Australia cannot make housing more affordable while protecting homeowners from falling prices. The current downturn may reveal how serious politicians really are about fixing the system.

Do the two sides of politics want more affordable housing or not? They would die before they admitted it, but if you judged them by the way they’ve behaved, no, they don’t.

What they’d like is to live in two worlds at once. A world for homeowners where house prices kept roaring up to the skies, and a world for would-be homeowners where house prices kept gently falling.

The impossibility of living in both worlds at the same time explains why they invented the clumsy and pompous term ‘housing affordability’ – which allows them to allude to the possibility of falling house prices without having to say the word. The trouble is that in the real world, you can’t do what pollies would love to do: have their cake and eat it.

But if you force them to choose, the pollies will always go for rising house prices. Why? Arithmetic. The number of voters owning their home far exceeds the number of voters who, at that point in time, are seriously trying to afford a mortgage.

This is my best explanation of why our politicians have allowed our housing industry to get into the terrible state it’s in.

Do you realise that the median house price in Australia is roughly double the median price in America? Do you reckon that makes us twice as well off as the Yanks? If the houses........

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