The campaign group GetUp has a “suggestion box” in which new campaign ideas can be suggested, debated, and if they receive sufficient votes, adopted.
Prosper Australia recently suggested a First Home Property Buyers Strike (click here for the Prosper Australia press release), and after a week or so it is the 9th ranked campaign idea with 1700 votes.
I just logged on and voted for it, with the following comment:
This is an excellent idea which I endorse. It would be a foolish personal decision to take out the size of loan now required to enter the market, and it would be superb to turn this personal dilemma into a political campaign. Though the banks have the most responsibility for driving up house prices by letting their LVRs rise from the responsible 70% levels of the 1960s-1970s to the utterly irresponsible 97% levels of today, the house price bubble has also been inflated by the so-called “First Home Owners Grant” scheme. This scheme, which I prefer to call the First Home Vendors Grant, has been used as a cheap macroeconomic boost by the government on five occasions now–1983, 1989, 2000, 2001 and 2008–and each time all it has done is push up house prices.
There are good odds that house prices will start to fall this year–with macroeconomic impacts flowing from that–and there may well be lobbying to bring back the FHVB for a sixth time. This campaign might well make that an impossibility, which would be a very good thing.
I urge Debtwatch readers who are Australian residents to log on to GetUp (it’s free to join) and vote for this proposal.
This link will take you straight to the discussion page for the proposal, where you can comment first and join up later (which I did).
Alternately, you can join GetUp first and vote for the proposal later. This is probably a better way if you don’t want to make a comment as such on their blog.
Each member gets 10 votes, of which up to 3 can be given to any one campaign idea (the votes are returned to you after a campaign idea is either adopted or dropped). The more votes a proposal gets, the more likely it is to be adopted.
As they used to say in Chicago, vote early and vote often.
