00:00 The Apple Isle has a profound problem with housing. It began about 10 years ago and in
00:06 many ways reached a real inflection point with the election this weekend. There's lessons
00:11 for the whole of Australia that is dealing with a housing crisis and the biggest one
00:16 is that governments are starting to take it seriously. The competing parties here in the
00:20 election have put forward a raft of policies that are great in scale and breadth and in
00:26 many ways, compared to what's happening on the mainland, would be considered quite radical.
00:30 This is to deal with everything from homelessness through to problems with renting and through
00:34 to a really substantial issue with short stay accommodations such as Airbnb, particularly
00:40 in places like Hobart. Also, protections for renters in the market and assistance for first
00:47 home buyers trying to buy. So a really substantial scale to the policies but a competing kind
00:55 of platform of whether they'll actually work or not. The problems here are so large that
01:02 Tasmania's population actually shrank in the last quarter. People left the island and one
01:06 of the reasons is housing has become so expensive. Rents are more akin to Melbourne despite the
01:12 fact that it is 20 times the size. There's been a substantial amount of properties here
01:17 in Hobart and other tourist centres around Tasmania that have been lost to the private
01:21 rental market because they're on short stay accommodation like Airbnb. A really broad
01:26 range of problems and a substantial but fragmented series of solutions being offered for the
01:31 weekend. Probably the biggest takeaway from this election is no matter where you live
01:35 in Australia, governments will be watching what happens this weekend as they realise
01:40 just how substantial the issue of housing is at the core of what voters value.
01:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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