Imagine you are a young nurse in Perth. You have been working double shifts for two years, saving carefully, skipping the overseas holidays and the new car. And yet every time you check what a modest home in the outer suburbs costs, the number is just a little higher than last time. You are not falling behind because you are doing something wrong. You are falling behind because the game itself may be rigged.
That, in broad terms, is the argument Gary Stevenson has been making to audiences around the world, and he brought it to Western Australia this week ahead of a public talk in Perth on Monday. Stevenson is an unusual figure in economic debate: a former foreign exchange trader at Citibank who became one of the bank's most profitable dealers in the years after the global financial crisis, then walked away to argue that the system producing his own wealth was quietly hollowing out everyone else's.
According to WAtoday, Stevenson sat down to answer questions about WA's economy and its housing crisis before his Perth appearance. His central warning was pointed: Western Australia cannot build its way out of its housing affordability problem. More supply, he argues, is not sufficient on its own.
This cuts against the dominant political orthodoxy in WA and nationally. Both the state government and federal policymakers have leaned heavily on construction targets and planning reform as the primary answer to soaring rents and purchase prices. The Western Australian government has pointed to streamlined approvals and land release programmes as evidence it is taking the crisis seriously. At the federal level, the Albanese government's Housing Australia Future Fund similarly centres on boosting dwelling supply over the medium term.
Stevenson's critique is not that building is useless. It is that supply-side solutions misdiagnose the underlying disease. His argument, developed over years of studying post-GFC economies, is that extreme wealth concentration changes how housing markets behave. When a large share of society's capital sits with a relatively small number of asset holders, new housing supply tends to get absorbed as investment stock rather than filtering down to first-home buyers. Prices stay high because demand from capital is structurally different from demand driven by wages.
In plain English, this means: you can build a lot of homes, but if most of them are bought by people who already own several, the nurse from the earlier paragraph is still locked out.
Now, before everyone panics and concludes that Perth is permanently unaffordable, it is worth sitting with the counterarguments too, because they are real and they deserve a fair hearing.
Mainstream economists and housing researchers, including those at the Reserve Bank of Australia, have consistently found that supply constraints are a genuine and significant driver of price growth in Australian cities. Research from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that WA's population has grown substantially faster than its housing stock in recent years, creating a straightforward mismatch between the number of people who need homes and the number of homes available. Dismissing supply entirely would be its own kind of overreach.
There is also a practical politics problem with wealth redistribution arguments: they tend to require tax reform, particularly around capital gains and negative gearing, which has proven extraordinarily difficult to progress in Australia. Labor took a modest version of those policies to the 2019 election and lost. The political cost of genuinely restructuring property taxation has, so far, always outweighed the will to act.
Stevenson himself is not naive about this. His argument is less a policy prescription than a structural diagnosis. If you only build, he says, you treat the symptom. The disease is that capital accumulates faster than wages, and housing is the most visible battleground where that plays out.
Here's what this actually means for the average West Australian family trying to buy or even rent a home right now: the answer is probably both things at once. More supply matters, genuinely. But so does who has the money to buy what gets built, and whether tax settings make it more attractive to hold housing as an asset than to sell it to someone who actually wants to live in it.
The honest answer is nobody knows with certainty which lever matters most. But Stevenson's visit is a useful prod to a policy debate that has sometimes treated construction targets as the whole conversation, when they may only be part of it. Reasonable people can disagree about the right mix of supply, taxation, and income support. What is harder to dispute is that what has been tried so far has not, for that Perth nurse, been enough.