"So you Lefties Don't go Blame The Feds, Because It Is your LEFTIE State Labour Governments That sold You Off."
Dear Grant,
My comment about the only effect that Howard's first home buyers grants scheme has is to inflate the price of houses is true.
But my post was never intended to be a 538-page erudite analysis (in descending order importance) of ALL the factors that are feezing young home buyers out of being able to own their own home.
IMO the most damaging develoment (in all states but not in the ACT) is the way local and state goverments (irrespective of party affilation during the past five decades) have loaded their commual infrastructue and even their staff training costs on the price of developent approvals for housing estates - imposts that can add more than $100,000 to the cost a standard block of land - imposts that are demanded up-front before a sod it turned by builders and developers who have to borrow the cash sometimes for years as an new estate grinds it way (fee by fee) through the development and then the building approval processes.
This whole cachophony of buck- passing and hidden mark-ups then attracts a second cachophony of mark-ups on mark-ups by real estate agents (as commissions on an inflated final sale price) as inflated stamp (on an inflated sale price) and council rates and land taxes based on an inflated sale price to form a Tower Of Babel and Obsfication known as:
'Fleece The Home Seeker".
But the ACT is even more cruel.
As well as all the aforesaid diddles, fiddles and and white-collar rorts, in the ACT (again no matter what party is in control of the ACT Assembly) the most damaging factr is Labor or Liberal Chief Ministers cannot WAIT to get their grubby paws on the rivers of cash that flow from the ACT Government (unlike in state capitals) being the ONLY bulk supplier of housing land (via the leasehold system) to the ACT housing industry.
Labor and Liberal MLAs have deliberately and with malice of forethought choked supply (like De Beers Diamond Corporation) to create an artificial land shortage (in the midst of huge tracts of vacant land sutiable for homes) to maximise their obscene Robber Baron mark-ups of around $200,000 per block over the $0 per block equivalent the land cost them when they received huge tracks of ACT land from the feds at self-government.
Nobody can do anything about that $200,000 monopoly mark-up ripoff (that is unobtrusivley embedded in 'package' deals) as federal competition regulations apply only to private Visy-Board type market manipulation NOT to 'crown' rorts, fiddles and blatant cartel profiteering.
