If two’s company and three’s a crowd, then new Melbourne MP Sarah Witty’s rental portfolio is looking a bit cramped.
Declarations to the parliamentary Register of Interests (all laid out helpfully in Crikey’s updated Landlords List) confirmed this week that Witty — the Labor Left MP for Melbourne who defeated Greens leader Adam Bandt in May’s surprise election upset — is the owner of not one, not two, but three rental properties. She has places in Point Cook, Brighton East and Richmond, on top of her unmortgaged home in Richmond. That’s four all up, in a market in which it is exceedingly difficult to acquire one. Aspirational, one might say.
Witty’s landlord status was always going to attract headlines, especially given the fact she toppled Bandt (“Green-slayer”, as the Oz recently dubbed her). But this, combined with her maiden speech — lamenting the fact so many are “locked out” of the market — has many galled, questioning just how socialist the “Socialist Left” can be. Was there really nowhere else for the former charity exec to park her money? Does she really need two rental properties, let alone three? Even the Herald Sun and 3AW got on board, though they admittedly take greater issue with Witty’s “hypocrisy” than with the portfolio itself.
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Witty is a relative unknown in politics, having first run as an independent in 2020’s Yarra council elections (it’s unclear when she joined Labor, but it may have been around the time she “set [her] sights on becoming the member for Melbourne”). Formerly CEO of the Nappy Collective, Witty is listed in a recent survey as a member of Victoria’s Socialist Left. Profiles tend to describe her as a foster carer and housing advocate, though her previous work has also spanned banking, business and insurance.
Witty is far from the only MP to own multiple properties, as Crikey has previously explored, though having three rentals does put her near the upper end. This isn’t on the same level as Amelia “renter wanting to get into the housing market” Hamer — Witty never portrayed herself as a renter, though she’s clearly trying to cultivate an image as a voice for them, giving further speeches on why housing is a “fundamental human right”.
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It’s worth noting that four is the same number of properties owned by the Greens’ Nick McKim, and previously owned by Mehreen Faruqi, both of whom have been accused of hypocrisy (in particular Faruqi, who recently slipped from being a landlord to two properties to just one). Some argue, not always convincingly, that it’s slightly more forgivable for politicians to be landlords if they are actively fighting to reform the system that benefits them, calling out the unfairness even as they capitalise on it.
So will Witty? How can she — or any politician choosing to profit off our broken system — expect those “locked out” to believe that she is on their side? Is it even possible to advocate for a fairer housing market while owning three more than you need?
These are questions I would genuinely like to interrogate when it comes to Witty, who used her maiden speech to decry Melbourne becoming “a playground for the wealthy,” and regularly cites “disadvantage” as her reason for getting into politics. Unfortunately, Witty’s office did not respond to questions regarding the terms of her rentals, or whether she negatively gears. Further questions relating to her views on investor tax concessions also went unanswered — unsurprising, given the bind Labor finds itself on regarding negative gearing and the CGT discount.
The first-term MP has been using her socials to spruik Labor’s expansion of its 5% deposit scheme, which experts warn will drive up prices even more than the government cares to admit — benefiting those already in the market.
Witty is running the standard Labor lines about supply — never mind that curbing investor perks would be the more immediate way to ease overinflated demand. As Australia Institute senior economist Matt Grudnoff wrote last week, Australia has actually been building dwellings at a faster rate than population growth over the past decade; it is investor demand, rather than supply, that is causing prices to rise so rapidly.
Witty is of course a first-term MP, unlikely to have a huge amount of influence in a negative gearing/CGT debate that has been plaguing the party, seemingly since before she was a member. She’s also just one investor, someone just trying to get ahead in a tilted system she didn’t create, and may very well wish to see changed (if only she’d been open to saying so).
But Witty’s property portfolio, like many politicians’ portfolios, raises serious doubts about the seriousness with which she takes the plight of those “locked out” of the market — no matter how many wonderful speeches the woman who set her sights on becoming an MP might give.
Can you really be a lefty while owning multiple properties?
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