Stephen Koukoulas
speaker
2,355 appearances
24 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 20 Sep
Stephen Koukoulas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 24 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 6.
Appearances
And that's why a few people are getting a little bit antsy about, you know, what does this mean?
Sure, a correction is welcome.
It improves affordability for first-home buyers and the like.
But be careful what you wish for because we know that when house prices take a big hit –
It has implications for household spending, for bank balance sheets, and we can get into trouble if the house price fall is too big or it extends for too long a period of time.
But at this stage, it's a welcome correction in house prices.
A brilliant question, and I'll try to be short.
One is a structural issue.
One is a cyclical issue.
Structurally, we know that immigration, even though it's coming off a bit, is still going to be around about 250,000 people.
We Australians are still having babies.
So the net increase in natural increase in population is around about 325,000, 350,000 people a year.
They're going to live somewhere.
So that's the structural side of the housing market.
We do need to build more houses.
over the medium term to make sure that when the cycle turns in a year or two, because housing is such a slow moving beast that we have enough houses for people there, but cyclically with cost of living pressures, maybe a bit of softening in the labour market, the interest rate hikes of earlier this year, that we do have that problem where, yes, it improves affordability, but if you've lost your job and you're a potential first home buyer because the labour market's weakened and you put your
numbers into the mortgage calculator, you're not going to get a loan, so you won't take advantage of the falling house prices.
So there's a whole lot of issues in housing.
You've uncovered a couple of really, really interesting ones that hopefully Michelle Bullock might even touch on tomorrow at her talk.
Well, one thing I've learned about the monthly labour force numbers is they're extremely volatile.
Showing 941–960 of 2,355 · page 48 of 118
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