Cameron Murray
@DrCameronMurray
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Chief Economist at Fresh Economic Thinking. Corruption and property market specialist.
Australia
Joined September 2011
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Interested in housing markets and policy?
My book, The Great Housing Hijack, is available to pre-order (out 27th Feb)
It makes sense of the economic and political forces in property, debunks myths that hijack debates and offers workable policy options
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Prediction.
In ten years it will be hard to find anyone who will admit to supporting COVID lockdowns, school closures, masks, and vaccine passports.
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Major rental market fears as landlords threaten to sell up en masse
How is this a threat? If you want houses to be cheaper and more available for first home buyers, this is great news.
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A thread on my experience:
1. 90% of students in my economics masters classes are international.
2. Half of them struggle with basic English
3. When I ask in tutorials why they are doing the degree, half tell me that they "need more points for their residency visa" (1/n)
'She couldn't speak any English': Are Australian universities using international students as 'cash cows'?
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Do people mind that the Lucas Heights reactor is about 1km from Sydney suburbs and is currently where our nuclear waste is stored.
It doesn’t seem to be an issue
Hand up who’s going to take a nuclear power plant in their area? Or a waste repository? 🦗 🦗🦗🦗🤯🤯🤯
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Despite all the political pretending, the ALP does not want housing rents and prices to fall.
We know this, because they are choosing not to do the only thing that works – build housing and rent or sell it cheaply.
Instead they are going to write a different number in a
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Guess which former federal politician, who chaired a lengthy inquiry into housing markets, is now chairman of an AirBnB short-term rental management company?
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Did I just see on mainstream television that there were 22,000 serious adverse reactions to Covid vaccines in Australia?
That’s one in 730 adults.
Bloody shocking.
I wrote about the surprise number of injury compensation claims made a while back.
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New data is out showing Australian deaths are running at 11.3% above average.
The lack of interest in this is a puzzle in light of the last few years.
Yet I predicted that we would stop caring about excess mortality.
1/
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I’d be more likely to take seriously the idea that Australian universities are underfunded if they didn’t have a cabal of high level bureaucrats earning $1m plus per year, far above global norms.
That seems like something organisations with plenty of spare cash would spend on.
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Why does retirement have to be at the end of your life?
Why not have multiple short retirement periods of a year or two at ages 30, 40, or 50, but work a little longer in old age if you can?
Seems more optimal to me
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For the price of these submarines, we could build about 750,000 dwellings (about 7% of the housing stock) and just give them away for free.
That would house 1.6 million people or about 20% of current renter households.
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I remember back in 2021 I said on Q+A that there was no need for kids to get Covid vaccines and that we overreacted with lockdowns and should just open up and return to normal.
Seems very sensible in retrospect, no?
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If the rest of Australia had the ACT's rental regulations, which limit annual rental increases to CPI growth x 1.1, inflation would be lower and millions of renters would be saving thousands of dollars a year.
Where's the downside to this?
Is it just whinging landlords?
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Many argue that housing problems are due to the stock of housing not growing fast enough to keep up the stock of people.
Yet the same people will argue that growing the stock of people faster is fine and not a housing issue.
I don't really get this.
We need to stop blaming immigrants for policy failures. Cutting immigration won’t fix the housing crisis but will instead make us poorer, both culturally and economically.
@Emilie_Dye
clashes with Dick Smith on
@SkyNewsAust
's new program, The Jury, with
@DanicaDeGiorgio
.
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The biggest rip-off in Australia is surely superannuation. Over $30 billion in fees per year. A similar amount of tax breaks.
All for essentially no macroeconomic benefit.
Supermarkets wouldn't even make it in the top 10 Aussie rip-offs.
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Please check out my substack.
A lot of housing analysis and fresh ideas that you don't get elsewhere.
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14. In sum, universities are being degraded so they can be used as a back-door immigration program, and no one at the senior levels of universities or major political parties want to change it.
15. It is nearly career suicide for younger academics to say anything about it (8/8)
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Why is Australia's future fund so expensive?
