Good housing policy will offend the current asset holders, so is unlikely for some time.
The mantra "inflation bad, but house inflation good" has been rattling around for a couple of decades now so is taken as gospel.
For those who got rich in real estate: Congratulations for funnelling someone else's wealth from the economy (probably someone's kids), because you certainly didn't generate any wealth by buying low and selling high. Housing is just shelter after all: a necessary expense. A real wealth gain would be some new process or technology that *reduces* the cost of housing...but that would just benefit workers and annoy the investors, so it's not considered.
A single fast (ie. modern) train line from Albury to Melbourne, or even Geelong to Melbourne would open up so much viable housing that the "land shortage" would disappear. Of course land banking would have to be disabled and the planning process would have to be taken out of the corrupt hands of the current incumbents. It seems the "marketing" budget of land profiteers is pretty huge: not only do all the obvious fixes not get done, they are barely mentioned. Oh well, the next doubling of housing will bring us to the absurd zone in terms of wages so I expect the crash folks have been dreading/denying/looking forward to will sort things out...pity it will also involve financial pain for all, including those who didn't gorge at the housing profits trough.

The article quotes the Senate Committee on Housing Affordability as saying: "...the combined total of capital gains tax arrangements, land tax exemption and negative gearing arrangements is estimated to be in the order of $50 billion per year."

By way of comparison, the GST was expected to raise $46.8 billion in 2009/10. That gives you some idea what a terrible price we pay for mollycoddling property owners.

What a pile of lefty rubbish.

Capital gains is there to entice private owners into the rental market. Public housing is always a catastrophe, & much more expensive, as the bleeding hearts always force government to subsidise it, making it too great a drain to sustain.

Then we have Ozandy wanting to build high speed rail to whop whop.

What's up mate, not enough graft in building office space?

Why not build offices for bureaucrats in ALL the regional centers, & get them out of the city. There is no need for them to see each other these days.

Can you imagine how quickly all the facilities of the capitals would devolve to the regions, if half the bureaucrats actually had to live there?

This way they could all get to work in minutes, not hours, & you could get rid of many trains, buses, cars, & those awful trams, all over the place. Certainly no need to build more railway tracks, unless it's to carry freight.

Of course rail freight would require some bureaucrats capable of running a system that could compete with privately run trucks. Fat chance there, more's the pity. Still, if we got them out of the city, that would be a start.

Hasbeen wrote: "Capital gains is there to entice private owners into the rental market."

Wrong. RENTAL INCOME is there to entice owners into the rental market: you have to get a tenant in order to get the rental income; but you don't have to get a tenant in order to get the capital gain. So if the tax system were serious about encouraging investment in rental accommodation, it would tax rental income more lightly than capital gains. But the system conspicuously and obstinately does the opposite.

The reason why rail freight can't compete with road freight is that myopic penny-pinching politicians and bureaucrats didn't duplicate the railway lines all the way. Had they done so, freight and passenger trains would be able to run in both directions at a rate of 20 an hour or more, and trucks and buses wouldn't be able to compete on the trunk routes.

I'm guessing HasBeen has benefited from negative Gearing!
Welfare is all well and good mate, but I'm pretty sure the rest of the world has good reasons not to give welfare to multi-property owners.
Also I'm not sure Albury, Wangaratta, Benalla, Euroa, Seymour, Wandong and of course Geelong would appreciate the "woop woop", sorry "whop whop"...Pretty clear how blinkered some city folk are!
Were you bitten by a bureaucrat as a child?

They'd never do it, Hasbeen.

>>Why not build offices for bureaucrats in ALL the regional centers, & get them out of the city. There is no need for them to see each other these days.<<

You won't prise them out of their shiny, hi-tech, centrally-located, $450/sq.m offices. Despite the fact that the vast majority could "do their job" anywhere that has a desk, a phone, a computer and a snack machine.

Bangalore springs to mind.

Incidentally, I am not too convinced that the author is particularly accurate here:

"Both the electorate and media now seem to use interest rates as a kind of proxy to judge the economic management of the government of the day."

When Mr Rudd became PM, the standard variable home loan rate (i.e. the one that is relevant to the citizenry rather than the bankers) was 8.55%. Today it is 15% lower, at 7.31%

I haven't heard too many of either the electorate or the media making much of a fuss about those numbers.