Closing the generational wealth gap in a changing economy

About the episode

For generations, the roadmap to the “Australian Dream” was linear: get an education, work hard, buy a house, and set yourself up for life. But today, even high earners find themselves at the mercy of a skyrocketing property market.

If you’re finding it harder to buy assets, spend, and invest, plus wealth is tied up in older generations, what does that mean for the future of our economy? 

UNSW Vice-Chancellor's Professor and Chief Societal Economist, Richard Holden, warns that when the dream of homeownership feels out of reach, it could trigger a bigger psychological shift. "If people think that they're never going to own a home, never going to be able to build wealth, and don’t have a stake in their future, then that's a very damaging thing."

If you can't rely on bricks and mortar to build wealth, how do you get ahead? 

Interested in hearing about how businesses are reacting to the housing shortage? Listen to our episode with UNSW Professor Philip Oldfield.

The Business Of podcast is brought to you by the University of New South Wales Business School, produced with Deadset Studios and hosted by Dr Juliet Bourke.

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Edited transcript

Prof. Richard Holden  00:03
If people think that they're never going to own a home, never going to be able to build wealth, it's a very human, natural reaction to say, "Well, I may as well enjoy myself." They don't invest, forget about financial investments, all kinds of investments in themselves, their communities, the country that they don't make if they feel that they're locked out of the future, and we'd need to be really concerned about that.

Dr Juliet Bourke  00:35
For generations of Australians, that sound was the ultimate goal, "the Australian dream". Buying a property was your foundation and a ticket into the economy. But for many young Australians today, it's not realistic. Some are leaning on the bank of mum and dad, others have done the math and walked away. This isn't just a housing shortage; it's part of an intergenerational wealth gap. So if young people are finding it harder to buy assets, spend, and invest, and wealth is tied up in older generations, what does that mean for our economy? I'm Dr Juliet Bourke, Adjunct Professor at the School of Management and Governance, and this is The Business Of, a podcast by the UNSW Business School. Richard Holden is Vice-Chancellor's Professor and Chief Societal Economist at UNSW. Richard, for a long time, the roadmap was: get an education, get a job, work hard, buy a house, and set yourself up for life. But that's not necessarily the case for many Australians today. Are young people actually worse off than their parents were 30 years ago?

Prof. Richard Holden  01:59
So, in general, they're not predicted to be, and they're not right now, if you think about consumption over people's whole life. But I understand why young people feel that way, and I think the major driver is the unaffordability of the housing market, particularly in Australia's major capital cities. There's another thing going on: life has become a little more delayed than it used to be. So, the story you told is exactly the one that I remember, and to a degree I experienced, people are often taking longer in education of various different forms, post-secondary education often, people are delaying, if you like, marriage or household formation, as economists would call it, to later in life, and part of that is people live longer and have the, you know, aren't in as much of a rush. And so, I think people sort of look at what maybe their parents' generation was like when they were up to when they were 30 years old, and say, "I'm not there, that's not necessarily a bad thing, and it's to be expected. But I think the compounding seems to be behind where my parents' generation was, and housing is really unaffordable. That double whammy understandably makes people feel the way they do.

Dr Juliet Bourke  03:17
And is it really unaffordable? How do we judge if something feels unaffordable, particularly housing?

Prof. Richard Holden  03:22
Yeah, it's a good question. So, if you look at the price of housing compared to median incomes, or the middle of the income distribution. By that measure, which is a pretty good measure, I think, Sydney's the second most expensive city in the world, behind Hong Kong, more expensive than London, New York, and Los Angeles. Melbourne's fourth; Adelaide's ninth. So, I mean, I got nothing against Adelaide. I like Adelaide. I've got a lot of friends who grew up in Adelaide, but if you'd told me that Adelaide would be among the top 10 most expensive cities in the world 30 years ago, I would have thought that wasn't the world's best prediction. So, you know the median house in Sydney, if you earn in the top income tax bracket, so you earn more than $190,000 a year, you spend all your income on a mortgage, you wouldn't be able to afford it, and no one would give you one. So that gives you a sense of how hard it is.

Dr Juliet Bourke  04:17
So, how has that happened? Why are we in this situation now? How did we get here?

