assumptions that many of us come across on Twitter - that a mass sell-off would lower housing prices sufficiently for a good portion of renters to become buyers - are, if not heroic, at the very least, courageous in the Yes Minister sense of the word. 

Nor do such assumptions deal with the amount of time such a process would take and how much couch-surfing or, indeed, homelessness, would result in the interim. People trying to navigate the current rental market, therefore, express profound fears about what a freeze might mean for them and the people they care about.

We hear in our research over and over again that voters immensely dislike what they call ‘bandaid’ solutions. They see such piecemeal approaches as products of political cynicism that try to meet the demands of short electoral cycles - that incentivise poor decisions which are in direct opposition to the bold, systemic reform they want.

A good portion of voters who have heard of the HAFF - and there are fewer of them than you think - see that policy as another piecemeal solution to be treated with a degree of scepticism - if not contempt. They have lost patience with Labor’s incrementalist response to crises - be those crises housing, cost of living, or climate.

But it’s important to note that in this context, the Greens’ focus on rent freezes is also seen as unserious because it, too, is seen as a form of incrementalism.

Add to that, voters are particularly resistant to politicians talking about politics - that is, talking about themselves and the ‘game’ they are playing. So if the HAFF disagreement starts really cutting through, there’s a danger it might be seen by voters through that prism.

The quickest and safest way to break out of that frame - for any politician, regardless of their party (or lack thereof), is to emphasise the need for wholesale systemic reform of housing, taxation, and adequate funding of services, accompanied by laser-focus on that message - i.e. incessant repetition. This sort of repetition is now the only way to cut through in our current informational environment.

For the vast majority of voters who are not engaged with the political process, inside-baseball memes and TikToks on such matters will likely never even make it into their feeds. And if they do, such content will largely be preaching to the converted who have let the algorithm know, long ago, that they’re among the very few who want politics served up to them.

This means that the Greens/Labor Parliamentary stoush will be algorithmically suppressed for most voters, and even when it’s not, it will often be ignored - if not met with anger. This is because it will strike so many as irrelevant political infighting that does nothing to fix the underlying, structural issues that are contributing to real financial pain for so many people - particularly those in marginal, inner-city seats.