“When the housing market went nuts the value of Tuross passed the threshold that prevented even a part pension. And just because we can’t live in two places at once, we’re suddenly the bad guys,” bemoans columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.
YES, my wife and I – and many of our friends – belong to the “lucky generation” born in and just after World War II as precursors of the Boomers.
Sure, we’ve had a pretty good run, but now, it seems, we’re the bad guys in the great housing debate. It’s punishment time: end negative gearing; pay capital gains on the family home; skyrocket rates; and badmouth the Boomers.
It’s easy to list the advantages we’ve had. In childhood, three good meals a day and we lived in okay houses even if sleeping on enclosed verandahs or sharing a bedroom with a sibling.
We walked or rode our bikes to primary school with classes of 40 to 50 kids. Our holidays were spent in rented beach houses where we could only stay two weeks before dad returned to work and mum to part time dressmaking. And boy, did we envy those folks with a beach house.
My experience was fairly typical. After two years at Brisbane Grammar, two years jackarooing, and a year matriculating with a Commonwealth Scholarship, I scored a cadetship on “The Courier-Mail”. The “south” beckoned and a stint at “The Age” led me to the paper’s Canberra bureau in the late 1960s; and pure chance – plus the jackarooing – the opportunity to become press secretary for his last year with the great “Black Jack” McEwen. Even better, I’d married the lovely Wendy Webster, a teacher, musician, composer and writer and bought our first house in Canberra’s suburban Pearce.
Then PM Harold Holt took his fateful swim and McEwen became interim PM. John Gorton offered him a deal, too good to refuse so he (and I) stayed on till his retirement in 1971, then we escaped with our two little boys to the Asian Development Bank in Manila for the next five years. That’s where I made documentary films in 32 countries and wrote my first book, “The Queenslander”.
A writing scholarship arrived and brought us back to Batemans Bay, where Wendy taught at the local school till we returned to Canberra where I began a disastrous foray into video production which – combined with 17 per cent bank interest rates – resulted in our losing the Pearce house. Now we were renters and in 1990 I returned to journalism at “The Canberra Times”.
Happily, a bright spot arrived when a generous colleague shared the acquisition of a little bolthole at Tuross. Then Wendy took an early farewell from daily teaching for the deposit on a house at Weston and I wrote a book with an old “Courier-Mail” mate.
This got me back into writing and 20 books later with Wendy’s relief teaching and a 2003 “Canberra Times” redundancy, we sold the house and moved to a nearby home unit.
That’s when the housing market went nuts; the value of Tuross passed the threshold that prevented even a part pension, and massively increased the maintenance on two properties. And just because we can’t live in two places at once, we’re suddenly the bad guys.
I’m not complaining. In our lifetime, our generation has been spared the threat of invasion. John Bell has brought us every Shakespearean play; we’ve watched great TV drama from “Breaking Bad”, “The Sopranos”, “West Wing” and Rachel Perkins’ “The Australian Wars”; we’ve been serenaded by The Beatles to Peking Duk; thrilled by the sporting greats too numerous to mention; relished the defeat of Scott Morrison by a fair election; and devoured the non-Murdoch press and ABC news which is keeping truth alive…just.
I hang my head in shame that we failed to act on climate change and are entrusting our foreign affairs future to the American imperialists. But we have worked very hard – most of us – to acquire our little pieces of real estate, and a modicum of comfort in our final years. I just wonder if the punishment fits the housing crime.
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