FET #18: Housing future fund and COVID updates
FET #18: Housing future fund and COVID updates
We catch up on recent housing and COVID policy developments
Appears in this episode
There has been a lot of news on both the housing policy and COVID policy fronts recently. Cameron and Jonathan share their thoughts on things like the Housing Future Fund, the latest on Australia’s COVID vaccination injury compensation scheme, a new anti-discrimination bill about COVID vaccines, and news out of the United States about hidden influences behind the COVID mandates, and more.
The Lee Fang article on Pfizer’s lobbying and financial influence is here.
The United States Senate report on COVID origins is available here.
The Australian bill on vaccine discrimination is here.
Follow Cameron and Jonathan on Twitter.
Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0
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FET #18: Housing future fund and COVID updates
This housing bill nonsense does my head in. It’s so misconstrued and misrepresented. People see Housing Fund and they think It’s money the Government is using to build or buy houses. I’ve had these conversations to people about Queensland’s ‘Housing Investment Fund’. They think It’s money that’s being used to fund houses. So when Cameron Dick comes out and says ‘An extra $1Bln for the Housing Investment Fund’, people see ‘An extra $1Bln spent on housing’, when in reality it’s got nothing to do with it. And when Federal Labor comes out and says ’10Bln housing fund’, they connect that money to money being spent for houses. But they’re basically unrelated. The only thing that connects them is a name and political spin.
This whole exercise is just leveraged investing to increase both sides of the Government’s balance sheet and try and harvest risk premium on the investments above the cost of debt. You can see this in the way they talk about the $500 million. When they say It will create $500 million in funding, what that actually means is they just have a budget assumption of 5% investment return on the $10 billion that they will use to report an increase of $500 million in interest income on the operating statement (whether they actually take the $500 million out of the fund is irrelevant). This then gives them the ability to spend an extra $500 million without it changing the outcome of the net operating balance accounting profit/loss i.e; “the budget”.
Concerns that ‘if there’s a bad year, they won’t be able to take money out to spend’ are probably genuine but naïve. The Government probably won’t be taking money out of this fund. They’ll just take out an extra $500 million in debt each year to fund whatever housing policy they want to spend money on, but because Credit Ratings agency’s care more about “net debt” instead of “gross debt”, It won’t create any new “net debt”, because over the long term that fund will grow by more than $500 million per year.
Win / win. The Government gets to spend more money, net debt doesn’t change – and will actually going go down over time, on average, probably. Which if you think about for more than 3 seconds will lead you to the logical conclusion that because the Government is extremely large, has an infinite time horizon and the ability to instantly raise more revenue if it really needs, that it should be able to infinitely increase its financial position simply by borrowing money and investing in risky financial assets. Obviously this is a bad idea in reality. Peter Costello has discussed this previously. It was his position that the Future Funds should receive money from surpluses, not debt! And he’s still the Chair of the Future Fund!
But of course the political and commercial aspects of it all mean he’s going to keep his mouth shut about the poor policy decision of adding an extra $10 billion to the Future Fund via debt, because suddenly his pride and joy Future Fund gets an extra $10 billion to extract fees off. But now you start discussing the issues with purpose of government, and leveraged investing, and public sector balance sheets and suddenly you’re going over people’s heads and we’re not talking about housing anymore, and we’re in a housing crisis, so get back to talking about housing!!
What they actually spend the money on is what is relevant and I think there is a criminally underdiscussed fact that no one has a clue what they’re spending the money on. Is it grants to State governments Housing Departments? Is it offering capital/equity injections to private developers and charities to subsidise BTR and discounted rentals? Is it just being used to inflate interest income on the budget to offset loss of revenue caused by changes in tax policy that will result in developers/investors paying less taxes in a false hope that it will induce more supply? Is it God forbid annual subsidies in juicy commercial-in-confidence 30 year contracts with wealthy developers who under no circumstance should ever need a subsidy to do their job and are just using the low vacancy rate, high inflation and their large political clout to force the Government into forking over public money before they’ll do their job? No one has a clue.
All the research shows a direct subsidy is the most efficient way to deliver more social and affordable housing on the ground. The amount of public money that goes to consultants, lawyers and advisors under these types of schemes warrants investigation.