What young Australians should know about the Greens' housing policy

How is it that the Greens are becoming the party of choice for anyone under 30, while also being the party most likely to destroy the future prospects of those under 30s?

Take housing for example.

The Greens yearn for the days when the state was the provider of miserable, cramped housing for Australians deemed too incompetent to organise their own.

This led to housing estates and stigma, and the "poor me" reminiscences of the current prime minister. No rational person would want to go back there.

When Liberal party founder Robert Menzies became prime minister in 1949 he began to sell off the Commonwealth's public housing.

The states never went that far, but despite their rhetoric, zeal for public housing waned, and the rate of building new public housing went on a long trajectory towards zero.

Is more public housing what the public really wants?

Since then the market (private individuals and corporations seeing an opportunity to do a favour to someone else, and earn a living doing it) stepped in and developers provided almost all Australians with a place they could call home.

It turns out there are hardly any Australians so incompetent they can't secure a place of their own either to rent or to own, and that just like every other service, individuals contracting freely with each other are better at arranging accommodation for themselves than the government is.

But this is not the world for the Greens with their retro-Marxist preferences and Che Guevara tees.

They want to boost the public sector rental market and marginalise the private ones, and have adopted a swag of policies to this end, including the abolition of negative gearing.

This is a serious problem for people who can't afford to buy and who have to rent. Even with the Greens promise to build 50,000 rental homes a year, it would only represent 1.5 percent of the total rental market, which would be overwhelmingly still financed by private owners.

The Greens claim that negative gearing keeps homeowners out of the market, but this is wrong for a number of reasons.