To be fair... I did say that they were chasing the easy buck
at any cost... even if it means stiffing every generation who is born after yours.
When "chasing the easy buck" results in what we have today, I personally think that you have to be almost morally bankrupt to willingly do that to others whether those "others" are perfect strangers, your kids or your kids' kids.
I don't think that is done everywhere else in the world. Actually, maybe except for China where they repeatedly chase the easy buck by doing things like selling melamine-tainted baby formula to falsely prop up protein content in lab tests. That one caused deaths of children and the people behind it were executed.
The housing industry obviously isn't quite as serious as that but what has happened here has still had quite an effect on the lives of the younger generations and will change the future of our Country. Expensive housing results in people waiting longer to leave home and start renting (if they ever do), it results in people holding off having kids until they're older... which results in increased numbers of abnormalities like downs syndrome which has knock-on effects for the rest of the country in terms of $$ care required for that child's life.
As for the government not being able to do anything, they absolutely could have done something the moment they saw it happening. Instead they sat back and marveled at the dollars that it was bringing in and how it made our country seem rich on paper. Look at how many politicians own investment houses. They have been grooming the system because their own bloody snouts are in the trough! Why would they want to change it when they themselves are profiting from it?!
The next logical step was for other countries to notice how our housing market was going up and so overseas investors started buying our houses to offshore their money in a more stable market than their own country, the government AGAIN didn't step in. They just gobbled that **** up and let it happen. Why would they want to stop it?
That just compounded the problem because those overseas investors weren't actually interested in renting out those houses, they just bought it to park their funds in a more financially-stable country. So the removal of those houses as rentable properties caused even less supply of houses in our country with already such a high demand that we couldn't satisfy.
Did the government step in THEN? **** no! Allowing overseas investors to buy - but not rent out - houses had a knock-on effect of driving up the prices of homes even more because the supply kept being reduced. With so many pollies having a vested interest in their own personal property portfolio, why would they get involved and stop it? It's quite the opposite - it made them happy as a pig in mud because it increased the value and equity in their own properties.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-2...etails/8453782
David Gillespie has EIGHTEEN investment properties. That's eighteen families forced to rent houses at inflated prices. Barry O'sullivan has 33.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-2...estors/8454978
Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse. In my view it's just as bad as insider trading and should be illegal for politicians to profit from the systems that they've shaped.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politi...20-gvp2g5.html
When this article was printed it began with the sentence "When Fairfax Media asked MPs to talk about their investment properties, an email went out telling them not to cooperate". That particular line has since been removed and every copy of the article that I can find has been scrubbed of it. It's now only visible in old copies of google cache.
The government won't fix this. They have too much of a vested interest in it themselves.