Key excerpt:
According to the late professor Patrick Troy, here’s how things were viewed in the early 1970s:
“The cost and price of housing continued to be a source of social and political concern. Over the period 1969-1973 the number of years’ average earnings required to buy a house site increased substantially. In Sydney, it increased from 1.7 to 2.7 years, while in Melbourne it grew from 1.2 to 1.8 years.”
Compare that to what modern researchers have to say about Australia in 2023:
“Since 2001, the national ratio of median house price to median income has almost doubled to 8.5, and the time required for the accumulation of a deposit for a typical property has increased from six years median earnings in 1994 to 14 years currently.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Overwhelmingly, they talked about the new and exciting Australia of the future, where workers would be highly skilled and living standards and wages would rise on the back of surging productivity and export competitiveness.
In the story Australians were told in the 1980s and 1990s about the need to have a more flexible and productive workforce, the future significant decline of home ownership among younger workers, and what that would mean for this country’s post-war social compact, was not really part of the vision.
They say the emergence of Generation Landlord has been partly fuelled by the growing financialisation of housing, reflected in the large increase in investors owning multiple properties in recent decades.
They say debt-financed landlords have been reframed in Australia as “mum and dad investors” who are valorised politically as enterprising, self-reliant, and providing essential housing for others, but who, upon closer inspection, are predominantly middle-aged and older, wealthier and higher-income.
“More recently, the rise of the ‘gig economy’ has signified a shift to more flexible work arrangements in which employment is undertaken on a time-limited, contract or temporary basis,” they wrote in March.
They say the modern reality of precarious and polarised labour markets is “inextricably linked” to these changed housing dynamics, and it’s challenging the idea of what is it to be Australian.
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