Prof. Richard Holden  04:23
So, it won't surprise you. Let me give you the cheap answer, the mechanical answer, the kind of arithmetic answer: house prices have grown a lot over the last 30-odd years, or 40 years, and incomes haven't grown nearly as much. There are a few reasons for that. So, in the middle of the 1980s, Paul Keating, as treasurer under the Hawke-Keating government, deregulated the banking system and opened it up to competition, which brought in a whole lot of international banks. It forced the big Australian banks, such as Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, NAB, and ANZ, to be more competitive, allowing people to borrow a bit more than before. And there were two big international capital accords, the so-called Baal Capital Accords, which regulate how much capital banks need to hold against different types of loans, and in the 1980s and in the early 2000s, these two big capital accords reduced the amount of capital banks needed to hold against residential homes, and that meant banks could lend even more against that stuff. The third big factor was that, beginning in the middle of the 1990s, central banks around the world, including in Australia in 1996, were granted formal independence from government. So we've often heard people talk about the Independent Reserve Bank. Well, that really started in the 1990's, and they decided to target inflation, saying they'd keep inflation in Australia between 2% and 3%. That kept inflation low and really reduced interest rates by as much as 4 percentage points. Which again, almost doubled the amount of money people could borrow. So, beginning in the mid-1980s and continuing through the 1990s, there was a massive explosion in how much people could borrow, and they put much of that into housing, in part because owner-occupied housing has no capital gains tax.

Dr Juliet Bourke  06:17
Oh, so we're coming to the capital gains tax story. So maybe just walk us through that, because it seems to have had a major impact on housing affordability in Australia. Well, not just affordability, but also the price of houses.

Prof. Richard Holden  06:29
So part of a pretty popular narrative is that Peter Costello, as treasurer with John Howard as Prime Minister, changed the way capital gains were taxed in 1999. So what used to happen is you could index the initial amount of your investment to inflation. So you wouldn't pay tax on the inflationary part, maybe 3% a year or something like that, and then you would pay capital gains at your full marginal tax rate, maybe 45, 47 cents on the dollar, at the moment. Peter Costello introduced a system where he said, "That's very administratively clunky, so we'll stop the indexation, but we'll only make you pay tax on half the gains. So, kind of halving the tax rate on capital gains while removing indexation. For some investments, it turns out to be a wash; for some, it's a bit better; for some, it's a bit worse. But part of the narrative that sort of taken hold is, housing is unaffordable in Australia because of that capital gains tax discount, and it might be a small part of the puzzle, but it's hard to believe it's a very big part of the puzzle, for a few reasons: one, it never applied to owner-occupied housing in the first place, that was always capital gains tax free, the, you know, the primary residence, so that didn't change, and as I say, there are all these other really major changes to the banking system going on in the exact same time period. So when I see a chart that says, look at when housing prices took off, firstly, it takes off 15 years before the Costello change to capital gains taxes, and secondly, there are all these other things going on. So I don't think it's a big part of the puzzle, and the most credible economic modelling suggests house prices might be about 2% lower if you made the capital gains tax change we've just seen.

Dr Juliet Bourke  08:25
Richard, we seem to be obsessed with housing in Australia, and it's not just about making the most of your asset; making the most money out of it, isn't it? Why are we obsessed?

Prof. Richard Holden  08:37
I don't know exactly why we're obsessed, but I think you're totally right about that. And I grew up in Australia. I spent 10 years in the US. I came back to Australia in the middle of 2011, and maybe I'd forgotten, maybe we were always obsessed, or maybe something went on while I was away for that decade. But I came back, and you know, back then, it's 2011, it's a while ago now, there were, you know, actual physical newspapers …

Dr Juliet Bourke  09:03
In the olden days …

Prof. Richard Holden  09:04
In the olden days, yeah, when I was a boy, that kind of thing. And you'd pick up the paper, you know, the Saturday, you know, major newspaper, and the back half is all like property advertisements, that's the back half, the front half is like half of that, or a third of that was about stories of people renovating their homes, and sort of, you know, sort of get through the paper and put that down. If you turned on the television, you know, one in four shows was about people renovating their houses. You know, even having like competitions for people to make the most money out of renovating, they had the block, and these kinds of shows. And then, you know, if you turned the television off, I distinctly remembered, in the first month back, going to dinner at a friend's house. And these are, you know, educated, smart, worldly people. I thought, oh, we're going to talk about US politics, or the world, or you know what's going on in Australia. The whole dinner party conversation was about one person renovating their bathroom and the other person putting in a pool. And we're, for one reason or another, we're completely obsessed with it, and I guess if everyone else is obsessed, maybe you feel a bit silly not being, you know, sort of keeping up with the Joneses yourself. I think the other factor is because it's not taxed at all, the family home, there is a real incentive for people to say, look, I pay quite a lot of tax on my income, I pay a reasonable amount of tax on capital gains, you know, where can I find a way to pay no tax without breaking the rules or without doing something risky? Well, that's a way to do it. Just stick it in the family home.