It has $500 million per year of administrative costs
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160,000 people die in Australia every year.
That’s 440 every day.
In fact in in 2019 7,000 more people died than in 2018 and no one noticed or cared (a 4.4% rise).
Context matters.
36 deaths today.
If it’d been a terrible accident, or an attack, or war, or a natural disaster, we’d have newspaper articles with photos and stories about each person.
Instead, we just have a number. Bigger than yesterday’s. Maybe smaller than tomorrow.
Who are all these people?
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Weird how the UK, Canada and Australia are all running enormous immigration programs at the moment.
Is it just catch up, or an active new policy stance?
Is there a shared view that this will avoid a technical recession or something?
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More housing per capita in the US today than at any point in history.
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One more time
Public housing is way cheaper than rental subsidies
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The Bank of Mum and Dad is a sensible way to pass on wealth to children when it is actually useful to them.
The average age of receiving an inheritance is over 60yrs.
No point having your grandchildren grow up far from you or in financial stress when you can just give them
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We need a serious debate about Australia’s immigration policy. 400-500k per year is far above optimal.
That’s more than a Canberra of people who’ll need 200k+ homes and infrastructure, which is more than we can build a year.
~100k seems optimal.
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If a high school principal wants a pay rise they can always quit and become a lollipop lady at a construction site.
What a dodgy situation we have created.
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@TheKouk
Every household would own their own home, no?
That's what must be true in this scenario.
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@Cernovich
It’s weird but common.
My Dad tells me he had to twist his mates arm to get him to help his daughter financially. Guy has ~$5m in assets, retired, doesn’t know what to spent on.
His daughter has a young baby and a $400k mortgage and struggling.
My Dad said “if you want more
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For some reason, many housing advocates still prefer rental subsidies over public housing.
But it is easy to show that public housing is way cheaper than rental subsidies.
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A strange immigration story in New Zealand this past couple of years.
A net inflow to NZ of 69k Indian citizens and a net outflow of 84k NZ citizens.
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Pretty wild that nearly 20% of all people in Australia aged in their 20s are international students.
There are >622k international students and ~3.4m people in their 20s.
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I asked an ACT political staffer why they don't use their public housing developer to flood the market to bring down rents/prices.
He said "We can't reduce the value of people's homes"
That's housing politics in Australia - yet we pretend otherwise
Landlords know that any policy that makes rents cheaper costs them money.
This is the heart of property politics.
It's why universal public housing options (to buy or rent at subsidised prices) are the best solution.
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It finally happened to me today!
Someone cited my own paper when arguing how uninformed I am of the research. In this case, the topic was housing and rezoning.
Is there a name for this type of thing?
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One of Australia’s biggest housing developers is looking to sell their business, which includes an extensive approved land bank.
The HAFF should buy it, then accelerate development of these tens of thousand of homes.
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I forgot to add that almost every student I failed or called out for plagiarism got second and third chances until they passed.
After the first chance it is taken out of my hands to higher ups at the faculty.
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Prediction.
More vaccination is not the COVID endgame, politically.
We will not open borders and return to normal as that means COVID transmission.
It will show the futility of our actions so far. An unacceptable political position.
The "finish line" never was one.
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In a sane world, there would be a cooling-off period that would enforce a break of, say, three years, between being Federal Treasurer and working as an in-house advisor at Goldman Sachs.
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Funny how we don't call house price declines "affordability gains".
We should. We are finally seeing some nice affordability gains.
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Reducing net immigration to 100k per year from its current 600k or so is equivalent to building 200k extra dwellings.
Our peak construction year in 2016 only built this many homes.
Many argue that housing problems are due to the stock of housing not growing fast enough to keep up the stock of people.
Yet the same people will argue that growing the stock of people faster is fine and not a housing issue.
I don't really get this.
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It’s been 10yrs since the financial crisis, & a crisis of economics. Have any universities radically changed their econ courses? Not mine.
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This is a brilliant book by
@ShellenbergerMD
I took a similar intellectual path. Was a naive environmentalist and slowly learnt to cut through the nonsense to gain perspective about what is a priority and what works to make the planet better.
