Transcript of AE 1353 - The Goss: How the Australian Property Market Got Cooked!

G'day, you mob! Pete here and this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news whether locally Down Under here in Australia or non locally overseas in other parts of the world, okay. And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right. If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goss.

So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content About many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills.

In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy Membership at AussieEnglish.com.au, where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time. Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising and that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode guys. Smack the bird and let's get into it.

Peaches! I've got my cat here. She's like..

She looks like the queen. She's sitting up there on the couch..

Such a fatty. She doesn't move around much at all. And even though I feed both her and the other cat Scraps the equal amount, he's ripped and she's.

Yeah, but he gets to walk around the block every night.

Yeah, well, he does go outside a bit more.

Excuse me.

How have you been, Dad?

Getting over bronchitis, as you can tell.

Yeah.

So, apologies for the wheezing and the coughing.

Good times. So I thought we could talk about property and housing, and the future of housing. And what it was like when you were younger. It's funny, I saw one of those videos where they were interviewing, um, people I think in the 60s would have been like ABC or whatever..

In their 60s? Or from the 60s..?

60s. From the 60s.

Which is ironically the same people. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that's about, I know at the time they'd be in their 80s or something now, right, because they were 20 or so trying to buy houses then. And um, they were talking about how expensive property and everything was, you know, I think they had to buy land for $1,000 or something and then build a house for a few thousand dollars, which would have been, I imagine, a few years wage back then. But yeah. What was it like for your parents in terms of buying property? And they would have done so in the 50s?

57. My parents bought the house that we lived in in 1957, and they paid £500, $1,000, for the house.

Which would be the equivalent of about what..

It was, probably my father was, if you do it, who knows? I always roll my eyes back about the equivalent of because I don't know how you can adjust for that, because..

What's relative..

Relative to his wage is the thing. At the time, my father was probably earning between 250 and £300 a year.

God, imagine having a house, like..

He was probably earning. He was probably earning 5 or £6 a week.

But imagine having a house today that was one and a half year's wage.

Yeah.

Like, oh my God.

Yeah. Well, the first house that we bought was just over double mine, and it was a cheap house out in the hills.

Yeah.

We would have had to have paid twice as much as that for a small house in suburbia. But even then, your average, the average house price in in the 80s, when we were buying, was probably..

100 grand?

3 to 4. Yeah, about that 3 to 4 times the average wage. Now it's about ten times the average wage. So.

Those were the days.

Yeah.

But yeah. So and I think it's the same for Nana and Grandpa. My, my mother's parents, I call them Nana and Grandpa. Um, they would have bought their house in, what..

In the 70s. Pretty affluent suburb of Camberwell, right, in Melbourne. Although it wouldn't have been at the time. I imagine it was.

Eh, semi affluent, not as affluent as it is now.

Yeah. Now it's become insanely expensive, but I think so. They would have bought their house for something of the equivalent, right?

I don't know what it was, but.

And then nowadays it would be worth 4 or 5, $6 million.

Yeah. So probably, probably three.

Three. You reckon? Yeah. But millions of dollars, right? So it's, it's probably gone up tens of times in value in their lifetime.

Yeah.

Um, so, yeah, I guess why did we get on to this topic?

Property.

Yeah. Yeah. But what happened? It came up in one of the previous episodes, right? And we were like, we got to cover this.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

It's mainly the property market and how ridiculous prices are getting.

Yes.

And why and people being priced out of the market. So do you want to talk about why prices have gone through the roof? Well, at least what your two cents is,

It's it's- Ian's theory. Um, it's a combination of as all things are economically. It's a combination of a whole bunch of things. I think it's a change. Firstly, it's the personal expectations of the buyers. When we were buying house, your mum and I were buying a house. We bought a two bedroom cement sheet shack in the hills.

And yes, five years later we put, or six years later we put a, double the size of the house, put a large extension on when your kid's got bedroom each and a living room and that sort of stuff. But our expectation at the time was we'll buy what we can afford.

Yeah.

