Still scribbling

Amid the vagaries of house owning, one springs irresistibly to mind. It’s the assumption that those of us who bought what were basically hovels back in the day have somehow become property magnates perched atop mansions we should be vacating because we’re acquisitive old farts.

This idea emerged from the recent housing conference in Canberra and full marks to all concerned for giving us a good laugh. Even in the Meander valley we can appreciate the finer points of government decision making. But did we hear someone say goodbye to negative gearing? Was there a proposal to build more realistically priced public housing?

Well no. It appears that for some in high office the best way to alleviate the housing shortage and get young people into something with four walls, a heat pump and a dunny is by giving current home owners a good thrashing. We must be made to realise that our house is not our home but an economic unit. Who cares if most of us have scraped, saved, painted and wallpapered it from its somewhat dingy beginnings to something approaching desirability, the time has come for us to do the right thing and bugger off out of it.

This piece of sociological nonsense is not going down well among home owners, most of whom can recite chapter and verse their road to real estate. Get a group of women of a certain age together and you’ll soon learn the following — multi-striped electric-hued carpet was the saviour of shabby lounge flooring; lay-by vinyl arm chairs, usually in taupe or cacky brown, could take everything kids threw at them; Toulouse-Lautrec posters of Aristide Bruant covered marks on the wall really well; cut-price cafe curtains were obligatory in the kitchen; slap a few bricks and lengths of timber together and there’s your book-shelf, throw in a pot plant and a Bali lady lamp and you were the epitome of interior decorating chic.

What we didn’t have was the following — more bathrooms than you’d find in a country pub; an entertainment nook, as opposed to a stick-legged telly in the sitting-room; ensuites to aforementioned bedrooms; ditto walk-in wardrobes; bench-tops made from rare and costly material; underfloor heating (may we be stricken with environmental plague but we sparked up the fireplace); a wet room, instead of wellies inside the back door next to the dog’s bed.

Despite this glaring lack of domestic buoyancy people soldiered on through kids, jobs, mortgages, and refurbs. The old house, of which we’d become rather fond, scrubbed up pretty well and we’d rather stay there thank you very much.

So the narks can forget their ideas about us folding our tents and going off into the night. If they’re not going to come down like a ton of bricks on negative-gearing multi-homeowners, and build compact houses workers can afford to buy, they should come up with a solid fall-back position. Slagging off what are smarmily referred to as ‘the mums and dads of Australia’ won’t cut it.