Highly recommended.
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People seem to hate inheritance taxes. This puzzles me.
Why do you think people hate them (or why do you)?
I can’t think of a better tax. If people want to avoid it by buying things or giving assets to family and friends, then that’s a good outcome too.
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Landlords arguing that rent controls will increase rents seems weird. If this were true, wouldn’t they lobby FOR rent controls?
📣 BREAKING: Eighteen associations representing housing providers, lenders and residents in a letter warn FHFA that mandatory rent control and rent stabilization policies will increase rents and exacerbate the housing affordability crisis.
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I've found the solution to a lack of public investment in housing in Queensland.
Don't call it "public housing".
Call it "Olympic housing"
Watch the money start flowing!
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I'm into the finer details of Australia's welfare system... and I'm quickly becoming a UBI convert.
The micro-management of tiny payments with multiple qualifying criteria applied to millions of households every year seems far from ideal.
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It’s the first week back at school and time to remind everyone that having schools provide lunch is going to save money and time for every parent in the country.
Surely a vote winner and a massive improvement all round.
How silly in 2024 to have millions of kids carrying
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Huh.
Look at Switzerland keeping their inflation down
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Speaking of tax, why do we still have the medicare levy?
Why not take the chance with Stage 3 to roll this revenue into the regular income tax rates and simplify things a little?
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@VPrasadMDMPH
My normal response to vaccine mandates or passports:
"I guess people just really want to catch COVID only from vaccinated people"
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6. If half the class can't understand English it brings down standards. It must—unless I fail half the class.
7. Think about the incentives—a casual lecturer who costs $25,000 fails 50 students paying $250,000. Change lecturer next year or reduce intake to keep standards? (3/n)
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Australia's housing debate contains a major economic error.
Housing is seen as a great asset for private investors to leverage into, but a terrible and costly thing for a government to build or own.
For now, I'll call this error the "Housing Asset Anomaly"
1/
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The bizarre part of the YIMBY movement is the idea that somehow property developers are being out-smarted by NIMBY grandmas who can play the political system to their advantage.
Are we forgetting that the property industry is hugely over-represented at all levels of politics?
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You regular reminder that public housing is way cheaper than rental subsidies
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Can we stick to sensible arguments when it comes to nuclear?
If adding 1GW of nuclear requires rooftop solar to be shut off daily, then adding 1GW of solar requires this too as it ONLY produces energy when rooftop solar does (but then none overnight).
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Why are people dunking on this?
It’s a cheap air conditioned home for people who need one from a government that seems to finally be taking some action.
More is needed, but the direction is right.
Great news! Tenants have just moved into these eight new factory-built homes in Gympie.
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I feel I should be angry, but I am mostly sad about this.
I tried for two years to explain why lockdowns are terrible for health. Much worse than COVID.
But the world was swept up in a kind of madness.
The long-term health costs of lockdowns are beginning to appear.
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Australia’s education export number only exists due to strange statistics that
1. Include all spending by resident students
2. Ignore local work and earnings (most of students work)
3. Ignore remittances that flow out of Australia
Details👇
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This story has it all!
1. Superannuation being used to buy housing
2. Someone thinking that leveraging into 5 Melbourne apartments is the best way to invest $3m
3. Expecting to retire at age 61
4. Whinging about losing money on bad investment choices
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Australia is a Game of Mates.
I even wrote a book about it. Maybe this will make the next edition.
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The property market feels a lot like 2005-06 period in Australia.
A surprise second wave of price gains. Thin market. Rising rents. Much higher interest rates.
I remember at the time thinking how implausible the situation was. Yet here we are again.
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This seems pretty close to the mark.
To buy the same goods and services as a $180k earner in 2008-09 you need about $280k in 2022-23 (or 55% more).
It might seem shocking, but it is mostly due to the 44% CPI increase.
My calculation
- $119k after-tax (incl medicare levy) in
Someone earning 280k today is worse off than someone earning 180k in 2008/09 thanks to tax and inflation.
