Hardest hit of all in the housing market today is the Indigenous people of this land, who had their land and economy stolen from them to create this country in the first place.

Unable to travel to the city without a permit to find a job that paid less wages than a white person, an Aboriginal person was unable to own land by reason of his colour until way after 1967.

Unlike many whites who lived in public housing and were able to buy their houses, at subsidied rates by the taxpayer in the sixty's and seventy's. Government attempts to assist Aboriginal people in the past to purchase housing has met with open hostility from the public and the press even today.

Therefore why should my taxes be used to assist white first home buyers to purchase a home or subsidies investors. Cut the demand and the prices will fall and limit small investors to two homes and that should even things out.

I can't afford to own a house in county where my family have lived for thousands of years, my twenty - years in the armed forces came to nothing, so why should I be helping out some invader through my taxes to buy their first home. Spend less on the arts and multi cultural functions and purchase factories or other dewelling and convert them to housing without the need to rip up the bush. The last thing we need is another cheap development without public infustructure.

The economy is a house of cards, occuppied by consumer junkies addicted to DEBT.

Eat, drink and be merry.

Have babies, so they can make babies who can pick up the tab. Hmmmm, or not.

The beast needs more and more debt to keep going. Central banks keep the tap running and the credit keeps flowing. More money, loose credit, slack lending. Prices go up.

US Fed doles out the dough at every threat of collapse and keeps us living blissfully unawares, at a comfotable distance from the precipe. Last drama occurred a couple of weeks ago with sub-prime machinations bursting a few bubbles. Some scary daze for those retirement folios. A LOT more buried in there, lets hope they can, er, 'manage' it. Lotta folks getting foreclosed in the US. OZ market is more disciplined and not so cavalier as the yanks. Still somewhat exposed.

Whether currently high prices are a normal part of the boom-bust property cycle or the plunge protection teams keep inflating away is anyone's guess.

Property prices, rents, living costs are symptomatic of consumer largesse. Negatively geared landlords and taxpayers are subsidising renters, as the cost of carrying a property is often twice the cost of renting it. And it takes 10-15 yrs to get on top it. Cant service debt and expenses with capital growth. You need other income. Majority of rental property owners have only 1 investment property. They are predominately middle income earners investing with fairly modest retirement objectives. The 'haves' and 'have-nots' are usually a tiny minority at the extremes.

How to fix it, l dont know, however... when finding oneself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. The ones who shouldnt be borrowing in the first place would be best placed to not start digging.

gimme, gimme, gimme... NOW.
bigger, better, more... NOW.
waaaaah.

Unless you are already several years into a mortgage or already have a secure job under the Award system, it's probably too late for you to get what the previous generation had.

The media are always telling us to "buy now or you'll miss out" and giving plenty of examples of how to make big money out of Real Estate. Even foreclosure auctions are being touted as "great opportunities" to get into the market.

Part of the problem is that nobody is building affordable houses at the lower end of the market. No more cheap entry-level hardiplank estates are being created for young families. They are now brick with double garages, carpet and all the mod cons.

I see the massive mortgages young people need to take out to achieve their dreams and it makes me shudder. There is no way my children, two of whom are young adults, could even consider buying their own homes for quite some time – even though they have reasonable jobs and live at home rent free so they can save as much as possible. At their age I owned my first home with a very small mortgage and tiny repayments – and that wasn’t all that long ago.

It seems to me that what’s really lacking is the political will to do anything about this problem which has been steadily getting worse for years. With the notable exception of people like Senator Andrew Bartlett who seems to have been a lone voice calling for national action on this for years, it’s something that’s only mentioned at election time by the major parties and then the promises of action are so vague as to be meaningless.

Young people being able to buy their first home should be at the top of the priority list closely followed by affordable public housing both to rent and to purchase.

Strikes me, the government likes high house prices because it drives the economy, especially with that great stamp duty revenue.

I think contributing factors:
1. Two income households can make bigger loan repayment = higher house price

2. Significant parental asset infusion (i.e. parents lend kids deposit) = young people can afford to enter unaffordable house market

3. Investors get tax benefit from home ownership = more people with more money own more houses (but can only live in one at a time). And believe me, they know every trick in the book to avoid Capital Gains Tax.

Houses are for living in, are they not? They seem to have become investment opportunities instead.

It's all about the means and the end. Money is the means, living is the end. Houses are not a means to make money. Money is a means to having a house to LIVE in. Lets get the focus right and start from there.

Of course, no government is going to be willing to remove houses from their entrenched role in the economy growth.

But when ordinary people can no longer afford a place to live we have to ask, what is our society all about?

M.Whitehouse, you miss the point about investors. You can make points about living in homes not making money from them, all you want. But the issue is that we have a shortage of houses available for rent, so we need to be encouraging investors to enter the market, not discouraging it. Rents ARE generally significantly less than mortgage repayments on the same type of home, so generally renters should still be able to save (there are some odd exceptions to the rule that exist but they are rare - I was lucky enough to get into the market on the back of one of them). And investors cannot avoid CGT if they sell. If they dont declare it in their tax return they are committing fraud, and are liable to pay up to double the tax in penalties and jail terms are even on the cards. The ATO has a data-matching arrangement with the State Lands Departments and has started to issue audit notices to people it can see have sold land but havent declared in their returns.