Is it time to give up on the Australian dream?

The Australian Dream is not what it used to be, but it is not lost either.

Homeownership remains within reach for most Australians. The OECD's latest data puts Australia's combined ownership rate at 62.7 per cent, steady for over a decade and just below the OECD average of 70.1 per cent. What has changed is not whether Australians own homes, but how, and more importantly, at what cost.

For most of the twentieth century, homeownership was a social contract available to most in the form of affordable land, accessible credit, a pathway achievable within a reasonable working life. As house prices have climbed, the path from renter to mortgaged owner to outright owner has elongated dramatically. People are entering the market later, borrowing more relative to income, and carrying debt further into middle age. The dream is still alive, but the quarter-acre block has shrunk to an apartment, and the finish line keeps moving.

This is not uniquely Australian. Around the world, countries are grappling with the same question: what does housing security look like when the old model no longer works? The answers, it turns out, are more varied and more instructive than the local debate suggests.

Among OECD countries, Romania (91.7 per cent) and Croatia (84.3 per cent) have the highest share of households who own outright. But their high rates trace back to a single policy event: the mass transfer of state housing stock to sitting tenants in the early 1990s. People own free and clear, which delivers real security of tenure. The downside is that the rental market never developed depth, so labour mobility is poor (hard to move for a job when renting is expensive and rare), housing quality is uneven, and property is often illiquid or hard to renovate. The geopolitical context these countries found themselves in is hardly easy to replicate for Australia now.

On the other side of the spectrum sits the most direct alternative to the Australian Dream. Western European countries like Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany built their housing systems around renting as a legitimate, stable long-term life choice, not a waystation to ownership. Switzerland’s 61.1 per cent and Germany's 55.4 per cent rental rate is the defining data point – not a failure of aspiration but the result of strong tenant protection laws, professionally managed rental stock, historically rent-controlled urban housing, and a deliberate post-war policy decision not to subsidise owner-occupation the way the UK or US did.

Japan offers the most radical alternative. Residential buildings depreciate to near zero within 30 years, stripping housing of its wealth-storage function entirely. Because houses depreciate rather than appreciate, Japan builds continuously. In Tokyo, more housing permits are issued annually than in the entire state of California, yet rents have stayed flat for decades. Without capital gain expectations, there is no political constituency for restricting supply.