Both the two most recent Quarterly Essays are essential reading at the moment.
I read Micheline Lee’s Lifeboat, Disability, Humanity and the NDIS when it arrived, but I didn’t get round to reading the letters section and writing a review. With the release of the NDIS review by Bruce Bonyhady and Lisa Paul, events have now overtaken me, so I refer you instead to this review at The Conversation by Helen Dickinson. She notes that Lee’s essay weaves together personal testimony and detailed analysis of history and policy, and for me, it was the personal experiences and conversations that gave the essay its power. It’s a window onto the reality of a scheme that promised much but failed to deliver, even though its eye-watering costs have now blown out to an unsustainable level.
One of the most vivid examples in Lifeboat occurs when Lee’s flight is cancelled at Sydney airport. We’ve all had this happen and it’s annoying — but for most of us the fact that our luggage is already on the plane and can’t be unloaded for security reasons doesn’t matter at all. But for Lee, strapped into one of those skinny airline wheelchairs that fit between the aisles, waiting four hours for the next flight, it’s something else again. She can’t move this chair herself, and it’s hard to keep her balance. She calls out for help but nobody takes any notice. Would it really have been so difficult for them — to retrieve her chair so that she could do what you or I might do — browse around the shops, get something to eat, have a drink at the bar and maintain a sense of independence and dignity until she finally gets to board the plane?
Lee’s essay still resonates even though the review has been released and looks promising. It’s still well worth reading.
Alan Kohler’s essay is of its moment in a different way. Kohler reports on finance for ABC news, but the essay gives him the opportunity to speak to a wider audience in a more comprehensive way. His topic is housing affordability and the mess Australia has got itself into.
I liked his concluding paragraph. Yesterday on TV I saw South Australian advocates demanding a Royal Commission into family violence, and I wondered, what on earth do they want that for? Victoria has just had one, investigating exactly the same problem, and the government is already adopting its recommendations. South Australia would do better to use what was learned from the Victorian Royal Commission and to spend the millions that a Royal Commission would cost on prevention strategies and provision of services. Because what’s needed is already known and a start could be made quickly. As Kohler says about his topic:
We don’t need another inquiry or a royal commission; there’s a room full of inquiries, reports and submissions. We just need a taskforce drawn from Treasury and the housing department to go through the work that’s been done already and come up with a policy that has a clear aim and is likely to work. (p.86)
Anyway…
What Kohler says about the housing problem is basically this:
The houses we live in, the places we call home and bring up our families in, have been turned into speculative investment assets by the fifty years of government policy failure, financialisation and greed that resulted in twenty-five years of exploding house prices. The doubling of prices as a proportion of both average incomes and GDP per capita has turned a house from somewhere to live while you get on with the rest of your life into the main thing, and for many people a terrible burden.
The problem of housing affordability now dominates the national consciousness and has affected the lives of everyone, dividing Australia into those who own a house and those who don’t; those whose families have housing wealth to pass on and those who don’t. (p.5)
The essay has a sprinkling of graphs, and reader-friendly explanations of how this has happened, but the really awful problem revealed by this essay is that it’s basically impossible now for an average millenial family, earning the national average wage, with one adult working full time and the other working three days a week, to buy a home for the national median price. And this in turn has put enormous pressure on the rental market.
Over the course of my lifetime, Australia has morphed from a country where education and hard work made us an egalitarian meritocracy into a society of haves-and-have-nots. Now it comes down to where you live and what sort of house you inherit from your parents. That’s destructive.
Unless you’ve had your head under a rock, you know all this. But what you might not know is the complexity of the problem and the length of time it could take to fix it, even if we started now, and there’s no sign that anybody really wants to do it.
The essay ranges from historical reasons for the problem to more recent factors, but concludes that the basic problem is that about two-thirds of people own their homes and they are quietly happy about the rising value of their property. No government, federal, state or local government is going to interfere with that. So there’s a lot of talk, and aspirational targets, but nothing will really change.
You can read an edited extract of this essay at The Guardian.
Author: Alan Kohler
Title: The Great Divide, Australia’s Housing Mess and How to Fix It
Quarterly Essay #92, published by Black Inc 2023
ISBN:9781760644239, pbk., 123 pages, of which this essay comprises 86 pages
Source: personal subscription
You can subscribe through the QE website.
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
I’ve heard a lot of discussion about Kohler’s essay, as you have too I’m sure, and it’s been fascinating. As you say, it’s complex. Perhaps education and hard work didn’t so much create an egalitarian meritocracy as that an egalitarian meritocracy is/was a phase along a trajectory that has led us to where we are now. Because, If you think about it logically, not everyone engages in education or works hard (for whatever reason) so inequality, it seems to me, can’t help but raise its head. We need more socialist-style policies to even it all out.
