As you grow older you should be able to tell your children that “back in my day” we had it much tougher!
But I don’t think I can tell my kids that it was harder in my day with a straight face any more given the housing situation they face.
Over summer I had to help my son find new accommodation in Brisbane while he studies there. It was a brutal experience.
Massive amounts of people apply for each place even for places with sky high rent.
We eventually found something, but others miss out. The number of people who are homeless in Australia should be a cause for national shame.
There are lots of good ideas to try and help the situation.
The LNP will allow young people to access their own funds in superannuation to buy their first home, rather than be forced to put their own money into soulless financial assets which just help enrich bankers.
We need to cut the ridiculously high level of migration that Labor has allowed in. Around 500,000 people have arrived in Australia in net terms each year during Labor’s Government, and we are building just 170,000 homes each year.
And we should help build the local roads, sewerage and power connections so that local government can open up more land for development without having to charge excessive developer charges. The LNP would establish a $5 billion fund to do that.
Long term, however, we will not make housing more affordable if we keep cramming people into just a few cities in Australia. More than half of all Australians live in our top 5 cities. Over 14 million people live in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.
Compare that to the United States. Just 18 million Americans live in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix, and that is just 5 per cent of the population of the US.
So, Australia crams more than half its people into 5 cities, whereas America has just 5 per cent of its people in its top 5. Amazingly, Brisbane would be the 4th biggest city in the United States.
The problem is that apart from Newcastle and the Gold Coast, there are no cities in Australia in the 500,000 to 1 million people range. A city of this size provides the diverse range of professional and technical jobs to attract families without delivering the congestion and housing affordability issues of large cities.
There is no reason why great towns like Toowoomba, Bundaberg, Gladstone, Rockhampton, Mackay, Townsville and Cairns could not grow to house more than 500,000 people. If we did this, we would be able to house another 2.5 million Queenslanders in a country town, effectively creating another Brisbane but spread out across the state.
If we instead cram those 2.5 million people into Brisbane, house prices will continue to skyrocket, and our children will not be able to afford a home.
That would be bad for our kids but also for our grandkids if we get any.
It now takes the average Australian seven years to save for a deposit. Most people won’t have children until they’re settled in their own home. If that is delayed until their early to mid-30s then people will have much fewer children than they would like.
Our birth rate has already crashed to just 1.5 babies per woman. At that rate, each generation will be just 75 per cent the size of the previous one (1.5 divided by 2). That means that after just three generations there would be just 11 million Australians descended from the 27 million Australians alive today.
That would fix the housing crisis, but it would be very sad if our children have it so tough that they cannot have kids of their own.
