Property Investors Council of Australia launched in preparation for a tenant-led war

Hear that clarion call blasting over the nation, gentle reader? That piercing siren calling all good people to take up arms and fight against the slow creep of tyranny?

Yes, friends, it means the most glorious thing in the world: there’s a new political lobby group in town.

The Property Investors Council of Australia has launched and it is determined to fight for the rights of that most oppressed class: wealthy people who own lots of property. That’s right: finally someone is standing up to give a united voice to these struggling, silent battlers, including the majority of our federal parliament. 

Now, let’s make one thing clear: property owners are not the devil. They’re people who were both rich enough and astute enough to take advantage of changes to negative gearing and capital gains laws made early in the era of John Howard to use property as a means of wealth creation, which was entirely the point of said legislative changes.

And it wasn’t even a terrible idea either: the notion that people have assets in their old age and thereby leave the aged pension for those most in need of it has a certain ring of reasonableness to it. The aforementioned devil, however, is in the details.

Things soured as this went from a policy to encourage self-sufficiency in retirement to an article of faith on the right of Australians to take on unsustainable debt in order to minimise tax and build on-paper wealth – coupled with the fact that wealthy foreign investors, particularly those in countries with governments doing financially-threatening things like cracking down on corruption, discovered that parking their money offshore in Australian property was a convenient way to keep their fortunes safe.

Now the balance in Australia has become skewed to a point where there are haves and have-nots with a yawning, unbridgeable chasm in between, which would be a niche question of economic inequality if it was about share ownership, say, but has practical ramifications when it’s about physical structures that can shelter people from the elements.

What’s more interesting about the establishment of this group, however, is what it portends: specifically, that the property industry clearly thinks that the Coalition’s grip on power is going to come loose.

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In the same way that it’s indirect indicators of ecological collapse that are the most horrifying – it’s one thing to look at long-term fluctuations in temperature records and another to go “say, where have all the insects gone?” – it’s possible to read much into the very fact that wealthy property owners, who have enjoyed decades of policies supporting and enhancing their accumulation of wealth (or, at least, debt) are now mobilising lest their structural advantage be threatened.

After all, the Liberal and National parties have made clear that all their proposed solutions to the housing crisis will not involve any sort of change to the structures of investment. If anything, their proposals have involved eliminating restrictions on development as a way of encouraging further investment.

Everything is geared towards the somewhat spurious goal of increasing supply, rather than doing anything like reining in negative gearing – which the federal government have explicitly ruled out.

Labor, on the other hand, has made clear that those sorts of structural changes are on the table, as have the Greens. So in the same way that no-one sets up an anti-tiger taskforce unless they think that a tiger infestation is imminent, there mere fact that this group exists and is commencing its lobbying efforts more than a year before an election is a strong indicator that it thinks a less inequality-sympathetic regime is on the political horizon.

So the appearance of PICA on the Australian lobbyscape is less an indication that the investing classes need a united voice and more that the national mood is changing. There’s no point recruiting a pro-landlord army unless there are concerns of a tenant-led war.