Unless you are a privileged household of high income, or have access to intergenerational wealth, the Great Australian Dream of owning a home is dead.
For those such as Jimmy Blackhall (Echo 4/2/26), you are up against the consequences of:
- Deregulation of the banks. By skewing their balance sheets to home mortgages, particularly since the 1990s, the big four money lenders have morphed into the most profitable in the world.
- Land banking by developers who are gaming the market by either holding vacant residential land or not proceeding on approved DAs. Included in this are the supply chain problems and lack of skilled tradespeople both of which are making it extremely expensive to build, if at all.
- Wage drift whereby wages fall behind inflation.
- Net immigration which, among other things, keeps wages down and increases the pressure on housing.
There is no political will to address the aforementioned fundamentals in full knowledge that the ‘housing crisis’ is both national and global.
Contrast the above with the period 1945 to the early 1970s. This was a time of the greatest social equity in Australia’s history with over 71 per cent home ownership. So, why then and not now? Wage increases kept up with inflation, the banking system was regulated and there was a massive federal and state government investment in public housing.
There is no political will to address today’s increasing social inequities.
Rental costs have skyrocketed but no one wants to address how the Valuer General increased residential land values in Byron Shire 90 per cent effective 1/7/22. Increases in land tax, Council rates and insurance have been horrific. They are, in part, the reason for rental stress.
Byron Shire’s mortgagees are similarly in mortgage stress. As more people move to the area, knowing that it is one of the most expensive in the state, property prices and rents will continue to increase. Furthermore, dwelling stock is reduced by the thousands of holiday rentals adding further pressure on any notion of ‘affordability’.
Demands on infrastructure, gridlocked traffic and the push for higher density living will mean we will be homogenised into the style and form of development further up the coast, destroying what has been hard fought for over decades to preserve.
Approving a pending slum in the form of The Nest is not the solution. We have never been a culture of communal living. We are a culture that demands privacy and space, not confining two people to live, long term in an area of approx. 4mx5m in each of the proposed 50 units.
The bigger question: is this the vision elsewhere for the Shire’s housing crisis?
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
