If rumours out of Canberra are true, we may be about to see one of the greatest intergenerational hospital passes in Australian history.

Coalition backbenchers have been calling for the Government to allow first home buyers to access their superannuation to help fund a housing deposit.

The idea is being "actively considered" by the Prime Minister's office, according to Sky News.

If that's true, let's hopefully cut that consideration short, well before we get to May's budget, when the Government has promised to announce measures to improve housing affordability.

The superficial logic of allowing young Australians to use their super to help get into the housing market is beguiling - after all, the money is just sitting there, they won't need it for several decades and desperately need it now for a step up onto the property ladder.

But the problems are manifold, and well explained in this piece by ABC News Online; the biggest concern is that Australian property is a wobbly ladder.

Housing on shaky foundations

It rests on the shaky foundations of record and still rising household debt, much of which is sourced by Australia's banks from overseas.

Holding up those foundations are the hunched backs of households burdened by one of the largest household debt-to-income ratios in the world at 187 per cent, and the confidence of faceless foreign investment houses who are lending to those households, mainly via the big four banks.

At some point a straw will break that back - it could be an international event that causes the foreign investors to rapidly withdraw their financial support, or a domestic economic deterioration.

One reason the major banks have put forward for opposing a royal commission is that it could undermine confidence in Australia's banking system.

If they were confident in their business practices, surely they would have little to fear?

However, a wide-ranging royal commission might expose to the world at large the true scale of lending to people who can't really afford to borrow the money.

Australian property Ponzi

So, if the property ladder is wobbly, why would our national leaders encourage us to start climbing it?

It all makes perfect sense if you view the current Australian property market as sharing many of the traits of a Ponzi scheme (prime example Bernie Madoff).

A Ponzi scheme is an investment where profits for the early investors come from getting more new investors to put money into the pyramid.

Those at the top thus can jump off with a profit. Those lower down need to find a new and even bigger group of investors to get on board to earn their profit.

These schemes don't earn any, or much, income from the funds invested. The returns are simply based on more and more people putting money in.

The Australian property market has been exhibiting a growing likeness to such as scheme, where the income from rental is nowhere near enough to cover the costs of the debt most people need to buy in, especially in Australia's two biggest cities.

This is measured through rental yields - the annual return an investor gets from tenants relative to the purchase price - which are at record lows below 3 per cent for houses in Sydney and Melbourne.

Rental yields from Australia's five largest capitals, showing a large plunge in Sydney and Melbourne.

If you're an investor and not making a profit from rent then you must be hoping that the value of the property will increase.

The only way this happens is if demand keeps growing - i.e. more people keep entering the market to pay higher prices to get onto the bottom of the ladder.

Hence why the Australian property market has Ponzi features.

Final act of intergenerational theft?

Of course, a Ponzi scheme collapses as soon as people realise what it is and want to get their money out or when it simply runs out of enough new recruits to keep the profits flowing for existing investors.

That is why using super for deposits could be cynically viewed as the latest, and potentially greatest, intergenerational theft by the baby boomers from generations X, Y and Z.

You see, many baby boomers didn't take their profits from the earlier stages of the property Ponzi, not recognising it as such.

Instead these investors doubled down on their bets, or much more in many cases, expecting property price rises to last forever.

Allowing first home buyers to access their super for a deposit will create a fresh pool of buyers.

That will prop up the Ponzi for a while, and allow many of the cannier investors to jump out with a big profit - at the expense of young first home buyers.

Thus we could be left with thousands of formerly investment apartments in the hands of first home buyers, just as Australia's big cities enter a widely acknowledged apartment glut.

When the smart investors have left and most young people who can buy have been enticed into it there will be no fresh pool of buyers to prop up the Ponzi and it will fall down, either slowly or spectacularly.

The smart boomers will walk away with the biggest profits, having been in the market the longest, while recent younger buyers will be left with more housing debt than equity and no superannuation either.

Thus the intergenerational transfer will be complete.