Alan Kohler

Well, anyway, I thought the piece you wrote while you were in the lockup was great.

If I can quote from the first paragraph, shareholders are being whacked to give customers a bit of hope.

And I thought that was pithy and great.

Thank you.

Well done, James.

Maybe you should just give us a bit of a burst on explaining that.

So what I said on the news in my preview was that to deal with housing affordability requires two things, economics and psychology.

The economics is simply supply and demand.

You need to more or less flood the market with new houses.

more supply than there is demand.

You need to both increase supply and reduce demand and they're doing what they can on supply, I think.

There's a lot to be done on supply and there's nothing simple or quick about that.

And, you know, and I've been pointing out that the National Housing Accord number of 1.2 million houses in five years, they're way behind on that.

What Claire O'Neill says, the housing minister says about that is that, you know, it takes three or four years for virtually all measures to sort of take effect.

So it'll speed up.

So, okay, let's see what happens.

On demand, there's two ways to reduce that.

One is tax reform, which they're doing, and the other is cutting immigration, which they're also doing.

which, I mean, just by the way on the immigration, I mean, it's interesting that One Nation and now the Coalition are carrying on about immigration, but actually immigration is coming down quite a lot.

I mean, it's a big, there's a big reduction in immigration going on, not as much as Canada did, which was 90%, but still, it's a fair bit.