Deposit by 25. Mortgage-free by 45. Retire at 65.
That was once a very achievable goal for everyday Aussies, sometimes with a single-wage household.
Today, even dual income households can struggle to get a foot on the property ladder.
In August 2026, even as house prices begin to dip on the back of the Albanese government’s budget, there is an unmistakeable sense among younger Aussies that something fundamental was broken years before they entered the workforce.
Those sentiments are growing rapidly among voters, and it is now being noticed by certain leaders outside the political duopoly.
Former Liberal senator Gerard Rennick gained notoriety as a polarising figure in Australian politics, drawing intense criticism for his promotion of conspiracy theory and fringe anti-Establishment stances.
During his tenure in the Senate, he routinely broke ranks with his party, spreading controversial claims about Covid vaccines, opposing state mandates, and accusing Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology of manipulating climate data to perpetuate a “global warming agenda”.
His rhetoric, which senior health officials and political leaders publicly rejected as anti-scientific misinformation, alienated moderate factions within his party. This friction ultimately led to him losing preselection on the LNP’s Senate ticket and subsequently resigning from the party to launch his own populist political group.
But now in a new role as head of the People First Party, Mr Rennick’s first agenda item attracting more mainstream attention than his historically controversial endeavours.
Mr Rennick believes one of the biggest economic reforms in Australian history set us up with a runaway housing market, rising debt and eventually an entire generation of working class citizens locked out, and wants to right what he says is a mistake that’s been expanding outwards for over 40 years.
Speaking to news.com.au, Mr Rennick described a nation that has spent decades replacing productive industry with debt-fuelled asset growth, essentially leaving younger generations priced out of home ownership and increasingly dependent on governments and financial institutions.
“In our national anthem, it says we’ve got wealth for toil, not wealth for speculation,” he said.
“It’s not that Australians have stopped working hard. We’ve just stopped rewarding the things that actually create wealth.”
He argues the turning point came in 1983, when the government floated the Australian dollar and removed most capital controls, opening Australia’s financial system to global capital and allowing banks to borrow far more freely from overseas.
In a recent interview with podcaster Mark Bouris, Mr Rennick said this was the moment house prices were “decoupled” from wages.
While the reforms helped modernise Australia’s economy, he argued they also laid the foundations for decades of debt-driven asset inflation, with the benefits flowing disproportionately to a relatively small group.
Everyone else “is now paying for it”.
Mr Rennick contends that Aussies were “brainwashed” into conflating debt with equity, and for a brief period, asset owners saw unprecedented gains.
“When we lifted capital controls, we could suddenly borrow more money than we earned here in Australia,” he said.
“What that did was inflate asset prices instead of increasing the supply of goods and services.”
The result, he argued, is an economy where younger Australians, even those in households earning above-average wages, are feeling like they’re moving backwards.
Figures he cited show around 40 per cent of Australians now retire with a mortgage, compared with about 10 per cent in the early 1990s.
Rather than focusing on the culture wars dominating modern politics, Mr Rennick said governments should be judged on whether ordinary Australians can afford to buy a home, raise a family and retire debt-free.
“I want every young person to have enough money for a deposit by the time they’re 25, have their mortgage paid off by the time they’re 45, and comfortably retire at 65,” he said.
Economists divided on the root cause
Rennick’s argument is that Australia’s great housing rupture began with financial deregulation.
But economists Saul Eslake and John Quiggin argue Rennick has compressed several distinct changes into one neat — and potentially misleading — story.
“I don’t think the deregulation of financial markets in the 1980s, in particular the specific factors you mention, were major contributors to the changes in Australia’s housing market which you cite,” Mr Eslake, a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Tasmania, told news.com.au.
He said the first credit explosion was overwhelmingly directed towards businesses and commercial property, helping bankroll the debt-fuelled rise of Alan Bond, Christopher Skase and other corporate adventurers before the system crashed into recession.
“The entry of foreign banks and other deregulatory measures taken in the 1980s led to a significant acceleration in lending to businesses, rather than households,” he said.
