The Liberal line of the moment ? This nonsense echoes Abbott's whining on about why the people are wrong and why Howard and Co deserve to be re-elected etc etc.

Always a winning formula to tell the punters they are dumb mugs who have never had it so good. Stop your whining you oily peasants and get back to work on an AWA.

Maybe the people believe Kevin is closer to the centrist maintsream than Howard who has spent the last few years stooping to the Right.

elMaybe they want someone other than John Howard as PM ? I thought in politics perception was reality ? Of course we can all agree that personal responsibility is a good thing

"...a staggering number of Australians blaming the Howard Government for their home mortgage problems."

Maybe they wouldn't if the Howard Government hadn't promised to keep interest rates low...

Maybe they wouldn't if the young home buyers grant didn't inflate prices...negative gearing, capital gains tax...

Maybe if the government's only control on inflation wasn't to suppress wage growth, it wouldn't be so much of a problem?

The concept of responsibility - personal and otherwise - died long ago.
A milestone in the decline would be the Iraq war. All responsibility for pre-empting this spurious conflict has been elided, though in this country rests squarely with the Coalition government.
Of course people have overcommitted when in a growth obsessed economy people are expected - then expect - to buy at any cost. Informed consumers make informed choices. Responsibility lays with both the consumer to research and the seller to provide the correct information.

Oh come on you bleeding hearts take on some personal responsibility. Do you need a house the size you have? Do you need a car, let alone two cars or three cars? Do you need all that pre-prepared food from the supermarket, the meal out, the alcohol, the cigarettes, the tickets to the concert or the footy? Do your kids need the designer gear or the constant child minding via an endless range of activities designed to keep them amused and apparently out of harm's way? DO you need the outsize television set and home entertainment centre?
What do you do for entertainment and what does it cost you? (Our local library is paid for through the council rates - and it is a great source of entertainment.) Can you garden (grow a few vegies perhaps?)
It's like the sob story in court, "I did it because I was abused as a kid or because I never had enough of this or that or I was not loved..." etc etc.
We expect too much, want too much and demand too much. Advertising tells us we have a right to it - and so do the politicians and the unions and the civil rights activists...no wonder we are so discontent.
Get out and do something creative...It can make all the difference!

The simple fact is that the average spent on housing as a proportion of average income has risen. Omitting the plasma screen telly and trips to the Gold Coast don't make a lot of difference to this.

In my household, we have a combined before-tax income of about $52,000. We own one car which uses 8lt of petrol a week. We don't have plasma screen telly, we have two weekends away annually. Our food bill is $50 a week for the two of us. We use 6kWhr of electricity a day and 140lt of water. And so on. We have $100,000 saved, and are saving another $20,000 annually.

We can't afford a home around here in Melbourne, where median house prices are about $350,000; stamp duty and other charges would add another $30-50,000 to this. Really, we can afford it, but any change in our circumstances - loss of a job, extended illness, interest rate rise, baby arrives, etc - would make us lose the house. Places cheaper than $350k are available, but as a rule each $2 cheaper means the place needs $1-$1.50 in work on it, so there's little net gain in money saved, or no net gain if the place is sold and capital gains tax paid.

We could try for a place further out, but then the money we save on the mortgage we'd have to spend on transport to work, so there's little or no net gain.

The mortgage we'd pay would be a $250-$350k debt, payments of $1,800 monthly and up - that's our entire discretionary income, basically. Any extra expense would hit us hard, there's no wiggle room in the budget. It's just that house prices are so high, driven high by low land availability and the tax breaks given investors. It's not because young couples are lazy and greedy.

But I guess it's always easier to blame the victims.

My wife and I, both in retirement, have built a home in delightful Portarlington, Victoria. We have not had to borrow, having had all those years in Sydney with a mortgage.

Felicity should perhaps consider the $31,000 in GST that we have paid to our builder, and the diverse other GSTs (eg $900 on floor coverings). In all, we will pay $40,000 in GST on our new home.

That money would be better employed in our self-managed super fund at say 8.5%.

It has been a keystone of Republican policy in the USA to encourage home ownership in a low interest rate regime because the GOP strategists believe that propery owners tend to vote conservative. 'Aspirational voters', 'asset rich' etc have become trite phrases. Now that the US mortgage market is going belly-up (my wife was in Boston a few weeks ago and was astounded at the number of forced mortgage sales, compared to last xmas when she was there before).

The tsunami is coming, comrades. Get out of debt if you can.