The Great Australian Dream now belongs to landlords

While the average housing prices rise above a million dollars, the Australian dream has lost its democratic morality and is a rapid dream for the rich, Carl Rhodes.

Australian Statistical Office on 10 June 2025 (Pessimistic) approved The average house price in Australia has broken the ceiling of $ 1 million.

Exactly, the price rose to $ 1,002,500. Average annual average tenfold income Before tax. HE structure Australia is the second most expensive housing market in the world delay Behind Hong Kong.

When it comes to breaking $ 1 million ceilingSydney was the first Domino to fall ten years ago, followed by Melbourne and Canberra in 2021. Today, there is no capital in the country where houses are below the average of the magic million.

The world did news. . BBC titled ‘The average Australian house passes 1 million dollars in a housing crisis’. Accordingly ForbesThis is a ‘Historical Milestone‘. Britain Daily mail more alarmist, reporting ‘The Australian dream becomes a nightmare as the value of the average house exceeds $ 1 million’.

Great Australian Dream

The dream of having a suburban quarter -quarter -acre block laid with a barbecue, hills hoist and modest three bedrooms may seem strange to people these days. However, while the dream is not more and more reaching for many, it remains deeply buried in the Australian culture.

Early expressing the idea of ​​the Great Australian dream dream united with Ray Lawler1955 Game, Write seventeenth Baby. The game was a great success and visited the audiences who wanted to see the theater productions reflecting their own lives. Australian playwrights were rarely carried out.

Although the Lawler does not use the term “the Great Australian Dream”, he questioned both documents and the cultural ideal of the Australian utopia of hosting. This was a dream of shared prosperity, economic stability and indigenous happiness – all of them were based on the idea that every Australian could buy their own homes.

Imagine democracy

House and land ownership with people working always had a deep democratic character. 2 million people in the post -war “population or no” period migrated To Australia. Racist White Australian Policy They came from England and Europe, formulated in 1901.

The host exploded. A little more than half of all Australians in 1947 Hosts. Twenty years later, in 1966, 73 percent peaked to almost three quarters. It meant something special for the new Australians, imagined from the European Class System, which was based on the historical privilege of aristocratic land holding.

The host was a sign of not separating the concrete inequalities of a European past. Individually, the dream was independence from a repressive host class. Collectively, it was a country that could offer prosperity and freedom to everyone who called it.

In his heart, the Australian dream has always been a democratic dream, but it is one of a very practical nature. By fusing political and economic ideals, it reflected what equality, solidarity and freedom could mean in terms of a unique Australia. Having a person’s own house was the material realization of Australia’s promise.

Things are different today. Finally, 67 percent of Australians it has Their own homes, expected of the ratio to fall To 63 percent by 2040. How exactly will this take us back dead In 1954.

Young people are particularly shot hard. Today, only half of their 30s buy their own or their own homes. For every consecutive generation that has been born since the explosion of the post -war baby, its hosting rates continue to decrease. What remains of the Australian dream has lost its democratic morality and is rapidly becoming a dream for only the rich.

Whose dream?

Let’s not children. For all their democratic ambitions, the Great Australian dream began as the dream of white people. For someDespite the death of this situation has not changed today White Australian Policy In 1973 and the rapid growth of multicultural migration. To ensure the reality of the dream, the soils purchased and sold were stolen.

Native Australians are excluded from a dream, in general, as the original owners of the land. rooted in racism Terra nullius: A dream of the original sin after Australia.

As a journalist and writer Stan Grant written In his book, Talk to my country:

‘The Dream of Australia condemned us to decay on government missions, to break down families, to poverty.’

For most of the history of Australia, domestic Australians are legally excluded from all kinds of property ownership. First temporary steps donate Aboriginal land titles were not taken until 1966. Aborigin Lands South Australia Trust. This has been long after the emergence of the Great Australian dream and for more than ten years of Lawler’s 1955 Write seventeenth Baby It was first held at the Union Theater in Melbourne.

In terms of the title of Freehold, the unfair heritage of our colonial past is as much as having their own homes compared to the rest of the population of less indigenous Australians. Contrary to 67 percent of the population, ratio It is only 42 percent for household peoples with at least one person who defines it as indigenous life.

The rule of the host class

Newspaper titles can call it a “housing crisis”, but much worse, a “crisis of democracy”. The gaspical cost of Australian houses puts Australia on a route that will return us to a feudalism in which the largest class division will be among the landlords and tenants.

The practical facts of the host reflected the democratic vision of an egalitarian society that could once get rid of the classified inequalities of Europe’s past. This dream was never available for all the Australians, but as the housing falls, it becomes increasingly less usable for everyone.

In the current orbit, land and hosting will once again protect the richer. A new class division emerges, not only having their own homes, but also defined as those who have people with others – hosts and tenants. This is not democracy, feudalism.

Let’s proceed, let’s not come back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avljhqlpizu

Carl Rhodes is a professor of business and community at Sydney Technology University. Five wrote book On the relationship between liberal democracy and contemporary capitalism. You can follow him on Twitter @Profcarlrhodes.

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