There is a number that tells the story more plainly than any political slogan. According to Cotality's Home Value Index, the national median dwelling value has reached approximately $912,000, set against a median annual household pre-tax income of $104,390. Saving a standard 20 per cent deposit now takes more than 11 years, the longest stretch on record. For a country that has built much of its social and economic identity around home ownership, these figures represent something more than a policy problem. They signal a structural rupture between expectation and reality.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports on Ricky Banga, who migrated from India with his brother in the late 2000s and worked two jobs alongside his wife for four years to scrape together a deposit on a home in Craigieburn, about 30 kilometres north of Melbourne's CBD. The block cost $380,000 in 2015. Today, by Banga's estimation, the same property would cost at least double. His story captures the arc of a dream that remains alive in aspiration but has become exponentially harder to reach in practice.
The numbers behind that rupture are stark. In NSW, a separate measure of wages has risen 78 per cent over the past two decades, while dwelling values are up 175 per cent, according to Cotality analysis cited by the Sydney Morning Herald. In Victoria, wages rose 79.9 per cent against a 164.7 per cent increase in dwelling values. The divergence, Cotality's former head of research Eliza Owen argues, accelerated from the mid-2010s, driven in part by the prolonged period of record-low interest rates between 2008 and 2022, which made debt cheap and pushed up asset values. Crucially, those gains flowed primarily to people who already held capital or property to borrow against.
The tax architecture around property investment has compounded the problem. The combination of negative gearing concessions and the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount, introduced in 1999, created strong incentives for speculative holding of residential assets. As Owen put it, housing is not merely a good like any other consumer item; it is also an investment vehicle, and that dual nature invites persistent speculation. Add prohibitive zoning regulations that constrain land supply in inner and middle-ring suburbs, and the conditions for chronic unaffordability are firmly in place.
The human consequences are now visible in the choices younger Australians are making. Australian Bureau of Statistics data confirms the long-run price trajectory. Research from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has found that people born in the late 1980s are the first generation in which more than half did not own their home by their early 30s. Some are responding by reconsidering ownership altogether. A Macquarie University study published in late 2025, examining the attitudes of under-40s, found that 24 per cent of the 70 people interviewed were actively debt-averse, with some describing a mortgage, borrowing from the French term, as a "death contract". Lead author and Macquarie Business School professor Elizabeth Sheedy observed that even existing home owners in the study reported poor financial wellbeing, a sense of being trapped in what she called "mortgage prison".
Will Mosley, 35, and his wife Katie, 39, are among those who have done the arithmetic and reached a different conclusion. The couple, who have three young children and need a family-sized home near work in Melbourne's eastern suburbs, found that buying in the Camberwell and Hawthorn East area would require an investment of roughly $2 million, carrying annual costs of around $185,000. Renting the equivalent property, by contrast, costs between $40,000 and $60,000 a year. They have redirected the difference into exchange-traded funds, superannuation, and other investments, treating flexibility as a form of financial resilience rather than a concession to failure. Their position is not sentimental, and perhaps that is the point.
New analysis from KPMG published in December 2025 gives the full weight of that calculation. KPMG found that a first-home buyer household earning approximately $180,000 a year can afford just 12 per cent of the national housing stock. Five years ago, a household on $150,000 could access roughly 30 per cent. In NSW, only about 5 per cent of homes sit within reach of first-home buyers, a figure that has not shifted in five years despite rising incomes. Victoria offers access to around 10 per cent. KPMG urban economist Terry Rawnsley observed that the pool of affordable new supply has also shrunk dramatically, with only about 12 per cent of new dwellings priced at $800,000 or less in 2025, down from one-third in 2023, as builder insolvencies pushed developers toward higher-margin projects.
The progressive critique of this situation deserves serious engagement. Critics across the political spectrum, and not merely those on the left, point to the sustained political unwillingness to unwind investor-friendly tax settings. Both major parties have, at various points, been reluctant to directly confront negative gearing or the capital gains discount, mindful that millions of existing home owners and investors would resist any reform that reduces the asset value of their property. Former opposition leader Peter Dutton explicitly said during the 2025 election campaign that he wanted house prices to steadily increase. Housing Minister Clare O'Neil similarly acknowledged in late 2024 that house prices should not fall. There is, in short, a structural political incentive to maintain the very conditions that price out the next generation.
From a centre-right vantage point, the most defensible reform path is also the least politically comfortable: liberalising zoning to allow substantially more housing supply in and around existing urban centres. Centre for Independent Studies chief economist Peter Tulip is direct on this point. Local councils, he argues, are restricting supply in ways that function exactly like any other market restriction, driving up prices. No one, he contends, has a right to insist that cities remain frozen in the form their parents or grandparents knew. The logic is straightforward: government-imposed constraints on supply are a primary cause of price inflation, and removing them does not require new spending or further regulatory complexity.
The retirement dimension adds further complexity. Research from Super Consumers Australia has found that a single older renter would need roughly $659,000 in superannuation to fund retirement, compared with around $322,000 for a retiree who owns their home outright. That gap is substantial. Yet Tulip's point about compulsory superannuation, introduced in the early 1990s, is not without merit. Younger Australians are accumulating retirement savings through a mechanism that did not exist for their grandparents, which may, over time, partially decouple financial security from property ownership.
The honest conclusion is that Australia faces a housing problem that has been decades in the making and will not yield to any single intervention. The evidence points toward a combination of zoning reform, careful reconsideration of tax concessions that favour speculative investment, and serious long-run investment in social and affordable housing. Reasonable people will disagree about the pace and sequencing of those changes, and about which level of government bears primary responsibility. What is harder to dispute is that the current system is producing outcomes that most Australians, across the political divide, would recognise as neither fair nor sustainable.