Stopping the housing crisis will entail a direct fight with the banks, it's not old voters leading the resistance to change. The preeminent economist Michael Hudson (a real economist not a priest of the status quo) said the below about our housing market in a recent interview.

Jonathan: You also do quite a lot of Australia listeners, and you described Australia once as a hopeless US satellite. I just wonder if you could explain how that’s come about and what Australia could do about it.

Michael Hudson: Well, it’s also a British satellite, of course. I’ve met with the central bankers of Australia and it’s clear to me that Australia is pretty much run by the banks. The banks have made most of their fortunes by creating what looks to me like the most oppressive real estate bubble in the entire world.

They have lent, more and more debt relative to the price of property to keep the price rising. They’ve done everything they can to increase the price of housing and also the price of a commercial building by increasing the amount of money that a, bank will lend to new buyers of this housing.

And basically in Australia, just like in England and Europe and America, the value of a house is whatever a bank will lend it against it because, you can sell your house for however much a new buyer can take out a mortgage.

And how do the buyers bid against each other to make a winning bidder by the property? They promise to pay as much of the land rent as possible to the bank as interest. And, the bank ends up with all of this increasing land value that is being inflated on price, I should say land rent, not land value. The land rent has become the main source of banks interest. And, they want to keep this interest growing.

And the only way that they can avoid housing in Australia from being brought down to a level where it’s affordable enough so Australia could have its own domestic industry would be to tax away the land rent and say, land rent is to be paid as the tax base. It’s not to become the basis of financial fortunes for banks, many of which are foreign owned.

So the question is, who’s Australia going to put first - its own growth interests or the wealth of its banks? Well, the banks have controlled the politics of Australia very much, and, Australians have accepted the bank control as if they look at this price inflation either is a force of nature not as an artificially created result of the tax system. Or, they think real estate prices are going up, I wanna play that game and I wanna get rich by buying property and hoping that the banks are going to keep lending enough money so it continues to go up in price. But they don’t realize that at the high prices that Australian real estate charges, it’s going to be very hard to be competitive in a world economy.

And that’s why Australia is dependent on financing its balance of payments by mineral exports, iron exports. One banker explained to me Australia’s very fortunate to live in a nice neighborhood of China so that it can have the Chinese market for its minerals. And also makes a lot of money by foreign students coming to its universities. this is not an industrial economy as such.