My house is not quite worth 504,000 yet is is my third property of trying to climb the ladder and decades of paying the banker. So if $504,000 is first home buyers median they cannot be doing too badly.

This is a classic private profit argument. The housing industry is trying to make more money off all of us. Do not be fooled.

Here is how the numbers work.

If you buy a 5 star home, it will have achieved this mostly with a solar hot water system. The extra cost is (generously) $3000. You put this on your 15 year mortgage and pay an extra $26 a month. But your electricity bill is cut by $30 a month.

Guess what the woman from the housing industry association did not tell you. You make $4 a month, the bank some proportion of $26 a month, the solar hot water manufacturers and plumbers some money and who misses out? Well, competition between developers probably means they don’t pass on the full costs anyway and that this is the true reason for this ridiculous campaign.

It would be laughable if you did not stop to consider the real greenhouse gas savings from solar electric hot water. Its around 20 to 40% of the household’s electricity’s contribution.

What we should be asking is why an article like this which is such misrepresentative drivel can be approved for publishing in the first place?

I read a piece recently that said that the Australian Securities and Investments Commission is concerned that Australian consumers are taking on too much without knowing the risks associated with their borrowings.

ASIC estimates that many people now have up to three loans with a mortgage, credit card and personal or car loans. The average Australian owes almost $2600 on their credit card.

So while this piece from Elizabeth Crouch may rightly be arguing for greater flexibility for housing and land developers so the costs don’t flow on to home buyers, the real threat is in how personal debt may see thousands of young home makers (in bad debt) renting indefinitely.

But there’s no analysis of this fundamental economic and social indicator in this article is there? I wonder why...mmm?

The death of public housing and especially housing that provides communities of low income earners with a “quality of life choice” – is being totally ignored in this argument to deregulate. More brick and tile urban sprawls as far as the eye can see? Yuk

Perhaps Elizabeth Crouch should offer her opinion on one building practice in Queensland, and probably elsewhere.

This is the noticibly frequent use of black roof tiles on many houses on new housing estastes.

In conjunction with, quite often, a lack of overhanging eaves, these tiles will absorb the maximum possible amount of heat from our record hot summer sun. People inside the house will feel as if they are living inside an oven or else will have to purchase expensive air conditioners and draw record amounts of power from our state's electricity grid.

At the start of summer Queensland Premier Beatty warned that this anticipated unprecedented demand would probably result in blackouts, and for me this warning has already been realised twice, with one blackout in my area lasting 4 hours.

If the builders who build these houses had any environmental understanding and any sense of social resposibility, I would expect that it would be possible to dissuade nearly all of their clients from making such idiotic choices in the colour of their roof tiles.

I think there is plenty of scope for savings in the cost of housing other than in removing sensible energy rating standards. A good many other regulations are written by the Housing Industry Association itsef, and are designed, not to benefit customers, but HIA members or members of related industry groups.

One is that any glass in a door, which has been broken, must be replaced with shatterproof glass, and not ordinary glass. As a consequence my sister had to pay over $1000 dollars to have glass in a second hand sliding dooor replaced. This was more than she could afford and the expense is completely out of proportion to the risk. In any case, it should have been up to her to choose whether to or not to take the risk.

It is these sorts of regulations that have helped to drive the cost of housing so far beyond the means of ordinary Australians. Another, of course is the disease of property speculation.

Elizabeth Crouch makes some good points and I do think that regulation is running mad.

However by far the biggest home ownership cost component that people face stems from cost of land not the cost of house construction. And land prices relate mainly to population growth and zoning laws.

I think we'd be better off if government's turned their attention to the development of infrastructure before land is released for housing development. This would be more useful than making rules about what sort of glass you can put in your sliding door. Railways, parklands, space for shops and services and so on should be in place before the houses go in. As it is, all this is done in an ad hoc manner and as an afterthought. Look at North-West Sydney. Try living there without a car. And even then, you have to drive several suburbs away before you find a shopping centre - let alone a railway station.

That said, the sort of planning I've mentioned doesn't create affordable housing. That can only come by governments either setting aside affordable housing or creating incentives so the housing industry does. An affordable housing strategy must include an affordable renting strategy so people can save money for future housing. The alternative is more of the same and Sydney will have the same rate of home ownership as somewhere like Tokyo. And maybe even a strata of working homeless like the big American cities.