Scott Morrison is advocating for a "cradle to grave" solution to housing affordability. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The government's own review of the work-for-the-dole program found an unemployed person's chances of finding work improved by just 2 per cent because of the program. Which might not be such a problem if it didn't cost a lazy billion over four years. Not surprisingly then, as Fairfax Media revealed on Tuesday, some members of the government's razor gang were quietly suggesting that maybe it was time to axe the policy, on the grounds it was, according to one unnamed MP, "shit". Naturally these squishy realists were quickly shouted down and a hard man was quickly dispatched to the front lines to beat up on the poor. "Long-term welfare dependency is poison on capable people," the Human Services Minister, Alan Tudge, thundered in The Daily Telegraph the following day.

Human Services Minister Alan Tudge has said an independent report into the first two cashless welfare card trial sites has been a success. Credit:Andrew Meares The problem for the government though is not that the policy is shit – or at least not just that the policy is shit – but that the government is becoming wedded to far too many shit policies, policies that are being pursued or advocated for in the face of overwhelming evidence that they do not or cannot work. An NBN that might have worked was dumped, for one that does not, simply so this government could cast the previous one as spendthrift. Illustration: Simon Bosch A market-based mechanism to reduce carbon emissions that worked was dumped and another abandoned in favour of Tony Abbott's "direct action" plan that not only runs contrary to basic Liberal Party philosophy, but that has seen carbon emissions rise.

And now the Treasurer, Scott Morrison, is advocating for a "cradle to grave" solution to a housing affordability crisis that is so misbegotten that it is suffering enthusiastic and near universal condemnation. Illustration: Cathy Wilcox Having finally come to the realisation that the cost of housing is a live political issue, but determined to differentiate itself from the Labor Party, the government will not reform a negative gearing policy that sees investors receiving tax breaks over first home buyers, but does plan to allow first home buyers to raid their superannuation for a mortgage deposit. Of negative gearing, leading economist Saul Eslake said that it was "hard to think of any area of government policy which has been pursued for so long in the face of such incontrovertible evidence that it doesn't work." The super plan Eslake described as "a thoroughly bad idea".

John Daley, of the Grattan Institute, said it was a "fundamentally bad idea". The Melbourne University professor of economics Chris Edmond tweeted that Morrison's proposal "is economic illiteracy of the highest order" that would not only not solve the housing affordability crisis, but make it worse. It was, he added unhelpfully, "breathtakingly stupid". Poor old Morrison was even slapped around by the Nationals MP Andrew Broad, who also took to Twitter. "Using superannuation to address housing affordability for first home buyers is a lazy response to the problem," he wrote. The general consensus was that giving more money to first home buyers would only force up housing prices, benefiting homeowners rather than home buyers. It would therefore transfer wealth from the younger and poorer to the older and richer.

Further, since that money would be drawn from superannuation accounts before they had a chance to mature, they might never properly recover, condemning those who had taken advantage of the scheme to more straitened circumstances in retirement, and further burdening the taxpayer who might have to step in to look after them as a result. But Morrison knows all this. And we know he knows all this not just because he has access to the best economic advice in the country, but because of a book by The Australian's Peter van Onselen and University of Adelaide academic Wayne Errington called The Turnbull Gamble. In it the authors reveal that before the last election both Morrison and the PM, Malcolm Turnbull, were "all in favour" of their own negative gearing reform which they would cast as less "extreme" than Labor's proposed changes. According to the authors, the two were rolled by a right-wing faction of Abbott supporters in their own cabinet. One of them, Peter Dutton, raised the "political value in doing nothing so as to attack Labor's changes 'with clean hands'." Loading

Now politics is a pragmatic business, and anyone who watches it long enough grudgingly realises that sometimes some governments are going to have to stick with some policies for political rather than practical reasons. The question is how often and how many policies? And how bad must they be? And at what cost?