Phil Naylor knows how much your kids are suffering; wants them to suffer more

This is nice: the financing lobby that has made a mint out of skyrocketing house prices pretends to be all sympathetic to the misery from which it has profited:

A survey of Australians aged under 30 shows they are increasingly pessimistic about the prospect of buying their first home.

The survey of nearly 900 people, conducted by the Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia, showed more than half those questioned said they were shelving plans to buy their first home.

With housing now less affordable than its ever been, with those who owned property before Howard’s house price surge demanding ever increasing ludicrous sums from those who didn’t, I’m not surprised. By filling the market with investors (thanks for halving the CGT, Liberals) and inflating the prices with a “grant” that increases prices by more than its value and is in effect a further gift of public money to the most privileged boomers, we’ve managed to make home ownership for the next generation a matter of blind luck, possible only for the very top earners, and those who will inherit property from their parents.

It’s a national disaster. Nice of the finance lobby to highlight it. How benevolent, to advocate for the ending of something which is clearly worth a lot of money to them…

Nah, just kidding. The finance lobby’s crocodile tears have a purpose: persuading the government to bring back the grant from which they’ve profited so handsomely at the expense of ordinary young Australians:

The association’s Phil Naylor says the scaling back of the first home owners grant is one of the main reasons for the trend.

You lying scumbag, Phil. You’re a representative for the finance industry, so there’s no way you don’t know that a government grant of X to first home buyers enables them to borrow several times MORE than X, and consequently the price of entry-level homes increases by more than the value of that grant. It pushes them further into debt. You know that. But your association would love to be able to charge them interest on all that extra cash. So you blatantly misrepresent the truth for personal gain – at the expense, if you’re successful, of tens of thousands of young Australians.

I don’t know how Phil Naylor sleeps at night.