Socialism Is Killing the Property Market in Victoria

Every time government tries to make something more affordable, it somehow ends up more expensive. Property is simply the latest example, but the pattern appears everywhere you look in daily life.

You can ring a plumber at two in the morning and they will be at your house in an hour. No waiting list. No paperwork. No bureaucracy. Because the federal government has never tried to make plumbing more affordable or accessible.

Walk into any shop and you can buy an eighty five inch television for around two thousand dollars. A basic dialysis machine will set the health system back about sixty five thousand. The reason is simple. Nobody in Canberra has attempted to make televisions affordable and accessible.

You can book LASIK eye surgery tomorrow, pay four thousand dollars, and walk out the same day. But major medical surgery in the public system involves months or even years of waiting along with significant out of pocket costs. Why. Because LASIK was never touched by government affordability policy.

Whenever government steps into the open market and claims it is doing something to help, things get more expensive and more complicated. There is no exception. Property is the perfect example.

Every time a state or federal politician tries to “support affordability” or “help first home buyers”, the cost of buying a home jumps. They get their twenty second media grab on the news, and the public gets the bill for the next decade.

Think back to the famous promise of two hundred and seventy five dollars off your power bill. The only way it came close to happening was by handing out temporary credits. And if you look at your power bill now compared with that year, it has not gone down. It has gone up.

The same pattern appears in the property market. When a government hands out a five thousand or ten thousand dollar first home buyers grant, the money does not help the buyer. It simply gets added straight onto the price of every property in Victoria.

Not just the house that a first home buyer is looking at. Every house in the market. That means all owners and all purchasers end up carrying the cost.

And the government is not upset by this. Because the moment prices rise, stamp duty rises, land tax rises, and the revenue base increases. They give away five thousand dollars and collect it back many times over. They also enjoy a small boost in the polls, which was the real point of the exercise.

This is the part most people never see. Affordability measures feel generous but behave like lighter fluid. They heat the market, distort buying behaviour, and send prices even further out of reach.

Victoria and Australia are now caught in a cycle where both major parties try to outdo each other with handouts and incentives. Every scheme adds fuel to the fire. Every intervention lifts the baseline price of homes. Every promise sounds caring and delivers the opposite outcome.

Socialism kills everything it touches. The property market is simply the latest casualty. The more government tries to manage prices, the more the market becomes unmanageable.

If affordability is ever going to return for Victorian families, the answer is not more grants, discounts, subsidies, or political tinkering. The answer is less interference, more supply, and a return to a genuine open market that can breathe again.