Brendan Coates

Thank you very much.

It's good to be with you.

Grattan Institute is an independent public policy think tank.

Now, most think tanks will say they're independent, but we do take it more seriously than most because our funding isn't tied to either political party, to the government of the day, or really to particular interest groups.

So Grattan's funded by an endowment.

It was put together by the then federal government and the Victorian state government.

That money is run by or managed by a board that's made up of people from both sides of politics.

And it means that we are steadfastly independent because there's no consequences if we offend one side of politics or another.

And we try to use data and we try to use evidence to sort of try to solve some of Australia's most pressing public policy problems, of which housing is, you know, one of the most urgent.

Yeah, look, it's very liberating and it does allow you to take, I suppose, have a more open mind about what the solutions are to a problem.

In my experience, no one side of politics has a monopoly on what are good ideas.

And so some of our policies will tend to be more politically palatable to the Labor Party.

Some of our policies will be more politically palatable to the coalition.

And the idea is to do what is going to work that would be in the best interest of the Australian people and try to communicate that forcefully.

and then hopefully persuade whoever's in power at the time to take those up.

Yeah, so home ownership is falling pretty sharply in Australia, particularly amongst younger, poorer Australians.

It's also falling amongst older Australians on low incomes.

So you've got these falling rates of home ownership and the drivers of that are the fact that young people struggle to put together a deposit unless they've got support from the bank of mum and dad.

And older Australians aren't in the workforce for long enough if they've got some savings to pay off a mortgage.

So that's where the idea of a shared equity scheme came from.