The prime minister’s new beach house has just made his job — and his colleagues’ — much harder

I’m sure we can all agree on certain baseline entitlements for our political leaders. They are allowed to have houses. They are allowed to live in nice houses. They are allowed to sell houses for a profit, and use the proceeds to buy even nicer ones.

All of this is true. With pleasing symmetry, it’s currently true of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. Neither grew up with personal wealth. Both made astute real estate investments back when you could go to a house auction as a Young Person and buy a fixer-upper without having to bring along your Dad, Logan Roy.

It is fair and reasonable for these men to buy expensive homes.

It was fair and reasonable at the beginning of this week, and it’ll be fair and reasonable at week’s end. And it is eminently possible for this fairness and reasonableness to co-exist with the fairness and reasonableness of another assessment.

Which is that the prime minister’s decision to buy, jointly with his partner Jodie Heydon, a $4.3 million clifftop beach house, with ocean views so expansive that they would challenge the visual field of an owl, right in the middle of a national housing crisis, right before an election campaign at which the single most reverberant issue is the cost of maintaining just one home, is the most baffling strategic initiative since Scott Morrison said (I’m paraphrasing here) “Just spitballing, fellas… how bad would it be if we just didn’t tell people I’m in Hawaii?”

Not because the PM doesn’t have the right to do whatever he wants with his own money, or because he’s not entitled to happiness or a nice new life with his lovely fiancee, who is a successful woman and presumably brings a substantial contribution to the kitty. Ms Heydon, who should not be punished for falling in love with a person in public life, is allowed to live in a nice house too.

The cold truth is, nevertheless, that this purchase just made the prime minister’s professional life — and those of his colleagues — much, much harder.

The beachside house creates a simple metaphor

Sometimes the events that change the course of a political leader’s fortunes are minor ones. And on paper, an Australian prime minister’s purchase of a $4 million home in NSW is not a big deal. Houses in NSW cost a lot. But it’s the shimmering ancillary factors that will make this a tough one to outrun.

1. Simplicity: The housing crisis is a perilous and dank maze of submerged interlocking caverns called things like Supply, Demand, Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, Population Fluctuation, Historic Tax Policy and The Pitfalls Of Modern Federalism. To get anywhere at all, the serious housing policy spelunker requires industrial-strength headlamps, 9,000 metres of sturdy cable, nerves of steel and that lovely doctor from South Australia who got the Thai kids out.
   There is much quality research and reporting of these factors. But who would bother, now that a bumper sticker — “Your Kids Are Dropping Off A Housing Cliff, PM’s Just Bought A Palace On One” — is so readily available? The house is so dramatically nice (the sparkling ocean! The glass walls! The cathedral ceilings! Views from the bath!) that this story — already a simple one to tell — comes with an unforgettable metaphor about life elevated above the concerns of everyday Australians. Like most campaign bumper stickers, its power derives from the simplicity of the slogan.
    
2. Common Purpose Among Disparate Enemies: Opposition Leader Peter Dutton yesterday primly declined to comment on the PM’s real estate venture. Obviously, this is very substantially because Mr Dutton has only just offloaded a kajillion-dollar Brisbane penthouse whose bath views rival those of the retirement home that’s just been purchased by the man Mr Dutton hopes to send into retirement at his earliest convenience. But Mr Dutton really doesn’t have to say anything.
   

   

   On this occasion, he can let his colleagues carry on about how “out of touch” the “battler’s PM” has become, drawing for breath only to tap in their mortal enemies The Greens, who couldn’t possibly have designed a clearer shot at goal. The Coalition isn’t too bothered about renters but love an opportunity to push at the already-ajar door of the perception that the PM is out of touch. The Greens, already established as the spokes-party for renters, cannot believe that the clearest reinforcement of their claim that Anthony Albanese has defected to the landlord classes has come from the man himself.
    

3. Content Gift For Above-Mentioned Enemies: A house is fine. An expensive house is fine. A waterfront house is possibly also okay. But for any political leader of whom there exists Pacific Islands Forum dance footage involving a) a tropical shirt and b) a flower garland and c) hip gyration of any kind, the purchase of a home in a beach town called Copacabana should just be flat-out banned.
   One assumes that the clean-up job around this development will involve a grim-faced staffer from the PMO flying nonstop to Palm Springs to intervene personally with Barry Manilow in an attempt to stitch up the rights to his 1978 hit, given the nightmarish ease with which it could be re-engineered into a campaign jingle, viz:

   His name was Albo, he was a battler

   Grew up with public housing blues

   Now he’s gone for ocean views

   Maybe he’ll rent it, and do the cha-cha

   Look it won’t be all that weird

   If it’s negatively geared

   (chorus: Aaaat the Copa… Copacabana

   Take it up with my financial planner)

    

4. Timing. Buying a fancy house when you already have two taxpayer-funded ones to live in plus a fully paid-off investment property, just before an election, in the hot flush of a genuine housing crisis, is kind of bold. Of course, Mr Albanese did not control the precise timing of the news breaking. But for it to break – thanks to Sydney radio presenter Ben Fordham of 2GB – on the day the PM was due to make a housing announcement, in the electorally dicey state of Queensland… OUCH.

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In buying the house, the PM forgot one of the ‘golden rules of leadership’

The prime minister’s personal news took colleagues by surprise yesterday. Any government MP defending a marginal seat knows how deeply their constituents are feeling the deterioration of housing affordability. A new paper — The Slow Erosion of the Australian Dream, published this week by Accent Research and the Redbridge Group — demonstrates that pessimism about housing affordability for younger generations is shifting voter sentiment against the ALP, especially in working-class suburban electorates.

Only 15 per cent of Australians think that younger generations will be able to afford to buy a home without family assistance. Optimism is even lower in working class suburban seats, the report found, and is actively driving anti-Government sentiment. In Queensland, these included the electorates of Blair, Oxley and Rankin — the electorate held by Treasurer Jim Chalmers, where the PM appeared yesterday to make a housing announcement that was immediately engulfed by his own purchase.

Additional detail supplied to the ABC by Redbridge yesterday reveals that of the top ten electorates most strongly of the view that immigration is to blame for the housing affordability crisis, five — Capricornia, Dawson, Wide Bay, Maranoa and Flynn — are in Queensland.

Tony Barry, a former Liberal Party staffer and strategist who joined forces with Labor stalwart Kos Samaras to form The Redbridge Group, said the research showed that governments and oppositions alike had not made the case for immigration, which — combined with a failure to deliver adequate infrastructure — was adding to the heat of voter sentiment around housing affordability.

“The optics are diabolical,” said Mr Barry of Mr Albanese’s house purchase, likening it to former prime minister Scott Morrison’s Hawaiian holiday, which the researcher said was readily recalled by voters until the end of his prime ministership.

“One of the golden rules of leadership is that you just can’t do all the things you’d like to do. Like overseas holidays, like selling investment properties, like buying spectacular waterfront real estate.”