Who woulda thunk it? On Tuesday yours truly pointed subscribers to the American website Demographia
and Australia’s worrying rankings on its “Severely unaffordable
markets” list of international housing. ABC business editor Alan Kohler
obviously liked it. He referred to the list in his daily report on the
7:00pm ABC TV News that night.

So did Labor’s housing spokesman, Kelvin Thomson. He “seized” on it, according to the ABC.
“That is an astonishing situation to find that [in] Australian capital
cities it’s harder for an ordinary person, an ordinary family, to find
accommodation than in cities like New York, Las Vegas, Miami and so
on,” he said.

The story has also had a great run on AAP. And yesterday BIS Shrapnel chief economist Frank Gelber told an Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce function in Sydney that the apartment market is “gone”.

Hmm. D’ja reckon we could engineer a housing crash with a few well-placed emails?