Dr Juliet Bourke  10:50
So, let's talk about intergenerational wealth, and I'm wondering what's causing that gap at the moment?

Prof. Richard Holden  10:58
Well, part of it really is the run-up in housing prices. So these measures of wealth that people come up with, and it's a fair enough way to do it, take account of all your assets, including if you own a home, you know, your own home, and because there's been a big run-up in those things, you know, you see that difference. The other thing is this life-cycle change we've seen with people doing things later. So very often people say, well, what's the difference in wealth between 25-year-olds and 55-year-olds now compared to a generation ago? Well, if 25-year-olds are doing things later, then you should be comparing 30-year-olds with 55-year-olds, or something like that. So the comparison isn't always the right one for the times, but yeah, there's been a really big run-up in asset prices, the share market, property, even more so, people who have had money to invest over the last 30-odd years have really built quite a lot of wealth. And for people coming in from scratch, there's a bigger gap than there used to be.

Dr Juliet Bourke  11:59
Richard, even if you work a solid job, you earn a decent paycheck, and you buy a property. Your income then seems to be swallowed up by the mortgage, and if we don't have enough money to spend elsewhere, what's the flow-on effect into the broader economy?

Prof. Richard Holden  12:14
Yeah, it's not great for the broader economy. It means two things. It means, as you say, people are spending a lot of money on housing and mortgages and not consuming as much on other things. So if you run a small business, if you're in a restaurant, or what have you, trying to sell things to people, they've got less disposable income for that, which makes that harder. I also think a major effect is that it has people putting a lot of money, if you like, investing in housing and not investing a lot in other parts of the economy. And one of the things that's been noted over the past 15 or 20 years is that investments of most kinds in the economy, business investment and other private investment, into things that drive productivity growth and economic growth, have been really low compared to historical rates. And I don't know if that's only because of housing, but for sure it doesn't help.

Dr Juliet Bourke  13:05
There's something in our ether that housing is an anchor, it's sort of this bricks and mortar idea, and I've heard the same thing, that it's harder to get venture capital for businesses, for startups in Australia than it is, for example, in Silicon Valley. Is that your sense of it, too?

Prof. Richard Holden  13:22
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think that's really borne out by the evidence. I mean, the other thing about housing, it is tangible, it is bricks and mortar, everyone else is doing it, there's the national obsession, but the other thing about it is it's a peculiar kind of investment, which is you get to consume it as well.

Dr Juliet Bourke  13:39
And it doesn't seem to have the same anchor or pull to it if you're renting. Like you don't really invest in a rental property, right? Because you might only be renting for a year or two years.

Prof. Richard Holden  13:50
Exactly, so it's probably not quite as nice in the first place, and that's understandable. You know, you probably don't want to make a lot of modifications, you're not going to put in a new oven that you can't take with you as a renter. It's often quite short-term, maybe a year or two years if you're lucky for that kind of lease. So it's different. It doesn't have the same feeling. It doesn't have the same sense of home or investment, I think.

Dr Juliet Bourke  14:15
And is that the reason, or part of the reason, that we don't see renting as a norm in Australia, if I compare it, for example, to Germany renting the life, or even New York?

Prof. Richard Holden  14:26
Yeah, exactly. You know, Germany is often pointed to as a really good example where it's completely normal, and people actually do put their own ovens in their own ovens and take them with them when they move, and you know that's a real thing. And you know, New York's a hard place to own property, and it's much more common. So, I think there is that kind of sense of norms, or a cultural or zeitgeist moment, about these kinds of things, but, you know, renting is becoming a lot more prevalent. I think one of the things that successive governments have looked into is more of this 'build to rent' type of scheme, where you know big property companies, Lendlease, and these kinds of companies will build entire developments with the purpose of not selling them, but renting them out. And there've been some details and peculiarities of the tax system in Australia that have made that less attractive. But as housing becomes harder for people to buy and rent, long-term renting is becoming more common in Australia. Those kinds of arrangements, I think, would give people more of a sense of longer-term leases, more certainty, maybe the ability to feel like they can invest a little bit more in a rental property.

