Here’s why nothing effective is being done about housing affordability.

In the past 12 months, every Australian who owns a house or apartment, which is most of us, made an extra $82,648, on average, from the increase in its value, and since only half of that gets taxed, it’s more than the average wage.

The ABS reports that the total value of dwelling stock at the end of March was $10.7 trillion, $917.4 billion more than a year ago, and there are 11.1 million dwellings.

Actually the 12-month capital gain for home owners was 12 per cent, since there is a total of $2.3 trillion in mortgage debt, so the total equity of Australia’s home owners increased from $7.5 trillion to $8.4 trillion.

Over five years, the compound growth in the value of Australian housing has been 10 per cent, much more than the 7.4 per cent annual return from the sharemarket.

Woe betide any politician stupid enough to blow the whistle on that gravy train.

But if you own a house, don’t worry – they’re not stupid: Housing won’t be made more affordable. It is not politically viable to do anything that costs anyone any money, let alone the majority of citizens a lot of money.

It means the drawbridge to the castle of home ownership, in which most voters are happily ensconced, has been pulled up: Only those with a boat to cross the moat can gain access to it, because the median house price in Australia has doubled as a multiple of average weekly earnings in the past 25 years, from four to eight times.

It is a devastating failure of government policy at all levels that has changed Australian society for the worse.

The “boat” in the metaphor is access to parents’ housing equity for the deposit and a........

© The New Daily