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Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble : Comments
By Ross Elliott, published 18/10/2013Apologies for distorting Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but recent talk of a housing ‘bubble’ in Australia is increasingly reminiscent of soothsayers with bubbling cauldrons of economic brew.
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Not all that long ago, the average house price only consumed around 4 times the average yearly salary! Now it's more like 7-10, and rents have followed suit, with a bed sitter in Sydney costing more than the single pension, with Sydney now taking over as the most expensive city in the world!
And then we wonder why we have a homelessness problem.
It's not a bubble, just an unnaturally expanding market, boosted by the professional boosters and the unrealistic expectations of sellers?
A bargain is usually brought on the back of someone's misery or bankruptcy.
And people will go to almost any lengths and sell almost anything to avoid joining that queue!
And that's not okay as this article seems to imply, with its graphs and dry number crunching.
To coin another of Shakespeare's homilies, something smells in the state of Denmark.
Denmark in this case being Oz and the real estate market; and indeed, the sheer numbers of parasites it supports?
None of the apparent justifications are okay, and things must be done to bring our house prices down to the global average!
The growing list of taxes must be removed from new dwellings, some states charging as much as 40% of the house price as tax/stamp duty, fees and charges. A problem compounded by the endlessly cascading GST!
Negative gearing must go!
It also simply compounds the problem as do the many foreign speculators, who are quite dramatically warping the residential housing market.
Govts have a role to play, and that role simply can't include charging the tax payer travel bills, to purchase an investment property.
Pollies and their bricks and mortar investments/mindset, are central to the problem; when as our so called servants, they need to be part of the solution.
If Labor wants to get it's collective bum back on the treasury benches, at the very next election, then surely the return of affordable housing, is the very vehicle they need to achieve it!
Rhrosty.