I’ll put it this way. 2 bedroom houses in inner city Brisbane (10km or so from the CBD) are $800,000 AUD or more. Further out Northside isn’t much better. A 2 b

I’ll put it this way. 2 bedroom houses in inner city Brisbane (10km or so from the CBD) are $800,000 AUD or more. Further out Northside isn’t much better. A 2 bedroom cottage sold for $1.2 million in Ashgrove last weekend. Property is the core investment most Australians make. So there’s zero political success in anything that would jeopardise house prices. See for example, the calls to sack the head of the RBA for raising rates “too quickly” (not quickly enough, and late). There’s construction, of course, but it’s all either terribly built shoebox apartments that are still horribly expensive, in cities without the infrastructure to really make them work well, or luxury homes for those who had the good fortune to be born 20, 30, 40 years earlier than those trying to get a home now. Add on top the fact we have frankly pretty bad renters rights, inflation plus rising rates and near zero vacancies plus profiteering have driven rents through the roof. Negative gearing and other tax benefits distort the market further. And because home owners are such a large and powerful proportion of the voting populace (which is the entire country as we have mandatory voting), and it’s an ageing population too so the young non-homeowners don’t outnumber them fully as a bloc, and you have political inaction as a near certainty. It’s a recipe that’s been causing damage my entire life, but it’s not going to be solved anytime soon.