Victorian Premier Dan Andrews this week played down to soaring price of homes, claiming that young people are no longer interested in home ownership:
Andrews also suggested the “great Australian dream” of owning a home was less important to younger generations, especially given the increasing cost of property – the median price of a home in Melbourne is now $1.1m.
“Not everyone has intergenerational wealth or the ability to act like a bank. So this is a really significant challenge,” he said.
“We’re always talking about the great Australian dream, absolutely. But I get a sense, I’ve talked to my kids and their friends, they’re much more focused on perhaps living where they want to live and ownership is not such a big thing. They are happy to rent with secure terms.””
These comments were attacked by Clifford Hayes, Sustainable Australia Member of the Victorian Legislative Council Southern Metropolitan Region:
The children of the Premier of Victoria and their friends is a woefully inadequate sample size to use as evidence that young Australians aren’t fussed about home ownership.
Even more so, it is distressing that this “evidence” is potentially steering policy objectives in our state.
If you don’t have security over your own housing, you are disadvantaged in all aspects of life.
As a parent, I want nothing more than my children to own their own home and I’m sure most parents would feel the same way.
In a survey conducted for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age by research company Resolve Strategic, only 19 per cent of respondents said they had chosen not to buy a home while 45 per cent said they wanted to but were priced out of the market.
This contradicts the Premier’s erroneous claim.
Instead of the Premier of Victoria conceding that young people need intergenerational wealth to buy a home, why doesn’t he do something about it?
There’s a lot of options, such as increasing state taxes on future foreign purchases, setting minimum affordable housing targets and advocating for changes to negative gearing at a federal level. Simply making up the furphy that young people don’t want to own their own home is a very convenient way to avoid the issue and do nothing about it.
Daniel Andrews could also reject a return to Big Australia mass immigration, which according to Victorian Transport Minister Jacinta Allan would mean “Melbourne would have a population of nine million by 2056, the size of London today”.
Of course we all know Dan Andrews would never do that. How would lower immigration back-fill his boondoggle projects, like the $10 billion Westgate Tunnel and the $120 billion Suburban Rail Loop?
