If you own your own home today, then you’re lucky. If you own two homes, then you’re luckier still, though you might ask yourself whether you really need the one you’re not living in, being that so many homeless do. However, if you own more than two houses, there is no argument: you’re a @#&+. You’re not shrewd, or admirable, just a @#&+. You are no novelty, either, as there are plenty of @#&+s about. Last Wednesday, news.com.au published a story about Australia’s housing shortage, and the reader commentary that followed was hijacked by a noisy confederacy of @#&+s like yourself, like this @#&+, for example, and this @#&+, and this awful @#&+.
According to the latest figures, there are approximately 9 million privately-owned dwellings in this country - a comfortable plenty for a 22-million population - but about 2 million of those homes are owned by @#&+s like you who do not need to live in them. This is why housing has gone to hell, why there are half-a-million homeless and countless more trapped in the notional homelessness of the feudal rental market. Not negative gearing, or incompetent government, or a construction industry way out to lunch – it’s greedy @#&+s like you.
This didn’t happen by accident, or without your knowledge – you knew what you were doing all along. You knew that if you gobbled up as much property as possible, and other @#&+s like you did the same, the people who needed it would become more desperate, its value would rise and you’d make tidy earnings for yourself, all the while robbing the very same paupers you disenfranchised by charging them rent to live in the homes you’d greedily seized from their reach. It’s a despicable act, and no matter how hard you try to doll it up with language that portrays you as a “smart investor”, you are really nothing more than a profiteering @#&+, dredging shameful wealth from those less fortunate, whom you have succeeded in making less fortunate.
