But while the affordability issue remains red hot, the more dangerous path is looking like doing nothing.

Shadow treasurer Chris Bowen looked foolhardy, reckless or crazy-brave – depending on your perspective – when he tied Labor to negative gearing changes before the last federal election.

Pre-election is the time to be cautious and careful, not to announce plans to halve the 50 per cent capital gains discount for investors and to restrict negative gearing to new homes only for future investors, as Mr Bowen did before the 2016 poll.

Labor lost that election – though only just – so it could be said that Mr Bowen’s gamble didn’t pay off.

But he has stuck to his guns on this subject and slowly, surely, it is looking like becoming a winner for Labor.

The Federal Government has had plenty of arguments about why the current negative gearing arrangements shouldn’t be changed, including that many of the housing investors using it are ordinary Australians, rather than millionaires, and that it would create havoc in the rental market.

Treasurer Scott Morrison said earlier this year that negative gearing was a structural component of the housing market and should be tampered with at the tamperer’s peril.

The problem for the Federal Government is that those who feel they can’t buy a house – and statistics show this group is of a hefty enough size to be a worry for any political strategist or number-cruncher – have reached a point where they want to know what can be done, rather than what can’t be done.

Rationales and explanations and economics lessons won’t cut it for the thirtysomething who feels they have been locked out by a generation of investors and is looking for a change in the system.

Whether Labor understood this from the start or had a genuine interest in reform in this area is now immaterial.

Labor has marked out its territory: it will do something.

And will that something work? Who knows. And, in the short term, it might not matter.

Perception in politics is everything – that’s as safe as houses.