And you can't do that now. You can't buy a two bedroom house now.

But that's the double edged blade, right? People want bigger houses.

Yes. And that's..

So, developers build bigger..

Build bigger houses. Yeah.

But then..

Because it's actually relatively cheap to buy a, to build a bigger house. Because you're building a house has a effectively a base rate of the amount of money you're going to need to spend. And obviously, the bigger the house, the more materials and the longer it takes to build. But that's sort of the icing on the cake. So you can build a five bedroom house for not much more than a three bedroom house, assuming you're still going to have two bed- two bathrooms, and a large open plan living area and a double garage. But the extra couple of bedrooms don't make any difference.

Yeah.

But that's the expectation now, is that people want 2 or 3 bathrooms, a large open plan living area, a double or triple garage, five bedrooms, uh, as the first house they buy. And I go, really?

Well I guess my point is. Yeah, as a result of that, there are now no small options.

Exactly.

You have to get a unit or, um, you know, a townhouse and even those now are through the roof in terms of price.

And I think the other thing, too, is that the, the demand for housing has clearly gone up because our population has increased. When I, you know, in the 1970s, uh, Melbourne's population was just over 2 million. Now it's five and a getting close to five and a half..

Close to six..

Over five. Um, and, and so it's actually much harder now. Very few people, when I was a kid, moved into a new house.

Yeah.

They just didn't do it. You know, you bought an existing house.

Well, I imagine too, back then, and houses, if you wanted them built, you probably would have needed a personal architect..

Yes.

To put together. They wouldn't have been done on bulk, and you would have been paying through the nose, relative to your wage, and everything else back then, to put these houses together. Whereas today there are all these companies like Metricon and whatever..

Yeah, they're big developers, and they..

Make certain..

They go out, they go out and buy 20 hectares of land and build 100 houses on it that are all..

Slapped together.

Copies of each other. There's four plans. It's actually the same house. You can just shuffle the rooms around a little bit, and if you really want to go silly, you can put a second storey on.

Yeah.

But, uh, but they're all basically the same, and that's cheaper still to buy one of those than it is to go and buy like where we live in Ocean Grove, buying an existing house in Ocean Grove. Old Ocean Grove. Uh, yes. You could still go and buy one of the old three bedroom shacks, but the land's worth a million and a half dollars.

Yeah.

And so you're starting at a million and a half dollars, and you've got a shed on it. Whereas if you go two kilometres up the road to the new housing development, you can buy a house for 750,000 and it's brand new.

Yeah.

So what are people going to buy?

Well it's nuts, right? Because again, it's so crazy to think the difference in. Price there is really, um, access to the beach in terms of walking to it.

Yes.

Or hearing it, or smelling it, or seeing it, right. Like it's, that's really the premium there, at least.

Yeah and living, and living in an area that's treed, you know. You, you walk down your road and there's, there's trees and mature trees in the, in the street and the houses and, and so on. Whereas the, all of the new development is..

Ten years ago it was a farm.

Yeah, it was a farm. So it just had nothing on it. Yeah. It's not like they've cut trees down. There wasn't, there weren't any trees to start with.

I'm impressed living here in Curlewis. I'm impressed with how quickly the trees in the streets are actually sizing up.

And they've done like, it's an off..

And they, it takes 20 years and they're seriously mature.

But they've done pretty well with the planning. I think when they buy this farmland, because there are certain groves of trees that are on that farmland.

And they leave them there and make them..

And they leave them and try and incorporate them into the area, which is probably going to keep the price..

I mean, the the creek down the road is a good example of that, that they've left, that they didn't just sort of bury it and put a big drain in underneath it. They left it and put bike paths down it and playgrounds next to it and those sort of things. So I think developers do a reasonably good job these days as opposed to development in the 90s. That was really just slash and burn and and just stick, you know, as big a house as you can possibly get on a smallest block as you can possibly do.

Yeah.

I think now there's a lot more open space built in, and some developers are building in community centres and, you know, and those sort of things into the planning for the areas.