180k was 122k after tax. To buy that basket of goods and services in 2022/23 would cost 173k. 280k is 172k after tax.
S/O
@nzbiggles
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We used to pay people to study teaching then give them secure full time jobs.
Now we charge them to study and provide year to year contracts.
Maybe there are lessons from the past about how to solve a “shortage”?
This is an extremely important issue: I personally know of teachers who have faced this problem, and it does drive many intelligent and highly educated people out of the profession. It used not to be this way, so how have we ended up here?
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I kind of feel like a nuclear power built out would be good for union members, no?
Australia is one of the sunniest and windiest countries on Earth, but Peter Dutton would rather play a game of nuclear roulette in our backyard than support renewables.
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The puzzle for me is that someone with access to $9 million thought that spending the money on this home was a good idea rather than spending or investing elsewhere
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Fixed rate mortgages have the same economic inefficiencies as rental control, right?
Insensitive to market forces, people get to stay in homes they shouldn’t be able to afford.
Why aren’t anti-rent control people who think it destroys cities against fixed rate mortgages?
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I wonder if Australia should copy Singapores approach of massive stamp duties on foreign buyers
🚨BREAKING
60-65% stamp duty for foreigners buying additional properties in Singapore now!!!! OMW 😱
#Singapore
#property
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Amazing how our governments can build subsidised homes for cars anywhere, any time, at any density.
But subsidised homes for people! That's crazy talk.
“The commuter car park at Frankston Station is looking great from all angles”
At a mere $175k per parking space, you’d hope so! Imagine the bus services and bike lanes this could have funded.
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Japan has low inflation, low unemployment, reasonable growth, and a central bank interest rate of zero.
This seems near impossible in a standard macroeconomic framework of understanding.
So what's happening?
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Imagine if the federal government still owned a major share of this bank. A massive source of public revenue.
CBA profit $10.1 billion
Up 5%
Staggering amount of money
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10. Unfortunately, this reality conflicts with the widely believed myth that our immigration program brings in "high skilled" workers.
11. 350,000 international students paying $25,000+ per year to study is $9billion being pumped through our top dozen universities. (6/n)
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New article:
Australia's $40 billion of education exports is a statistical trick
You've heard Australia exports billions in education services, but you won't believe where this number comes from
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My view on super for housing has changed after digging into the superannuation system design in more detail.
Now, I think it is totally reasonable to use super for your own home, and there are two main reasons.
1. Super is already used to buy homes in SMSFs, BTR and paying
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If we taxed land properly, we'd have billions of extra dollars to fund big tax cuts elsewhere. So why don't we do it?
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I'm hearing an abnormal amount of talk from friends and acquaintances about how they are tightening spending at the moment.
Is this just me, or is this a late-2024 trend that others have noticed too?
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12. Halving the number of international students would keep all the good students, boost standards for all, and remove the visa scams.
13. But this would remove $4.5billion per year of revenue to the universities. (7/n)
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Weren’t two doctors banned from YouTube last year for saying that lockdowns would weaken immune systems and result in less tolerance to other viruses?
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Prediction:
In 2024, interest rates will really be squeezing mortgagors and the idea of using superannuation to pay for mortgages will become a hot political topic again.
And it's going to be wild
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It is incoherent to think that
A) rooftop solar subsidies in Australia are good, but
B) subsidised nuclear is bad.
Rooftop solar is both expensive and unreliable and pushes costs elsewhere in the grid.
Nuclear was of course subsidised internationally. Not in Australia. Korea kept building and pushed costs down.
In Aus, we subsidise rooftop solar—an expensive tech.
To be consistent, subsidising rooftop solar is a worse policy than subsidising nuclear right?
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A fast and efficient way to get subsidised housing up and running.
Got to give
@meaghan_scanlon
and the QLD government some credit here.
They’ve bought a bunch of under-utilised hotels, retirement villages etc in recent months. It’s going to add up.
