Bubble trouble: Australian housing most unaffordable in the world!

Because the Government chose to prop up Australia’s banks, and not implement the Citizens Electoral Council’s Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill 2008, Australia has the worst housing unaffordability crisis in the world, CEC leader Craig Isherwood said today.

Mr Isherwood was responding to the 6th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, which ranked Australia as the most unaffordable housing market in the world, with median house prices 6.8 times annual median household income, ahead of New Zealand, 5.7 times, and the United Kingdom, 5.1 times.

Last month, visiting American fund manager Jeremy Grantham bluntly assessed Australia’s property “bubble” as a “time bomb”. Grantham forecast a 42+ per cent collapse in Australian property—our market is “twice the size” that it should be, he stated.

“The property bubble is teetering over Australia’s economy, and is threatening to come down on it with the ferocity of an avalanche,” Mr Isherwood said.

“The people of Australia are already the victims, because what has been mischaracterised as a ‘boom’ has all along been nothing more than an unaffordability crisis, crushing families and first homebuyers under severe mortgage stress.

“When the bubble does collapse, it’s the banks and financial system which will be wiped out, as the overinflated mortgage assets vaporise, which comprise the majority of the business of all of Australia’s banks.”

Mr Isherwood accused the Government of deliberately setting up the Australian people, by making the population pay through the nose for property prices artificially inflated by schemes such as the First Home Owner Grant scheme and the housing shortage lie, in order to prop up bankrupt banks.

“The CEC put forward Lyndon LaRouche’s firewall solution to the financial crisis in 2007, the Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill 2008, which attracted widespread support among Australian elected officials, but the government put the banks ahead of the welfare of the people,” he charged.

“To cover the government’s butt when it had to intervene in 2008 to prop up the banks, Julia Gillard lied, ‘No-one twelve months ago was talking about a global financial crisis.’

“Wrong! The CEC was, and still is, and is the only political party in Australia with the solutions to the crisis.”

Mr Isherwood concluded, “Australia will only survive this crisis, if the people demand that whatever the government, it puts the welfare of the people first, and not the banks.

“That’s the CEC’s fight—join us.”