Vikki Campion: The generation priced out of home ownership have given up on the major parties

There’s little difference between Labor and the Coalition on housing policy with neither brave enough to crack down on foreign investments as its own citizens deal with the prospect of never owning their own home, writes Vikki Campion.

In some apartments, you rarely meet the neighbours. During midnight fire alarms, the miserable number evacuated in pyjamas on the street is a fraction of how many would be there if all the units were occupied.

“In three years of living here, I have never seen another person taking their rubbish to the bin,” one Labor-voting apartment dweller in Sydney says. He’s got a six-figure income, has saved up a $100,000 deposit and has been trying to find an apartment to call his own for two years – but at every auction, he gets outbid by someone who will never set foot inside.

When Treasury data revealed in the Telegraph this week Chinese buyers were snapping up $7.8m in Australian property a day, those who make the most money from foreign investment rushed to warn off any change, pulling the “it will remove homes for rent” card – rather then the “it will reduce my commission” card.

People didn’t die defending this country so that people in another country could keep a foreign piggy bank in an empty residence that should be a roof over someone’s head.

Vacant apartments have become a dark warehouse of foreign wealth.

Everyone knows it’s happening, but where is the political will to stop opportunistic overseas investors from parking their money in apartments, not even renting them, but hiding them in a safe like their grandmother’s jewellery?

It’s not just an Australian phenomenon. Other countries are realising they need to take action to protect their citizens.

The dream of owning a home has gone up in smoke for a whole generation.

Singapore has doubled stamp duty on foreign homebuyers to 60 per cent so its people can afford to buy a roof over their heads. Even progressive, politically-correct Canada is stamping out overseas investors, which left the country navigating wildly expensive, underused and vacant housing.

The biggest proponents of foreign residential investment in Australia are the ones who make money from it. And it’s big money.

People in China have spent $7.4bn on residential real estate in Australia between 2020-21 and the first three quarters of 2022-23, followed by Hong Kong on $1.5bn, Vietnam on $900m, Taiwan on $400m and Singapore on $400m. I sympathise with the Taiwanese, who are more likely than others in the near future to need an alternative residence to escape to. In total, that’s $19.2bn in foreign investment in residential real estate approved in 32 months, including 1447 homes in the January to March 2023 quarter alone.

Nearly $20bn in Australian dreams has been sold beyond the grasp of Australian families in nearly three years – the same families who would defend the country if attacked, work as doctors, nurses and school teachers, and pay the taxes to pay the NDIS and Centrelink.

Foreign investment is important when we don’t have domestic funds willing to be risked on capital, or as is happening now, you have moral crusaders in our four-pillar banking system refusing to fund sections of the minerals industry.

But there is no problem with getting Australians wanting to invest in Australian houses.

We have inflated the prices and strangled the availability, and created a problem when one should not exist.

Shouldn’t you be 100 per cent committed to the country if you want to own a dwelling here? If the conservative side wants young people back, they must give them a fair home ownership opportunity.

Nothing is more fundamental to being an Australian than your right to own a section of it. As a farmer told his son, complaining about campers on their farm: “How do you expect people to love their nation, son, if you never allow them to set foot on it?”

The same dictum could be applied to a home: How do you expect someone to love their nation if they can never own so much as a square metre of it?

There’s little difference between Labor and the Coalition on housing policy regarding foreign investment. Neither is brave enough to face the issue front on.

Labor pays a lot of attention to public housing, an important safety net, but people dream of living in their own houses. You can’t hand public housing to your children struggling to get a foot in the property door.

Because the houses are overpriced, the Coalition says to “take money from your super to buy a house”, and Labor says, “you can live in my house” – but we don’t want to live in the government’s house or smash our super to buy a house.

The people whose nation built the home, whose future will be determined by the children growing up in the home, deserve the chance to buy the home for what it’s really worth. If major parties are worried why their combined vote is dwindling then they have to be more discerning about straight answers to the questions that move votes: law and order, cost of living and the ability to own a home.

The same cohort who have given up ever owning a home have given up on the major political parties. You’ve made them a rolling stone and they are gathering no traditional political moss.

Labor and the Coalition want the political stability of the two-party system, but offer younger Australians none because they don’t have the courage of Singapore or Canada to say our homes should be for people who are living here.

It is obscene that we have vacant units while families live in cars and tents in winter. Homeless because they can’t afford a home, not for any other careless judgment.

It’s a cliche of some moderate Liberal MPs to cite Sir Robert Menzies in their maiden speeches and then fail to follow the policy prescription he set.

He believed the path to victory was to represent Australians with a stake in the country, those who saved for their homes. Foreign ownership is precisely that – another country’s ownership of your nation.

Spin it how you like, PR girls – the one thing it does not mean is ownership of Australia by Australians.