While the focus on the rental market in part reflected the political heat of the fight with Labor about negative gearing, the speech appeared to concede the realities of the housing market were that the "dream" of owning your own home was being replaced by a reality that a growing number of younger Australians would only ever rent.

Beyond changing the prospects for many households, it also seems to confirms a huge change in the political dynamics of the housing debate to one which is much more dominated by housing investors at the expense of home buyers.

While Mr Morrison – and others in the government – have raised the spectre of a range of measures that government could undertake to make housing affordable, Mr Richardson put a reality check on the discussion on Wednesday in which he pointed out that – relative to recent moves in house prices – the impact of any government policy change would be marginal at best.

"The most overlooked thing [the Treasurer] said was that there was no silver bullet around this," Mr Richardson said.

"You absolutely do need to look at renters who are of course the flip side of looking at investors."

There were "heaps of things", the government could do but when "you have more than nine million homes and families in Australia, you're not necessarily going to change things heaps".

"You need to understand how small the levers they have on how big a market the Australian housing market is", he said.

"They might affect prices by 2-3 per cent: we easily did more than that over the course of November-December".

Independent economist Saul Eslake agreed, saying that it was "much easier for them to make housing affordability worse rather than better", and that the government appeared to be toying with "more idea that would make it worse".

Mr Eslake's cynical take was that it wasn't surprising that Mr Morrison had started to focus on the rental market because "there's even less the federal government can do about rental housing than owner occupied housing".