Pointless Enquiries

When politicians create an inquiry or a royal commission to examine an important issue, you can be certain that nothing much is going to change. An inquiry is a device used by politicians to give the appearance of doing something meaningful, while changing nothing. So the Prime Minister’s plan to have an inquiry into supermarket chains like the thoroughly-dishonest Woolworths, which will take over a year, is a clear signal that there is a serious issue which the Federal Government has no idea how to deal with – and that nothing will change any time soon, if ever. We’ve seen that with inquiries and royal commissions in the past into a range of issues, including aged care, the behaviour of banks and financial institutions, deaths in custody – and, in the real estate space, housing affordability and the rental shortage. The most likely outcome of these massive wastes of time and taxpayers’ money is that the politicians involved will scapegoat a section of the community, blame them for the problem and hit them with punitive measures, to give the appearance of actually doing something. And if they can use the situation to hit the chosen scapegoats with new or higher taxes, then so much the better. This happened with Federal Parliament a decade ago with housing affordability. Two inquiries were held and it was decided to blame foreign investors for poor real estate affordability. The Federal government hit foreign buyers with massive new taxes and told the public they had fixed the affordability problem. But can anyone say that housing affordability has improved since then? Clearly, it hasn’t improved, it has continued to get worse, because foreign investors were never the problem. What these measures did do was effectively wipe out foreign investment in Australian real estate, which is one of the key reasons why we now have a massive shortage of rental properties. So now federal politicians have concluded an inquiry into the rental shortage crisis, with rapidly rising rents. This happened in early December – and if you’re wondering why you haven’t heard anything about it, it’s because there was nothing to say. What recommendations did the parliamentary committee deliver as a result of the inquiry? None whatsoever. The only outcome was that the chair of the committee, a Greens politician, repeated the party’s policy of having a rental freeze across the country. All that time and energy wasted with no outcome at all – other than a reiteration of Greens policy by one committee member, which has no chance of ever being implemented because it’s a folly that would turn a crisis into a catastrophe.