Dr Juliet Bourke  15:34
Yeah, because the organisations that have been buying these properties to do long-term rentals have not been the pension funds, and it's only recently that the pension funds have started to come in, and really it's been mum and dad, or someone, a small-term investor, who has one, two, three properties. And is that changing now? Are we starting to see these long-termers come in and buy up the rental market?

Prof. Richard Holden  15:58
It's sort of nascent, and certainly happened overseas. I mean, one of the other changes we saw announced in the budget was the phasing out of negative gearing. So, this is the idea, which has always been around for a really long time, over a century, for all asset classes in Australia, that if you make a loss on an investment, you can offset that loss against your labour income, your ordinary income. But residential properties are a very special asset class for most sorts of regular folks. So, the first thing is, you can get a loan for a pretty big proportion of the value of the asset, so maybe five times as much as what you put down, so five to one, or even nine or 10 to one leverage. Imagine you were investing in the stock market in an exchange-traded fund or something like that, you'd be lucky to be able to borrow any money, that's called a margin loan. You might get a little bit, but if you're someone earning, say, $100,000 or $120,000 a year, you're not going to get a big margin loan. And by the way, if the shares go down, you get a margin call that says we're going to sell them for you and take the money back, and you're going to lose your equity, or you've got to put in more money. But that doesn't happen with residential property. So, residential property has been this incredibly special asset class, and so people have negatively geared, and that's where you hear these stories about people on $120,000 a year with three investment properties, you kind of scratch your head about how that's even possible. It's been a real thing. As negative gearing gets phased out, and is now only allowed for new property investments, it might be that you get more of these pension funds and institutional investors coming into that market and fewer of the mums and dads in that market.

Dr Juliet Bourke  17:37
So do you think we would develop an appetite for renting for life if, in fact, a rental property became available not just for one or two years but for your lifetime?

Prof. Richard Holden  17:48
I think it's entirely plausible. I think the thing that's tricky for most people is that if, if and when you retire, feeling like you're still paying rent rather than having paid down a mortgage, and you sort of say, okay, I've got to pay, you know, rates and utility bills and stuff, but I've got that there, feels hard for a lot of people. Now, you know, we have retirement savings, we have superannuation, we have the safety net at the age pension, so it need not be the case. But I think, psychologically, that would be challenging for people. So I think that during one's working life, it will become more common and more accepted. I think people still have, in the back of their minds, the seeming insecurity about what happens if I retire without a mortgage paid off. Now, of course, you know, you had to pay a lot of money on the way through. We were just talking about how big mortgage payments are, and you're not doing other things. Well, rents are often about 3% of the property's value. Well, the interest on a mortgage these days is more like 6% or 6.5%, and that's before paying down the loan principal. So people often talk about dead rent, well, that might be 3% of the value of the property. There's also a thing called dead interest payments, the interest payments on the mortgage, which might be double or more than that. So I think people need to think about it on a more apples-to-apples basis. But there is this psychology that I mean, you hear that phrase, dead rent, that's a phrase for a popular phrase, for a reason, and people don't always sort of think through the appropriate comparison.

Dr Juliet Bourke  19:24
Just to follow on from what you were saying, then there is this idea that what I'm trying to do over my life course is build a mortgage-free asset, and then I will spend my superannuation, or my savings, on a healthy lifestyle, a lovely lifestyle.

Prof. Richard Holden  19:40
Yeah, travel, grandkids, that kind of stuff, right?

Dr Juliet Bourke  19:42
Right. And so the retirement system itself was built around that idea, because, you know, how much you are supposed to need in retirement is based on whether you own your own house. So, therefore, you only need $70,000, $80,000 a year, or something like that. If that's no longer attainable, I wonder what financial security will look like in the future?

Prof. Richard Holden  20:06
Well, if you don't own your own house and all you've got is the age pension, that's going to be tough. I mean, borderline impossible. But what it's going to mean, if that's the choices that people make, is people are going to have to have more, more super than they, they think of as funding the whatever the number is, but like you say, maybe $70,000 or $80,000 and you figure out what do you need to have in super to be able to earn that after tax. Well, if people are going to be paying rent, they're going to need a lot more in super.

Dr Juliet Bourke  20:35
So, where is capital going to go if it's not going to go into an investment property, because we're ruling that out now? And we don't seem to like investing in startups, for example, the money's not tangible, and we cap out in our superannuation. Where do you think it's going to go?

