Sometimes, it feels as if you can’t turn on a TV without seeing news bulletins devoted to interest rate updates, fake-tanned celebrity realtors hawking white McMansions, or middle-aged men in chore jackets stroking their chins at a tasteful mid-century reno. Our free-to-air and streaming services are full of content to fuel our national obsession with home ownership. But when it comes to the real-life housing market, you might be left thinking there’s a bigger picture just out of shot from those million-dollar views.
Into the breach rides Mark Humphries, Australia’s leading – albeit frequently axed – TV news satirist-for-hire. In his new hour-long Foxtel and Binge special Sold! Who Broke the Australian Dream? Humphries fronts up to the challenge of Australia’s housing crisis with the frustration and fatigue of a long-term renter – because he is one.
“If a D-Grade celebrity like me can’t afford a home, who can?” he asks, before joining the queue at another rental inspection.
Sold! sees Humphries attempt to unpick the history, economic settings and popular myths that underpin the current housing affordability crisis – and an orthodoxy that few in the mainstream media or politics dare or care to challenge.
Foreign investment, immigration and international students are favourite scapegoats, but Prof Nicole Gurran from the University of Sydney tells Humphries these factors have had only a minor impact.
“I have heard people tell me that there’s a lot of foreign investors and they go to auctions for instance and that’s how they know,” Gurran says. “I’m always amazed at their X-ray vision, to be able to recognise someone’s citizenship just by looking.”
Humphries also speaks to Jordan van den Lamb, AKA Victorian Socialists candidate and social media star Purple Pingers, to expose the woeful conditions Australian renters endure to keep a roof over their heads – even if it has black mould.
Humphries even borrows a trick from Adam McKay’s Oscar-winning satire The Big Short by putting economics journalist Alan Kohler into a bubble bath, Margot Robbie-style. Kohler sips champagne while explaining how a turn-of-the-millennium decision by the Howard government to introduce a 50% tax discount on capital gains, along with negative gearing, “supercharged the perceived benefits of owning property”.
“Housing was no longer seen as just a shelter, a place to live,” Kohler says. “It was also an investment and the best way to build wealth.”
In his pursuit of answers, Humphries also learns about build-to-rent schemes, meets public housing tenants for whom basic shelter is life-changing, and speaks to a trio of squatters who have opted out of the system entirely by moving into one of an estimated 97,000 vacant homes in greater Melbourne.
He also introduces us to a “heartless boomer investor” who turns out to be a nice lady and former colleague of Humphries who happens to own two properties. That she is an empathetic member of society – not an “evil investor” – is subtly signalled by the books casually piled on her coffee table. After all, would a “property hoarder” own a copy of Rick Morton’s robodebt exposé Mean Streak, Stan Grant’s Talking To My Country or an essay collection from the Australia Institute?
It’s a gentle contradiction that nonetheless captures the kind of defensive self-interest that seems to paralyse any real reform or debate, even when the reality is right there on the coffee table. When it comes to property, it seems we think we’re Daryl Kerrigan from The Castle, but perhaps we’re closer to Mr Gribble from Round the Twist.
By the time Humphries finds himself chatting to a 3D-printing entrepreneur pioneering cheap, fast and very weird-looking homes, you get the sense that maybe it’s not that big a riddle after all.
If it was that complicated, Sold! would probably have ended up as a stunt-driven ABC miniseries fronted by Craig Reucassel instead of a one-hour special. Instead, the Chaser and War on Waste host produced, co-wrote and makes a cameo appearance.
But that might be for the best. Rarely do we see anyone on Aunty turn quite as righteously enraged as Humphries does by the end of his fact-finding mission – you can see the whites of his exasperated eyes.
“I gotta be honest, this is not good enough,” he groans to the camera. “It’s a mindset issue we have in this country, where we are viewing property as a pathway to wealth as opposed to something which is designed for people to live in … this is wrong – it’s actually morally wrong what we’re doing,” he pleads. “So get angry about it, because I bloody well am.”
Humphries might have prolonged his own rental woes by putting himself on the shit list of every real estate agent with a Binge subscription – but it’s hard to disagree with him.
Sold! Who Broke the Australian Dream? premieres on 21 July at 8.30pm on FOX8 on Foxtel and on Binge from noon.
