Anthony Albanese had every opportunity to have a sophisticated understanding of urbanity. Raised in low-rise inner-city social housing by a single mother on a social wage, he was schooled at an early age in squabbling internecine Labor politics, and apprenticed to Tom Uren, the greatest political thinker on urban renewal in Australia's history.

Albanese, though being too young at the time to have participated in Uren’s creation, the Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD), nevertheless inherited the guile, if not the ideas and oratory, of Uren. (In one memorable speech at the University of Sydney, Uren promoted the development of western Sydney by locating the demographic centre at Rookwood Cemetery, which he labelled the city’s ‘dead heart’).

Judging by Tuesday night’s budget, we can only presume that any ideas Albanese might have for the improvement of our cities, its housing, its urbanity and development have completely disappeared. Less vision than Ray Charles.

Abolishing negative gearing (and CGT discounts) is admirable, if 20 years too late. Reconfiguring it to apply only to new builds may provide a little building stimulus but will overwhelmingly continue to benefit investors, who will take up most, if not all, of the holy grail of supply, doing nothing for millennials wanting to purchase contemporary homes. Let them rent slums.

There is no effective money allocated to social housing, which is left to fight it out with dribs of market-driven affordable housing in the HAFF (The Housing Australia Future Fund). It can only be built directly by the government. It can’t be privatised, much as neo-liberals would like to consign it to the past. By 2030, 10% of all households will need social housing. But no big money to lift it from the current 3%. We need about two AUKUS subs' worth. We're getting less than a periscope.

Announcing incentives for an additional 5000 aged-care places is admirable. Except the buildings for them can't exist, given the impossibility of building within the constraints of the current construction industry. Limited building capacity isn’t understood or acknowledged. Workers from the revived apprenticeship schemes are a good wish but not happening anywhere near fast enough.

The additional well-trained contractors can only come as migrants. But vilifying immigration is a race to the bottom for all political parties, with bottomless racism on the far right. No need for Albo’s mob to go there. So why do they? Do they not know that the wildly multicultural Snowy scheme gave Sydney and Melbourne a concrete head start? Another old Labor idea.

We need increased infrastructure for buildings and housing in our cities, not for an overpriced suburban rail loop built by corrupt unions in Victoria. Now it’s federally funded to prop up an ailing and apparently bankrupt state Labor government. Once again, the budget fails us. People forget that the Whitlam government built sewers. We have fringe suburbs that could use a bit of that.

A thimble-and-pea trick with finances means Australia’s Economic Accelerator (AEA) is being gutted to prop up the CSIRO. Whacking one research institution to fund another. This has a very dark denouement for a study of urbanity, an area that is increasingly complex and difficult, needing a sophisticated understanding of research.

Prof Melanie Davern, director of the Australian Urban Observatory at RMIT University, discovered she had wasted three months of interdisciplinary, multifactorial work preparing an AEA grant proposal for a funding round that closed in March of this year. The rug just got pulled from under a rigorous proposal for “applied research that would have major social, economic, and environmental benefits". Too bad it wasn’t fossil fuels.

What will our cities look like if housing is increasingly partitioned to the wealthy, if we lack aged care facilities, if we don't have social housing of consequence, and if we don't research urbanity? We had such high hopes for a Labor cabinet, but it seems to have fallen apart, badly scratched with broken hinges.

Too busy rorting expenses, rolling Jewish and Muslim ministers whilst whistling social cohesion, and avoiding anything for our gambling addictions; funding Morrison’s absurd defence scheme, once formidable members are now cowed from attacking a gutless, wishy-washy Prime Minister.

We're saddled with another 5 years at least of Albanese’s minimalism and urban avoidance, tinkering at the edges of society and our cities. Maybe even a decade, as all the alternatives, within the cabinet and in other parties, are worse.

Despite the brilliance of our architects, designers and planners, we are condemned to a mediocre urbanity by a mediocre government.

Anthony Albanese’s not fit to tie his hero’s shoelaces. Ironic really, since Tom Uren wore R.M. Williams boots.

Cross-Sections are Friday musings from Tone Wheeler, formerly of Tone on Tuesday. Amateurs draw plans; professionals draw sections – never at cross-purposes.

Tone Wheeler

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