The front page of The SMH was choc full of articles bemoaning Australia’s housing crisis:
Shane Wright, Rachel Clun and Craig Butt decry that “Australians are carrying record levels of debt to pay for homes ever more distant from their places of work”.
This “dysfuntional housing system” is breaking the economy by killing productivity, while “inflicting long-term financial and community pain on almost every part of the nation”.
“Decades of poor policies, greed, NIMBYism and population growth have allowed the economy to be consumed by the Great Australian Dream”, according to the authors.
“Australia is watching the slow destruction of inter-generational equity as young people are priced out of home ownership”.
One of the main causes “is the sheer increase in the number of people calling Australia home”, thanks to the federal government’s mass immigration policy:
“Between 2002 and late last year, the population grew by 6.5 million. About 70% of that growth was in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra. Another 700,000 people moved into Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, Newcastle, Wollongong and NSW’s Central Coast”, the article notes.
The authors also cite as causes lax tax settings that encourage property speculation, first home buyer grants, planning restrictions and NIMBYism, and lower interest rates.
To be fair, the articles are quite good and balanced when viewed in isolation.
The problem is nicely encapsulated by the below comment from Barry:
“You guys just worked this out now? This paper has been the front runner on talking the housing market up higher and higher and now they want to say it was wrong?”, says Barry.
Spot on. Domainfax has been the main cheerleader of rising house prices for more than a decade.
It has also pumped copious propaganda supporting mass immigration and a ‘Big Australia’.
Now it’s had a mea culpa.