I really liked how Canberra had it set up when I was living there. Because the new suburbs, they would have like a set of shops in the interior of the suburb.

Yeah.

They would then have..

Like concentric circles around it.

Well, they would have outside of those shops, they would have a high rise, kind of like apartment blocks.

Yeah.

And then outside of that, they would have the suburb with the, you know, houses that were being all built up. But it meant, it was interesting because you could go from suburb to suburb and kind of have an idea of where you needed to go. You would just look for the high rises and you're like, oh, the shops..

The shops are going to be next to those.

Yeah, yeah. So I kind of like..

And we're talking about high rises, they're three storeys high.

Yeah. They're not storey things like. Yeah well half a dozen or something. But it was kind of really interesting just driving around and constantly seeing those kind of like, um, geographical symbols and you're like, oh, that's where the, the Woollies will be, you know, in there.

Yeah, exactly.

But yeah. So what do you think of the policies brought in by Howard? Right. Negative gearing and capital gains tax, and their involvement in increasing prices as well. And because it seems like from all of the people that I've listened to and the things I've read and watched, that was the point at which house prices started to deviate from wage growth, and people started speculatively investing in property. And that's what makes our property market so fucked up compared to a lot of other places around the world, because we're spending all this money propping up prices.

Yeah, well, I'd say negative gearing I don't have a problem with, particularly because if you're. As an example, we own a the house that we originally bought and now we have people renting it.

Yeah.

Now we notionally negatively geared it. We never quite got to negative gearing, but..

You scumbag.

Yeah, exactly. But in a sense that you're, as an income if you're going to be taxed on the income, the rent that you get from it, then you should be able to as with every other expense you have for your income, you should be able to counter that with expenses in order to maintain that. Now you can't. All you can do is negatively gear against.

Do you want to explain what it is?

Yeah. So negatively gearing is effectively you are trying to make sure that your expenses for maintaining that property are higher than the income.

Yeah. So that..

And therefore you get zero tax on the income. But you still have to pay the expenses. You can't invent those expenses. Um, and as interest rates went up, then negatively gearing was, negative gearing was easier. Because you can, you can get a deduction, a tax deduction on the interest that you're paying on the mortgage, that you own, the property on which you should be able to do. I don't have a problem with that. Um, what the problem I have with capital gains. Capital gains tax is the reverse. And that is that if you sell something that you have made, it's increased in value over the period you've had it. And let's face it, the only thing that happens to is collectables like art and jewellery and property.

Well, shares, right.

Yeah. Or shares.

Usually.

Usually. But the problem we had with property is that the capital gains on property is only half what you pay on everything else that you get capital gains on. And that was to try and increase. You know the the whole idea of that was to say, well, we're going to make money out of capital gains. The government is taxing you on the money that you have made, which is fair enough. Some people would argue the reverse. So why do I. Because I, you know, speculatively invested. Well, why do I, when I sell it, why do I have to, you know, pay the government something? Well, you've made it income. You've sold it as income.

Yeah.

And but the idea of making, um, halving the negative gearing, sorry, halving the capital gains on property was to try and get people to buy property. And guess what it did.

The whole point..

It, that worked.

The whole point of that, I thought, was to try and get people to invest in property, to try and have more places people could rent.

It was. Yeah.

Yeah, but then it's I don't know if it's necessarily had that impact as, as it was initially thought to. Again, I'm not the best at arguing these cases. And from what I've seen when people broke it down, it's it's not having anywhere near the kind of incentive for people to build houses. They just buy already constructed houses.

Yeah, they do.

Wait a few years for them to go up in value, and it's just passed around constantly. So it's not having the desired effect that originally was planned.

Well guess what? That's a smart thing to do. If you buy a brand new house, it's actually going to devalue over the first 5 to 10 years because it's going to require maintenance in ten years time. If you buy a ten year old house, the devaluation is already counted. So everything from there on is increasing in value.

Yeah.

So yeah.

But that's.

Yeah.

And that's but that's where..

