Unable to crack the housing market, I went looking for cocaine

On a rainy morning last week, I paced along Manly Beach in search of one thing: a brick of cocaine. I’m becoming increasingly convinced, not of the benefits of doing a line of coke, but that I will need something close to a lottery win to get me out of the rental rat race.

If you haven’t already heard, tightly packed bricks of cocaine have been washing up along the NSW coastline after a botched import last year. Since December, cocaine packages ranging from 1 kilogram to 39 kilograms have been found on several of Sydney’s beaches.

My search for cocaine ended with a package of another kind.Credit:

With roughly 650 kilograms of cocaine still (allegedly) floating around out there, I decided there was nothing to lose from scouring the sand for signs of my first home deposit. Last year, one gram of cocaine was fetching up to $400. Houses are out of the question, but one kilogram of the posh powder could help me buy half an average apartment in Sydney, 70 per cent of one in Melbourne or nearly a whole apartment in Perth.

Would I know how to cash in a brick of cocaine? No. But there I was getting my sandy steps in, with multimillion-dollar properties teasingly on the horizon.

Getting into the housing market has become a ludicrous lottery. House prices tripled in the three decades to 2020, while real earnings ticked up by only 50 per cent, worsening affordability and inequality.

It’s great news for people who own their homes outright, and even better news for the roughly 20 per cent who are wealthy enough to own at least one investment property, because both house prices and rents have been soaring in recent years. But there’s no doubt the wealth divide is growing. From 1997 to 2017, the housing wealth gap between the income-poor young and the income-rich old doubled from 532 per cent to 1230 per cent.

Last week the federal government pledged $12.3 billion in new housing programs, including $9.3 billion for social housing. But there’s a lot of catch-up to play, with more than 200,000 households in NSW alone experiencing an unmet need for social or affordable housing in 2021.

Even those who are comfortably cruising along with a house under their belt are realising just how difficult it will be for their kids to get a foot in the door of this housing market. It’s a problem from both a wealth inequality and intergenerational perspective.

In the early 2000s, 90 per cent of middle-aged and older Australians had owned a dwelling at some point in their lives. Now, for many young people, that seems impossible to achieve.

In 2004, when I was roughly four years old, people in Sydney and Melbourne were, on average, buying their first homes in their mid-20s. Now that I’m in my mid-20s, first home buyers are, on average, in their mid-30s! At this rate, I may never be old enough.

Roughly 67 per cent of Australians own a home or are paying one off, meaning that for the majority, rising house prices are in their better interests. There’s no doubt that finances are tough for many of the 35 per cent with a mortgage right now. But renters, especially those on low incomes, are grappling with budget pressures as well as the constant anxiety of rent hikes, being uprooted and ending up without a home – all while knowing the money spent on rent has left their pockets forever.

A survey this year showed that more than 70 per cent of renters are under financial stress, meaning they spend more than 30 per cent of their gross income on rent. Many, including me and my flatmate, are spending more than that, severely limiting our ability to save for a house deposit.

Having family financial assistance doubles a person’s chances of owning a home. But low-income households, especially those who are renters, will find it difficult – if not impossible – to make a meaningful financial contribution.

We need to remember that a home is, first and foremost, an essential shelter. Tax concessions for investors, especially when they are buying up existing homes, make little sense as we face a housing shortage and affordability crisis that leaves the majority of renters in housing stress and more than 120,000 people homeless.

The capital gains tax concession – which allows investors to be taxed on just 50 per cent of the profits made from selling a property if they hold on to it for at least a year – needs to be cut. There’s no real reason why the figure is 50 per cent. Instead, capital gains should be taxed at the same marginal rate as any other income, with some adjustment for inflation.

As it stands, it’s a tax discount costing billions of dollars: $60 billion in the 10 years to 2032, according to the parliamentary budget office. And 80 per cent of the benefit flows to the top 10 per cent of income earners. That’s money that could be spent on social and affordable housing to make a real difference to housing affordability.

It’s a tax discount that shouldn’t have the support of either end of the economic spectrum. It distorts incentives from a free-market perspective, and it’s highly regressive, worsening inequality, from an interventionist perspective. Yet it’s still in place. We need a brave government from either side of Parliament House to do what’s right.

There’s much more that can be done about housing affordability, some of which I’ve written about before: unwinding zoning regulations, replacing stamp duty with land tax and expediting building approvals. But we should also focus on the capital gains’ concession.

My search along Manly Beach did not yield any cocaine. Instead, I ended up with a rumbling stomach and scoured the nearby shops, where I settled for a tightly packed box of fish and chips. My immediate hunger subsided, but sadly, my appetite for a more equitable housing market will endure.

Millie Muroi is a business reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.