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Frank
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Or maybe Albanese is just a little bit ashamed at his role in a treacherous political class that profited sensationally from cheap power and lots of houses—and then jacked up energy costs and throttled housing supply for everyone who followed. Albanese’s first property purchase may give us a small-sample case study. The future PM paid $146,000 for a two-bedroom Marrickville shack back in 1990. Subject to only standard inflationary forces and stable supply-and-demand, that house would today be worth about $350,000.
But it isn’t, of course. You’d be lucky to get change from $2 million, and that’s before having the place sprayed for Greens. Australia’s political class—currently led by Albanese, but all are guilty—has created unaffordable housing from a land with unlimited cheap energy and an amount of space equal to Texas times eleven. As this is written, an IPA media release reveals that the average price for our homes has reached $1.016 million.
At which point Albo’s advice to young buyers, as much as we’d all wish to hear it, may no longer be viable. The PM generated his own millions the safe, old-fashioned, house-buying way, thanks to the fossil-fuel-powered and population-managed nation he’s now dismantling, but younger Australians are encouraged to try something different.
Albanese suggests magic. “The global shift to clean energy is the biggest economic transformation since the industrial revolution,” Albanese told his friends at the Business Council of Australia in early September. “And it is a profound economic opportunity for Australia.”
Yes. Before us lies a glittering world of plenty, brought to us by higher energy bills. “If we act now, if we get it right,” Albanese went on, in the style of a 1980s time-share salesman, “we can set our nation up for a new era of growth and prosperity.” Nobody ever asks the obvious follow-up question: “How?” Or, more expansively: “How will energy from wind and solar make us rich? Rich enough, say, to buy a damn house? How?” ...
Australians were once able to buy houses with the money they’d saved by working at ordinary and worthwhile jobs. Even Albanese pooled together enough scratch, and he was just a back-room Labor flunkey. The future isn’t so sweet, however. Sunlight and space and the right infrastructure and skills and research, Albanese said, would make Australia “a destination of choice for data centres and the new jobs of the digital economy”.
That’s one hell of a closing pitch, isn’t it? We’re going to be a global capital for six- figure housing deposits and … data centres. All of the pain from our clean energy revolution will definitely be worth it. Tm Blair
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