Proof Australia ‘not the lucky country’

It is no exaggeration to say that the nation is in the grip of a housing crisis so full-blown it

threatens to blow the very roof over our heads.

The problem is it is a triple-pronged crisis, an unholy trinity of forces pounding owners,

renters, and those who can’t even get their foot on the doorstep.

The one third or so of Australians trying to pay off their mortgages are essentially engaging

in BDSM with the RBA.

The Reserve Bank is deliberately punishing us in an effort to make us stop spending. When

we finally submit and do as we are told the unspoken agreement is the pain will stop.

That is bad enough but at least for most it is a form of very expensive roleplay. Assuming we

can withstand the punishment for as long as we need to, the hikes will eventually stop and

things will eventually go back to normal.

Still, it is a particularly perverse form of BDSM when the person who has the safety word is

the master instead of the slave.

Having raised the spectre of Philip Lowe in latex, we can now turn to those for whom it isn’t

a game: Namely those who unwittingly overextended themselves based on the RBA’s ill-

advised quasi-promise that there would be no rate rises until 2024.

As it turns out this was not actually ill-advised: Advice issued to the RBA in 2019 specifically

said they shouldn’t make such predictions.

Or, in RBA-speak: “The paper recommended state-based guidance to provide flexibility to

react to unexpected developments, noting a number of risks associated with calendar-based

forward guidance.”

That “number of risks” is now as large as the number of families whose homes are at risk.

Whoops!

And to make matters worse the fall in house prices means those who may end up having to

sell their homes could well get less than they paid for them — minus whatever they owe the

bank of course.

This is what polite society might refer to as a cluster-congress.

But it’s only the beginning. For anyone trying to rent a home the market is tighter than an

Irishman on Saturday night.

Rental housing is now just as unaffordable as home ownership. In fact it’s even more

unaffordable given that those desperately trying to get a place are somewhere in aisles of

the famed Melbourne department store Buckley and Nunn in ever being able to afford the

latter.

And so we have those who can barely manage their mortgages being screwed, those who

can’t manage their mortgages being screwed even more, and those who can only dream of

a mortgage being screwed most of all.

So much for the lucky country.

And then we have those who are slipping between the cracks in the floorboards —

sometimes literally.

This is a crisis that carelessly transcends state boundaries but which is unashamedly most

pronounced in NSW, namely a veritable famine of affordable housing — public housing,

community housing and subsidised rentals — at a time when the hunger has never been

greater.

In the nation’s first and largest state the waiting list for social housing exploded by 15 per

cent — some 7,000 people — last year alone.

With Australia’s population ever-growing, and Melbourne set to overtake Sydney as the

nation’s largest city in a few short years, this is an ominous bellwether.

And it gets worse. As was rightly pointed out at a housing summit I attended just this week,

the 57,000 figure for NSW isn’t actually people at all.

It’s applicants. Households. Families.

In other words, for every one of those bureaucratically processed numbers waiting in a

queue — for more than 10 years in many cases — there are untold numbers of children and

partners who are also hanging on the line.

This is a disgrace. And while NSW might be suffering the most acute chasm between

deliverance and need, it is a national disgrace.

If Australia, as one of the wealthiest nations in the world — and undoubtedly the best —

cannot guarantee a roof over its citizens’ heads, then there is really no point to us. There is

no point to civilisation at all.

And the most frustrating part is that this could be delivered with a relatively minuscule

investment in social housing — $150 million in NSW alone — that would be recouped many

times over in the costs to welfare, health and criminal justice when people are cast to the

scrapheap.

There is a veritable Everest of evidence to support this, so much so that it’s a waste of ink

and pixels to repeat it here.

All any government has to do is simply act. And its reward will be eternal, both in this world

and the next.