Prof. Richard Holden  20:52
It's going to go into consumption. People are going to spend it.

Dr Juliet Bourke  20:56
Bigger TVs?

Prof. Richard Holden  20:56
Yeah, bigger TVs, you know, more expensive cocktails. I wrote in my AFR column from the budget lock-up at some throwaway line that there's a little bit of seriousness behind it. I said something like, "Yachts just became more attractive and productivity-enhancing investments less attractive for wealthy Australians,” and it's true. What these changes do is tilt the playing field against investing, as we were just noting, and in favour of what happens if you don't invest? Spend.

Dr Juliet Bourke  21:28
You know, we hear this phrase "high-income, working poor", or we hear "asset-rich, cash poor." What's your perspective? Is that real for people?

Prof. Richard Holden  21:38
Yeah, I think that refers to two possibly different groups of people. So the sort of asset-rich, cash-poor might be people who've, you know, paid off their mortgage, got the big house that they've, you know, put a lot of their income into, and now don't have a lot of other retirement savings. So they're sitting on this expensive house, but they only have a modest amount of income that seems like a kind of imbalance that you wouldn't really want to have, and ideally, in that instance, particularly if you've had kids leave home and things like that. You might want to, you might want to downsize, so that's one thing. The other is the kind of, if you like, you know, wealthy working poor, which is people who say investing in the, in the family home is like, you know, it's tax free, and I can get a lot of leverage, and I've got to do that, and then end up putting so much money into it, not only do they have a not a lot of money to invest, but maybe can't enjoy themselves. You can understand what drives that kind of phenomenon, which is, this is such a great investment, this is such a, it's such a beautiful house, I get to enjoy it. Oops, I haven't got as much as I would have otherwise had left over to enjoy myself in other ways.

Dr Juliet Bourke  22:52
I'm just wondering whether the transfer of wealth between generations actually exacerbates the potential divide we're seeing in society. So those who have wealth pass it on. Those who don't have wealth are falling further and further behind, and perceiving themselves as never able to work their way out of it.

Prof. Richard Holden  23:12
Well, I think that's right. And I think you touch on two really important things. The latter is the perception; let me come to that in a second. The first is, if you're starting from scratch, you don't inherit anything, but you're a smart, energetic person, you know, you've got a decent education, you're ready to go, you pay some of the highest income tax rates in the world if you're successful in Australia. So, the 40% marginal tax rate kicks in at less than two times full-time earnings. You know, there are many other jurisdictions where that number is more like 10 times or even higher multiples of earnings. So people who are successful, well-educated, and entrepreneurial, or who earn a good living in other ways, pay a lot of income tax, so it's very hard for them to build wealth if they're starting from scratch. I think the other thing that you touched on, so important, is the perception, and if people think that they're never going to own a home, never going to be able to build wealth, it's a very human, natural reaction to say, well, I may as well enjoy myself. Like, why am I going to, you know, eat ramen every night if I'm never going to get ahead anyway? I might as well just sort of, you know, enjoy myself. And that's not a wholly productive thing to do, even though it's incredibly understandable. And I think, if people feel that they don't have a stake in their future, then that's a very damaging thing. They don't invest, forget about financial investments, all kinds of investments, in themselves, their communities, the country, that they don't make if they feel that they're locked out of the future. And we'd need to be really concerned about that.

Dr Juliet Bourke  24:54
Did you see anything in the budget about intergenerational wealth, this sort of idea that people are waiting for it, or there's a gap that needs to be filled?

Prof. Richard Holden  25:03
Well, I heard a lot of rhetoric from the treasurer. He talked a lot about intergenerational equity in the lead-up to the budget. What I saw in the budget were some measures that I think can only legitimately be described as kind of boomer-bashing. But I didn't see a lot for millennials and Gen Z. There's the WATO, this is $5 a week, $250 a year …

Dr Juliet Bourke  25:27
What's the WATO?

