Why Barnaby Joyce's 'Tamworth solution' to housing affordability is fanciful and plain unhelpful

Sydneysiders struggling to get their foot on the property ladder, will be relieved to know that they can still live out the Great Australian Dream of home ownership if they simply swap their precious harbour views for the countryside.

Priced-out buyers just need to look to regional centres like Tamworth, about 400 kilometres north west of the Sydney CBD, to find affordable housing, according to Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce.

“Houses will always be incredibly expensive if you can see the Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Just accept that,” Joyce told ABC Radio National on Wednesday. “Houses are much cheaper in Tamworth, houses are much cheaper in Armidale, houses are much cheaper in Toowoomba.”

Joyce is right of course. Houses are a hell of a lot cheaper in regional areas, but by only looking at one half of the equation and suggesting that Sydneysiders should just leave the city is fanciful and unhelpful.

Sure you might be able to buy a house in Tamworth for a third of the price of a Sydney home, but there’s a reason we tend to flock to Australia’s big cities and it’s not because we are intent on getting into huge debt for the sake of a harbourside house. It’s jobs.

Even if you were happy to leave behind your family and friends and Sydney lifestyle – with its nightlife, beaches and those harbour views – and move to Joyce’s New England electorate, what would you do for work when you got there?

Economic growth is becoming increasingly concentrated in cities, particularly in city centres, with research from public policy think tank the Grattan Institute showing half of the net job growth in Sydney and Melbourne over a five-year period, occurred within two kilometres of their respective city centres.

“There’s no question that rent and house prices will be cheaper in a Tamworth, but the question is whether you’re going to have a job to pay the rent or your mortgage,” Grattan Institute chief executive John Daley told Domain.

Tamworth, which has an unemployment rate of 7.46 per cent, above both Greater Sydney and Australia’s unemployment rates of 3.82 per cent and 5.7 per cent, is already struggling to hold on to skilled workers with many people reportedly migrating to the coast and metropolitan areas because of a lack of tertiary education or employment opportunities.

In an attempt to give Joyce’s affordability solution a go, a quick job search for accounting roles in Tamworth resulted in just three suitable jobs, one of which was for an assistant position. You may have more luck if you work in health care, retail or manufacturing, which are the region’s biggest industries.

“We’re not necessarily seeing towns like Tamworth shrink,” Daley said. “But we are seeing them grow a lot less than the cities, it’s not because people are simply choosing not to live there, it’s because businesses aren’t choosing to set up there.”

“Governments have been trying to move jobs around the country over the past 117 years, yes Barnaby can move the quarantine agency to Armidale, you can move jobs around that way, but it’s very very expensive and you don’t move very many people.”

It was clever misdirection by Joyce to suggest we shift people to Tamworth and distract us from a serious problem in our big cities that requires a serious solution.

People need to be able to afford to live where the jobs are, and while Joyce may suggest that Sydneysiders want affordable houses in Mosman, what most people want is to be able to buy a house they don’t have to spend over an hour commuting to work from.

A house in Mosman is never going to be affordable, but there are also 270 other Sydney suburbs that now have a median house price above $1 million. Even in Penrith, which is about 55 kilometres west of any harbour views, there were nine houses which sold for more than $1 million in 2016.

The reality is that jobs are being created in Sydney and Joyce’s suggestion that the thousands of people who can’t afford to buy a home here should just pack up and move west is not helpful.

If he’s serious about coming up with affordable housing solutions, then it’s time to talk about how we can lure people to regional centres with private sector jobs as well as a high-speed rail that could make commuting to Sydney for work from the likes of Bathurst or Orange viable.

And as Daley suggests, at the same time we need to focus on creating more infill housing in middle ring suburbs, to make it easier for Sydneysiders to afford to live closer to where they have to work.