[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Christine McCormack from Radio Northern Beaches and you've just tuned in to the Listen and Chat with Christine McCormack Podcast. This is the space where we pull no punches, sometimes a little controversial, sometimes downright outrageous, and sometimes just packed full of information that is interesting to know. But mostly, this is where you get Chrissy Mack's rants on the real issues. And today I have a doozy for you.
[00:00:27] Oh my god, I am so utterly exhausted by the sight of politicians slapping each other around verbally, trading childish insults, and completely missing the fact that the everyday person is looking on, shaking their heads in absolute disbelief, and saying, You have learned nothing. You are still not listening.
[00:00:53] Well today, Christine McCormack is going to have another rant on the exact things that the political class is completely blind to, and failing to understand. And let me make this clear, it's not just the major parties sitting in their bubble, it's also the RBA, whose blunt, out-of-touch decisions prove they have completely lost contact with the grassroots of our society.
[00:01:21] Now I need to declare right here that these are my opinions and not that of the station, so don't go ringing them up and abusing them for something that I've said. Today we need to talk about a profound, dangerous disconnect running through Australian politics right now. If you look closely at the major parties and the crossbench, it is becoming glaringly obvious that our policy makers are no longer getting it. They are writing laws based on neat, sterile statistic models,
[00:01:49] completely blind to the messy, real-world, human domino effect they trigger on the ground. Take seminar David Pocock on insiders. He was boasting about pushing for housing changes, and claimed that since people were moving away from gas anyway, he wanted to ensure the public got a return on it. Well let's pause right there and inject some reality.
[00:02:15] Everyday Australians are not automatically, organically, choosing to move away from gas. They are being forced away from it. When state and local policies step in and forbid new homes from connecting to gas, choice is stripped away from the consumer entirely. And there's a massive political reality that politicians sitting in comfortable climate-controlled offices completely ignore.
[00:02:42] For regular families, a dual energy household isn't a luxury preference, it's a critical backup system. When a severe storm hits or the electrical grid fails, and the neighbourhood blacks out, gas is the only thing keeping the house warm. It keeps the hot water running, it provides the simple dignity of a cooked meal, or a hot cup of tea or coffee. Forcing total reliance on a single, fragile electrical grid
[00:03:09] leaves households incredibly vulnerable. We've seen it all before. Take away the water tanks. They're back. Stop converting your garage into a temporary flat. Well that didn't work either, because they took away that transitional period and ability for a child to move from a home into a garage flat, and then into a stable rental system. So that blew everything out of the water, didn't it?
[00:03:38] Because now they've got no intermediate place to go. What happens when policy forces that grid to contract? And we're talking about the gas again here. The massive infrastructure costs of running the gas network don't just vanish into thin air. Instead, those costs are squeezed into a smaller shrinking pool of users. The people left holding the bag, existing householders, mum and dad consumers, and local industries, are hit with skyrocketing bills,
[00:04:06] compounded by a broader gas pricing crisis they didn't create, simply because they cannot afford an instant, forced transition to total electrification. This brings us to the second, even more devastating blind spot. The total failure to understand the housing crisis and what it's doing to independent Australians. The major parties love to target property investors
[00:04:31] as a monolithic group of ultra-wealthy corporate tycoons. They use that character to justify punitive tax changes. But in doing so, they've completely blanked on a massive group of citizens, the self-funded retirees. These are people who did exactly what successive governments begged them to do for decades, take care of themselves, so they wouldn't become a burden on the state.
[00:04:58] Let's look at a real common example of what's happening right now. Take a person who retired as a self-funded retiree at the end of COVID. Being single, that person purchased two modern houses to support their retirement and ensure they wouldn't need the age pension. Then reality hit. The cost of living crisis exploded. Private health insurance premiums sawed, interest rates spikes, holding costs climbed, and everyday expenses went through the roof.
