Alan Kohler

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

Look, I didn't go to the lock-up because I had to do stuff on the ABC News, which obviously gets broadcast at 7pm before the budget comes out, so I had to do my analysis of the budget before I read it, which, you know, I think that's a good way to go.

Well, in fact, I searched the budget in vain for stuff that hadn't been leaked.

And I couldn't really find much, if anything.

I know.

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.