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By: whisperinggums on December 10, 2023
at 10:04 am
Well, I’m not sure if this is semantics, but my understanding of an egalitarian meritocracy doesn’t necessarily mean equality. People argue about this in education all the time… if academic results can be predicted from a postcode (and they can), then the system should be adjusted so that it doesn’t, so that you get more equality of outcomes. But then, proponents of meritocracy say that equality of opportunity is all you need, and you can argue about what that looks like forever.
There certainly wasn’t equality when I was young. But with education and hard work people could and did join the middle class in home ownership with all the benefits that brings to individuals, families and the nation. People who lucked out could access public housing, even if they had to wait for it, and even if it wasn’t great. There wasn’t the homelessness that there is now, and home ownership wasn’t defined by a generational divide.
But now education and hard work is not enough. Younger Australians mostly have both of those qualities in spades, but they still can’t afford to buy a house. Not without help from The Bank of Mum and Dad.
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By: Lisa Hill on December 10, 2023
at 10:18 am
Thanks Lisa… all makes sense, from my long-ago studies in the sociology of education. I do think opportunity is a fundamental issue, but re housing there are so many things at play aren’t there. I’ll never forget a friend’s son saying a few years ago, “baby-boomers like property”. Not us, I thought. We just see property as a worry, negative gearing or not. One of the reasons that convinced me to downsize now rather than in a few years was that we were two people sitting in a spacious family home. I felt increasingly guilty about that. But l’m rambling now….
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By: whisperinggums on December 10, 2023
at 10:32 am
Yes, well, there is an ugly narrative about baby boomers, and it assumes that we are all equally responsible for what’s happened.
I have only ever owned one house at a time (and indeed, one house only) and the same is true of all my friends. We do not regard our houses as investments, and never have. None of us even have holiday houses (though that’s really because they’re a pain).
Kohler doesn’t say (unless I missed it) what proportion of people are property investors rather than simple home owners. Maybe my friends and I are an irrelevant minority. But I am not ever going to wear the carping because I bought a house 45 years ago and am still living in it now. It wouldn’t solve anybody’s problem for me to sell it because I’d then be competing with other people for somewhere else to live.
Young people (and other people who care about it) need to read this essay and understand the complexity of the issue if they’re ever going to achieve change.
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By: Lisa Hill on December 10, 2023
at 11:16 am
Yes, I agree re the ugliness and divisiveness of the narrative. We’ve never been into holiday homes either or homes as investment. Which is just as well as we we’ve never sold in great markets! We only now have a second place, in Melbourne, but it’s pretty minuscule, 57sq m. Just enough for us to manage and let us visit our kids on a whim. We are lucky to be able to do that.
You are right that they need to read it and understand the complexity that has led to this
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By: whisperinggums on December 10, 2023
at 2:36 pm
And get involved in politics!
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By: Lisa Hill on December 10, 2023
at 3:45 pm
We – you, me, Sue – seem to have grown up in that sweet spot where there wasn’t too much inequality – in the white community at least – and where education through to university was, for just a few years, freely available. The two big components of that were State Housing, which gave my parents, her parents, and Milly and me our start in life, and of course a relatively fair and well financed education system.
Here in WA housing prices aren’t totally out of control, but I couldn’t imagine starting out now in Melbourne, let alone Sydney. And of course my kids, now in their forties are still carrying education debt, which is just straight out ridiculous.
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By: wadholloway on December 10, 2023
at 12:20 pm
It makes you wonder what it will be like in 25 years time…
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By: Lisa Hill on December 10, 2023
at 12:49 pm
I want to read the housing one… because I have many #thoughts on this issue, not the least the way in which housing is not seen as providing a roof over someone’s head but as a means to make money/profit. I’d be intrigued to see what he says about the role that ownership of second homes, foreign ownership and the short-term rental market (ie. AirBnB) has played in creating the current situation.
(Also, apologies for flurry of comments… it’s the first chance I’ve had in a couple of weeks to catch up with people’s blogs properly)
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By: kimbofo on December 16, 2023
at 5:51 pm
Kohler certainly thinks that the attitude about housing as investment has to change. Everything else they do is just chipping at the edges, but politically speaking, attempts to change the rules just means losing government, so nothing is achieved.
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By: Lisa Hill on December 16, 2023
at 5:59 pm
[…] Lisa @ANZ LitLovers also reviewed this essay. […]
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By: Quarterly Essay 92: The Great Divide | Alan Kohler – This Reading Life on January 7, 2024
at 5:12 pm