Exposed - the Australian real estate scam

Finally, someone has done the work to understand the Australian real estate scam and exposed the details - here. Read it and weep.

Some quotes from the report:

"The country that promised limitless land, cheap housing and near universal home ownership to all comers now has the most expensive housing in the world amid very tight housing and land markets and little prospect of restoring the balance."

"As long as the government, the public and the media remain in denial, and self-congratulatory rhetoric continues that Australia has cleverly avoided the housing market correction it needed to have, there is little chance that matters will improve."

According to the Author’s, Australia’s housing market is in "a very dangerous and unstable situation which has received little adverse attention."

I suppose that it is not so difficult to understand how we got here given that there are so many vested interests - all aligned to feed-off those poor unsuspecting and often naive house purchasers.

The state governments, the banks, the media, the real estate industry, the multitude of service providers and all their associated hangers on - are quite merrily feeding at this trough - as though there is no tomorrow.

And then we have the ludicrous situation of various federal governments delivering a cash hand-out and calling it the "first home buyers grant" - supposedly to help some of those poor unsuspecting souls buy a house. In reality all it has ever done is push house prices higher. It should be renamed the "first home sellers grant" because that is what it is.

It’s quite amazing that when in opposition, all political parties promise to fix the problem but as soon as they are in government they revert to form and shovel cash at the *haves* while purporting to help the *have not’s*.

And the real tragedy is that almost no-one will actually get to hear the details of the problem because the vested interests will do their best to keep this "bad news" out of the news because they don’t want anyone upsetting their cozy little scam.