The Inflection Points Podcast

It’s not the same as social housing, and it doesn’t help those most in need. Australia is spending big on ‘affordable’ housing—but we shouldn’t.

In “Against ‘Affordable’ Housing”, Dom Behrens and Ethan Gilbert argue the reality that ‘affordable’ housing is deeply, intrinsically flawed. 
It is a wasteful use of public funds that redirects government support away from the people who need it most. It provides those who do benefit with help they don’t particularly value, and the criteria and rules set up to administer it result in bizarre outcomes. Most importantly, the policy is wholly ineffective at delivering the outcome Australians actually want: not ‘affordable’ housing, but inexpensive housing. 

Economist and Sydney YIMBY Secretary Dominic Behrens co-authored “Against ‘Affordable’ Housing” with Ethan Gilbert, and is our guest on today’s show.

Hosted by Jonathan O’Brien, Editor-in-Chief of Inflection Points.
Read the article: inflectionpoints.work/articles/against-affordable-housing

In October 2023, Jim Chalmers told the Sydney Morning Herald about his chocolate-eating habits. He said: "I don't do moderation, in anything. I'm always going 100 miles an hour. If I eat a piece of chocolate, I eat a block of chocolate."
On Tuesday night, he stood up in the House and ate chocolate.
He scrapped the fifty per cent capital gains tax discount. He quarantined negative gearing on existing homes. He cut the growth of the NDIS from ten per cent to two. He pulled the private health insurance rebate off the over-65s and shovelled the money into aged care. He put two billion dollars on the table for states and councils brave enough to reform planning.
It's the most interesting Budget since the Howard-Costello era.
It’s not quite a whole block of chocolate. But it’s a start.
Matt Bowes — Senior Associate at the Grattan Institute. Matt will take the reigns on infrastructure and housing.
Jessy Wu — Founder and Managing Director at comms agency Encour. Jessy leads us through productivity and innovation.
Manning Clifford — Founding Editor-at-Large here at Inflection Points. Manning will steer us through state capacity and human flourishing.

Alain Bertaud has worked in over forty cities across the world. He has seen what happens when cities try to function without land markets — in Moscow, in Beijing, in post-apartheid Johannesburg. He has seen what happens when planners restrict the market's ability to produce floor space — in Mumbai, in New York, and, indeed, in Australian cities.
In 2018, he synthesised sixty years of field work into a book: Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, published by MIT Press. It became, quickly, one of the most important books in the canon of housing and land use reform, providing the most robust framework available for combining urban economics with urban planning.
In two hours of conversation, we cover the functioning of cities as labour markets, what communist cities taught him about what markets actually do, and how to diagnose a city the way a doctor diagnoses a patient — with specific numbers, rather than adjectives. 
We also got, at the very end, an admission from Bertaud: that leaving the importance of urban design out of Order Without Design was a mistake, and Australia, of all places, is the one that convinced him this was so.
Purchase Order Without Design: https://yimby-melbourne.square.site/product/order-without-design-how-markets-shape-cities-alain-bertaud/PQ5DV6J7VMNTEI3SC7W5XEDE

Recorded live in Melbourne in March 2025, this event — co-hosted with Effective Altruism Australia — brings together three speakers making the case for reforming our charitable giving laws.
Ryan Ginard (Fundraise for Australia) argues that without fixing the infrastructure, the $5.4 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer will pass the charitable sector by. 
Clare Ozich (Justice Connect) explains exactly what the system is, why it fails, and what the Productivity Commission's solution would do. 
Grace Adams (Effective Altruism Australia) shows how DGR rules actively distort giving away from some of the most important causes of our time. 
Myriam Robin of the Australian Financial Review moderates the panel.
Read Ryan Ginard's essay “The Generous Country” in Inflection Points: https://inflectionpoints.work/articles/the-generous-country
Support Justice Connect’s Unlock DGR campaign: https://justiceconnect.org.au/campaigns/unlock-dgr/

Keith Wolahan is a barrister, a former Australian Army commando with four deployments including three tours in Afghanistan, and the former Liberal Member for Menzies—the seat named after the party's own founder. 
He won the seat in 2022 by unseating a thirty-year conservative incumbent at preselection. Three years later, he lost that same seat as the Liberal party's metropolitan vote collapsed beneath his feet.
In his essay for Inflection Points, Keith argues that the Liberal Party's failure is structural, not cyclical, and driven by three forces: migration, education, and home ownership. 
The party has lost the multicultural suburbs. It has lost university-educated professionals, particularly women. And it has lost a generation locked out of the housing market—people who, as Keith writes, are “not hostile to Liberal values; they simply do not believe the party is serious about the one thing that would make those values real.”
This is a podcast about the seriousness required to bring a political party back from the brink.
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Read Keith Wolahan’s essay, Liberal Foundations, in Inflection Points: https://inflectionpoints.work/articles/liberal-foundations