Hasbeen is absolutely correct. Decent employment conditions (permanency being the key factor), low tax and a loan fixed at a rate for the whole life of the loan, all meant people were able to plan a family and live according to a budget etc without fear of tomorrow.

As for the article, I sat there waiting for the proposals, but didn't see any...where there any offered?

What a farce of and article!Our Labor State Govts with their taxes,levies and regulations have doubled the cost of housing in the last ten years and now have the audacity to blame the Federal Govt for their own excesses.

Remember the home owners warranty debacle that excluded thousands of builders because they didn't have enough assets to afford an insurance which they themselves indemnified with their own assets!Then we have the workers comp debacle whereby payouts were reduced but the employer's premiums were increased to meet the total claim over three years.This is not insurance.

Then we have the safe work place debacle driven by litigious lawyers and gutless Public Servants driven by empire building and fear of litigation.How many busineses have they destroyed in NSW?It is beyond belief.

In NSW workers comp claims for the Public service are three times that of private enterprise.Most were on stress leave.Last financial year the workers comp claims were $672 million.The NSW Govt could have saved $500 million just by instilling some discipline in their workforce.

If you want the reduce the cost of housing,reduce Govt interference,taxes and regulation.The Netherlands is on a crusade to reduce Govt regulation,we seem to be just feeding the monster of bureaucratic incompetence.

We are living in a fools paradise in this country,and when the chickens come home to roost,the reality may beyond our ability to cope.

Hasbeen: Only 7.5% tax? You're killing me here! I can only dream of such things. What I want to know is if we're paying so much tax (and these days, both men and women work, so the tax base is broader), why do we get so little for it?

If politicians want to do one single thing that will ease the burden on the population, it would be to get their snouts out of the trough. They're the biggest bludgers of all.

Also, for people whining about housing costs and running a car in a big city, why not move out to the country? The lifestyle is so much nicer. Frankly, why live in a city like Melbourne or Sydney unless you can take advantage of the good things about those places (eg. live music, art galleries, etc.)? You can't really if you live in the cultural wasteland that is the outer suburbs, so why endure all the bad points of cities (eg. traffic jams) then? The outer suburbs make no sense at all to me, which is why despite growing up in Melbourne and loving that city, I believe it's way past actually being livable, so I'll never buy property there. I fled the place last year and couldn't be happier.

Realist: I agree that credit cards and phones are a major reason for young people struggling, as are all the other consumer goodies and lifestyle choices. I must be one of the few in my generation who still believes if you can't pay cash, you shouldn't buy it.

Good to see the Senator thinks to mention "Peak Oil." And with global oil supply set to decline 32% by 2020 - as this July 11th 2006 Senate document shows - all bets are off . . .

http://www.energybulletin.net/18506.html

Government interference in the housing market to improve affordability won't work; it will cause prices to rise further by increasing demand, so erasing the intended benefit. That's what happened with the first home buyer's grant. Abolishing negative gearing won't work either. Keating tried it in 1985, only to find it created a severe rental property shortage, hurting the very people the policy was supposed to help. The fact that house prices rose so much and so rapidly from 2000, it is inevitable that they will fall. This is already happening here in Sydney, where I don't see prices rising for at least 4 years. As an investment residential property is hopelessly unattractive. To attract a rational investor, either house prices must fall or rents must rise.

There are other options to improve affordability in the long term that actually work:
(1)Abolish stamp duty, which encourages house price inflation as vendors 'pass on' the stamp duty that they originally paid to the purchaser.
(2)Eliminate immigration. As long as migrants continue to come here, there will be less and less land per person. Prices must therefore keep rising. Without immigration and a zero population growth rate, land prices will remain static.

Nothing would blow both feet off the Australian economy, and housing affordability, like zero migration and zero population growth. So the only way to maintain economic growth while taking the unsustainable edge off metropolitan growth and house prices is to implement effective (not fake) decentralisation policies.

The creation of new nodes of economic concentration has only been successful when it is associated with new seats of governance, as in Canberra and Darwin since self government.

Two new regional state capitals in Victoria, NSW, Qld and possibly WA, would concentrate the region's share of government decision makers and head office outlays in their new capitals and become the key economic drivers of those local economies.

And that shift in development pressure would buy the existing State capitals their most scarce and valuable resource, BREATHING SPACE. The pace of change in the existing capitals is such that problems are being locked into place by sequential solutions that are implemented before the earlier problems have been solved. And this ensures that the eventual solutions are multiplying in complexity and cost rather than by simple addition.

It is nothing more than what Bob Carr had been saying for years. It would shift growth to places that can cope with growth without harming the prospects of those in the places that are already too full. Merely shifting it to the edge of town just makes a bigger problem.

The moving finger of life writes our cities large, and having writ, moves on to a fresh page. It is far easier and cheaper to create a sustainable city from scratch than to retrofit sustainable values onto an unsustainable structure.