What an amazing world where a financial structure such as the proposed AussieMac can be described as a "technology"!

Anyway, the real and only enviromentally supportable solution to the housing crisis is to stop net immigration and to begin to reduce the Australian population to levels that can be sustained at the lower levels of energy that will be available in the future. Stop population growth and watch the housing crisis disappear!

Yes houses are far too expensive and they are too expensive and not
being built, not because building them is too expensive, but because
land is too expensive.

Land is too expensive, because the chardonay set that runs urban
planning, pontificated that they would force people into high
density living, rather then urban sprawl.

I'm told that taxes on charges on a block in NSW, are over 100k$
alone. That added cost prices land out of reach of many, for its
as much as the house might cost, just in fees!

Make land available (Australia is not short of land) at an affordable
price and companies will build homes, that families can afford.

Pure and simple, the chardonay set got it wrong and we are paying
the cost for that.

I wonder why Australia needs so many new houses, when the population is hardly increasing.

Even rural towns with a shrinking population have new suburbs that eat up the bush and consume extra resources.

Perhaps it has got to do with the fact that 1 in 4 households is now a single person household.

I recon you got it right HRS, the popularity of no husband households, and people that just prefer to live alone. This must cause a lot of extra building going on. That wat makes the reserve bank figures somewhat on the rubbery side, when they try to figure out weather they raise interest rates or not. There has got to be another benchmark on which to calculate their predictions.

HRS,

Australia's population is actually growing by 1.6%, which would imply a population doubling time of a little over 43 years if it continued. This is due to both natural increase (momentum from past high fertility rates) and net migration. See

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/3101.0

The high housing prices may well have been deliberately engineered by the federal and state governments, which have abandoned decentralisation and are encouraging population growth. They make people and corporations who own land richer, they make the banks richer, and they increase the participation rate because families must usually now have two incomes to survive. They also buy the acquiescence of the older generation, who already own houses and don't usually have much superannuation, to government policies such as means testing of the aged pension and mass migration.

Mick If we don't ave population growth we dont ave anything. so ya better come up with something else to put ya blame on.