4 November

What worries Australians, graphed over the last 7 years. Look at housing on the rise. Australia is in real trouble. Its economic success in the last 20 years is almost a complete fantasy. The country has been run like a casino, the only thing making the ‘economy’ look good has been the eye-popping amount of private debt. There has been no real investment in the nation at all, instead individuals and families are shouldering the increasing burden of paying for things that previously the country as a whole took responsibility for. The two things that have kept the whole fantasy going have been the mining boom, and the ridiculous inflation of house prices. Neither of those things have actually produced a single thing for Australia, except debt. No new infrastructure, no new sustainable jobs, no investment in our productivity. Any money made from mining was pissed up against the wall in tax cuts in the Costello era, and is already spent, but not on any investment in the country. House price inflation has given us ridiculously over-valued homes, again no actual investment in the productive capacity of the nation at all - nearly all of the money going into housing has been used just to endlessly inflate values of existing houses. Housing has been our permanent Melbourne Cup; gambling, nothing more. The mining boom is over, housing will be next. Then we could be left with a train wreck. If you think this is alarmist, name one industry or product Australia has produced in that last 20 years, that it can sell to the rest of the world in any sort of big earning way. Or one measure of how our capacity as a nation has improved, in that time - better education, or productivity, or better infrastructure etc.