COMMENT: Sometimes our politicians sound like Oprah Winfrey in one of her giveaway frenzies: You’ll buy a home, and you’ll buy a home, and you’ll buy a home …

And that of course ignores the simple and irrefutable fact that a huge number of people who are young now will never be able to afford their own homes.

Last week we saw another attempt to disrupt the over-stuffed housing market with the wafer-thin mint of the First Home Buyers Guarantee Scheme which will make it easier for first-time buyers to get mortgages, albeit for the slightly more affordable homes.

The fact that many of those homes will immediately become less affordable as more people compete for them with more money to spend, is just a case of supply and demand; or reduced supply and increased demand, to be precise.

But the insidious lie in all of this is politicians trying to make us believe that we should all aspire to owning our homes. Of course, it’s nice when you do – but that really only applies when the mortgage is paid off and you truly do own the place where you live.

According to surveys quoted in the Conversation, while people who owned their homes mortgage-free were a lot happier than renters, people still paying off loans were only slightly so. And even that mostly applied to younger borrowers.

“Beyond age 50, the existence of a mortgage debt burden appeared to cancel out any boost to financial satisfaction from homeownership,” the article said.

So what we are seeing now is young people being herded into long-term mortgages in the overstated belief that they will be a lot happier. But if you sign up for a 25 or 30-year mortgage at the age of 25 or 30, you aren’t going to be that much happier for that much longer than if you miss out and have to rent.

Or look at it this way, the average mortgage payment in Sydney is $1200 a week: the average unit rent is $720.  These are very generalised figures but you get the picture; You could be saving $400- $500 a week by renting and you wouldn’t be having a panic attack every time the mortgage rate  comes up for adjustment.

Some smart people do a thing called rent-vesting, where they invest in a property but rent somewhere else, taking advantage of negative gearing.  Others think, stuff it, I’m going to travel, live well and pay off my student loans and pump up my superfund with the money I save by renting rather than owning.

However, there are people who can’t or don’t want to rent because of the lack of security of tenure.  Families with kids at school are one example.

So this is where politicians delude themselves and us, by selling the idea that home ownership, like a private school education, is anything more than an expensive way of measuring the progress in your life.

The country needs renters. It needs a flexible workforce that can move to where the work is and, instead of pouring every spare cent into the banks’ already bulging coffers, keeps the economy going by spending some of what it earns.

To be honest, I think our smarter pollies know this but still worship at the altar of home ownership because to do anything else would be unAustralian.

However, what they really should do – and probably never will –  is to incentivise investors to offer rental security. The way to do that is to use negative gearing more judiciously.

Imagine if negative gearing was only available to landlords who offered five-year leases with rent increases linked to CPI. Tenants would have security and we could dial down the lemming-like urges to saddle ourselves with barely sustainable debt for what should be the happiest and most productive years of our lives.

I would hate to be a young person facing the struggle to find a home right now. But surely making it easier to lock yourself into 30 years of debt can’t be the only answer.

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