The International Monetary Fund's Global Housing Watch confirms that Australia, along with Canada and Belgium, has the most expensive housing in the world, measured by the ratio of debt to income. Even with low interest rates, the amount of household income consumed by interest payments has trebled in a generation. The Australian Bureau of Statistics raised an alarm in May with a report entitled, 'Trend in Household Debt', which warned: "Household debt has increased nearly twice as fast as the value of household assets over the last 25 years." Ever since, the Reserve Bank has been issuing warnings about excessive activity in the housing sector by investors, as distinct from owner-occupiers. Investors accounted for 60 per cent of all new home borrowings in Sydney in the past year. This may be good for the super funds of baby boomers but it works to the detriment of young families wanting to own their home. Not only is there a frontal assault on first-home buyers, whose numbers have dropped to a historically low percentage of buyers, but Australia is over-invested in real estate. Federal governments have encouraged this via tax incentives for negative gearing, more tax incentives for superannuation funds, and maintaining a sustained rate of high immigration. Demand for housing has also been stimulated by a multi-billion-dollar flow of funds from Chinese buyers. To meet demand, state and local governments in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, where most of the housing pressure is felt, have had to increase both housing density in existing suburbs and urban sprawl in new developments, leading, inevitably, to more traffic stress and more congestion generally.

Young Australians are also confronting the prospect that the rising cost of their tertiary education will leave them another year older and deeper in debt. There are ways to reduce Australia's excessive household debt levels yet the Senate is now in a state of gridlock and a majority of voters are in a state of denial about debt. They want Labor back in office. Voters want Labor back, after six years in which it blew up the budget. Not, as it claims, to protect the nation from the 2008 financial crisis – which certainly inflicted plenty of damage in Australia – but because of a spectacular blow-out of spending. In Labor's final year in office it spent 50 per cent more per year than in its first year in office. That is a huge increase in spending, given that the economy and tax flows did not grow by even close to 50 per cent. The difference was funded by debt. The Abbott government's efforts to curb Australia's culture of debt are themselves inadequate, but even that is mostly being blocked in the Senate by Labor, by the Greens, by the increasingly circus-like Palmer United Party, and by a couple of minor-party senators who are not what they appear.

Senator John Madigan, of the Democratic Labor Party, for example, issued a media release on September 25 that could have been drafted by the Australian Council of Trade Unions: "Australia [is] moving towards an American system of low wages and zero benefits … The individual contracts being pushed by Tony Abbott are worse than those of former Liberal Prime Minister John Howard." This is what the ACTU said about the same subject: "[It will] move Australia towards an American system of low wages and zero conditions … The Fair Work Amendment Bill that goes further than the Howard Government did in stripping away protections around individual contracts". Last Thursday, Senator Ricky Muir, of the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party, asked a question in Parliament which could have been drafted by the Transport Works Union: "Will the government guarantee to retain the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, which is the only body with powers to intervene when transport clients put pressure on truck drivers to drive in unsafe and unfair conditions?" That same day, the TWU issued this press statement: "The Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal is the only body with powers to intervene when transport clients like Coles use economic pressure to force faster deliveries at the expense of safe and fair conditions for truck drivers". No major debt reduction reforms are going to come of this Senate, leaving Australia deeper in debt than is healthy or wise.