Neale Prior: Liberals offset sense with super silly homebuyer pitch

Here’s hoping reports about Federal Liberal politicians plotting new ways for homebuyers to access their superannuation are just the product of a slow news week.

A mooted regime for first homebuyers to use their super savings to offset their mortgage is dangerous, confusing long-term investment objectives with short-term debt funding.

Who invests the offset account principal sums? Will it be the Libs’ old chums at the big four banks who they so reluctantly subjected to a royal commission last decade.

Turning super into a giant offset account risks distorting its primary function of helping us save for retirement and covering us if we become so sick or injured that we can no longer work.

It will just add more fuel onto the fire destroying the home-owning aspirations of young Australians.

We already have too much money chasing too few blocks, houses, units and flats.

Decent, well-located housing has become unaffordable to young people not earning big dollars or without parent’s willing or able to give them a deposit.

Sure, banks have tightened their lending criteria since the heady days before last decade’s banking royal commission and are now taking a conservative approach to loan applications. the potential for a further surge in interest rates.

But this tightened lending criteria is only a problem because first homebuyer loans are now so big.

Housing prices have grown around double the average Australian pay packet since the mid-1990s.

Affordability is the symptom of a crisis, not the cause.

Australia faces well-documented barriers to the supply of new land and buildings, including the myriad bureaucratic processes delaying approvals.

There are a lack of people willing or able to work in the high-risk building game, where rogues thrive, regulators flounder and tradies are expected to ride the market cycles.

The current Labor Government is allowing high levels of migration into a country unable to build enough houses to accommodate the people already here.

Labor is terrified of even trimming back negative gearing, having lost the 2016 and 2019 based on clumsy plans to eradicate this housing price inflator.

And the Liberals ain’t going to deal scrap negative gearing given its holy status on the economic right.