The budget papers include a long statement spelling out what’s wrong with housing with a candour I’ve not seen before.
Last week, a fairly ordinary place in our street, similar to ours, sold for $4.7 million. I suppose I should be congratulating myself on how well I’ve done in the capitalist game. And it’s only fair since I’ve “worked hard all my life”. In truth, all we’ve done is pay the exorbitant price of $180,000 for our place, then hung around for 40 years. This makes sense? Surely, this crazy game can’t keep going onward and upward forever.
All the things pollies do in the name of helping first-home buyers – such as cutting stamp duty on the purchase price – don’t actually help, and probably aren’t intended to. When they claim to be helping you afford the high price, they’re really helping to keep it high. If they helped you and no one else you’d be advantaged. But when they also help the people you’re bidding against, it’s actually the seller who benefits.
When the value of the oldies’ homes just keeps going up, this constitutes a transfer of wealth from the younger to the older generation. The Bank of Mum and Dad transfers some of the wealth back to the youngsters. The losers, however, are those kids who didn’t have the sense to pick well-off parents.Well, for a start, it makes more political sense than it used to.
Why all these frank admissions? Because the Albanese government has decided to do something big to ease the problem. The budget announced new measures worth $6 billion which, added to those already announced, amount to a $32 billion plan to deliver 1.2 million new, well-located homes in the five years to June 2029. This would be equivalent to a city the size of Brisbane.
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