Australia’s most expensive illusion

Why have Australians, otherwise alert to unfairness and quick to condemn political failure, accepted a settlement around work and housing that now punishes so many of them? Exhaustion is the familiar answer, with people absorbed by immediate housing costs and by the awkward conversation with a parent who may or may not be able to help. They are worn down by the ordinary demands of work and care, and by the labour of staying afloat in uncertain conditions. This however, misses something more unsettling – many Australians have been worn down by the housing order while also being taught to imagine themselves through it. At the heart of this is a mistake of self-description because a renter is rarely addressed as someone whose present security deserves political weight, and a worker whose pay is being swallowed by housing costs is rarely invited to ask what kind of economy would let wages support an ordinary life. The dominant invitation points elsewhere – see yourself as a delayed owner, treat the current position as temporary, and keep faith with the deposit, the first unit, the family loan, the suburb just beyond reach, or the rate cut that may reopen the door. Your present life may feel precarious, but the culture around you insists that your real identity lies ahead.

We have been infected with a strange political psychology in which people are encouraged to judge public policy from the imagined standpoint of a future status they may never occupy. Once a renter absorbs the idea that they are really an owner-in-waiting, it becomes harder to think like a tenant, a young employee with no asset appreciating while they sleep can feel protective of capital gains they have not received, while a household priced out of ownership can become nervous about measures that would make housing cheaper, because cheaper housing has been made to feel like an injury to the future self it has been taught to protect. That imagined future does practical work by making hardship feel transitional and drawing political sympathy away from the life a person is actually living towards the life they have been told to expect. It encourages renters to worry about the landlord they might become, leads young workers to fret over a tax position they may never hold, and asks families without inherited wealth to keep faith with a market that increasingly rewards inherited wealth.

A society can mislead people without lying to them in any simple sense, especially when so much of the language around property sounds benign, even affectionate. Parents urge their children to buy as soon as they can, banks speak of possibility, mortgage brokers speak of options, politicians praise aspiration, and property commentators warn that reform could unsettle ordinary investors. Around dinner tables, rent is still called dead money, despite the awkward fact that rent is often the money keeping someone else’s asset alive. The power of this language lies in its familiarity because it rarely appears as ideology, more often, it appears as advice. Get a foot in the door and think long term, because falling behind is presented as the great danger. These phrases are not sinister in themselves, and in many households, they are spoken with care, yet their repetition trains people to treat their present condition as an embarrassment to be overcome rather than as a life whose claims should be taken seriously.

That is why the present housing debate feels so confused. Many people who would benefit from lower prices are made uneasy by the thought of prices falling, while people who have never owned investment property can still feel implicated in the fate of investor concessions. Tenants who need stronger protections can find themselves speaking the language of investor confidence, as though their security depends chiefly on the reassurance of those who rent homes to them. This is better understood as a consequence of the way security has been organised in Australia, where ownership is treated as the only fully respectable form of stability. Renting remains too insecure for too many people, social housing has been left with the status of a residual safety net, and retirement is often dramatically easier for those who own outright. In that environment, the wish for property makes sense as a rational response to a society that has made non-ownership feel like exposure.

From here, a reasonable wish for security is absorbed into a culture of property escalation and the desire for a home becomes entangled with the hope that the asset will rise. Providing for one’s family becomes tied to the ability to outbid another family, while retirement comfort becomes linked to the continuation of tax and market arrangements that exclude many younger people from entry. A modest ambition is pulled into a speculative order and then presented back to us as common sense. Once this happens, aspiration becomes difficult to criticise because criticism sounds like an attack on ordinary hopes. Nobody wants to be against the young couple trying to buy, the parent helping a child, the nurse with a small investment unit, or the retiree who believed the rules they were given. The reality is untidy, and any account that turns it into a pantomime of villains and victims will fail. Most people are adapting to incentives they did not design, trying to protect their children and reduce the risk of falling behind in a country that has made housing the great instrument of private safety.

Still, understandable behaviour can produce an unjust settlement, because a bad incentive does not become good when decent people respond to it intelligently, and the fact that households have built plans around the present order does not absolve the order itself. The phrase “mum-and-dad investor” shows how this difficulty is managed in public language. It is one of the most effective terms in Australian politics because it domesticates ownership, placing the landlord in the family kitchen before the argument has even begun. A discussion about incentives and bargaining power is replaced by an image of ordinary people trying to get ahead.

The phrase works because it contains truth, since many landlords own a single property and do not experience themselves as powerful. Rising interest rates can frighten them, maintenance can be costly, and the investment may stand in for confidence they no longer have in wages, pensions, or government provision. Yet none of that removes the relationship at stake – the tenant is paying for access to shelter, the owner is acquiring or holding an asset, and the law decides who carries insecurity when the relationship strains. Whether that arrangement is fair cannot be settled by personal decency alone. Australia has trouble staying with that distinction because we prefer stories about character to questions about design. When the landlord seems decent, the system feels less objectionable, when the investor is someone’s parent, reform can seem ungenerous, and when the tenant is imagined as a future buyer, present insecurity is demoted from a political condition to a difficult stage. The result is a curious blindness in which renters are numerous enough to shape the country, yet are still spoken about as though they are passing through a waiting room on the way to becoming real stakeholders.

