Gone are the days when a ‘good job’ gets you a house – and now we have the data to prove it | Greg Jericho

New research from the Australia Institute shows that even a good job is no longer enough to afford to buy a home.

Joe Hockey made the infamous comments in 2015 he was rightly scorned.

But it’s worth actually testing his claim, since, as a colleague pointed out, surely the cost of buying a house has gone up much faster than incomes.

Our tax system has been working to reduce housing affordability since 1999 , when John Howard and Peter Costello changed capital gains tax so combined it combined it with negative gearing to incentivise investment.

Well, four months after making this claim, he left parliament and in his final speech he told Australians that “negative gearing should be skewed towards new housing so that there is an incentive to add to the housing stock rather than an incentive to speculate on existing property”. A decade later , we are heading into an election where neither major party proposes such changes. Instead, we can only assume they are content with sentencing young Australians to saving forever for a deposit that they’ll never actually reach. - Greg Jericho is a Guardian columnist and policy director at the Centre for Future Work .