Stephen Koukoulas

There could be implications for the rental market as we sort of get through this adjustment process.

But I think, again, they're going to be relatively small and temporary.

They could have been bolder but probably would have lost the next election because we know that about one in six, one in seven householders

has an investment property that they negatively gear or use as part of the structure of their self-managed superannuation fund and these sorts of things.

So you're hitting a big part of the electorate if you do it.

And, of course, the scare campaign would have been really huge.

Ideally, if the government didn't have to appeal to voters, they should have made it retrospective, but it's a little bit like a lot of other discussions on tax and spending.

A lot of the ideas are very, very good, but they're politically unpalatable, which makes them hard to implement because you're impacting a relatively small part of the population quite significantly for the benefit of the masses, and the masses only get a small amount of that benefit.

That's the policy versus politics issue on many of these issues, including as far as housing policy goes.

It's tracking well below that.

We're not going to see the – well, highly improbable to see the $1.2 million.

Having said that, if they'd started it a year later, they might have got a lot closer because what we're actually seeing in the dwelling building approvals numbers is quite a marked upswing in the number of new building approvals.

And, of course, approvals become –

completed dwellings after 12 months or so of construction.

So interestingly, in the last three months, in January, February, March of this year, the latest available data, it's increased by 30% from the low point two and a half years ago.

So there is a pickup in building approvals occurring, but I think they'll fall short of the 1.2 million.

My current educated guess is I'll probably get to about

a million and 50,000, so a little bit short, but that will be the largest five-yearly rolling sum number of dwellings being built in any time in history.

So we are seeing a response.

It just won't meet that very ambitious target that they put in place.