Peter Tulip

G'day, Craig.

Glad to be with you.

Yeah, they're two very big policy issues.

I think they're two of the biggest problems Australia's facing at the moment.

Yeah, so amongst our parents' generation or our grandparents' generation, it was very common for young families to buy a home of their own, but that's just not happening anymore.

So it used to be that home ownership amongst 20 to 30-year-olds was something like 60% back in the 1980s, and now it's fallen to below 45%.

So there's been this huge fall in home ownership of young families, and the reason for it is the cost.

That families just have real difficulty getting their deposit together.

That saving for, typically, you want to put down 20%, and with prices rising as quickly as they have, families just don't have that money anymore.

Yeah, so, Craig, that's the thing that we've been working on a lot at the Centre of Independent Studies.

We think that the reason housing is so expensive in Australia is because of planning restrictions or what a lot of people call zoning or land use restrictions.

It's just very difficult to supply housing.

Just simple economics.

When you restrict the supply, the price goes up.

Right, so it's not just a problem for homeowners.

About a third of the population typically rents.

It's actually an increasing share.

They're being squeezed really badly.

The housing cost is not just the price, but rents have also risen a lot.

So we've done a lot of work trying to estimate the effects of planning restrictions and zoning restrictions on housing costs.