With average house prices rocketing to over a million dollars, the Australian Dream has lost its democratic ethos and is fast becoming a dream for the rich, writesCarl Rhodes.

ON10 JUNE 2025, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)confirmedthat the average house price across Australia had broken the $1 million ceiling.

To be exact, the price rose to $1,002,500. That is about ten times the average annualincomebefore tax. ThatmakesAustralia the second most expensive housing market in the world, slightlylaggingbehind Hong Kong.

When it comes to breaking through the $1 millionceiling, Sydney was the first domino to fall ten years ago, followed by Melbourne and Canberra in 2021. Today, there is no capital city in the country where houses are averaging below the magic million.

It made world news. TheBBCheadlinedAverage Australian home passes AU$1m amid housing crisis'. According to Forbes, this was an 'historic milestone'. BritainsDaily Mailwas expectedly more alarmist,reportingAustralian dream turns into a nightmare as the value of the average home soars past $1 million.

'Insiders' ignores hard facts of housing crisis

A discussion on ABC's Insiders sidelined the plight of the elderly and disabled through Australia's housing crisis, focusing on problems of the younger generation.

The Great Australian Dream

The Great Australian Dream of owning a suburban quarter-acre block furnished with a barbecue, hills-hoist and modest three-bedroom dwelling might seem quaint to people these days. But while the dream is increasingly out of reach for many, it remains deeply embedded in Australian culture.

The early articulation of the idea of the Great Australian Dream is oftenassociatedwithRay Lawler's 1955 play,Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. The play was a huge success and toured nationally to audiences eager to see theatre productions that reflected their own lives. Rarely did Australian playwrights work get performed back then.

While Lawler did not use the term "Great Australian Dream", his play both documents and interrogates the Australian cultural ideal of the suburban family utopia of home ownership. This was a dream of shared prosperity, economic stability and domestic bliss all predicated on the idea that every Australian could afford to buy their own home.

Dreaming of democracy

The dream of home and land ownership by working people always had a deeply democratic character. In the post-war "populate or perish"era, 2 million peopleimmigratedto Australia. In keeping with the racistWhite Australia Policyformulated in 1901, they were from Britain and Europe.

Home ownership boomed. In 1947, little more than half of all Australians werehomeowners. Twenty years later, it grew to almost three-quarters, peaking at 73 per cent in 1966. Emerging from the European class system rooted in the historic privilege of aristocratic land holding, the dream of home ownership meant something special to the new Australians.

Home ownership was a sign of being finally unshackled from the concrete inequalities of a European past. Individually, the dream was of independence from an oppressive landlord class. Collectively, it was of a country that could offer prosperity and freedom to all who sought it.

At its heart, the Australian Dream has always been a democratic dream, yet one of a very practical nature. Fusing political and economic ideals, it reflected what equality, solidarity and freedom can mean in a uniquely Australian sense. Being able to own ones own home was the material realisation of Australias promise.

Things are different today. At last count, 67 per cent of Australiansownedtheir own home, with the rateexpected tofallto 63 per cent by 2040. That will take us back to exactly what itwasin 1954.

Young people are hit especially hard. Today, just half of those in their 30s own or are buying their own homes. For every successive generation born since the post-war baby boom, rates of home ownership keep falling. What is left of the Australian Dream has lost its democratic ethos and is fast becoming a dream only for the rich.

Why this Labor term may not see sufficient housing reform

On the back of Labor's historic win, the Government's biggest challenge will betrying to deliver on itspromise to reform housing.

Whose dreaming?

Lets not kid ourselves. For all of its democratic ambition, the Great Australian Dream began as a dream of white people. Forsome, that has not changed today despite the demise of the White Australian Policy in 1973 and the rapid growth of multicultural immigration. The land that was bought and sold to furnish the dreams reality was stolen.

Indigenous Australians, as the original owners of the unceded land, were, by and large, excluded from a dreamrootedin the racism of terra nullius: a dream born out of the original sin of post-invasion Australia.

As journalist and authorStan Grantwrotein his book,Talking to My Country:

For much of Australias history, Indigenous Australians were legally excluded from property ownership of any kind. The first tentative steps tograntAboriginal land titles were not taken until 1966 with the establishment of theAboriginal Lands Trust of South Australia. This was well after the advent of the Great Australian Dream and more than ten years after Lawlers 1955 Summer of the Seventeenth Doll was first performed at the Union Theatre in Melbourne.

In terms of freehold title, the unjust legacy of our colonial past lives on, as far fewer Indigenous Australians own their own homes compared to the rest of the population. In contrast to the 67 per cent home ownership across the population, therateis just 42 per cent for households where at least one person who identifies as Indigenous lives.

Rule of the landlord class

Newspaper headlines might call it a "housing crisis", but much worse, it is a "democracy crisis". The extortionate cost of Australian housing is putting Australia on a route that will return us to a form of feudalism where the biggest class divide will be between landlords and renters.

The practical realities of home ownership once reflected a democratic vision of an egalitarian society that could break free from the class-riddled inequalities of Europe's past. That dream was never available to all Australians, but with housing affordability plummeting, it is becoming less and less available to everybody.

On the current trajectory, land and home ownership will once again be the preserve of the rich. A new class divide is emerging, with those on top being defined as those who not only own their own homes, but also own those that others live in a nation of landlords and tenants. That is not democracy, it is feudalism.

Lets go forward, not back.

Carl Rhodesis Professor of Business and Society at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has written fivebookson the relationship between liberal democracy and contemporary capitalism. You can follow him@ProfCarlRhodes.

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