If Google is to be believed, countries like: Laos (95%) at number one home ownership; down though Kenya, Iceland and Brazil, 70 percenters, to Canada and Australia 66%.

Makes you wonder, when "wog" countries outdo us. Even Vietnam beats us.

Of course, the dwellings might be humpies, but with different living standards anyway, are those people any worse off than we are, with no mortgages, enough to eat, strong families. In Australia, only 30% of owner occupiers do not have a mortgage over their heads - which will still be there when they reach retiring age. The days of paying off your mortgage before you retire - the relief and the pride - seem to have gone, according to available information. And the bank of Mum and Dad won't be around much longer, as boomers pop their clogs.

I'm OK. I paid off three mortgages in quick time, with saving, sacrifice and common sense. Most of my generation is OK. But those coming on need to start calling out the self-serving bullsh.t artists posing as politicians in this country.

Not surprisingly, our dropkick politicians have allowed Australia to be the top overseas destination for Chinese property buyers in the first half of 2023. Chinese buyers are more active in the market than the official Foreign Investments Review Board data claims.

Chinese buyer activity helps explain why house values have risen so rapidly despite ongoing interest rate hikes. Chinese buyers purchase without a mortgage, and are unaffected by interest rate rises.

Meanwhile, in the Queensland town of Glenden, 300 houses look like being bulldozed after the Glencore mining company quits, and an incoming company wants to build a workers camp.

There's been many funny and disturbing comments
today, and in the past, from leaders whose comments
were examples of their obliviousness to the conditions
and daily lives of ordinary people.

Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, during the French
Revolution when told that the starving peasant
subjects did not have bread responded with - "Let
them eat cake."( Cake being more expensive than bread.)

Former PM Scott Morrison's comment:

"If you can't afford rent, buy a house," is both funny and
disturbing.

So many Australians, many of whom are young people with
low wealth and heavily taxed incomes and government subsidies
for a relative minority put upward pressure on prices for the
many, preventing a trade off where it is more difficult to
save a deposit for a home.

Therefore such comments are
disturbing and reflect on how far removed some leaders are from
the reality on the ground.

We have a housing crisis - and it is only going to get worse
with wasteful attempts at funding of expensive
undertakings such as the Commonwealth Games.
Rational planning is needed - which appears
that our elected officials are not
capable of undertaking
and instead of trying to solve problems, some play politics by
creating even further problems - which in many more cases are
very expensive to resolve.

Are we going to end up with "tent cities," as we see in other
countries?

Hi Foxy,

Morrison has become a pathetic character, a dead weight sitting on the Liberal Party backbench, offering nothing of substance, simply drawing his pay under false pretences. There he was yesterday addressing an almost empty parliamentary chamber, even his own side of politics uninterested, or uncaring, about what he might have to say. There was the "once great man" wailing to the few, crying of his innocence with his part in the scandalous Robodebt, sobbing how he's been framed by vengeful conspirators and detractors. Guilty as sin, Morrison fools no one! The quicker the bloke disappears into the dustbin of history the better!

Dear Paul,

I guess Morrison has a right to sit in parliament until he,
like Tony Abbott was, gets tossed out of his electorate.