The New Queensland Homeowners’ grant, now 20,000, doesn’t mandate any enviromentally-friendly inclusions such as solar panels, cooling towers, solar pump hot-water heaters, insulated walls, rain-water tanks, etc. before the grant can be claimed. I’m disappointed.
Does anyone else feel the same way?
Does anyone else feel the same way?
Yes!
Not living in QLD I haven’t followed the issue. Is it $20k to all home buyers or only apply to first home buyers?
I can understand mandating environmental conditions for new housing, but how would it apply to an existing dwelling?
I lost faith in any home buyers schemes after figures seem to prove that ultimately all it does is artificially inflate the cost of building/buying a house… 
But $20k?! Yikes…
I’d love to see a graph showing housing prices, noting when various state/federal home buyers schemes have been implemented…
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/20100517_Australian_House_Price_Index_1986_-2009.pdf/page1-1753px-20100517_Australian_House_Price_Index_1986-_2009.pdf.jpg
Yep… introduced in 2000…
The grant is for new homes for first-time buyers, with contracts signed after a certain date, probably July 1 but I don’t know. Owners of existing homes or homes under construction cannot claim the 20K grant. The previous new-owner new-home grant was 15K, still quite a bonus and yes, I’m positive it just inflates the price of new homes by the amount of the grant.
Before the the fifteen K grant there was a 7K grant for fist-time buyers of new homes. Don’t know if there was one between the 7K & 15K.
I wonder if we can expect national grants to be announced for people wanting to negatively gear some properties:
Wonder who would be sending his property manager out to get his 38th? I know, envy is showing.
Yes, when we bought in Darwin, we got the 7k ($7500?) national First Home Owners grant… but that was just any property, new or old. I believe the additional grants for newly built homes has been shown to have a flow-on affect, inflating old houses too.
I don’t know what the answer is, in terms of housing affordability… certainly looking at the above graph (of which I have no idea of the authenticity/validity), there is a big disparity between the cost of living and the cost of housing… We’ve been renting since moving to Victoria, and I really can’t see us buying again within the next 5 years at best… and I suspect by then (ie mid 40’s) money would be better invested in shares or even as an investment property rather than your own home…
Unfortunately I get emotionally attached to having my own piece of dirt and my own cave but I appreciate the logic of choosing an investment property though that trend is forcing up the cost and reducing the opportunity for younger Australians to become home-owners. Add foreign investors into the market and it gets even more distorted.
I don’t agree with negative gearing… couldn’t believe it when I first heard the concept that you could buy an investment property and claim expenses against your income tax… There will however always be a need for rental properties…
Cosmic’s chart shows housing is a better investment than putting our money in the bank. And he is right the first Home owners’ grant just ups the cost of entry housing $20k. Requiring yet another set of enviro compliance does exactly the same. Why should first home builders be different from any other home? Nice little earner for whoever gets engaged to do the totally unproductive tick and flick though
I guess it would also be a lovely bit of virtue signalling.
Negative gearing isn’t housing exclusive. If you have income from more than one source and one is currently losing money you can offset against the earning source. I don’t have an investment house but have offset lost income against income from another source from time to time. You pay tax on total earnings
In housing of course you tend to make money from the deferred capital gain, not the rental stream ( fortunately for renters!) due to restricted supply and numpties wanting to increase the cost of building houses through excessive regulation ( like extra enviro regs for first home builders) and of course the government gets at that deferred income through capital gains tax.
If it wasn’t for negative gearing there would be no point in being willing to defer the income from the housing. That did not end well for renters ( who suddenly had to provide a more positive income for the investor) and investors (whose asset started falling in value as stock unlikely to earn a positive rental income was sold off) in the 1980s when the government temporarily created a special class of negative gearing for housing to reduce the amount it could be geared. It would be worse now if they tried it as asset values are much higher.
Far better for the government to release more land and ease excessive regulatory restrictions to increase housing stock to make it more affordable, less out of kilter with CPI, and thus of less interest to investors, but NIMBYs wouldn’t like that. I for example, would not like to see my house price fall. So guilty.
I feel sorry for first-time home buyers who move into a shoddily-built, non-insulated house with no provision for cooling in summer other than installing and running an air-conditioner and the expense that entails. Better to put that investment into up-front heat-mitigating strategies such as insulation and simple design considerations such as window and door placement to allow for cross-drafts and, if possible, higher ceilings and cooling towers.
First home buyers who do qualify for the 20K gift would benefit in the long run from spending part of it on energy-efficient features that enable them to avoid the on-going need and expense of air-conditioners.
Not all energy-efficient features cost more. They require the will to do more than simply keep building more of the same as there’s no incentive to change. Currently the 20K becomes a gift to developers.
Not sure what you mean by ‘the totally unproductive tick and flick’.
Negative gearing summarized:
and some useful advice for first-home buyers:
You need to demonstrate compliance to any additional regulation, Buttercup. There is infrastructure and cost to any compliance regulation: public servants, their offices and managers, all employed to approve, and then there is the compliance monitors to be paid. All of this costs. People forget that in their zeal to Do Something!
So sometimes, if not often in fact, to save money not only to the people who have to comply but also itself, governments minimise the paperwork. In some cases this devolves to a sheet of paper with check boxes and minimal monitoring. Hence the term ‘tick and flick’.
Tick and flick means it becomes just meaningless additional compliance requirements that don’t achieve all that much.
Thanks Ent. I wasn’t thinking of making it a compliance issue but rather a ‘If you want the extra 5,000 in the grant, here are the terms’
Well truth to tell I am getting too cynical for my own good.
I recall, somewhere, that the concept that Australians should own their own home was introduced by the Menzies government to increase the number of voters who were more interested in voting conservative, and it worked. My recollection may be wrong, but its not the first time that our governments have used these types of incentives and tricks to increase their potential long-term voters. And of course there are many more civilized societies than ours that have different arrangements to provide adequate housing for the populations.