In early 2010 I wrote at Business Spectator that I did not think that the time had yet come for the reckoning of the Great Australian Housing Bubble. My rationale was simple. Although the bubble had been obvious for a decade and more, it was equally clear that authorities had the wherewithal to bail it out if trouble came.
And so it has proven to be. The commodity super-cycle came and went and housing eased and then boomed again.
In 2011, I coined the phrase “politico-housing complex” to define the extraordinary capture of policy at all levels of government by the bubble, its ideologies and its interests. Again I did so because it was obvious that nobody gave a hoot that the bubble was in the process of crowding out the entire economy bar resources. Not only that, that authorities were hell-bent on propping up the bubble no matter how perverse policy became.
