'Australia has a serious landlord problem' - Jacobin magazine interview with VS candidate Jordan van den Lamb
Published on Mon 13 Apr
US-based socialist publication Jacobin recently interviewed Victorian Socialists candidate for Melbourne Jordan van den Lamb (aka. purplepingers) about the housing crisis in Australia and why far right parties like One Nation don’t offer real solutions to it.
Read the full interview here.
A few choice quotes from Jordan:
“In the past, periods of high inflation have involved businesses raising prices to widen profit margins and workers fighting for higher pay to safeguard their standard of living. But the gutting of the labor movement means the active conflict between profits and wages that we saw in the past is just objectively not happening. There aren’t two sides upping the ante at the moment. Inflation is massively profit-driven, but wages don’t keep up with those profits in any way.”
“Working-class migrants who move to another country to seek a better life don’t determine house prices: the ruling class does.
Migration is actually lower now than in the five years leading up to COVID, and foreign purchases of residential property in Australia account for less than 1 percent of sales. Any caps or bans would have a negligible impact on house prices or availability.”
“We don’t have a supply issue, we have a distribution issue. Over the last twenty years, Australia has had more dwellings completed than it’s had households formed. There are more than enough homes in this country. They’re just either empty, Airbnbs, or prohibitively expensive. It’s pretty simple: we’ve got more empty homes than we have people experiencing homelessness. We could expropriate those homes without compensation and distribute them.”