Just the thing the Reserve Bank board didn’t want to see a day ahead of its meeting today.

A bubble in Australian house prices.

And we can’t say we weren’t warned last year by Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens.

He suggested we had a chance of avoiding this, but we muffed our chance. Now we will pay for it with more interest rate rises, one of which could be a hurtful 0.50%. Such an impost wouldn’t surprise today or in March.

Those Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showing a 13.6% in the year to December, with a rise of 5.2% in the December quarter were more than anyone had expected. Melbourne prices up by nearly 20% were a shock. That’s bubbleland.

But don’t tell it to all the baby boomers sitting back watching their tax-free capital housing gains rise by the day. They’re joining the bankers, retailers and others who were bailed out in 2008-09 by the federal Government.

Ask them and they will tell you they don’t like government’s spending too much, or running up debts. Don’t tell them that the stimulus packages, low interest rates and bank deposit and borrowing guarantees have effectively underwritten their huge home price gains (especially in Melbourne).

This is what Stevens said last July on housing:

A very real challenge in the near term is the following: how to ensure that the ready availability and low cost of housing finance is translated into more dwellings, not just higher prices.

Given the circumstances — the economy moving to a position of less than full employment, with labour shortages lessening and reduced pressure on prices for raw material inputs — this ought to be the time when we can add to the dwelling stock without a major run-up in prices.

If we fail to do that — if all we end up with is higher prices and not many more dwellings — then it will be very disappointing, indeed quite disturbing.

Not only would it confirm that there are serious supply-side impediments to producing one of the things that previous generations of Australians have taken for granted, namely affordable shelter, it would also pose elevated risks of problems of over-leverage and asset price deflation down the track.

Should the RBA lift rates by half a per cent today, or at a future meeting, we can’t say we haven’t been warned.

Finally, a reminder of what the RBA’s head of economic research, Tony Richards, said in a speech last September about the winners and losers from rising house prices:

So when the price of housing rises, higher-income households tend to benefit at the expense of lower-income households. As I have noted before, as a nation, we are not really any richer when the price of housing rises, but the more vulnerable tend to be hurt.

It’s a bit rich when it’s the central bankers pointing out the social equity arguments in housing. But they have to, everybody else has abandoned all pretence, especially the baby boomers.

It’s all about not sharing the easy capital gains with newcomers wanting to board the good ship Greed.