BREAKING: We’ve bought another vacant 124-home retirement village for Queenslanders in need. 🏡
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8. It is frustrating when top international students from foreign governments/central banks come to your class, then sit next to rich Chinese (almost always Chinese) who can't understand a word and are there to buy a visa (4/n)
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9. The evidence shows the effect on standards is real. . 10. None of this is a secret. That research is from 2011. Here's an article from 2014 (5/n)
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Singapore knows how to do stamp duty on property
So, what do other countries do when it comes to housing investors & foreign buyers? Here's what Singapore is doing!
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“its important to remember that it was likely a lab leak, masks don’t work, mandates didn’t work, vaccines were not needed in people who had COVID, nor children, closing school was a human rights violation, masking kids didn’t work, vaccine mandates were unethical, vaccine
On Jan 17, 2024! I saw a guy outside double masked on a bicycle.
That to me is simply... crazy.
What's the path forward? Should we just stop talking about COVID19?
My latest
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One of the many big lessons of 2020 for me is that fiscal policy works. It really does.
Want faster growth, more economic activity and investment? Give people money to spend.
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The whole housing debate would make more sense if we could first decide whether we wanted rents and prices to be lower or higher.
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I’m seeing reports in the news today about landlords selling homes as if that is a bad outcome.
But it’s the only way to get higher homeownership. If that’s your goal, it should be encouraged.
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For people who say “it’s just catch up immigration from Covid”, what’s your view on “catch up speeding” when driving through the suburbs?
High speed is a problem whether is it catch up or not.
Reducing net immigration to 100k per year from its current 600k or so is equivalent to building 200k extra dwellings.
Our peak construction year in 2016 only built this many homes.
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Why would a reputable university try and compete with online courses that can be delivered from anywhere in the world by companies much better at creating such an experience than they are?
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One of my niche frustrations is footpath clutter. Especially stuff like this.
It’s so annoying because it’s so easy to fix - just install these things off to the side.
But it keeps happening out the front of new complexes of multi million dollar apartments.
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I keep hearing that businesses are crying out for workers and hence we need a huge immigration program.
Yet these same businesses won’t pay wages that are higher than they were in 2012?
Mmm…
Avge compensation per hour has rounded Cape York, headed down past Townsville then Bundaberg and is just about to hit Brisbane
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That most people supported this craziness is a real lesson about human behaviour
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Public parks are middle-class welfare.
We don't need to subsidise people who won't buy their own backyards.
We should fence off parks and only allow in low-income people who qualify through Centrelink. Their allowed visits should phase out if their income rises.
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I don't get it.
Why does a very large bank need to back a company that lends money for home deposits rather than just offer 95% or 100% LVR mortgages directly?
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People underestimate their collective power.
In Byron Bay no one wears a bike helmet, despite the silly law. Simply doing this makes the law unenforceable.
If school students stopped wearing masks in schools this silly rule would quickly disappear.
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People don’t have a good sense of scale for large numbers.
A good rule of thumb is to compare to the 11 million Australia households.
$1.1 billion per yr is $100 per household per yr.
This rule of thumb is also useful for thinking about the scale of government spending.
Up, up, profits are up.
Coles have posted a $1.1 billion profit.
At the same time, demand for food relief services in Victoria are at any all-time high, with millions unable to afford the basics.
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Economists love price controls to deal with inflation.
As long as it is the price of money.
Other prices controls are bad. Money price controls are good.
The more I learn the more I struggle to understand why.
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Australia effectively sells residency by requiring payments to universities. Other countries sell citizenship by requiring you to buy real estate.
Why not just directly sell residency and/or citizenship?
Discuss
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Why do many people think that higher interest rates are a good idea at the moment?
Inflation is falling in Aus and globally. The tide is receding, and we are feeling the lagged effect of rising rates from 6+months ago.
It was never going to be a smooth line back to 2%
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There’s talk of international student caps in Australia.
Why isn’t a cap-and-trade system being proposed? Auction off a national quota to universities each year and let them trade amongst themselves.
Raises public revenue. Ensure universities target highest value students.
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