Let's not try skiing through a revolving door here, Wegs! There's a massive low-cost housing problem, and you'd need to be a very deft skier to navigate your way through that plate-glass turnstile unpulverised.
But it's not just low-cost rental housing that's in shortage. There's a chronic shortage at all price levels! Saturday's SMH had only half a page of properties advertised for rent last weekend. That's an astonishingly small number for a city the size of Sydney.
Okay, it's superficially 'great' for we landlords, but it doesn't auger well for either social stability or the security of our landlords' rights in the longer term. Not unless you think there won't ever be a backlash of some sort.
If we don't start seeing a massive upturn in the residential construction industry in this country, and soon, we'll all start to feel it, one way or another. Unions are already in talks with senior Labor officials about bringing in some sort of higher taxes or lower tax deductibility for property investors, as if that will help the situation!
We need, I'd suggest, two things immediately. A wholesale scaling down of government levies on development, and a reversal of the DA-approval system from we-show-reason-why to they-show-reason-why-not. (After all, applying for a DA in this country is tantamount to being guilty-of-overdevelopment unless proven innocent. Nimbyism just has to go!)
You want more low-cost housing? Build more housing!
Rant over. Bring on the bazookas.