A person’s present life does not lose importance because they hope for a different life later. The possibility of future ownership does not suspend a tenant’s need for stability, and the promise of capital gain does not answer a worker’s need for a wage that supports ordinary life. We understand this in other areas of public life, where we do not say that a patient’s present pain counts for less because she may recover, or that a student’s current schooling can be neglected because he may become prosperous. Housing, oddly, is allowed to evade that ordinary moral discipline, as though people should wait for recognition until they become owners. Waiting is everywhere – wait for supply to improve, for rates to fall, for wages to catch up, for the market to cool, wait until you can move further out, buy something smaller, borrow more, or receive an inheritance that turns distance from the market into a strategy. The instruction is rarely cruel in tone and is often delivered as realism, yet realism of this sort can become a polite name for powerlessness.

Something similar occurs with the ladder metaphor, which suggests a visible path of upward movement, flatters the person who has climbed and disciplines the person below, while implying that the difference between them is effort or at least timing. Contemporary Australian housing is less like a ladder than a moving structure whose distance from the ground varies according to family wealth. A parental deposit can erase years of saving, earlier entry can create equity that later entrants must borrow against, and someone can work hard for years, accept a suburb far from support, and still discover that the market has moved faster than their household can follow. Parents who help their children are not the object of the criticism, since most parents with the means to help will do so, and love quite properly pays little attention to the purity of economic theory. What is important is what the need for help reveals. When family wealth becomes the hidden infrastructure of home ownership, the old promise of broad access has already frayed, even if the public language continues to speak of effort while the practical contest is increasingly shaped by inheritance.

That shift alters the psychology of the country because those with help can see their success as earned, which may be partly true, while the assistance that made success possible recedes into family intimacy. Those without help are left to experience delay as personal insufficiency. Inequality is translated into biography, becoming a story about planning, sacrifice, and the supposed failure to act at the right time. If ownership increasingly depends on parental assets and timing, with access to credit doing much of the remaining work, then continuing to present it chiefly as a reward for discipline is misleading.

The danger of misleading stories is that they organise lives, pushing people to delay children, accept punishing commutes, move away from family support, and tolerate insecure rentals while sometimes taking on debts that make their futures fragile. Each decision may be rational for the household making it, but in aggregate they reveal a society that has outsourced too much of its burden to private endurance. The culture then praises endurance as seriousness, calling the person who manages to borrow responsible while treating the person who asks why responsibility now requires such exposure as someone who wants the world made easier. That suspicion is a political red herring as it prevents a more basic question from forming – who made the rules under which ordinary responsibility became so punishing?

At the centre of the difficulty sits a contradiction almost too obvious to mention. Australians say they want homes to be more affordable, yet rising home values are still treated as evidence of national health. These desires cannot be reconciled forever, because a home cannot become easier for a new buyer to purchase while remaining a reliable source of escalating wealth for the existing owner. The country keeps trying to soothe both sides of the equation, which is why so much housing policy sounds like comfort administered in advance of disappointment. Grants and deposit schemes may help particular buyers, but they can also pour extra money into prices already beyond the reach of wages. Supply targets are important, especially in places where planning constraints and construction bottlenecks are real, though supply alone cannot answer the question of who bears insecurity while the market adjusts. Appeals to aspiration are emotionally potent, yet the word often results at the precise moment someone has asked whether the current arrangements are just.

A more pertinent line of inquiry would begin with the lives people are already living. It would inquire whether a renter can build a stable life without having to apologise for renting, why wages no longer support dignity without speculative gains doing the work that pay once did, whether a child’s chance of future security should depend so heavily on the balance sheet of her parents, and whether a tax system that rewards gains from scarcity deserves to be treated as morally neutral simply because many people have arranged their affairs around it. A democracy depends on citizens being able to describe their interests with some accuracy. If people are continually encouraged to think from the standpoint of an imagined future owner, democratic judgement is distorted before the policy argument begins, and they may vote against the life they have in order to protect the life they have been promised.

That distortion narrows sympathy, turning the renter into a threat to investor confidence, the buyer into a rival at auction, the neighbour into an obstacle to redevelopment, the older owner into a symbol of hoarded advantage, and the frustration of the young into impatience. Public life is crowded with private anxieties, each one real enough on its own, yet together they leave little room for a shared account of what housing is for. Housing is where ordinary life occurs before it is a vehicle for wealth, and the order of those claims is crucial. Once the investment function dominates, citizens begin to see one another through the market positions they occupy or hope to occupy, while the common question of how people should live gives way to the private question of how one might escape exposure.

A better account of aspiration would not require Australians to give up the wish to own a home. That wish remains understandable, especially after decades in which policy has made ownership the safest harbour. But aspiration should not be narrowed until it means gaining entry to an asset system whose rewards depend on continued exclusion. It ought to include the possibility of renting without humiliation and working without being consumed by housing costs, alongside the chance to raise children without needing an inheritance to secure them against the market. Such a society would still have owners and private investment, and people would continue to make plans and seek advantage. What it would resist is the conversion of every citizen into a speculative subject, measuring each reform against the interests of a future investor they may never become.

The old dream promised that work could become security, and for some Australians it did, while for others that promise was always weaker than national mythology admitted. Today the dream has altered again, asking people to support arrangements that burden their present lives because those arrangements may one day reward their imagined future lives. People renting insecurely are encouraged to think of the rent they might one day charge, workers under pressure are invited to imagine assets doing what wages cannot, while young people without family wealth are asked to remain loyal to a market increasingly governed by family wealth. Australia has persuaded too many people to act on behalf of a future self who may never arrive. It has taught them to see exclusion as a stage, debt as proof of seriousness, inheritance as private good fortune rather than public evidence, and insecurity as the price of eventual belonging. The dream has become a trap because it flatters those caught inside it, telling them they are not really excluded, only early in the story, and that the policies hurting them now may become useful later once they cross the threshold. That will be true for a shrinking number, but for Australia, the cost of maintaining that belief is becoming intolerable.