Hey Realist,

Your point about interest rates not going up due to deregulation doesn't gel with the 17% period. That was after deregulation.Wasn't that the highest such interest rates have been?

Re discounting bank fees. Have you seen any evidence of such? There isn't any I'm aware of. In fact the interest rate increases last year were accompanied by one of the highest years fees rises in the last decade. If discounting were to occur it must be side by side with interest rate rises otherwise...

DavidJS makes a good point about infrastructure preceding occupation of new land releases. Governments just don't bother do they? And of course in Brisbane they are now talking about "air space" rather than new estates etc. That is apparently meant to refer to taller and taller buildings but "air space" is a spin doctors term to cloud the issue (pun intended).

For Daggett,

As a fellow Brisbanite I must sympathise with you re electricity. We haven't had other than 1 two minute blackout this season, to date anyway, and the reason for this is that our suburb has electricity undergound rather than sitting up high among the gum trees. David's point re infrastructure is relevant here. Rather than spending the endless maintenance costs the QLD energy provider and government should be replacing above ground electricity as a matter if urgency.

DavidJS, RobbyH and Terje,

Thanks for your input. The HIA has clearly a lot to answer for for the total shambles that passes for housing policy and urban planning in Australia these days.

Of course, as Terje points out, both population growth and zoning laws have played a big part in housing hyper-inflation of recent decades.

Property speculators openly and shamelessly advocate population increase as a means to raise the value of their investment. As an example, an article in the Courier Mail of 18 Feb 2005 is entitled "Migration brings steady growth". It states "... with migration to the Sunshine coast flourishing and rental and housing yields in the region increasing by up to 7 percent in a year, the commercial market is nipping hard on the heels of this steady growth."

It is precisely this same kind of "steady growth" that has long ago placed secure detached housing completely beyond the means of many living in the larger cities.

So, far from facilitating true economic growth as nearly all of the economisits have been asserting with deafening loudness for the last thirty or so years, migration has simply been a crude means to facilitate the transfer of wealth from the rest of the community, as well as from poor countries, into the pockets of property speculators and related business interests.

One knee-jerk reaction to the problem of housing unaffordably would be to simply force the councils to allow ever more subdivision and urban sprawl. However, this could quickly lead to the further loss of much bushland and farming land on the outskirts of the existing metropolises, and if we fail to effectively control our population levels, it would only be a matter of time before we are right back where we are today in regards to housing affordabiity.

I agree that some more land should be made available to meet the needs of Australia's current population, but it needs to be done carefully and in such a way that land speculators don't continue to benefit at everyone else's expense.