The housing bubble in Australia over the last decade has been an out and out rolled gold disaster - and now it is time to pay the piper.
Think about the country we had ten years ago and the country we have now. Try to put to one side the fact that you might have been old enough and lucky enough to catch a freak property wave, and what you will see is that the potential of a stripped back, tariff reducing and competitive Australia in the 1990s has been thoughtlessly and needlessly wasted on housing. In the last decade we have seen:
- enormous transfer of wealth from financially illiterate younger generation to older generation who did absolutely nothing productive or useful (from a national GDP perspective) to obtain the wealth.
- malinvestment in houses rather than infrastructure; research and development or national savings.
- it becoming an ingrained theme of Australian culture that you get rich by going to Bunnings and doing some renos (rather than say, developing a new business idea, creating a business plan or employing people to work creating something valuable).
- a generation of morons for politicians who think their job is to spend taxpayers money like a drunken sailor to bankroll the farce.
Now it will probably take at least a decade for this explosion of national unproductive debt to play itself out. I think it will go down in the history books that we wasted trillions of dollars on selling each other houses.
