Chris Richardson

And when interest rates in Australia rose, you would think, well, hey, presto, house prices will come down, they'll become more affordable.

The alternative approach

said, well, look, you know, for decades, the Australian housing policy has been the word no, you know, no, you can't build it.

no, you really can't build it there in that leafy suburb because older and richer people don't want you to.

If in the rare occasions we say yes, we put all these rules and regulations that make it stunningly expensive to do.

And if you roll on to today, our interest rates have risen a lot over that period.

And it is the equivalent of

of the Reserve Bank abolishing negative gearing and the entirety of capital gains tax discounts of any kind many times over.

So whether you're talking about interest rates, capital gains tax,

Negative gearing, you are talking about the cost of money going into property, right?

We've done the equivalent of all this stuff around negative gearing and capital gains taxes, and it did not stop a big rise in house prices in Australia.

We now know, right, we have great evidence that the way to fix housing in Australia is going to be the political fight of the rest of

our lives.

You know, it is convincing older and richer Australians who don't want change in and around the suburb where they live, that if population is going to grow this much, we need to change a lot.

Yes, I did.

Very happy to see it.

Also fair to say, you know, it's again, not a big enough lever.

So the budget has an extra $2 billion essentially going into infrastructure around housing, all the, you know, the sewerage and the rest of it.

And that is great because we haven't been spending enough.

But the ultimate is supply in Australia requires street by street, suburb by suburb, council by council.