Michael I think you have had too long in government & large NGOs, & are therefor missing the obvious point.

We have to get all public servants the hell out of CBDs. With modern communications there is no reason that the bulk of bureaucrats, & yes even economic advisors, can not be moved to the outer suburbs.

You suggest some reward for private companies moving out, but why not public servants. Thumb your nose at the property council, & build office space for them out to the periphery. Much commercial, & particularly high end retail will follow them, & the current offices can be converted to inner city apartments for the chattering class that actually like living in them.

These simple steps solve much of the peak hour traffic congestion, along with a lot of the housing costs. I had a lot of Brisbane people working for me in a company located in the northern Gold Coast, as commuting was easier than to anywhere in Brisbane, going against the traffic.

Then get the planners, [& council & government charges], the hell out of development, & let property owners actually do what they want with their own property. The glut of building blocks would lower housing prices dramatically.

Just remember it all starts with getting bureaucrats out of the city centres.

Correction: Rail fates should read rail fares or rates. Apologies for the fat fingers and the automatic self correcting program.

Thank heavens it's not Singaporean english. I mean what would the program correct (fleight lates) fl-eight elates into?
Rhrosty.

Hasbeen - I did mention transport as an option: reducing demand for housing near the city and increasing it on the outskirts.
A better idea is telecommuting which would allow people to work from anywhere, including completely outside cities.

I ponder this scenario:
a) If part of the problem with the high cost of housing in oz is due to investors taking advantage of negative gearing and.......
b) If most of those investors are asset rich baby boomers and....
c) If most young folk can't break into the housing market because houses are too expensive what happens when........
d) the said asset rich folk want to sell their houses...
e) who is going to have the equity to buy those houses as most of the young folk have been spending all their money on high rents?
Is it then that the price of housing will plummett because there'll be lots of houses on the market and nobody with the money to buy them?
As a cusp baby boomer with a 16 year old son I grieve for our young folk who can't afford to have their own home. What a sad reflection on a generation of folk raised by those who lived through the great depression and had nothing! You've feathered your superannuation portfolios now START GIVING BACK

The solution is very, very simple. Take away a very broad and non-targeted tax break that really only benefits the banks bottom line in the long term, and replace it with a program that targets specific areas of the building industry needing tax breaks which can quickly alleviate market demand for rental housing. For example only provide this sort of market interference, ie market subsidization program for wealthy people to purchase second hand rental market properties, with a program that is only available to developers and builders of new housing.

Alternatively demand that rental and second house owners that want tax breaks to justify the tax break with a ratio spend on upgrades against the purchase price of the house.

A simple formula I apply to government subsidy is by replacing one commodity with another. In this instance try replacing a private motor vehicle with the house. Would it be wise or necessary for the government to provide tax breaks for people to purchase a second hand car so that the car then then be used to enable wealthy people to make an income from poor people so they can retire comfortably? While the poor people on low incomes are subject to the market forces in diametric burden imposed by a squeezed rental market eg tight rental market? rents go skyhigh and poor carry the burden, while mortgaged owners and banks reap profit and aren't exposed negatively by the market flunctuations thereby also ensuring the poor new entrants into the hosing market are effectively brickwalled by government subsidy and greed of lazy investors that are cash rich and motivated by the fear of losing wealth through the normal business functions involving production or investment in innovation and productivity.....

Try and float that one through parliment. lol

Negative gearing is merely deductability in an investment, to remove it is to permit the government to start picking winners again which is assured to be a fiasco. This stupidity would assuredly spread to other investments with a cascading, slow rolling disaster.

The problem IS government intervention in not releasing land and trying to force people to live in "Ticky Tacky boxes" which truly are Units that the Great and Good wouldn't touch with a 12.194 metre pole.

Price rises in Inner Sydney is also separately driven by the huge quadrilateral economic asset that is the Airport, Sydney CBD (damaged by Clover) and the 2 Unis.