Tony Abbott Reckons Young People Can Afford A House Because His Daughter Can, So There You Go

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If you felt a vast, inchoate desire to catapult yourself into the sun at about 8am this morning, it was probably because two of our living national nightmares, Tony Abbott and Alan Jones, were having a chinwag on 2GB. The waves of pure filth which that encounter sent out into the world are still reverberating through the lower levels of the atmosphere as we speak, with a stack of derision already being directed at Abbott’s idiotic, unscientific and actively employment-harming comments about wind farms and the renewable energy industry.

Not only did Abbott chuck a Joe Hockey circa 2014, describing wind turbines as “visually awful” and voicing his concerns about their non-existent “potential health impact” — he admitted the government is actively working to dismantle the renewable energy sector, telling Jones a recent deal with the Senate to slash the Renewable Energy Target was part of a strategy to “reduce the growth rate of this particular sector as much as the current Senate would allow us to do.” There is so much densely-packed stupidity, of so many different kinds, in those few quotes that properly excavating them would require the nuclear drill thing Bruce Willis drives in Armageddon. Calling wind turbines ugly, while dumb enough on its own, is relatively harmless compared to undermining an entire industry just to placate the Old Man Yells At Cloud fears of the Jabba the Hutt of talkback radio.

With all eyes on the fallout from the wind farm stuff, what got less attention was how Abbott responded to Jones’ grilling on the furore around Joe Hockey’s comments on house prices earlier this week, which drew a pretty clear contrast between the “Liberal MP/landed gentry” and “everyone else” perspectives on housing affordability. The following is an excerpt from that interview, which required me to physically listen to Jones and Abbott in conversation for several minutes, an instance of clear workplace maltreatment for which I will be claiming worker’s compensation.

“Can I ask you, because you’re the Prime Minister: how does a young person or a young couple — I’ve got them here, you’ve got daughters — with a HECS debt of 40,000 bucks, paying rent of four or five hundred dollars a week even if they’re sharing, how do they afford a house on $500,000 if they’re lucky in Sydney, which will require a deposit of 100,000? So they’ve gotta pay off their HECS debt, pay off their rent, and save $100,000? I mean I’m not a defeatist, but that’s impossible,” Jones asked.

“Well it’s not impossible Alan, because remarkably a lot of people do it. It’s not easy, no doubt about that — I’ve got three daughters as you know. One of them has just managed to get into the housing marketing, albeit in Canberra, and yes, I suppose she’s had a couple of lucky breaks along the way. The other two are looking at the housing market and thinking ‘My God, it’s a daunting task,'” Abbott replied.

Just to clarify, he wasn’t referring to Frances, the Abbott daughter whose “lucky break” took the form of an almost-free $60,000 scholarship from her design school courtesy of its unique “you get a scholarship because your dad’s Prime Minister” bursary program. He was referring to Louise, his youngest, who can count a 2014 fall in Canberra house prices as among her “lucky breaks” considering it was her dad’s cuts to the public sector that caused them. Incidentally, Louise works as a public servant for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, but presumably her job is safe where thousands of others aren’t for reasons lost to the endless mists of the universe.

Not that Louise herself is at fault — as Fairfax’s Latika Bourke pointed out on Tuesday, using your influential dad’s heft when trying to break into the housing market is something Joe Hockey quite literally wrote the book on.

Recalling this anecdote from @JoeHockey‘s book about how he never told private seller his Dad was a real estate agent pic.twitter.com/RTJhoKKDiM

— Latika M Bourke (@latikambourke) June 9, 2015

So buck up, youth of Australia — if the daughter of a wealthy Prime Minister who may or may not use his position to advance the interests of his family members can get ahead in an environment in which she is immune to the damage meted out to other people by her dad can afford a house, you can too! You just need the right attitude.

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