There's a receipt for the housing crisis. You just weren't shown it.
It costs $650 a week to rent the national median in Australia right now.
In March 2020, that number was $420.
Your wages, over the same period, went up 17.5%.
Rents went up 43.9%.
Someone's doing fine out of this arrangement. And it's not the 33% of your pre-tax income disappearing into someone else's mortgage.
Here's the receipt
The National Housing Supply and Affordability Council dropped its State of the Housing System 2026 report in April. It is a government document. It is not a polemic. It is, however, a fairly devastating account of what's happened to the country's housing market, written in the plain-English of tables and percentages.
The headline numbers:
- Price-to-income ratio: 8.4. Record high, December 2025. A generation ago, buying a house cost you roughly three to four times your annual income. Now it's eight and a half.
- 11.2 years to save a 20% deposit on a median income. Up from 9.0 years in 2015.
- Only 15% of homes sold are affordable to a median-income household.
- 33.1% of income going to rent, on average. Also a record.
- Home ownership for 25–34 year olds: 43%. In 1981, it was 61%.
That last one is worth sitting with. In forty years, nearly a third of young Australians dropped off the ownership ladder. They didn't do that through laziness. They did it during a period when the tax system made it increasingly good to be a landlord.
The bit that gets left out
When the housing conversation comes up in Canberra, it usually ends up at supply. Not enough homes being built. Zoning problems. Construction costs. The government has a target of 1.2 million new homes by 2029.
It's going to miss that target by approximately 220,000 homes. There are currently 3,325 construction industry insolvencies over the past twelve months — builders going under — which doesn't help.
But supply is only half the story, and it's the half that conveniently sidesteps a different number.
The Capital Gains Tax discount gives investors a 50% reduction in tax on profits from assets held longer than a year. Property is the most common asset Australians use this way. According to Parliamentary Budget Office modelling, this concession costs $247 billion in foregone government revenue over the next decade.
Who gets that $247 billion in benefit?
The top 10% of earners receive 90% of it.
Negative gearing — where landlords write off rental losses against their wage income — costs further billions on top.
These policies were set up decades ago. They have been defended, tweaked around the edges, and grandfathered through every government since. The 2026 budget made modest changes to both. Modest. And grandfathered — existing investors keep their current benefits indefinitely.
So who benefits?
Existing property investors. People with multiple investment properties. The top income decile who can turn paper profits on real estate into a reduced tax bill.
Not renters. Not people trying to buy their first home. Not the median-income household that can only afford 15% of what's on the market.
Who pays?
You might have noticed your rent going up. Maybe you've been at it a while — signing a new lease, watching the number on the new contract, doing the arithmetic in your head.
Two million Australian renters are in rental stress — meaning they're spending more than 30% of their income on housing. That number has risen from 24.9% of renter households in 2014 to 29.5% in 2024. The trend is going in one direction.
National vacancy rate is 1.6%. The historical average is 2.5–3.3%. When vacancy is that low, landlords don't need to compete for tenants. Tenants compete for housing.
Meanwhile the $247 billion gap in government revenue — money not collected — has to be made up somewhere. Higher government debt, reduced services, or taxes on things other than property profits. Working people, basically.
What the budget did
The 2026 budget announced changes to CGT and negative gearing.
The changes are grandfathered. Existing investors keep their current arrangements. Future changes apply only to new purchases. So the system that's been inflating property prices and squeezing renters continues for everything that's already in it.
Both major parties have managed this arrangement across decades. This is not a partisan observation — it is simply what the record shows.
The pattern
Australia is not running out of money. It has a record-high price-to-income ratio and a $247 billion tax concession flowing overwhelmingly to people who already own property.
The rort is legal. It's signed off quarterly. It's grandfathered so carefully that nothing changes fast enough to matter to anyone currently renting.
The door is $650 a week. You can see the receipt.