Prof. Richard Holden  25:28
The Working Australian Tax Offset, I think it stands for. It's a $ 250-a-year tax credit for 13 million working Australians. You don't get it if you are on investment income; you get it only if you pay taxes on your sort of wage or labour income. That's five bucks a week, that's good. The negative gearing changes, and full disclosure, I wrote a report from the McKell Institute in 2015 about grandfathering away negative gearing. Option three from that plan is exactly what Chris Bowen and Bill Shorten took to two elections, and it's exactly what the government have implemented. So I'm for that. But that was basically never designed to, like, really lower house prices a lot. It was designed to raise a bit of government revenue and to put potential owner-occupiers on a more level playing field with investors. And to his credit, the Prime Minister talked, you know, I think quite eloquently in recent weeks, about, at an auction on Saturday, you know, potential first-time buyers don't have to worry as much about being outgunned by investors. That's a good thing. That's the level playing field that I was getting at, and that Bowen and Shorten really emphasised. That's good, but that's what's in this budget for millennials and gen z. 5 bucks a week? And you might get outbid by another millennial rather than an investor at the auction on the weekend. That's good, but if you're looking at the story of, I don't know, I'm just going to eat ramen and drink martinis because I'm never going to have a future. Does this really address that? I don't think so.

Dr Juliet Bourke  27:05
You know, one way of thinking about this is the inequality, the distance between the haves and the have-nots. What should we be doing about that?

Prof. Richard Holden  27:13
Well, I'd like to see us focus more on lifting people up than just focusing on the gap. When you focus on the gap, it's very natural to say, well, there are these people up here, and there are people down here. Well, we could close the gap by doing this. And it's actually pretty easy to do that. You can just tax these people a lot, and you can do a whole lot of things that have bad flow and effects on the have-nots, actually. But that's relatively easy to do, to whack people. The hard work is really in lifting people up. So, how do you lift people up? We want to make sure they've got the skills they need to earn really good incomes. That means focusing heavily on the education system, all the way from before primary school, if not even earlier, but certainly from primary school onward. It's really focused on ensuring people can engage in lifelong learning and develop and refine their skills as the economy evolves. That's really salient at the moment with the advent of AI. People say that three years ago, you told me to learn how to code. Now, Claude Code is better than all the coders in the world. People will need to reinvent themselves, and the education system needs to help them do so. And that's why you know I feel particularly privileged to be part of UNSW and part of the sector that's trying to make sure that we can make a contribution to helping people flourish all throughout their careers and their working lives. I think we need to do that. We need to make sure there's enough investment in productivity-enhancing technologies that people with these skills, these human capital, could be matched to businesses and employers and physical capital that make the most of those skills that go together really well. It means not taxing people's income too much. So, I've said for a long time I'd like to see us tax income less and consumption more, and we're a real outlier compared to the average OECD or advanced economy. We get about twice as much of our government revenue from taxing income and about half as much from taxing consumption as the other average advanced economy does. That makes it a lot harder for people at the bottom to lift up, so the hard work from government, from society, from all the different kinds of centres of energy that can help lift people up. I think it should be much more focused on that. So, I'd prefer we talked less about the gap and more about what we can do to help those toward the bottom really move up,

Dr Juliet Bourke  29:41
So Richard, if you were starting from scratch today, what's the most effective way to build wealth at any stage of your life? And I do want to caveat this with, I know you're not giving free financial advice, but I'm just interested in your opinion.

Prof. Richard Holden  29:55
Yeah, I'm not even giving paid financial advice, I don't want to get in trouble with ASIC or somebody, I think what I would have said was, yeah, invest in the share market. I might have said, "invest in the property market” – which has just become a little bit less attractive. I think what I'd say is, invest in yourself, invest in your own skills. If you're more on the entrepreneurial side, you know, invest in yourself, but invest in having a great idea and putting your energy into building that. You know, if you're less of an entrepreneur and more of someone who's maybe going to work for somebody else, try to make sure your skills are as valuable as possible, and retool them over the course of your lifetime. You know, those can't be taken away from you, and yeah, save what you can save, that's for sure true. And just because the tax rate's higher now doesn't mean saving isn't a good idea; it just means it's a little less attractive than it used to be. So don't, don't lose sight of the broader goal.

Dr Juliet Bourke  31:02
That's UNSW Vice-Chancellor's Professor and Chief Societal Economist Richard Holden. If you want to hear more about how businesses are tackling the housing crisis, listen to our episode with UNSW Professor Philip Oldfield.

Professor Phillip Oldfield  31:16
This whole spectrum of indirect impacts on businesses is going to make it challenging, and we know in Sydney, for example, the housing crisis costs the economy $10 billion a year. So it is not just a social crisis, it's a productivity and economic crisis as well.

Dr Juliet Bourke  31:33
You'll find the link in the episode description. The Business Of is brought to you by UNSW Business School, produced with Deadset Studios.

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