You don't buy a new car as an investment. You buy a good second hand car as an investment.

Yes. But I guess that's where all these like incentives that the Howard government brought in in the late 90s, early 2000 were sort of I guess they probably came from let's do this because it's going to make a difference and be good. But they didn't account for the fact that, you know, market forces were going to absolutely pour millions upon billions of dollars, trillions of dollars into the housing market and push prices up through the roof. And now we have an issue where the average person, I think if you want to buy in Sydney, you need to save a deposit for 43 years to be able to buy one at today's prices.

Yeah.

It will take the average human being..

Melbourne's much better.

Yeah.

And Brisbane is not much better.

It's. It's like chasing the dragon. Except the dragon's accelerating.

Yes.

Right?

Exactly.

So, and this is where it's going to be interesting with the boomer generation, your generation, as you guys get older and then die passing on your properties. What's going to happen with the haves and have nots? Because you're going to have the younger generation coming up and now being able to vote and seemingly having zero chance of ever being able to afford a house. So I wonder how much governmental change of legislation is going to take place in the next few decades, because it seems like the Labour Party and the Liberal Party want to do nothing, absolutely zero, to reduce or even stagnate house price growth. They're always like, we want it to be sustainable. We want sustainable growth. And the issue that the reason they're doing that is because at the moment, their voter base is largely people who have property.

Yeah.

And also I think your retirement superannuation..

Part of that is invested in property.

Is all now tied to property. So if you had properties halved tomorrow, a lot of people in Australia would be fucked in terms of their investments, right. So we're between a rock and a hard place with that. And the dumb thing though, that I keep hearing, is people like the liberals or even Labour saying, you know, we'll get you to buy a house with a 5% deposit or you can access your superannuation. And it's like, dude, this is just going to push prices up.

Yeah, exactly!

Like, this is just gonna push..

And it's going to make you it's going to make you poorer.

It's robbing you from..

It's robbing your future.

Because what would it be the equivalent of, if you took $10,000 out of your super today, that would be the equivalent of how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in 30 or 40 years, right?

Exactly. But it's also, and all of these things will allow you to, you know, take out a money out of your super to pay a 5% deposit. All right. And they maxed it at 10% of your superannuation. So anybody who's buying their first home. So it was first home buyers only. Anybody who's buying their first home. Let's do the arithmetic here. Let's call them and stretch it a bit and say they're 35 years old.

Yeah.

Now, most first home buyers historically have been a lot younger than that.

Not any more!

Not any more. But let's say they're 35 years old.

I've got my hand up!

Let's say on that basis, they've been working for 15 years. Their average person, who's been working for 15 years on the average wage, average salary has probably got something like 100 to $200,000 in their superannuation. Maximum.

And if they're only able to..

And if they take out 10%, they can, let's half, let's split the difference so they can take out $15,000. $15,000 is not going to be a 5% deposit on anything. So it's a political game.

Yeah.

It's a stunt to say, we're going to allow you to do this because it's going to make no difference. The only difference it's going to make is that people are going to try and do that.

Well, they'll add to it. They effectively just now everyone boosts deposits by 10%.

Exactly.

Or whatever the amount of money.

And if all it does is it make it, make it easier for you to get into the property market. Guess what? The property market's going to go up.

Exactly. That's why I'm always so scared.

And the first home buyers grants, they were always a farce.

Yeah.

You know you can get $20,000 from the government if you buy your first home. A

nd you're like, well, well..

Now. But all that did for, for if you were the person buying the house was go, I can afford $20,000 more now.

Mhm.

And so you're buying at an auction, or the developers go, here's the flat price. You don't negotiate a price on a new house.

Yeah.

They say it's $750,000. Well, I can afford $770,000 now. And they're like, well, it just it's now 770.

Exactly!

It's like great. So yeah, this it's, it's just a joke, I don't know. And as someone who only recently, I guess, what, three years ago, two and a half years ago, bought my first house. It's it's one of those things that just makes me sad.

Yeah. It is.

