Australian home owners now have the protection of a “financial shield” in uncertain times but there is a widening the gap between established owners and aspiring first home buyers, Domain says.<\/p>\n
He said many Australians say they want improved housing affordability and lower house prices but it’s “nonsense” to expect that those things will occur under our current policy settings, because the “entire construct of the Australian economy” is embedded in the housing mortgage book.<\/p>\n
AustralianSuper is Australia’s largest superannuation fund.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It manages the wealth of more than 3.7 million Australians and has more than $410 billion<\/a> in assets under management, making it one of the 40 largest asset owners in the world.<\/p>\n “You know how they say in casinos ‘The house always wins’?” Mr Schroder told the ABC.<\/p>\n “I would say that in the financial sector, in the Australian economy, the ‘house’ always wins.<\/p>\n “And the reason why the ‘house’ always wins is that housing prices, and housing valuations, underpin the entire banking system,” he argued.<\/p>\n Paul Schroder is the CEO of AustralianSuper. (AAP: Bianca De Marchi)<\/p>\n Australia’s inflated housing wealth<\/p>\n Mr Schroder made his comments on today’s episode<\/a> of That’s Business with Alan Kohler, the ABC’s new business podcast published every Friday afternoon.<\/p>\n He said Australia needed to have a serious conversation about its capital allocation, because the inflated level of our housing wealth was extreme compared to the size of our economy.<\/p>\n Loading…<\/p>\n He said the nominal value of gross domestic product (GDP) in the United States is US$31.4 trillion and the value of US housing stock is US$55 trillion.<\/p>\n By comparison, Australia’s GDP is worth $2.7 trillion and its housing stock is worth $12.3 trillion<\/a>.<\/p>\n He said the “whole show” in Australia was built on housing and it couldn’t continue this way.<\/p>\n “John Howard said nobody wants<\/a> their house to drop in value,” he said.<\/p>\n “For the last 25 years, all of our additional wealth has gone into inflated housing prices that you can’t really do anything about because you’ve got to move from one house to another house.”<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/bd19db7ad8ff354bb531c3b1e085db65.jpeg\")
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