The Greens have accused Labor of joining Peter Dutton in a race to the bottom on blaming migrants for a housing crisis they didn’t cause. The proposal has been previously widely criticised by economists and housing experts.
"Whenever house prices go up, and affordability deteriorates, we come back to this idea of banning foreign investment. But at the end of the day, it really doesn't do anything to help affordability.” (CoreLogic head of research Eliza Owen)
Labor’s proposal, which copies the Liberals, is to ban foreign investor purchases of established properties for two years. On the latest reportable data only 34% of the 5360 properties foreign investors purchased in the 2022/23 financial year were established properties. This means Labor and the Liberals’ proposal would only affect about 0.3% of all property purchases in Australia per year - or 1,800 of the roughly 670,000 property purchases in Australia in a single year.
Conversely in the last year alone, domestic investors have purchased at least 192,000 properties based on ABS bank lending data, more than 100 times the number of homes targeted by Labor and Dutton’s plan.
When Peter Dutton first announced this policy in 2024, Labor’s Treasurer Jim Chalmers rightly criticised the policy as “not thought through” and too small to make a difference. Now, under pressure following three years of failing to meet the scale of the housing crisis, Labor are desperately adopting Peter Dutton’s policies to distract from the real causes of the housing crisis.
Lines attributable to Max Chandler-Mather MP, Greens spokesperson for Housing and Homelessness:
“Dutton and Labor are insulting the intelligence of Australians, pretending like this will do anything to help fix the housing crisis.”
“The proposal would only affect about 0.3% of all property purchases in Australia per year - or 1,800 of the roughly 670,000 property purchases in Australia in a single year. In contrast, domestic property investors purchased at least 192,000 properties.”
“All Dutton wants to do is protect the financial interests of wealthy developers and banks by mimicking Trump and scapegoating migrants with policies like this, so it beggars belief that Labor would copy him.”
“The way to stop Dutton bringing his Trump style politics to Australia is to take him on, not agree with him.”
“Compared to this Dutton brainfart of a policy, even modest changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount for investors with multiple homes would see 770,000 renters move into home ownership.”
“What today shows is the only way we are fixing the housing crisis is if we keep Dutton out, but ensure we have Greens in the balance of power to push Labor to take real action on the housing crisis, like phasing out negative gearing and building public housing the way real leaders like Whitlam used to.”