This humble little three-bedroom, one-bathroom fibro and iron house at Port Headland in the north of Western Australia sold four years ago for $1.3 million. It was passed in at auction on 7/2/2015 for $360,000 - click here.
Take away the tax concessions available on negatively geared investment properties and the 50% discount on capital gains tax (and no capital gains tax at all on owner-occupied properties), and house prices in the rest of the country would go the Port Headland way. Of course, doing so would be electoral suicide but it's either cutting into the generous real estate tax concessions or into the ten times bigger 140 billion welfare sector. The latter has spawned aged pensioners who live in million-dollar houses, layabouts who have been on the dole for so long, they've forgotten what kind of work they're out of, disability pensioners whose only infirmity is that they can't get out of bed in the morning, and single mothers who have turned their fecundity into a cash cow.
Social commentary aside, nobody needs to tell me that the mining boom is over. All I do is look at the price of my BHP shares which at on time almost touched $50, then went down to $26.90 as recently as 15th January 2015. The latest price is $31.55.