It seems it's, it's almost offensive now when I meet people who have loads of houses, I just it's so funny how quickly that changed. Like, one of my, um, one of my friends owns a whole bunch of properties, and.

Well, no, he doesn't. The bank owns a whole bunch of properties.

But you know what I mean. And, yeah, he's he's he's having other people pay off his bank loans.

Yeah, exactly.

So earning him..

The bank allows other people to live in his, in those houses. And..

But initially I remember, like, you know, a decade ago or whatever, it was like, wow, you're so far ahead. And now I just think, scumbag. Like, I mean, and it's, I mean, it's harsh, but I think too, with the awareness now I'm like you, surely you have the awareness now to realise that participating in this, um, long term self enrichment is at the expense of other people. It's not the same as investing in the share market.

No.

Where other human beings aren't as negatively affected by for a, for a, for a, um, thing that they need to live. Like, yeah, you can lose money in the stock market, but you're not. You're not without a roof. You're not without water. You're not without.

Well, the thing is, if the stock market goes up, nobody loses.

Yeah.

Whereas if house prices go up, lots of people l

ose. Exactly. And so that's, it's so funny how I've noticed that tone kind of shift. And I've, I had to have this kind of difficult conversation too, with a friend recently where he was like, he's been so diligent and saved up, you know, I think $200,000 in the last decade or so with his wife and put it into an offset and he's like, man, I can pretty much pay off the house. What do you reckon we should do? And I'm like, ethical me would say, pay off the house and invest the rest in the stock market or EFTs or, you know, whatever else. Unethical me would say, you know, as it would say, buy another property like and that's the, the sad thing. And I said to him, I'm like, you have to work out what you want to do. Like if you're thinking communally or about the community, you know, and what's best for Australia as a whole, don't invest in property. But if you're thinking, how do I make as much money as I can for my family and for the children? And how do I have another property that I can potentially pass down to one of my kids? If you reduce your kind of community to your immediate family, I would say buy another property, you know? So it's sad that we've ended up in this position.

And yeah, but part of that, too, is that there's an argument also that says it doesn't matter who owns the property, as long as there is property available for people to live in.

Well, and they continue to live there after they retire.

Yeah. A: that and, but also that it's affordable.

Yeah. That you know, I don't care if somebody owns ten properties, or the bank owns ten properties, and they've got people renting them because at least those nine houses have been financed and now somebody is renting them.

Well, this is..

The challenge though, is that this is like those people who have started squatting in houses that are left empty and derelict for ten years or something, right? And after ten years, they can claim it as their own.

Yes.

And there's people that go around now in Australia. Find those houses and list them online.

Yeah. Um, I think the, the only way it will change it's. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube in a sense that the government can't change their policy overnight. Well, they can't change their policy around, you know, financing of housing and stuff if that's done and dusted, because there are so many negatives to trying to change those.

But I think they have to do things like changing negative gearing and capital gains on new properties.

Oh yeah.

Like it's one of those things where..

Well, capital gains when capital gains came in, it was Howard that halved it for housing. But when capital gains came in, it was, uh, Paul Keating. And it was because that was a way of the government taxing the wealthy.

Yeah.

You know, if you're making money on assets that you own and you sell them, then the government should pay for them. Um, that was fine, but they didn't reverse it. You know, they grandfathered it in so that because the house that we have in, uh, the original house we bought, we bought three months before capital gains was brought in. So any capital gains that we make, if we sell that any capital gains is exempt from tax. Yeah. Um, and so that makes sense. If you suddenly went, all right, we're going to drop it. Do you go, well, do we drop it from anything moving forwards, or do we increase it for anything moving forwards, or will we reverse it? But but I think the biggest thing that the government can do is to put financial are the only incentives that count, but put financial incentives and planning policies into medium density housing to say, you just you change people's expectations on what is affordable by changing what's available.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's no longer sensible for. And Melbourne and Sydney are two good examples of that. That in order to buy, sensibly buy a house now, for most people, on an average salary, you cannot live within 50km of the central business district in Melbourne or Sydney.

