An even better solution is to decentralize the Economy. We have several large centers that are growing, and lots of smaller centers that are sinking. A 20% deposit for a house in Sydney will almost buy you a whole house in Hobart.

Median house prices in capital cities
– Australian median house price $695,788 (down 0.4 per cent in December quarter)
– Sydney down 2.5 per cent to $1,025,478
– Melbourne down 0.1 per cent to $718,000
– Hobart up 9.8 per cent to $392,000
– Canberra up 3.7 per cent to $593,000
– Brisbane up 3.2 per cent to $490,000
– Darwin up 0.5 per cent to $608,750
– Perth up 0.4 per cent to $535,000
– Adelaide steady at $430,000
Source: REIA. Weighted average median house price for eight capital cities at December 2015 quarter.

If we ended negative gearing on residential housing tomorrow and instead encouraged the much vaunted innovation!?

We might see the widespread rollout of safe clean molten salt thorium reactors, which can power the average family home for a dollar a year!

At 3 cents a kilowatt hour? Capable of achieving massively monumental returns! But particularly when tasked with very safely burning radioactive waste from the rest of the world, who will pay us billions for the amenity! Then here is new wave desalination that relies on deionization rather than reverse osmosis, and consequently desalinates water for quarter of the current cost, while producing 95% potable water!

Coal seam gas and salt problems? What salt problems?

The good news doesn't end there given nuclear technology has recently found a way of combining Co2 extracted from seawater and compounding it with hydrogen extracted from the same seawater to produce superior synthetic jet fuel, diesel and petrol replacing methanol!

Does it work, or just unproven theory? I saw a model plane take off and fly using this synthetic fuel! And molten salt thorium power is cheap and inherently safe enough to perform that task forever!

I mean just 8 grams of thorium will power your car for the next 100 years without ever needing to refuel!

There's enough in the soil to power the entire world for a thousand years! If you want a surefire and safer investment than residential housing? Try energy and innovation!

Or just sit blathering on until the rest of the world has done it, the limit of the imagination of dumb as dishwater, Aussie investors!?

Get on U tube and look at the TEDx Thorium/molten salt reactor lectures, if only to understand what the fossil fuel industry didn't want you to know!?

Now is the time to kick the bricks and mortar mindset get on this gravy train or get left behind with the rest of the dropkick dummies!
Alan B.

A few points here:

Not owning a home is not the disaster some make out, as we see in an economy like Switzerland, where most people rent long term.

Home expectations have changed. In the 70s we were happy with a 13 square 3 by 1. Now we live in the world's biggest houses, nearly double that size, with every mod con available and the young don't want to do it tough, without those things, as we did.

The young have a different world view, preferring to travel a great deal more than we did and commonly changing jobs and locations, which all are more difficult once they have bought a house. They also know that they stand to inherit far more than any generation before them, when we fall off the perch, so will likely still own a house by the time that they retire, only obtain it the easy way rather than the hard way.

Any couple really determined to own a home, can still do what smart couples did in my time and that was to shack up with partner, both live frugally off one wage and bank the other. Within 4-5 years they had enough saved to pay off a substantial part of a house, let alone just a deposit.

In my view we are surrounded by fools, all seeing their neighbor as just a (captive market) source of largely unearned revenue? And more than willing to see shelter rise beyond the means of our children and their children!? What for?

Money for nothing negatively geared investment that the tenant and the taxpayer pay for!? Even there, wanting the lowest possible deposit!?

Incredibly short sighted! And incapable of passing the J.C., do unto others test/basic economics!

The more we spend on housing and essential (captive market) service, reticulated energy/water etc. the less we have as disposable income, the basis of all discretionary spending and though it the domestic economy! Or, makes affordable super doable!

The basic tenet of capitalism is competition, not monopolies and captive markets screwed for the last dollar!

Look, if we just eliminated the profit demanding middle man, we'd halve the cost of living and put irresistible downward pressure on the interminable price wage spiral!

Long overdue decentralization puts genuine downward pressure on house prices!

We need can do leaders whose actions speak louder than words and at least one new idea to bless themselves with, rather than a mottley collection of eternal blame shifting excuse makers, who seem unable to think beyond selling our heritage and economic sovereignty?

If I had my druthers no foreigner would be able to buy any Australian real estate and if an investor? Would be limited to thirty year self terminating government guaranteed, income earning infrastructure bonds!

The only way of separating foreigners from their hard won without selling the farm/icons or economic independence or control!

I mean, case in point, selling milk co-ops to foreigners competing with us for market share went well didn't it!? And deregulating the sugar industry forced farm gate price through the roof? Yes?

Ah well, you can fool some of the people some of the time and or all of the people some of the time!

We've had the million miles a minute yakity yak blah blah blah blah! Time for something different!
Poor beggar my country!
Alan B.

Three problems:

1. the devil is in the detail of "regard the house as part of retirement planning." which is not precisely explained.

2. might "regard the house as part of retirement planning." be inflationay on housing prices - particularly hitting those who don't have superannuation?

3. would "regard the house as part of retirement planning" be political suicide for the Coalition or Labor - just as the no-go zone "cancelling negative gearing" is?

Not owning your own home almost guarantees, you retire in penury? And more applicable to single elderly females than males? Supply and demand has a place in affordability, as does rationed urban land release and land banking, which does the same thing!

And another of those money for nothing schemes that some folk see as their entitlement! The stark differences between still affordable Hobart housing and almost unaffordable Sydney housing and the fact that Emergency response Firies, ambos, police and nurses have been priced out of an artificially massaged market, highlights the problem as nothing else has or could!

Yes sure we can put people further out and make them spend 2 hours or more each way, in the average daily commute! And you guessed it, folk who have/can afford/inherit homes don't see the problem? Nor are they troubled cramming families with kids into pocket handkerchief sized apartments as a problem!?

They're alright Jack! And all too often waxing fat on the rent they extract from the homeless? Moreover, reducing deposits is almost guaranteed to force house prices higher!

However, removing residential housing from negative gearing or as some kind of actual investment, as opposed to an essential human right to shelter? The J.C. whip whip test! Might help reduce obscene prices?

As would eliminating non nationals from our housing market!

Let them invest in self terminating thirty year infrastructure bonds, if we want their money minus their control/tax avoidance/profit repatriation!
Alan B.