Every con needs a mark who thinks they are being rescued instead of fleeced.
Carnival grifters used to pick the gullible one out of the crowd, run the game and then chalk them on the back afterwards – a literal mark.
Every other operator knew that one had already been worked and to leave them alone.
Young Australians, planning for their futures, have effectively been chalked.
Labor picked them out of the crowd 10 months ago, ran the housing game and is now standing over the wreckage.
And the numbers just landed prove it.
First home buyer loan applications have tanked more than 20 per cent because nothing says “come buy a house young Aussie” like torching the market with uncertainty and watching the RBA itself admit the budget frightened buyers.
Turns out new taxes on housing during an affordability crisis does not inspire confidence.
Who knew.
For a full budget cycle, the government wept publicly over young Australians locked out of home ownership then produced, with great ceremony, the instruments of their liberation.
Last October it was the very same five per cent deposit first home buyers scheme.
Housing Minister Clare O’Neil said at the time: “It’s just not right that an entire generation of young Australians have been locked out of the housing market, saving for decades while paying off someone else’s mortgage. So Labor’s changing it.”
In April he said: “The issue of intergenerational equity in general is important … for many young people, they feel like they haven’t got a fair crack compared to my generation.”
The government’s official Budget housing statement in May went further still: “This is about building more homes, helping more Australians realise the dream of homeownership and giving younger Australians a leg up in the housing market.”
By June it was a tax raid on “greedy” investors so sweeping Treasurer Jim Chalmers called it the “most ambitious and important” housing reform in decades.
Negative gearing is now restricted to new builds.
The capital gains discount has been replaced with a minimum 30 per cent tax.
Your self-managed super fund is no longer welcome anywhere near an investment property.
The great equaliser, we were told, had arrived.
But the equaliser has helped nobody.
Some recent buyers under the government’s own guarantee scheme are now sitting in negative equity.
Yes, those young Australians.
They are the generation Labor promised to save but is now quietly ruining which, I would argue, is worse than indifference because at least indifference is honest.
Add to this the auction clearance rates which have collapsed to around 43 per cent.
While Labor talks about “delivering” for first home buyers, property data and analytics firm Cotality’s numbers this week showed Sydney and Melbourne posting their worst monthly falls in value since August 2022 – down 1.2 per cent and one per cent respectively in a single month.
Four capital cities are now going backwards, with Adelaide the latest to join the slide in June.
This is not a soft landing or a “cooling market” but a genuine, measurable retreat happening in real time.
O’Neil’s verdict however was that the market is undergoing a “correction”.
The PM, asked directly whether Treasury had got its forecasts wrong, offered a masterclass in obfuscation.
Treasury forecasts, he explained, “aren’t week by week” because they are “serious” and based on “modelling” so should not be judged against anything so vulgar like what is actually happening.
“We stand by the reform that is about giving young people a fair crack into home ownership,” he later said in an ABC 7:30 interview with Sarah Ferguson.
“We’ve seen home ownership rates drop for younger Australians, and I don’t want to live in a society that’s defined by intergenerational inequity, by people from my generation having access to buying their own home and having the security that comes from a roof over your head, to people who are the younger generations simply giving up on buying their own home.
“That is why this reform is so important and the estimate is that 75,000 additional people will get into home ownership as a result of this reform.”
Spare a thought for the young buyer who did exactly what the government told them to do.
Five per cent down and the government’s stamp of approval on the whole transaction.
That young Australian is watching their equity vanish on a schedule Labor itself set in motion and no amount of Treasury word salad is going to fix that.
Young Australians did not get equity.
They got a minister calling their shrinking deposit a “correction” and a PM telling them not to read too much into it.
If this is what saving a generation looks like, I shudder to imagine what Labor and its carnival of clowns considers to be letting them down.
Louise Roberts is a journalist and editor who has worked as a TV and radio commentator in Australia, the UK and the US. Louise is a winner of the Peter Ruehl Award for Outstanding Columnist in the NRMA Kennedy Awards for Excellence in Journalism and has been shortlisted in other awards for her opinion work