I am writing this article from the UK, having just returned from a battlefield tour of the Western Front with a few old 3RNSWR army mates.
The story of Australia’s role in WWI is now one of legend, and it was a great experience to see first-hand the terrain they fought over. So open and flat in most parts.
I was particularly impressed by how many French schoolchildren go to many of the battlefield sites and how they are imbued with a sense of their country’s glorious and sometimes tragic history. Also by how healthy and fit most of them seemed to be.
Most French people these days also seem to have a very good grasp of English and greeted my pathetic attempts to speak to them in French with responses in good English.
One other thing I noticed was how cheap housing in France was compared to Australia and the UK. The areas we went through were prosperous rural areas within 100 and 200 kilometres from Paris. You could buy a one-bedroom renovator’s delight in Péronne for about $60k on a 600-square-metre block of land, and a good three-bedroom house on a quarter-acre block for anywhere between $150k and $200k. You could buy a five- or six-bedroom house on 1,500 square metres of land for about $500k.
I’m not sure what their secret is, but it would be sensible if someone in the ACT government found out and saw if we could replicate it in Canberra. I was told their local taxes on land are considerably less than in the ACT, but there must be other reasons for this as well.
Units and houses in Belgium are much dearer and more like Australia, as are house prices in the UK.
At a housing forum hosted by the Belco Party in Belconnen recently, a number of interesting suggestions were put forward as to what we can do in the ACT to help address housing affordability (which I will write about in a future article). A lot of the suggestions concerned the release of land and issues around land development by the ACT government.
One suggestion was that if the ACT government, which owns the land, developed it and sold it at cost or for a small profit, and then first home buyers were encouraged to build a modest dwelling on that land (say with two or three bedrooms), then a basic standalone house could cost first home buyers about $500k – about $250k for the land (a small 300- to 400-square-metre block), plus building costs of say $250k for a small 100-square-metre house.
The views expressed at that forum will be sent to the ACT government and to our five federal reps, so hopefully they can examine them further and use the better ones to introduce schemes and practices to ensure the price of new housing is significantly reduced, so our young people can afford to buy their own home.
If the French can do it, why can’t we?
