Is there a housing bubble in Sydney and Melbourne? Of course there is. The two markets have been distorted for years by an influx of murky money coming from China, which should be of interest to the Foreign Investment Review Board. Except that the board is a bureaucratic joke inside the real estate industry.

It is a joke that has been lost on would-be first home buyers in particular, who have been watching properties slide out of reach or requiring a level of debt that their parents and grandparents never had to carry.

It is no coincidence that during the past seven years the price of housing has increased by 40 per cent, shrugging off the Global Financial Crisis, while not a single foreign home-buyer has been prosecuted by the FIRB, even though thousands of established homes, valued at tens of billions of dollars, have been purchased illegally.

There is nothing wrong with a boom market or a globalised property market or closer ties to China, our biggest trading partner, where most of the buying comes from. But a bubble market is different.