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this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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Australian Politics
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I was going to say that.
Good policy is more important than the 24 hour media cycle.
The media headlines framing the budgets in terms of "winner and losers" fuels this counterproductive notion that government policies serve some at the cost of others. For example, high house prices seem positive to house owners, but this comes at a long term cost to all of society.
I can't think of a good reason why people who own one home to live in should care about the average property price. If it goes down then the house they would sell & move to are both cheaper. Less stamp duty etc.
It only seems to matter when you want a big asset to borrow against or if you treat it as an investment that makes money by appreciating.
There are a lot of people who aren't able to make that logical step. Home ownership is a rite of passage in this country, mainly because renting is awful for many. When the media frames house price rises as positive, which was the framing for much of the previous 3 decades, many people accept this without question.
Err it probably matter to people who bought a house in the last 10 to 15 years. They will still have a huge debt on an asset that would be worth less than the debt effectively locking them in to an asset that may no longer be suitable for them along with having to funnel vast quantities of cash into that asset for the next 10 to 15 years which they will never see again and could be going to actual investment rather than bank shareholders pockets. You could argue they made their bed when they took out the mortgage but these people probably aren't landlords, they are mostly just people who wanted a house.
I understand that, and I empathise with their position. I have friends in this position. I'm talking about housing prices rising, not staying the same or dropping and putting them into negative equity. It will affect everyone negatively unless they are an investor. But I can't stand hearing the boomers in my wider social circle creaming their pants over house prices. I've put up with it my whole life. They never spared a thought for the future generations.
Yeah, I hear boomers complaining that some of their friends have based their whole retirement portfolio on having access to one tax incentive and they will lose everything if it changes. I empathise with them but it's not rocket science to diversify your portfolio and basing their whole investment on something that might be currently law, but has clear contention from a large portion of the population seems their risk appetite might be too big ..
To look at things from a charitable perspective, that generation experienced the most stable economic period in history, in terms of social mobility. I think a lot of them assumed that we had reached a stable normal (as in the fukuyama end of history idea). What they didn't realise was that the period they experienced coming of age was a historical anomaly, and now we are reverting to the normal (unequal wealth). They had a misplaced trust in authority. I can accept that things have changed, but I can't accept millenials being told it's their fault they didn't work hard enough. On the one hand I hear about about 17 percent interest rates, and then they go on about buying a house in Melbourne on a single income public service wage and leaving work for the pub at lunch time. The cognitive dissonance is rattling.