If you want evidence that #Albanese will never change, check out his response to a Dorothy Dixer asking whether “ea parliament dominated by progressive political forces provided structural opportunity in the event the government pursued additional legislative measure” on renewables.
Rather than saying “Yes, we will work with the Parliament” #Albo went straight on attack against the Greens, for forcing him to strengthen his pathetic Housing Fund. He’s a hopeless case. #auspol
John Quiggin 
Like so, so many I hoped for a great celebratory period of immense relief and then progress after the demise of the previous federal government.
The Labor party I learned to distrust profoundly in the early 2000s, when they thought it was more important to attack the Greens than to recognize what they represented.
With the successes of the independents (aka Teals, plus others) and the Greens most recently, one would think what an opportunity.
I agree. Hopeless, pathetic even.
Yes, it is pretty disappointing. A close look at systemic issues with Australian society would focus on loss of affordable housing (in this case, either a rent that doesn’t soak up all available dollars, or a price that doesn’t need a massive loan that soaks up all available dollars), and would look at both demand and supply issues. We know we have a massive problem, we know that tradies are finite in number and are bounded by a normal working week; we know that population growth is overwhelmingly immigration driven. We know that pouring money into first home own grants just jacks up the size of the loan, and hence the market value of the properties put on the market, with no benefit to anyone but the lucky ones who could immediately jump on the grant.
The Greens are entirely correct to focus on this as a major structural issue, one that needs a multi-year and multi-decade strategy, first to rapidly reduce the problem, and then to ensure we don’t sleep-walk our way back to such a problem. For the short to medium term, that might mean we need rent control, or a lowering of our annual immigration, or various measures on banks to force them to only issue loans for a set minimum deposit (i.e. ruling out interest only loans), the winding back of negative gearing, and the like. It would help if we had more tradies, but that needs apprenticeship opportunities, and obviously has a fairly long lead time until the impact is felt. Far better to wind back the entirely self-defeating negative gearing, capital gains tax break, grants, interest-only loans. As for more public housing, the government could of course issue bonds to fund the construction of modern and climate-appropriate housing, in the places where the demand is great. It doesn’t need to rely on taxes to fund it.
It seems the modern ALP is stuck in the thrall of neoliberalism, despite the data showing it has benefited an ever smaller coterie of people, at the expense of the rest of us. Workers, and people who can’t work, they deserve to share a bit more in the natural wealth and the generated wealth of our society. No billionaire need go bankrupt, just because we tax more and funnel more money into public health, housing, and other community stabilising things.
Until the ALP takes the quantum leap to consider an alternative future, one in which neoliberalism was a footnote in history, they’ll be the doggerel of our political system, only somewhat better than the other mob. What are they scared of? That they’ll lose some totem of support from the few very wealth rentiers? Or are they too embedded in the rentier class, that self-interest pulls them up short, every frickin’ time?