Immigrant demand denying Australia's Gen-Y of urban housing

A SENIOR Treasury official has sounded the alarm over Australia's property market. He has warned that the prospect of a sudden and dramatic drop in prices is "the elephant in the room" and should not be ignored by the federal government. [Source: Treasury warning on home price bubble by Sean Parnell, FOI editor, The Australian, 20th November 2010] While the government and Reserve Bank insist Australia does not have a housing bubble - as some economists and the International Monetary Fund suggest - it remains such a worrying concept that Treasury has privately sought reassurance from its analysts that prices are not artificially high and that Australia does not face the kind of house price collapse that has hit Britain and the US. Documents obtained by The Weekend Australian under Freedom of Information laws show the Treasury officials preparing the so-called Red Book of briefs for the incoming government were as divided as private sector economists about the strength of the property market. Phil Garton, the manager of Treasury's Macro Financial Linkages Unit, sent colleagues a draft paper on the rise in household debt, prospects for further growth in the debt-to-income ratio and the potential implications of slower household debt growth. His email prompted an exchange with Steve Morling, currently the general manager of the Domestic Economy Division, who argued the paper should "make a bit more about the risks". "The elephant in the room is house prices or more specifically the risk of a precipitous drop in them, perhaps from an external shock or perhaps from their own internal dynamics when affordability constraints or capacity debt levels see prices and expectations of house prices start to move in the opposite direction," Mr Morling wrote on June 15. "(I) know there are very supportive fundamentals, but prices rose by 50-60 per cent in three to four years in the early part of this decade, with largely unchanged fundamentals, so they can have a life of their own. "And given what's happened elsewhere I'm far less sanguine about this - and the interplay with debt - than in the past." Mr Garton agreed that there would be risks if the fundamentals of low interest rates, unemployment, and financial deregulation "reversed significantly". But he maintained the price growth in the early 2000s was based on a "lagged response" to improvements in the fundamentals, and questioned how Australia could have maintained a bubble for more than six years.