Coverage of Marian Tupy’s paper, Peter Tulip on housing, Robert Carling on CGT and more

Not migrants: research pinpoints housing crisis culprit — Canberra Times and across ACM via AAP

Australia’s shortage of homes is not an inevitable consequence of immigration, but instead the result of not enough dwellings being built, a report released by the pro-free-market Centre for Independent Studies has found.

Not migrants: research pinpoints housing crisis culprit — Across McPherson Media

Peter Tulip on ABC TV the Business re housing (at 14:10)

What the Great Australian Dream looks like today — across Fairfax

Centre for Independent Studies chief economist Peter Tulip says the introduction of compulsory superannuation in the early 1990s has eased the pressure on paying off a mortgage quickly.  “It was the case for our parents’ and grandparents’ generation that paying off the mortgage was the way to save for retirement,” he says. “But the current generation is saving a lot of money in compulsory superannuation … and will have substantial superannuation to retire on.”

This does not mean the desire to own a home has disappeared.

“Home ownership is an important aspiration in Australian culture which is being denied to future generations. Young people just do not have the opportunities for home ownership that their parents and grandparents had.”

Tulip says the first step to solving the crisis is to change zoning rules. “Local councils do not allow enough building in their council areas, and like any market, when you restrict the supply of something, it pushes up the price,” he says.

“I don’t think anyone has the right to insist that our cities are frozen in their existing state. Nobody has a right to expect a city to look exactly the way it did when their parents or grandparents bought.”

Who’s afraid of changes to the Capital Gains Tax discount? — Crikey

The right-wing CIS has labelled the CGT discount a “favourite whipping boy” for housing advocates, lamenting that it had been a “persistent theme of tax policy debate ever since the defeat of the Howard government”… I wonder why that is? Senior fellow Robert Carling claimed reducing the CGT would have minimal impact on house prices, budget revenue, or wealth distribution — curious, given how much of its time the organisation spends arguing against it.

Angus Taylor backs childcare voucher model to fund nannies and flexible care — The Nightly

Speaking in a broad-ranging address at the Centre for Independent Studies on Monday, Liberal leader Angus Taylor had also raised the need for a more flexible and less expensive approach to childcare.