Dear nation’s renters, Treasurer Scott Morrison is very, very, very worried about you people.

Indeed, worried is an understatement.

He’s damn near obsessed with your wellbeing. He’s looking at the housing affordability crisis and weeping – weeping, I tells you! – about your ability to keep a roof over your head.

And it’s totally authentic and absolutely not a way of avoiding doing anything about housing prices, let’s be clear. His empathy is totes, as the young people presumably say, legit.

It would be easy to suggest that he’s just looking for reasons to change the subject, since the government has been struggling with its bold decision to make housing affordability a core policy area after it came up in a focus group after the whole jobs and growth thing sort of fell by the wayside.

The problem that the government has created for itself is this: that housing affordability is becoming an enormous problem in the two largest cities, and that actually solving it would put their voting base generally and the members of the party specifically at a huge financial disadvantage.

See, there are two ways to “solve” housing affordability.

The first is to make everyone richer – which isn’t going to happen with flatlining wage growth, let alone a government that is actively determined to reduce the income of Sunday workers and avoiding increasing the minimum wage. So that’s out.

And making housing cheaper isn’t going to happen when at least 97 of our parliamentarians own at least one investment property. And if you’re a treasurer in a right-leaning party that markets itself to the aspirational classes, it’d be political suicide to start cracking those nest eggs.

This is why Morrison has been so keen on emphasising increasing housing supply as the only viable solution: it flies well with the developers that donate so heavily to his party, it puts the onus of success back on state and local governments rather than the federal one, and – most importantly – it won’t work.

That’s because all the incentives for investors remain, meaning that most of the supposed increase in supply can be mopped up without any of that pesky downward pressure on prices. It’s win-win! Except for people that are keen to enjoy the luxury of shelter, obviously.

There’s also the other fairly important fact that tends to get overlooked among the breathless headlines about housing prices, which is that it’s only really happening in two cities – Sydney and Melbourne – and that there’s a fair whack of nation that isn’t in either of those places.

And this illustrates the largest problem with the whole housing debate, which is that it illustrates just how many things have gone dangerously wrong.

The biggest problem isn’t Morrison’s will-he-won’t-he dance about housing affordability. It’s that he’s opened a Pandora’s Box of massive, intractable problems that have huge knock-on effects and – as have so often been the case, from the rise of One Nation to Australia’s involvement in doomed US-led military forays in the Middle East – were caused by John Howard.

The Howard government introduced generous incentives for people investing in property, specifically a 50 per cent cut to capital gains tax in 1999. This came after the Hawke government had attempted – and failed – to reign in the use of negative gearing to rental properties only in 1985.

That one-two punch did the job of encouraging investment in the building sector and allowing ordinary Australians to build wealth, but also turned housing from a thing that people needed in order to live into a conveniently on-shore tax haven.

So not only have Australians had thirty-something years of being encouraged to use property as their nest egg, but a suite of other policies have been built around it – for example, the assumption in all economic projections that most retirees own their family home outright, and that they’d be able to sell it to fund a move into an aged care facility if the need arose.

Everything – from our pension levels to the erosion of state-run aged care services and shunting of the duty of care of our elderly to the rather more predatory mercies of the for-profit sector – is based on the idea that retirees have a big fat asset they can liquidate.

Add to that the fact that people have been moving to the two large cities because that’s where the jobs are, and the government has been encouraging this with direct policies such as choosing to remove subsidies for the motor industry in SA and regional Victoria, and indirect ways such as taking to the media to angrily rail against those lazy unemployed people who aren’t prepared to uproot their lives in Burnie, say, and move to places with more employment opportunities.

There are ways to address this, of course, and some are even on the table at the moment. Encouraging long-term, low-risk investors (such as superannuation funds) to get into the low-income housing game is one genuinely good idea being floated. That would do something to help those unable to get into the rental market, but is going to do zero for the skyrocketing prices in Sydney and Melbourne.

It’s pretty much impossible to see a solution to the multi-pronged housing crisis that doesn’t also include changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax, not to mention a complete (and expensive) overhaul of our pensions system and a government-led decentralisation to encourage more business and residential movement to the other capitals and regional centres, since prices and rents aren’t ever going to cool in the two big cities while they’re the only pools in an evaporating job market.

And that’s far too difficult, so using the sudden concern for the wellbeing of renters as an excuse to do nothing will provide just enough cover in the short term to give the impression of progress while leaving the problem for the next treasurer to deal with.

After all, given Morrison’s efforts to date, that’s unlikely to be too far away.