"But looking through the hundreds of pages of transcripts it's possible to get a good idea of why home ownership is shrinking, and the best place to start is the evidence from Morrison's department, treasury, then run by Joe Hockey.
Graph 13 in its submission shows that up until the end of the 1990s the median dwelling price stayed in a tight band of 2.5 to 3 times household after-tax income. Then in the space of three years it shot up to near four times after-tax income and has stayed there ever since.
What happened at the end of the 1990s? In September 1999 the government halved the headline rate of capital gains tax, making negative gearing suddenly an essential tax strategy. Whereas before, renting out a house at a loss for tax purposes had been mainly an exercise in delaying tax, because the eventual profit made selling the property would be taxed at close to the seller's marginal rate; afterwards, with the profit taxed at only half the marginal rate, it became an exercise in cutting tax.
Would-be investors poured into the market. One in every six taxpayers became a landlord. To get there and stay there they've had to outbid would-be residents. As the Reserve Bank's Luci Ellis put it succinctly in evidence to the inquiry: "It is a truism that if an investor is buying a property, an owner-occupier is not.""