Yeah.

50km.

Yeah.

And that's how big the cities are now, you know, that you have to go and you have to be on the outskirts. And that's where all the new housing developments are.

And the sad thing is, how many hours a day is that sucking from people? Because it's unpaid work. It's just travelling constantly two hours a day, 3 or 4 hours a day..

Or you end up living in ghettos. You know, and not ghettos in the old, you know, socio economic sense, but ghettos in the sense that you you don't have access to the things that you get by being closer to a big city. Even though you're living in the suburbs of Melbourne, you're an hour and a half drive away at midnight. You know, your mum went to visit her parents yesterday. Um, when we first moved down to Ocean Grove. Um, going to visit them was less than an hour and a half drive each way.

Yeah.

Now it's at least two hours. Probably closer to three hours.

Just because of traffic?

Just because of traffic!

Yeah. Um, and so it's it's madness. So we have to change people's expectations. And you were talking about the Canberra model is that you don't create ghettos, you create communities, You create a. When you build a new suburb, you don't just build more houses, you build the entire thing. And it's planned. And at least Canberra has been planned from day one, and it was always planned to have those little satellite towns.

Yeah.

Canberra, the big you know, the city of Canberra is made up of about six little satellite towns that have not been built when it was first created in the 1930s, but been built every decade, a new one popped up.

It is one of those cities that I just wish I was still living there, but I wish it was closer to the Bush family.

Well, it's close to the bush!

Yeah, but bush bush like proper forest, right where you don't have to drive hours and hours to get to it.

You don't have to drive far from the ocean. Yeah. It's not well, you got to drive for 2.5 hours to three hours to get to the ocean.

It was if everyone lived there, like if you guys lived there, if my sister and her family lived there, and if it was closer to the beach, I would be like..

Isn't it funny because I hate it?

You really hate it. Why is that?

I don't know, it's almost like it's, it's almost like it's been over planned. It's sterile.

But that's here. Look at Curlewis, right?

Yeah. No..

But look around the street.

Yeah, but this is just suburbia. And I grew up in suburbia. I was grew up in a very pleasant suburb.

I was moulded by it, shaped by it!

But it's. But Canberra as a whole. You drive around Canberra and yes, it's pleasant and it's driving is pleasant because, you know, it's only 250,000 people that live there.

Yeah.

And they're not much bigger than Geelong..

On the weekend..

And half of them are not there. Exactly. So they're all, they've all gone out to the coast. They're holiday houses on the coast or they're gone..

And there's so many politicians. They fly home.

They go to Sydney or Melbourne. Um, but it's I think it's just sterile. It's one of those places where it has no, um, sort of old community that, you know, the oldest, go to a pub, go to a pub in Canberra.

Yeah.

And it just doesn't have the same feel. It's like. Where do you go to go and eat in Canberra?

Monkey Wrench? Was it called Monkey Wrench or monkey.. The Grease Monkeys!

Grease Monkeys.

It's a burger place.

Yeah.

Loved it. But. But. Yes.

You go. There's no. There's one suburb that has this little community of restaurants and bars and things everywhere else. It's like there's you go to the central business district, which isn't really doesn't exist. There's a couple of bars and a couple of restaurants. There's nothing else there. 4:30 in the afternoon, when all the public servants are finished, it's closed! It's like tumbleweeds!

But that's what, that's what I mean about. I would love to live there, but it'd be closer to, like, to have that vibe of what their suburbs were like and the nature around it.

Right here would be perfect. I love the fact that you would see kangaroos in the street. There was echidnas around. There were birds everywhere. You felt like there was farmland all over the place with trees.

Well there is.

Yeah, exactly. And so I love that.

That was the way it was planned. It wasn't planned as a suburban sprawl. It was planned as a bunch of villages connected.

Yeah.

And so I guess that's why I like it. But, yeah, the housing thing, I think they're going to have to change legislation around negative gearing and capital gains. They're going to have to deal with migration and the rate of migration in Australia, because that seems to be a recent thing.

