8 Woe to those who join house to
house,
who add field to field,
until there is no more room,
and you are made to dwell alone
in the midst of the land.
9 The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing:
“Surely many houses shall be desolate,
large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.
10 For ten acres of vineyard shall yield but one bath,
and a homer of seed shall yield but an ephah.
Isaiah 5:8-10
You may have heard
this saying before, “the goal of a system is what it achieves.” If you have
read my blog long enough you will have probably heard that statement once or twice. It is very clear that that the government has no intention of making
housing more affordable because every single policy they direct towards housing
increases the price and when it starts to go down a bit they quickly institute
a new policy to float it back up again. I posted on social media about this
around about a week ago. Now I see that Professor Steve Keen agrees that our governments
have been raising house prices deliberately for decades. Many of you have likely
noticed the same pattern. Well Keen proves it.
Keen even
shows in his video how both sides of government have done this, and multiple levels of government as well. Again and
again, they have punished younger people by engineering the inflation of the
assets of homeowners, who are more likely to be older, so that the young can
have their income extracted in growing numbers. He even demonstrates, with
graphics, how governments respond when it looks like houses might go down in
value, they do something to stimulate an increase in house prices. From
negative gearing, to first home buyer grants, immigration and more, governments
refuse to let house prices recorrect inline with people’s incomes.
I've been
talking about this since before I was a young youth pastor. I came to realize
what was happening after having studied Isaiah and Leviticus and seeing how
hoarding homes was always condemned by God, because it entrenches poverty
through no fault of the poor, because it simply advantages those who got there
first, by virtue of age. That is the only real skill you needed to make bank in
Australian housing, buy cheap and sell after the government has inflated the
prices for you by indebting the next generation.
It was not
really hard to see where this was going to end up. If you have a limited number
of houses and a growing population, and certain people in the population buy
multiple homes, this will cause extra pressure to be exerted on the housing
market, and prices will go up. If every generation faces a higher point of
entry, and house prices accelerate faster than income, eventually most people
will be crushed by the system. Throw in high immigration and you can escalate
the house price increases. There is no one cause to all this, debt is a major
driver, using housing as an investment industry is too, so is record
immigration, and so is environmental policy. Australian governments have created a
perfect storm of wealth extraction from the young to get into the housing
market. It is immoral and very short sighted.
When I first
started to talk about this virtually everyone thought it was no big deal. I
remember one time when I was teaching on Isaiah 5:8-10 in 2011 at a Bible study the level of anger I got from some people who were from families who built wealth in the
home investment industry. The ire was so stark I never forgot it. Not only
could they not understand what Isaiah was saying, what I was laying down, they
could not fathom that this would end up going bad. I remember another
conversation with some senior leaders in a church talking about housing
investment and how they needed their properties to increase. I noted that we
need it all to crash. They responded, but then we will lose money. I said if it
keeps going up we all lose, eventually. But now most people get it because they
just have to look at their rent or mortgage bill and realize they have been
robbed. The housing investors got what they want and now we live in an
inflationary nightmare, especially with housing.
You need to
realise you have been robbed by the policies of Red and Blue, who both tend to be older home
owners themselves and landlords. They have, together, manipulated policy to
grow their own portfolios at your expense. Sure, their policies have benefitted
most older Australians and some others. But the rest of the country is facing
life long debt servitude or rental servitude just to have somewhere to live.
Which is why many people are fleeing the country to move overseas.
Australia’s
cost of living has gone up so high that many people are now seeking to pursue opportunities
overseas, where they believe life is more affordable. The high rental costs,
high mortgage service raters, and inflation across the board are stealing our
way of life right from under us. It is not necessarily the poor who are
leaving, either, as many who are leaving are those with means who can turn that
into a good opportunity overseas.
Some of the
top destinations I found online for Aussies leaving are the UK, New Zealand,
which just had house prices drop, South East Asia (places like Thailand, Bali,
Vietnam etc), the United States, and Southern Europe. Moving somewhere like New
Zealand can offer a familiar way of life, with slightly less costs. Whereas
someone who moves to Thailand or Bali, as long as they can adjust to the
massively different cultures, can live like a king from the sale of a house in
Australia. Though moving back will be difficult.
However, some
love the lifestyle,
“It
has taken the pressure off. We’ve had to reinvest into our business and we are
starting to actually save some money.”
Lloyd
also pointed to the lifestyle advantages, with the couple being able to spend
more time with their young family.
The
couple isn’t alone, with migration data showing many other Aussies are looking
for an alternative lifestyle.
According
to the latest government figures, migrant departures – people leaving Australia
to move overseas – increased by 8 per cent to 221,000 from 204,000 between
2023-2024.
The
Australian Bureau of Statistics measures the top five countries of birth for
migrant departures from Australia each year. Since the Covid pandemic, the only
major demographic group to consistently leave the country is Australian-born
citizens, with a further 57,100 leaving the country in 2023-2024 and about
35,590 coming home.
The
median age for Aussies leaving the country was 31.”[1]
Even
immigrants are leaving because of the high cost of living.[2] Though not in high enough
numbers to mitigate the growing population we have been experiencing through
immigration for three decades.
I encourage
you to watch Keen's video and share it around. An economy structured like ours
is heading for a hard crash. I have no idea when. People's recency bias, what
they see happen, tells them it will not happen, as in their experience prices have always gone up.
But every system has its limits. I would also note that a crash can come in
many forms. For instance, the young being locked out of housing and forced to
live in rentals with other couples is a sign the economy has already crashed.
The young moving overseas is too. Australians no longer being able to live our
traditional lifestyle in our own country is as well. Crashes do not just come
in the form of an economic downturn. The economic numbers are so twisted and spun and
artificially interpreted that going off official figures tells us very little.
What people are experiencing tells us that the way we are doing things is severely
broken. This is beyond question.
You all know
my solution, debt forgiveness and then strict restrictions on lending and
usury. No more easy money. Keen would likely advocate some of the same policies.
He has been following this in detail longer than most of us, and benefits from
economic training coupled with being an iconoclast, which allows him to buck
the narrative and do it with an informed perspective. The fact that he proves
that the government on both sides keeps deliberately inflating house prices
with their policies is helpful, because it is more evidence that neither side
of politics have served our country well.
When a
landlord is allowed control of immigration and other policies that can be used
to inflate house prices, what do you think happens? We have had over 40 years
of landlords doing just this. I agree with Keen it is time to put forward political
parties with real and genuine polices to reduce housing. Otherwise, our way of
life may go extinct, and the rise of a technocratic landed gentry might be ushered in.
We don’t want that.
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