The Money Café with Alan Kohler
Jun 3, 2026 · 46 min · 11 segments
On The Money Café this week, Alan Kohler and Stephen Mayne discuss the housing market, the rise of One Nation, the AI bubble, plus listener questions on CGT changes and much more! See…
No entities detected.
Stephen MayneHost
Alan KohlerHost
Where do you wanna start? I just read your column on the ABC this week about the budget.
Why don't you start with telling us, uh, as the dust settles on the budget, what do you reckon the government is doing, and how's it going?
It's always difficult to do a column where you're saying two things, [laughs] so...
Which is, the first thing was that, um, uh, I'm starting to feel like we, uh, we, um, will see more affordable housing, that all the things that are being done, um, including interest rates rising, which is not being done for housing purposes, but interest rates have, are going up, uh, will als- will all combine to, uh, cause house prices not to rise for a while.
But I, but, but the problem with that is that there is a dark side to that, which is what I pointed out, that, which is that a whole lot of people who bought, um, houses recently in the last few years, and in particular we're talking young families with, using a whole lot of debt, they did so on the understanding that they would incr- they would acquire equity over time because house prices always go up.
Um, and so they are gonna be disappointed, I think, if, if the government succeeds.
I mean, you can't actually make housing affordable while house prices continue to go up, obviously.
So therefore, um, all the people who've bought in the last sort of five to 10 years at very high prices, um, using a whole lot of debt, are going to find themselves not building equity as they expected.
Particularly those in the five, the government's new 5% scheme, which was one of those last little encourage leverage, you know, borrow up to 95%, we'll cover ins- your, your mortgage insurance.
But aren't we all having conniptions? Isn't the, isn't the response been, oh my God, auction rates are down a bit.
I mean, are we mature enough to handle a, a long overdue sort of modest correction in housing? 'Cause the first sort of reaction has been, this is, you know, the sky's falling in.
I mean, we've got the May, uh, house price data on Monday, and, uh, the national median price was, uh, increase was zero.
Um, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth continued to rise, but not as fast as they have been, so their growth rate is coming down.
Where do you wanna start? I just read your column on the ABC this week about the budget.
Why don't you start with telling us, uh, as the dust settles on the budget, what do you reckon the government is doing, and how's it going?
It's always difficult to do a column where you're saying two things, [laughs] so...
Which is, the first thing was that, um, uh, I'm starting to feel like we, uh, we, um, will see more affordable housing, that all the things that are being done, um, including interest rates rising, which is not being done for housing purposes, but interest rates have, are going up, uh, will als- will all combine to, uh, cause house prices not to rise for a while.
But I, but, but the problem with that is that there is a dark side to that, which is what I pointed out, that, which is that a whole lot of people who bought, um, houses recently in the last few years, and in particular we're talking young families with, using a whole lot of debt, they did so on the understanding that they would incr- they would acquire equity over time because house prices always go up.
Um, and so they are gonna be disappointed, I think, if, if the government succeeds.
I mean, you can't actually make housing affordable while house prices continue to go up, obviously.
So therefore, um, all the people who've bought in the last sort of five to 10 years at very high prices, um, using a whole lot of debt, are going to find themselves not building equity as they expected.
Particularly those in the five, the government's new 5% scheme, which was one of those last little encourage leverage, you know, borrow up to 95%, we'll cover ins- your, your mortgage insurance.
But aren't we all having conniptions? Isn't the, isn't the response been, oh my God, auction rates are down a bit.
I mean, are we mature enough to handle a, a long overdue sort of modest correction in housing? 'Cause the first sort of reaction has been, this is, you know, the sky's falling in.
I mean, we've got the May, uh, house price data on Monday, and, uh, the national median price was, uh, increase was zero.
Um, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth continued to rise, but not as fast as they have been, so their growth rate is coming down.
Every episode on Radar is fully transcribed, speaker-labeled, and rich with metadata. Here is a taste of this one. Try Radar for free to see the rest.
3 of 5
SpaceX IPO "a retail grab"
Stephen unleashes on SpaceX retail push
Australia's Duopoly Is Dead
Alan predicts end of party duopoly
No Growth For 20 Years?
Why home prices may stagnate decades
+2 more clips · 4 min 52 sec of audio in all
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
All 5 clips — the highlight moments, each cut as its own audio, with a title and a speaker
All 11 segments — the transcript broken into labeled sections, every ad read marked
All 25 topics — jump to every other episode discussing the same subject
Every related episode — other shows Radar links to this one
No account is needed to search Radar.
