Skip to playerSkip to main content
  • 6 months ago
The financial divide between renters and homeowners is growing wider and new research is showing inequality in Australia could actually be worse than statistics suggest. That's prompted two of the nation's leading economists to recommend taxing the family home or a wide-reaching land tax which they say could go a long way to evening up the playing field.

Category

📺
TV
Transcript
00:00Two 25 year olds, both hardworking but facing two potentially very different financial futures.
00:09One is a homeowner.
00:11I was fortunate enough to have a family who was willing to let me stay at home essentially until I saved up a deposit.
00:17The other a renter.
00:19I'm still unsure whether or not I'll be able to save enough to get a home.
00:23New research from UTS and Melbourne University found that while the average disposable income of outright homeowners is 34% higher than renters,
00:34when housing is counted, that income gap widens to 86%.
00:40Including that, Australia rises to become the 10th most unequal country in the OECD.
00:47There's two ways you get effective income from your own home.
00:52The first is you effectively pay yourself rent.
00:57The second component is the capital gain that you get on housing, particularly in Australia
01:02where we've had quite substantial capital gains on property certainly over the last 30 years.
01:09The economists argue exempting the family home from the capital gains tax costs the budget $50 billion a year,
01:17discourages more productive forms of investment, pushes up home values and locks young people out of the property market.
01:25To make the system fairer they're calling for a tax on land, wealth or the family home.
01:31There are obviously areas that no sensible government would go near and that's one of them.
01:36The boss of the nation's biggest bank says he'll raise housing affordability at the government's economic round table.
01:43When we look at future generations and even younger Australians now I think it's hard to save for a deposit.
01:49The Australian dream getting further out of reach.
01:52The Australian dream getting further out of reach.
01:54Harvest Rio好icher
01:57?
01:58The Australian dream getting further out of reach.
Comments

Recommended