Foreign banks also lacked the extensive branch networks needed to compete seriously for Australian home loans. Mr Eslake says Citibank was the exception, but it never overturned the dominance of the local banks.
Mr Quiggin broadly agreed that foreign institutions were more useful as a political bogeyman than a direct source of suburban mortgages.
“None of that had much to do with foreign banks,” he said.
The more immediate change, Mr Quiggin argued, was the removal of interest-rate ceilings and the end of credit rationing.
Under the old system, banks couldn’t just simply increase mortgage rates to match demand. They rationed loans instead, favouring customers with large deposits, long savings histories and secure incomes.
The moment those controls disappeared, the question shifted from whether a household qualified for scarce credit to how much it could actually service.
As Mr Quiggin puts it, banks went from making customers plead for a loan to effectively asking: “How much money do you want to buy a house?”
“The banks got deregulation while also retaining an implicit government guarantee,” he said. “It was a great deal for them.”
Mr Eslake places the next major turning point in 1988, when the Basel I capital rules made residential mortgages cheaper for banks to carry than most business and unsecured personal loans.
Under the new framework, a conventional mortgage received roughly half the risk weighting of an ordinary business loan. In simplified terms, a bank needed to support $100 of mortgage lending with about $4 of its own capital, compared with about $8 for the same amount lent to a business.
That made home loans considerably more attractive. Banks began chasing borrowers, recognising second household incomes, accepting smaller deposits and higher debt levels, and competing aggressively for investors.
Foreign capital became substantially more important later, when Australian banks began raising large sums through offshore wholesale markets and mortgage-backed securities.
That supports part of Mr Rennick’s case, but the money was largely channelled through Australian financial institutions rather than foreign banks marching directly into the mortgage market.
The final accelerant added to the mix was tax.
Mr Eslake and Mr Quiggin both pointed to the 1999 capital gains tax discount, which allowed investors to deduct property losses at their full marginal tax rate while generally paying tax on only half the eventual capital gain.
“The big discretionary choice was the decision to cut capital gains tax,” Quiggin said.
So while deregulation opened the financial system and made the later credit boom possible, the mortgage explosion was driven by a sequence of additional decisions.
What does a successful Australia look like?
When asked what a successful Australia looks like in 15 years, Mr Rennick jumped deep into the weeds. In layman’s terms, he proposes a country that processes more of its own vast natural resources instead of exporting raw materials overseas. That, and stronger incentives to produce homegrown goods, services and infrastructure.
“There is no reason we shouldn’t be making more steel here,” he said.
“If we add value to our own resources, we grow the pie instead of simply taxing what’s already there.”
He is also pushing for a tax shake-up that he believes will give more financial opportunities to those needing it most.
He proposes raising the tax-free threshold to $45,000, giving minimum wage earners, or young people earning side cash while studying, an immediate leg up to get their savings chugging.
He also proposes a massive superannuation rejig, arguing Australians will benefit from having greater flexibility rather than be glued to a compulsory superannuation scheme.
The move, while risky, aims to reduce power from the relatively small group of managers who oversee Australia’s $4 trillion in superannuation, which Mr Rennick says costs around $40 billion a year to manage and operate.
He also wants more public investment in manufacturing, arguing Australia has become too reliant on financial services, or “paper engineers”, while allowing productive industries to decline.
In short, Australia’s white collar jobs economy is extremely weighted towards financial services and People First is aiming to get back to the basics on what built Australia’s economy in the 20th century.
“We’ve commoditised childcare, financial-ised university degrees and turned too much of the economy into paper assets,” he said.
“We need real engineers, real builders, not financial engineers.”
‘I still believe in this country’
Despite his heavy criticism of Australia’s economic and political direction, Mr Rennick says he remains optimistic about the country, and believes young people should be as well.
He believes Australia has the natural resources and workforce to rebuild its manufacturing base over the next decade if governments are willing. But it’s going to take some serious work.
“The reason I’m so diehard about it is that I still believe in this country,” he said.
“I’m extremely driven by the sacrifices of our forefathers.”
alexander.blair@news.com.au