If you are a millennial like me you have sat through more than a few conversations in your days with some wealthy boomer, who never finished
school, had some kind of trade (builder, cabinet maker, carpenter, etc, etc.), or even no trade, who
is laying out how easy it is for the average man with a low income not only to
succeed in life, but do really, really well. I can remember some of these
conversations really well, and they are both interesting because they give you
insight in what our culture and society once was, but they are also disturbing
because they show how disconnected from reality so many people can be today. Things
are not the same anymore:
“Saul Eslake says decades
of ‘bad policies’ have inflated demand as report finds about 20% of households
effectively ‘locked out’ of the market
Housing affordability has
deteriorated over the past year to reach its worst level since records began in
1995. First home buyers now rely on wealthy families or high-income jobs to
enter the market, according to the latest housing affordability report from
PropTrack.
Driven by high mortgage
rates and increasing home prices, affordability further deteriorated this
financial year to the point where a median-income household earning about
$112,000 could afford just 14% of homes sold – the smallest share since records
began. This share has declined from 43% in just three years…
…The report showed how hard
the situation had become for first home buyers, with a median-income renting
household being able to afford just 11% of homes sold over the past year. In
comparison, a median household with an existing mortgage could afford 34% of
homes sold over the same period.
Paul Ryan, a senior
economist at PropTrack, said in the short-term, high interest rates and prices
had created an accute affordability issue. First home buyers trying to get into
the market were now in an almost impossible position, he said.
“The unspoken message here
is that wealth matters an enormous deal in the Australian housing market at the
moment, in a way that it didn’t just one generation ago.”[1]
20% of households are locked out of the market and most
houses are out of reach of the average income home. And this has worsened in
just the last 3 years. A household where the man was a maths teacher, or woolworths manager, or middle manager, and his
wife a stay at home mum, could afford to buy far more homes in 2021 than he can
now, and this is true for many similar families.
The idea of a high school dropout with a trade or no trade being able
to build the kind of wealth that boomers and older Gen x were able to create is
simply a pipe dream today, unless your family already has significant wealth
and resources from which to draw. The property treadmill is throwing off more
and more Aussie families.
I like how the article notes towards the end that,
“If you were really wanting
to do something about that, the first thing you would do is stop doing dumb
things,” he said. “Stop needlessly inflating demand by scrapping all the
programs that needlessly inflate demand, and stop constraining supply by stop
doing the things that constrain supply.”[2]
This article comes from the Guardian which is a far left
of centre news organization, but the two major causes of inflation the last
three years are government stimulus and mass immigration, things the Guardian will avoid mentioning like the plague. At this point every
Australian who cannot afford to buy a home needs to recognize that the
government is stealing from your security to benefit foreigners, and that is a
simple fact. But they are also willing to pretend to be helping by dumping more
and more money on the economy to help the needy…which in many cases includes
those foreigners who just got here.
This has been happening for so long now there is no way
this is unintentional either. The liberal government worked out in the late 90’s
the by increasing immigration they could artificially grow the economy, and
grow housing wealth at the same time, and every government since then has only
increased this. This is not some random policy, it has been tried and tested
for some time now. I think it is far past time that we should be admitting that
the elites of our society have almost no regard for Australians, and are quite
content to give our inheritance to any and sundry if they can find some benefit
for themselves in it.
As the article notes “stop doing dumb things…” There is
no doubt that these policies are dumb and counterproductive. Growing tent
communities filled with unfortunate Australians is proof of that. But just
because they are dumb, does not mean they are not also malicious.
I can’t help but think of this verse in relation to what
is happening, Deuteronomy 28:43, “The sojourner who is among you shall rise
higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower. 44 He
shall lend to you, and you shall not lend to him. He shall be the head, and you
shall be the tail.” It is very obvious that God is judging this nation, in fact
the West in general. When he wanted to judge the Rephaim he sent in the
Amorites into Canaan and when he wanted to judge the Canaanite he sent in the
Israelites, and many other examples could be given.
But getting back to where we started the old boomer
advice is no longer relevant. Really, what they did was recognize that the
housing market was an untapped resource for wealth building in our country, and
like all other limited resources, this means of building wealth has been consolidated
by the few, and shut off from the majority, and they have simply created a
situation where others, even foreigners, can profit lavishly off their
children. That same generation has the wealth and the political power to change
all of this, as well, by transferring the wealth to their children and grandchildren,
and changing the laws to stop the kinds of things which led to this situation from happening again.
But do they have that in them?
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