Part of that is exaggerated because it's what do you do with statistics? More than half of the people who get included in migration statistics are students coming to Australia.

It's beside the point. At the moment we don't have like I mean, the problem is we, we haven't done anything to adjust how much is coming in whilst we have a rental crisis and don't have..

Students aren't renting houses.

Yeah, but they're renting somewhere. They're living..

Yeah, they're renting. But the majority of developers went mad in Melbourne, as an example, in the city of Melbourne of building these 50 storey student accommodation buildings.

Yeah.

They're mostly empty.

College Square.

Yeah, they're mostly empty. Well, you lived in College Square, which is about eight storeys, but there are some of these ones in the Latrobe Street stuff that are just ridiculous.

Yeah.

But they're mostly empty, so.

Well, I don't know. Open it up. Let other people rent it then.

Well, but the trouble is that they've been built as student accommodation.

Yeah, but I think that's..

Very cheap and small. The government has to deal with supply and demand. So they need more houses built, which they're currently falling behind heaps on. And the liberals would be way worse as well if they came into power with delivering that much.

Well, the challenge there was that was post Covid.

Yeah.

As you know, the ambition is there, but it's availability of materials and cost of materials.

Exactly. And so there's all of those aspects to it. You know, the capital gains negative gearing, the amount of people needing these things at the moment, the lack of supply. And then I think we need to change our culture of investing in this stuff. You need to. That's the saddest part, I think, for me, is that we spend so much money propping up house prices speculatively, speculatively, instead of investing in businesses. And so now to I've heard that it's insanely difficult to get a business loan from a bank, but you can get ridiculous loans on property. Because the expectation is that property.

But but a property, but a but but it might be unproductive, but a property has some inherent value.

Yeah. Well.

That even if the value goes down and..

It's still the..

He only goes broke, the bank takes over the property, they get something out of it. If you start up a business and you go, look, I need 150, $200,000 to start this business, and I need that for the for the next five years. So $1 million loan over a five year period and you go broke in the first year.

Yeah. I know, but like if you go to the US it's a lot easier to get a loan.

Of course, it is..

That sort of thing. If you go to the UK it's much easier. And so we need to somehow adjust things to set that up and change incentives.

The other one that we have to do is we have to stop, um, non Australian citizens and residents from being able to buy property. Housing property. If they want to buy a shopping centre, that's a different thing.

Yeah.

Because I don't care who owns the shopping centre. You know, the parochial part of me says it should be an Australian. But the other part of me says that I don't want somebody from overseas owning the house next door to me.

Yeah.

I don't care if they come and live in it.

Yeah, yeah.

But they shouldn't be able to own part of Australia..

And not be in Australia.

And not be in Australia.

That's that funny thing of like, can you buy a property in China?

Or Japan?

Yeahh.

Or India?

Can you go and do it?

No.

Yeah.

No.

And yet we would see.

I can't go and buy a house in the United States!

Yeah. And yet we would see that as like. Well, of course. But then when you say that in Australia so often, they'll be. That's racist. You can't. Why would you prevent racism? Yeah, exactly. You're like, dude, just you can be whatever race you want as long as you're in Australia and buying these properties..

I don't care if you're Chinese or Hungarian. If you want to come and live in Australia and you buy a property and you're intending to stay, that's fine. But not as a speculative investment because the Australian property is booming. Yeah. The number of people from, you know, Hong Kong is a good example. The number of people from Hong Kong who were buying Australian houses.

Yeah.

And, you know, auctioning on the internet.

Again. Yeah, yeah. And that's it. The market overseas for people wanting to make money on these investments would be much larger than the people at home wanting to try and just buy them to buy the house to live in. And then it pumps it up. So. Yeah. Exactly. Anyway, a really long rant about an incredibly boring topic, but hopefully you guys found..

If you get to, if you got to this point, congratulations.

Yeah. That's it. Send me an email and say I loved it. Property's my, my jam. Thanks, Pete. Anyway, see you guys!

Bye!