[00:05:26] Very rapidly, the cash buffer they set aside dwindled to nothing. Reluctantly, that person is forced into a corner. They have to sell one of the properties to pay out the mortgage on their own family home and clear mounting bills. But the damage doesn't stop there. Look at the human domino effect. To sell the house, a tenant has to be evicted. That means one less rental property exists in the hyper-competitive, non-existent rental market,
[00:05:56] leaving an everyday person or family displaced until they can desperately scramble and find another roof. Then, the federal government steps in with aggressive, rewritten capital gains tax, CGT, laws. By the time the taxman takes his cut, the sale of the house achieves virtually nothing. It doesn't even clear the remaining debts. So what now? The independent individual is left with no choice but to look at giving up their private health insurance at the exact time in their life
[00:06:25] when they are most likely to need it. They are forced to walk into Centrelink, apply for the age pension, and become a burden on the taxpayer, which are the young people. That is something they were deeply, fiercely proud not to do. Their independent retirement is gone, wiped out by clumsy policies, with many years left to live. Why is this happening? Because the modern Australian government has a structural revenue crisis and they are choosing to solve it
[00:06:54] by treating the local mum and dad investor like an endless piggy bank. Let's look at the hard data of the official budget papers. The government raises roughly $650 billion to $700 billion a year. Do you know where that comes from? Over 40% of it comes directly out of our individual workers' pay packets via personal income tax. When you add the 12% from GST,
[00:07:21] individual, everyday Australians are carrying more than half the entire burden of the country's spending. And here is the problem that everybody is ignoring. The modern Australian government doesn't actually own anything that brings in recurring, independent revenue. Unlike resource-rich nations that act as co-investors, pour heavy funding into national infrastructure and reap massive direct dividend rewards from state ownership,
[00:07:49] successive Australian governments spent the last 30 years selling the farm. They privatised the Commonwealth Bank, they sold Telstra, they sold the state electricity and gas networks, and we leased out the ports. They didn't hold assets that bring in income. Instead, we rely on flawed tax systems like the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax for offshore gas, which allows the multi-billion dollar multinational resource giants
[00:08:16] to use complex write-offs to take our natural wealth and pay next to nothing for it. Because the government has zero asset-based income, their entire strategy for balancing the budget relies on squeezing the only group that can't hire a team of corporate lawyers, the small investor, the self-funded retiree, and the everyday working people. And then we have the Reserve Bank of Australia
[00:08:43] swinging its blunt investment rate hammer to knock inflation down. It's not knocking down inflation, it's knocking out the little guy. The standard economic theory tells us that raising interest rates stops running away spending. But that is a complete fallacy. The lower end of town isn't spending. They aren't eating out, they aren't using their heating in the dead of winter, and they are skipping meals just to survive.
[00:09:11] They are not contributing to inflation at all. They are losing ground every single day. The brutal irony is that every time the RBA raises interest rates, they are actively compounding the problem and driving prices higher. A small business, whether it's a local bakery, a corner store, or a local Sparky, relies on commercial loans and overdrafts to operate. When the cash rate goes up,
[00:09:39] their bank repayments skyrocket. Combined with doubled electricity bills and soaring insurance, these small businesses cannot just absorb the cost or they'd go bankrupt. They are forced to pass it on, rising the prices of basic goods and services at the counter. Raising rates doesn't lower the global price of crude oil or fix broken international shipping lanes, which drive half of our inflation. It just strangles local production, kills small business,
[00:10:09] forces staff layoffs, and punishes the vulnerable. So, this brings us to the deepest, most troubling issue of all. An issue that the major parties and the mainstream media are completely ignoring. The political class loves to frame the housing and economic debate as an intergenerational war. They want to pit the boomers against the millennials because it keeps the spotlight entirely off their own
[00:10:38] catastrophic policy failures. They paint an entire generation with a single brush, treating them as a monolithic block of wealthy hoarders sitting on millions. They completely erase the history of how that modest wealth was created. The baby boomers generation worked hard all their lives. These are people who regularly worked two or three jobs, made immense personal sacrifices, went without luxury, and endured interest rates
[00:11:08] that peaked at 17% in the late 1980s, all to buy a single family home and build a life. But what happens now in their retirement? That very home and the modest investment they made are under direct threat due to an artificial government-induced cost-of-living crisis. People completely forget that the baby boomers created this wealth specifically to pass it down to their children. In a broken modern housing market where young Australians
[00:11:37] are locked out, the bank of mum and dad or a future inheritance is the only fighting chance the next generation has left. What happens to the housing market when an inheritance can't be passed down because a family is forced by interest rates and utility costs to liquidate their assets and find a rental? What happens to the mum and dad investment property that was purchased with the child explicitly in mind? Bought for the sole purpose
[00:12:06] of providing those kids a secure home once the loan was paid off. What happens when that home is forced into a fire sale? When the small end of town is squeezed out of the property market those houses don't become cheap for the first-time buyers. They get snapped up by million-dollar corporate developers and institutional buyers who have the scale to absorb these taxes. Turning Australia into a permanent nation of renters corporate beholden to the high side of town.
[00:12:36] The major parties are playing a dangerous game. They want the youth to resent their parents and grandparents claiming the older generation is hoarding all the wealth. But they forget a fundamental truth. Baby boomers didn't build security to hoard it. They built it to pass it down. They wanted their kids to have an easier run than they did. When you hit self-funded retirees with a barrage of rate hikes forced energy costs and capital gains traps
[00:13:05] you aren't fixing housing affordability. You are stopping an ordinary Australian family from helping their own children. You are forcing proud independent people to liquidate the future they built for their family only to end up on a pension queue. Yes, that's right. The politicians aren't just squeezing the present they are actively raiding the future of the next generation. Think about that. Well, that's my opinion of what's happening at the moment
[00:13:34] and I'm so tired of it all. Somebody has to bring some common sense into the world. The world has just gone mad. Alright, I hope I've given you a lot to think about and talk about and debate and maybe disagree with. Don't forget to follow, like and share. Stay safe and I'll catch you next time.