“Data!” cry Vancouver’s beleaguered house poor. “Give us data!” Their shouting has yet to pierce the stone-deaf resolve of our senior governments’ refusal to do so.

In the meantime, the debate on the effect of offshore investment on the Metro Vancouver house prices festers in a stew of anecdote and urban folklore.

The result leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It has set generation against generation, and fed anti-immigration and anti-Chinese resentment. Meanwhile, our governments and our real-estate industries offer up figures and arguments that are at best vague and at worst deflections.

As their excuses pile up about the difficulty of gathering data, or that the effect of offshore investment is negligible, or that rising house prices are the fault of municipal governments, they have begun to look not just feckless but complicit. What is it they do not wish us to know? What is it they themselves actively avoid knowing? Why not gather data, if just to calm the public and bring empirical evidence to dispel the myths?

Australia went through this debate decades ago. Its Foreign Acquisitions & Takeovers Act is 40 years old. The original means of data collection, however, was spotty, and the rules governing offshore investment in residential real estate were so porous they could be easily skirted.

The Australian government determined to improve that data collection. Last year, it held an inquiry into foreign residential real estate buying, and the inquiry committee was aghast to learn that between 2007 and 2014, the Foreign Investment Review Board, which regulates the Act, failed to prosecute a single illegal foreign real-estate transaction.

It “defies belief,” the committee report stated, that there was universal compliance to the Act for seven years. This gave rise to tougher new rules on compliance, higher fines and better coordination of data collection between government ministries.

(Since the new rules were enacted in May, the FIRB has begun investigations into 195 property purchases that could led to prosecution. Whether those new efforts and rules will have any effect on house prices is still to be seen.)

But as porous as Australia’s data collection system was, at least there was some data, especially data collected by the Foreign Investment Review Board and the Ministry of Immigration.

Using those bodies’ figures, and extrapolating from buyer trends, a team of Credit Suisse research analysts published reports on Chinese investment into Australian residential property last year and this. This year’s report was released on May 6, and while the report’s authors “bemoaned the poor data quality in Australia,” they still believed it to be “the best in the world” of its type.

“For example,” the report stated, “in New Zealand, where Chinese demand for housing is reputed to be strong, there isn’t a body even attempting to record these flows.” (Nor for that matter, they could have added, is there such a body in Canada.)

Some of the report’s highlights:

• The Chinese property boom in Australia will only accelerate. They predict an additional $60-billion demand for housing from Chinese offshore investors and new Chinese immigrants over the next six years to 2020. That will be more than double the $28 billion spent over the last six years. There is an aspect of inevitability to this, the authors conclude, since China is undergoing to greatest wealth-creation in history, and Australia is on China’s doorstep.

• The stricter FIRB regulations, reporting requirements and increased fines, the authors feel, will have only a “marginal” effect on demand.