Ask any Australian what they think defines the ‘Australian Dream’, and they’ll tell you that it is a house and a backyard that they can call their own. Home ownership is a fundamental tenet of our social fabric. But for us young Australians, this critical part of our national identity has never felt so far away.

This anxiety is so consuming that it has become a routine conversation topic with all my early-career working friends. They feel derailed by the economic circumstances that they have been born into and left disappointed by the band-aid policies of the incumbent Labor government. With population growth hovering around 2 per cent, coupled with the RBA embarking on a wave of interest rate cuts, the already unattainable cost of housing will likely continue to rise.

For the average late-20s Sydney couple with a dual wage, the time required to save for a 20 per cent deposit on an entry-level priced home is now 6 years and 8 months. This demoralised generation of young Australians now measures their self-worth and success by their proximity to the ever-retreating goal post of home ownership.

Whilst the major parties attempted to characterise housing as a battleground issue at the 2025 federal election, industry experts were quick to describe both policy platforms as reckless, inflationary, and damaging to the budget. Despite the election being over and won, debate around a bold agenda for home ownership in Australia must continue. Home ownership is not simply an economic issue – there is so much more at stake.

Suppressed by the economics-focused discourse around housing supply and migration numbers, there has been little conversation about the critical role that home ownership plays in the shaping of our societal and cultural identity. Put simply, it is only when one has a physical stake in the country that one feels a part of the culture, direction, and identity of Australia. As more and more young people feel that their own stake in the country is unattainable, we face the irreversible risk of Gen Z becoming the least involved generation of civic citizens in our nation’s history.

But what does this actually mean for the future of Australia?

Local communities will continue dying, with young people ceasing to feel tied to the neighbourhoods in which they live. Fewer Australians will participate in neighbourhood initiatives targeting local issues, with the number of young people volunteering in community organisations already at an all-time low.

Gen Z, feeling materially detached from the country, are focusing their concerns on abstract global issues like climate change and social justice, as opposed to showing interest in pressing domestic issues such as the economy, crime, and taxation.

Most worryingly, as more and more young people feel they either won’t own a home or will only be able to afford a shoebox unit, they are becoming increasingly unwilling to start families. These precarious housing conditions are undoubtably a factor in almost 50 per cent of young Australians believing they will not have any children in the future according to the 2024 Youth Barometer. In practical terms, the McKinsey Global Institute warns that declining fertility rates in the developed world, including Australia, will have a wide array of cultural and economic impacts. Future generations will inherit lower economic growth and shoulder a disproportionate cost of more retirees.

I think it would be folly to expect young people to buy into our pre-established set of social values and institutions when the barrier to entry has undergone such a pronounced increase. I see these devastating trends emerging on the daily when chatting with young people around university halls and by the coffee machine in the office. There is a generational chasm widening – endangering our institutions of family values, of civic citizenship, and of personal and communal responsibility.

We only need to look back through history for reminders of the crucial link between home ownership and a successful and united society. In the ancient world, Aristotle explained that home ownership was a necessary condition to solidify not only personal virtue but also the prosperity and pride of the broader state. The ancient poet Cicero elaborated that, in Roman society, the sanctity of property ownership was key in compelling societies to bond together.

For Edmund Burke, one of Britain’s great philosophers, the stability of our society depends on the preservation of established institutions which importantly includes the right to private property. Ownership of property, as explained by Burke, is a cornerstone element of the social contract, and its protection is necessary to maintain the people’s liberty and the formation of civil society.

And in modern Australian history, the founder of the Liberal Party and our longest-serving Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, stared down this very nation-defining dilemma 70 years ago. Were we to cower and accept the Chifley-Labor government’s policies that preserved a society of renters, or did we want to show courage and give our people their own physical stake in the country? Menzies answered this question emphatically in the latter with a pipeline of policies that allowed more Australians to buy homes. He famously said that with home ownership comes ‘a responsibility for home – homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual’.

Absent from contemporary discourse is a frank discussion of the importance of what Menzies identified as ‘homes spiritual’. We live in the greatest country on Earth, but never have young people felt so little pride in our flag and been less willing to commit themselves to their communities.

The home ownership crisis in Australia has been mischaracterised as a bubble waiting to be popped – it is more a slow-spreading disease that has progressed to the point that it now threatens to erode the cultural underpinnings of a successful and cohesive society. Despite the federal election being over, it is imperative that pressure continues to be mounted on our political leaders to show courage and face the home ownership crisis with courage. If we don’t, we run the risk that our next generation will leave our cultural institutions and shared national identity behind.