THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN DREAM
Home ownership is heavily promoted as being the great Australian dream. All throughout school we are force fed this belief along with numerous others such as ‘Study hard and you will get a good job’ or modern day values like ‘save the environment’ But do these teachings hold true in the real world?
Most of the super-successful Australians never even finished school, let alone studied hard. Many of the highest paying jobs are in the building and mining industries, where brawn and common sense are preferred to academic success. Not to mention the huge numbers of university graduates who cant even find work. It seems that ‘study hard and you will get a good job’ was an outright lie.
The modern day saving the environment campaign was based on the presumption that the world was heating up. They coined the phrase ‘global warming’ to describe the phenomenon. The theory was shot to pieces when in the last few years the world temperature has dropped; so they conveniently renamed it ‘climate change’. Similar to the ‘global cooling’ lie that was perpetrated in the 1970′s, the public are ready to accept any theory as fact as long as the seeds are planted while they are at school.
When the evidence for the belief system instilled at school is examined to determine its truthfulness, it overwhelming shows that the beliefs are false. But what about owning your own home? Surely there can’t be anything bad about that.
PRISONER INSIDE YOUR OWN HOME
Gone are the days of housing affordability. Housing prices have gone through the roof and housing affordability is at its lowest levels in Australia since the index started being recorded. Additionally, the purchasing price of a home should not be measured solely in monetary terms, but also in its true value of its effect on your life.
It is no longer possible to save up and purchase a house outright. Bank loans are essential to own your first home. Whilst the home loan is initially spread over a 30 year term, in reality it is generally much closer to 50 or 60 years to due the inevitable refinances over the years. Home repairs, renovations, extensions, improvements and even other purchases such as cars and holidays are usually tacked onto the loan once equity is established.
You don’t need a degree in mathematics to work out the average age of a homebuyer once they have paid off their home. If a first homebuyer is aged 25 and the retirement age is 65, considering the abovementioned real home loan term lengths, the average homeowner will die before they are able to pay off their home. Is it worth working like a slave all your life chasing this elusive dream?
WHOSE DREAM IS IT ANYWAY?
As the reality of owning a home slips further into the netherworld, we need to analyse just who is promoting this fantasy and what are their true intentions. Certainly the government is acting through the education system to reach the minds of schoolchildren while they are young and vulnerable, but for what purpose?
Generations of honest, hard working Australians striving to own their own home: sounds like a good plan. The public will stay off welfare support and pay high levels of tax from their jobs. Additionally, home ownership generally equates to an individuals feet becoming firmly planted in Australia; rather than someone who skips the country for greener pastures after the government has spent thousands in educating them. The financial benefits of home ownership are great for the Australian government, but what about the social consequences?
Many of the traditional cultures have a strong set of family values at their core. This is still evident in many of the Asian countries today, where families share a strong bond from growing up together in a limited space. These family values are severely lacking in Australian society, where children move out of home at a young age and it is the norm for every person to have their own room in a house.
In Asian countries, children will sleep in the same bedroom as their parents. Grandparents are not thrown into retirement villages, but instead live with their children and grandchildren in the same house. When a son or daughter is married, they do not move off elsewhere, rather preferring to build an extension to the family house and stay in close proximity.
Many experts link these simple values failing to be attained from the home environment to the degradation of society; to the point where rapes, murders, theft and thuggery are all common place. Separate home ownership needs to be considered not just from the monetary point of view, but from the potential social damage it may be responsible for.
WILL YOU REALLY EVEN OWN IT?
Owning property means that it is yours: at least that’s what the Australian government wants you to believe. The true reality is that the government actually retains ownership of the land and you rent the land on a peppercorn leasehold basis.
As depicted in the great Australian movie classic ‘The Castle’, we are living under a false assumption that the land can ever be considered ours. The government purports the power to be able to take our ‘home’ from us at any time and for any purpose that it sees fitting.
Then there are the courts, which have a long history of ‘stealing’ property for frivolous reasons. Local councils also stamp their authority over the homeowners, even though that authority has been revoked through referendums which deem council rates to be illegal and unenforceable. If you have to pay a fee for the privilege of owning your home, should that really be considered as true home ownership?
Yet even after considering all these factors, many Australians will continue to believe in the impossible dream.
