You may have heard this saying before: “The goal of a system is what it achieves.” If you have read my blog long enough, you will have probably heard that statement once or twice. It is very clear that the government has no intention of making housing more affordable because every single policy they direct towards housing increases the price, and when it starts to go down a bit, they quickly institute a new policy to float it back up again. I posted on social media about this about a week ago.

Now I see that Professor Steve Keen agrees that our governments have been raising house prices deliberately for decades. Many of you have likely noticed the same pattern.

Well, Keen proves it.

Keen even shows in his video how both sides of government have done this, and multiple levels of government as well. Again and again, they have punished younger people by engineering the inflation of the assets of homeowners, who are more likely to be older, so that the young can have their income extracted in growing numbers.

He even demonstrates, with graphics, how governments respond when it looks like houses might go down in value; they do something to stimulate an increase in house prices. From negative gearing to first home buyer grants, immigration and more, governments refuse to let house prices recorrect in line with people’s incomes.

I’ve been talking about this since before I was a young youth pastor. I came to realise what was happening after having studied Isaiah and Leviticus and seeing how hoarding homes was always condemned by God, because it entrenches poverty through no fault of the poor, because it simply advantages those who got there first, by virtue of age. That is the only real skill you need to make bank in Australian housing: buy cheap and sell after the government has inflated the prices for you by indebting the next generation.

It was not really hard to see where this was going to end up. If you have a limited number of houses and a growing population, and certain people in the population buy multiple homes, this will cause extra pressure to be exerted on the housing market, and prices will go up. If every generation faces a higher point of entry, and house prices accelerate faster than income, eventually, most people will be crushed by the system.

Throw in high immigration, and you can escalate the house price increases. There is no one cause for all this; debt is a major driver, using housing as an investment industry is too, so is record immigration, and so is environmental policy. Australian governments have created a perfect storm of wealth extraction from the young to get into the housing market. It is immoral and very short-sighted.

When I first started to talk about this, virtually everyone thought it was no big deal. I remember one time when I was teaching on Isaiah 5:8-10 in 2011 at a Bible study, the level of anger I got from some people who were from families that built wealth in the home investment industry. The ire was so stark I never forgot it. Not only could they not understand what Isaiah was saying, what I was laying down, they could not fathom that this would end up going bad.

I remember another conversation with some senior leaders in a church, talking about housing investment and how they needed their properties to increase. I noted that we need it all to crash. They responded, but then we will lose money. I said if it keeps going up, we all lose, eventually. But now most people get it because they just have to look at their rent or mortgage bill and realise they have been robbed. The housing investors got what they wanted, and now we live in an inflationary nightmare, especially with housing.

You need to realise you have been robbed by the policies of Red and Blue, who both tend to be older homeowners themselves and landlords. They have, together, manipulated policy to grow their own portfolios at your expense. Sure, their policies have benefited most older Australians and some others. But the rest of the country is facing lifelong debt servitude or rental servitude just to have somewhere to live. This is why many people are fleeing the country to move overseas.

Australia’s cost of living has gone up so high that many people are now seeking to pursue opportunities overseas, where they believe life is more affordable. The high rental costs, high mortgage service raters, and inflation across the board are stealing our way of life right from under us. It is not necessarily the poor who are leaving, either, as many who are leaving are those with means who can turn that into a good opportunity overseas.

Some of the top destinations I found online for Aussies leaving are the UK, New Zealand, which just had house prices drop, South East Asia (places like Thailand, Bali, Vietnam etc), the United States, and Southern Europe. Moving somewhere like New Zealand can offer a familiar way of life, with slightly lower costs. Whereas someone who moves to Thailand or Bali, as long as they can adjust to the massively different cultures, can live like a king from the sale of a house in Australia. Though moving back will be difficult.

However, some love the lifestyle,

“It has taken the pressure off. We’ve had to reinvest into our business and we are starting to actually save some money.”

Lloyd also pointed to the lifestyle advantages, with the couple being able to spend more time with their young family.

The couple isn’t alone, with migration data showing many other Aussies are looking for an alternative lifestyle.

According to the latest government figures, migrant departures – people leaving Australia to move overseas – increased by 8 per cent to 221,000 from 204,000 between 2023-2024.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics measures the top five countries of birth for migrant departures from Australia each year. Since the Covid pandemic, the only major demographic group to consistently leave the country is Australian-born citizens, with a further 57,100 leaving the country in 2023-2024 and about 35,590 coming home.

The median age for Aussies leaving the country was 31.”

Cameron Micallef, 2025 News.com.au

Even immigrants are leaving because of the high cost of living. Though not in high enough numbers to mitigate the growing population we have been experiencing through immigration for three decades.

I encourage you to watch Keen’s video and share it around. An economy structured like ours is heading for a hard crash. I have no idea when. People’s recency bias, what they see happen, tells them it will not happen, as in their experience, prices have always gone up. But every system has its limits. I would also note that a crash can come in many forms. For instance, the young being locked out of housing and forced to live in rentals with other couples is a sign that the economy has already crashed.

The young people moving overseas are too. Australians no longer being able to live our traditional lifestyle in our own country is also. Crashes do not just come in the form of an economic downturn. The economic numbers are so twisted and spun and artificially interpreted that going off official figures tells us very little. What people are experiencing tells us that the way we are doing things is severely broken. This is beyond question.

You all know my solution: debt forgiveness and then strict restrictions on lending and usury. No more easy money. Keen would likely advocate some of the same policies. He has been following this in detail longer than most of us, and benefits from economic training coupled with being an iconoclast, which allows him to buck the narrative and do it with an informed perspective. The fact that he proves that the government on both sides keeps deliberately inflating house prices with their policies is helpful, because it is more evidence that neither side of politics has served our country well.

When a landlord is allowed control of immigration and other policies that can be used to inflate house prices, what do you think happens? We have had over 40 years of landlords doing just this. I agree with Keen, it is time to put forward political parties with real and genuine polices to reduce housing. Otherwise, our way of life may go extinct, and the rise of a technocratic landed gentry might be ushered in. We don’t want that.