Australians are heavily focused on house prices. As well as being their home, nearly everyone's house is their most valuable asset.
The home-owning "haves" benefit from high house prices. Those not owning their own home are mainly younger renters.
They are constantly looking at house prices that are depressingly receding away from their affordability horizons.
As renters, they also recognise the increased costs they are shelling out for a roof over their heads.
There are those who argue that it is only demand that is forcing up house prices.
The Age's property writers have been suckered into this theory which is being popularised by Macquarie Bank.
Macquarie Bank's Rory Robertson thinks the reason why house prices have gone up in some places but not others is because some places are "sexy" and others are "dull".
Australia is rather flattered by this perspective because on the Robertson gauge, all our capital cities are sexy.
They are joined by United States cities including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Honolulu, as well as British cities like London, Bournemouth (Fawlty Towers territory) and Cardiff (which receives international recognition only when hosting the Wallabies or the All Blacks).
Those cities Macquarie Bank considers to be "dull" include bustling Toronto; Houston, the world's space industry capital; cosmopolitan Quebec; and Dallas, one of the premier energy and high-tech centres in the world.
Like beauty, "sexy" is in the eye of the beholder. What really allows affordable housing prices is the supply of land on which the authorities permit new houses to be built.
Despite growing faster than all Australian cities, Houston, Dallas and Atlanta have house/ land packages roughly half the price of Melbourne. This is because their planners don't prevent land being used for housing.
It is no coincidence that Melbourne's recent price surge has been accompanied by building-lot supplies on the fringe that have fallen by half since 2003.
If there were no restrictions on land for building, it would cost $60,000 for a fully serviced block on the fringe of Melbourne.
Yet, according to the Urban Development Institute, the average price is $145,000, having doubled since 2001.
And Melbourne is not even the worst city in Australia for land releases.
In Perth, government restrictions have brought a four-fold increase in land prices.
John Howard has identified slow land releases around the country as the cause of higher house prices.
Higher house prices in turn push up rents.
The president of the Australian Council of Social Services has also recognised that the key issue for housing affordability is land availability.
It is common sense to most people -- including the Prime Minister and ACOSS -- that increasing the supply of something will bring prices down.
Unfortunately, the blindingly obvious is lost on Labor's housing spokesperson Tanya Plibersek.
Ms Plibersek does not believe scarcity of land causes high house prices. Her solution is more levies on new houses to cross-subsidise low-income housing.
Such measures further punish the battlers trying to scrape enough together to buy their first homes.
They are at odds with the ALP's traditional championing of the less well-off.
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