CAMERON MILNER: Albanese will enjoy a luxury Christmas in the Lodge as more Australians spend the day homeless

This Christmas, while so many will have a roof over their head, more people than at any other time in the past 80 years will be sleeping rough and doing it tough.

While the PM at the Lodge will be putting the finishing touches on his early election plans, while dining on roast turkey and sipping a chardy, too many of his fellow Australians will need Foodbank to provide them with their Christmas ham in a tin.

This is our reality in 2024 and it’s on this Prime Minister’s watch that it has been allowed to get this bad.

Anthony Albanese grew up in public housing, and currently resides in public housing. After almost 30 years in Parliament the public has funded his property portfolio including a $4.2 million clifftop retirement villa. Little wonder he’s just so out of touch with Australian’s struggling to have their own home.

According to Mission Australia and UNSW, Australia has 150,000 homeless people — a 22 per cent increase in the three years since Albanese came to power.

One in seven are over 55 and nearly 20 per cent are children.

A nation this wealthy simply shouldn’t have this many people struggling.

Though the causes of homelessness can be mental health-related as well as financial, domestic and family violence remains the largest cause.

The solution is having more housing available at an affordable price.

Even as we stretch our charitable sector and front line social workers to breaking point with demand for emergency shelters, rented motel rooms and halfway houses, too many people will still be on the streets.

While many this Christmas will be cared for by the Salvo’s or given a shower and have clothes cleaned from Orange Sky, it’s still a national disgrace that it’s this bad in Australia.

The wider housing crisis, driven by a post-COVID lack of new dwelling construction, is often cited by Albanese as the reason for the crisis. After all, even Mary and Joseph struggled to get a room at the inn.

The real cause, however, is much simpler. To avoid a headline announcing our economy was in recession, Labor threw the floodgates open and over 1 million additional migrants were allowed in and have stayed.

Well, the cure might’ve been worse than the condition, as voters are smart enough to realise that their lives are much worse today than they were three years ago.

Albanese might have dodged an official recession, but Australians are suffering through a household recession. That’s why cost of living is the No.1 issue for voters.

Everyone is affected by the cost of living, but housing affordability runs second to this and the two are interconnected.

As interest rates have risen 12 times under Albanese, it’s not just mortgage holders feeling the genuine pressure, but also tenants as so many more compete for fewer and fewer housing options, driving prices ever higher.

Tenants and mortgage holders are missing meals, not spending on essentials and delaying getting medicines, all while a few mega-rich property investors get to negatively gear, ride the wave of capital gains and jack up the rent to match the market.

Albanese dithered, and despite championing a $10 billion housing fund, won’t have actually completed a new home under that scheme in his entire term in office.

Words are cheap and the PM’s actions are too few and so often come so late in the piece.

The PM’s paranoia and procrastination see him paralysed when it comes to making decisions.

Albanese’s sense of entitlement for the trappings of office has been laid bare for voters to see.

As Aussies are doing it tough, enough is never enough for Albanese.

Albanese has been the beneficiary of negative gearing rules over the years, despite having to take a haircut on his windfall gains on his Dulwich Hill rental. It’s incredible that he was making huge financial decisions like a Copacabana purchase, all while proposals for negative gearing and capital gains tax changes were under consideration by his Government.

Albo’s skill in keeping a straight face while he sooks over media coverage of the perks he’s received — the Qantas upgrades, Chairman’s Lounge membership for his son, the concert tickets — shows the true measure of denial this bloke can engage in.

For those already homeless, or one of the estimated more than 3 million Australians at risk of becoming homeless according to Homelessness Australia, really could’ve expected so much more from a Labor PM.

Albanese has been a disappointment from the moment he secured office promising to fight the cost-of-living pressures on Australians.

He promised a $275 power price cut and didn’t deliver it. He promised people would be better off under a Government he led and has demonstrably failed.

What he never got a mandate for though was adding another million people to our community without ever having a plan to build the houses to put a roof over their heads.

Homeless people, those living in tents in public parks, might be the all too obvious effect of the PM’s desperation to avoid a recession headline, but it’s the rest of Australia dealing with the chronic under supply of housing options whether they are owners or renters that are his silent victims.

Albanese made conscious decisions to put this fuel on the fire of housing affordability, in the midst of the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation.

It’s this decision more than any other that has made it harder for so many Australians.

A few like the PM have benefited. As Albanese rubs shoulders with chief executives and like-minded captains of industry, he truly is the PM for the few, not the many.

In a few months time, voters will get to decide which roof Albo gets to sleep under. Given the last three years of lived experience that’s less and less likely to be the Lodge.