‘It’s not a house… it’s a home…’ Darryl Kerrigan, The Castle.

It was the mid-1990s, economically, the hard times induced by Keating’s ‘recession we had to have’ had left its mark. This famous line was about to drive a nail through Keating’s chance of re-election and condemn the ALP’s economic credentials in the minds of the electorate for decades to come.

Today, mortgage rates have returned to the serviceability costs faced by Sydney families in 1989, but with higher debts, this is a more difficult prospect for young families.

Global Central banks ‘unprecedented monetary interventions’ at the behest of governments during the Covid panic has set off a time bomb, ensuring high inflation at a time of high debt. A stagflationary crisis that will likely remain a feature of the 2020s.

After the GFC, Global banks moved interest rates to zero, and house prices soared, meanwhile wages stagnated. These monetary excesses have increased the risk of a recession and may bring about sustained real house price declines not seen in Australia since the 1930s or the 1890s (Long Term Housing Prices, Nigel Stapleton, 2007).

For affordability in the Sydney housing market to ‘mean revert’, prices would need to halve. A coal-led surplus, along with a shortage of rental housing should, for now at least, offset a plunge in asset prices, but this is not going to save Australian households. Australian households have become the second most indebted in the world. Young families are trapped in debts they are struggling to service.

Meanwhile, government excesses have built up over the past decade. The ALP-led social schemes misallocated capital and workers away from productive enterprise. Instead of paying down debt, the Rudd government introduced schemes that morphed into giant money pits. The Rudd’s meanwhile got rich.

Morrison and Frydenberg did not attempt to correct these excesses and doubled down on the ALP’s big spending, plunging the Australian government further into debt especially over Covid. Morrisons’ home-owner building grant misallocated investment and increased the cost of building. We won’t mention the ‘single Mum low deposit scheme’. Canberra insiders deluded themselves into thinking that government spending and the associated inflation would set off a new ‘post-war boom’. A fake boom for a fake war.

Morrison then attempted to make like a pirate, spending as much as possible to ensure re-election. It failed. This period of fiscally irresponsible governance has left a foul taste in the mouths of many conservatives. The federal Liberals failed Macro-101, and Econ-101 forgetting Micawber’s principle that served them so well under Howard:

‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’

The instinct of the Liberal Party for the past few years has been to throw their hands in the air, ‘Let the voters eat cake, so long as we get a small piece in the process!’

The ALP is now doing everything possible to pin the blame on Lowe’s woeful track record. Lowe for his part cannot put the inflation genie back in the bottle, and will likely do more harm than good if he leaves rates too high for too long. Once the RBA induces a crash, it will likely need to stimulate again. After a decade or two of mismanagement, Australia’s luck may run out.

The Liberals seem unable to get out in front of these problems, unable to read the room. If they don’t have the gumption to represent ‘Howard’s battlers’, they need to question their existence. They seem to be continually fighting a losing, reactive game, experimenting with talking points on clueless focus groups and never rocking the boat. Where are honest, real Australian families (truly the forgotten people) supposed to get representation?

Australians now have a treasurer whose ‘vision’ is ideological hogwash for the benefit of the ‘champagne socialists’ the ALP represents. Their agenda for 2023 is ‘the Voice’, it is a distraction, exactly how it will help Australian families will never be explained.

The Kerrigan family needs a Lawrence Hammill QC, someone prepared to go in and bat for the battler.

‘You can’t buy what I’ve got…!’ says Darryl.

Lawrence echoes these remarks in his closing statement to the high court:

‘They want to pay only for the house, but they are taking away more than that, so much more. Sure, the Kerrigans built a house, then they built a home and family.

‘You can acquire a house, but you can’t acquire a home. Because a home is not built of bricks and mortar, but love and memories. You can’t pay for it, and you’re only short-changing people if you try.’

Darryl’s understanding of the house is closer to the ancient meaning of the word ‘economy’, ‘oikos/nomia’, which denotes a relationship means and ends, ‘household/management’.

In the same way, Australia needs to be seen ‘as a great place to raise a family’, not just a place where ‘jobs and growth’ enable misspending, and unaffordable houses. Sir Roger Scruton lays this out beautifully:

‘We take the future of our community into account not by fictitious cost-benefit calculations, but more concretely, by seeing ourselves as inheriting benefits and passing them on. Concern for future generations is a non-specific outgrowth of gratitude. It does not calculate, because it shouldn’t and can’t.

‘[The] binding principle is not contract but something more akin to trusteeship. It is a shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and receiving, and to recognise that the good things we inherit are not ours to spoil but ours to safeguard for our dependants.’

Do older generations of Australians want to see their children and grandchildren brought up in the family home?

For young Australians to plan to raise a family in their own home, property needs to be affordable. Sustained real wage growth with some reduction in both mortgage rates and prices would be ideal, a ‘beautiful deleveraging’. But this is not the major long-term problem facing younger generations, it is Chalmer’s kind of socialist capitalism that will do the most damage.

Governments can ‘chip in’ by spending more on childcare so Mum and Dad can work longer hours, but nobody stops to ask whether Mum and Dad should be working overtime to afford houses? Houses with no homemakers, how much anti-family planning can we handle?

Without a home, conservatism is dead in this country. The home needs to be ‘the castle’ it once was.