The internet-based Buyers Strike led by Prosper Australia has become a magnet for anonymous trolls trying to deflect the debate from the key issue of housing affordability with abuse and vilification.
“Their message to first home buyers is simplistic and insulting: Submit! Sacrifice! Conform! They have filled the comments at prosper.org.au and at GetUp with their bile,” Prosper Australia campaigner David Collyer said today.
“But when a couple with two solid incomes and a good deposit cannot get a bank loan for a starter home on the edge of town, the game is already over. The market must turn.
“First home buyers are the ‘Greater Fools’ of the real estate market. Our Buyers Strike campaign has made them aware land prices can go down as well as up.
“The looming fall in prices will cause great economic hardship. Consider the US experience, where a quarter of mortgaged homes are ‘underwater’, worth less than the loan they support and pinning homeowners in an impossible situation. They cannot afford to sell and the heavy loan repayments make no sense.
“The spivs and spruikers and trolls of the real estate industry continue to claim Australia is an exception – it cannot happen here. Ask any economist: there are no exceptions; prices always revert to the long term trend.
“Prosper has left their comments up in the interest of an open debate. The trolls don’t seem to realize how transparent and pathetic their rhetoric is.
“Australia is in this fix because governments have consistently failed to adopt the powerful automatic stabilizer of land prices – Land Value Tax – despite the repeated urgings of many senior economists including the Secretary of the Treasury Dr Ken Henry in Australia’s Future Tax System (The Henry Review).
“My fervent wish is that this chaos leads to new taxation arrangements that end the taxing of wages and business with government taking its revenues from economic rents instead. That means Land Value Tax and an honest Mining Tax,” Collyer said.
Collyer repeated that he is not today calling the bursting of the bubble but does say it is ‘imminent’. ENDS
Saw you on Sunshine David and you were brilliant! Can’t tell you how long I’ve dreamed of this day when the voice of common sense would finally get a chance to be heard. For years the spruikers have had a field day with no opposition (except the lone voice of Steve Keen.
Well done, we are 100% behind you!
Umm, my wife and I both have solid incomes, in fact reduced now that the baby is almost here. We managed to buy a house in Sydney, and not on the outer limits, with no help. Perhaps the “trolls” on GetUp aren’t the only ones feeding misinformation.
Yes, the trolls will try to disrupt this campaign. They will float a few tired mantras but the average person now has access to alternate analysis rather than junk MSM.
Engo, good you have solid incomes but this campaign is not about high income earners.
It is about making the system fair and less prone to the boom/bust cycles we experience. Protecting a neo-feudalistic tax system should be seen for what it is – uber-dumb.
The trolls might find it hard to complain about a STAMP-DUTY STRIKE: http://is.gd/psd_strike .
the reason why property values are deliberately kept inflated is simple, state governments have taken huge loans against land they own. land releases for new housing are tightly controled, and development on a smaller scale than necessary to adress the housing shortage. this makes sure that any development that takes place will not affect the housing market, thereby protecting state coffers, and giving governments higher revenues for the land already developed and those lands they sell to developers, not to mention the value of land they have borrow against.
I have $50 to offer if another 10,000 people can do the same, pass it on to David and he can but someone a home interest free! Lets stick it to the Real Estates and the Banks!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry I mean BUY Someone a home.
It is about time some logic was spread in Australia. I come from the UK. I can assure you that we were all told the same, prices can never go down, population growth is very strong and there is a dwelling shortage.Our country is different.etc etc well they did go down and they are still falling. Check this website and have a look at the graph entitled real house prices, economics always has the last say and the last say will be a significant deflation in prices back to a sustainable level.
http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/
I have been trying to warn my children who are in the circumstances you describe (dual incomes, secure jobs, saving deposit money) to be real careful – there is a real possibility that property and Sydney property in particular is about to meet its come uppance.
Furthermore; they should very sceptical about what the property spruikers are trying to tell us.
I don’t know if they are listening but I really believe that it is out there and I have been an equity investor all my life and where there is a boom there is always a bust and when someone says that this time it is different they are fools or lying.