The Chaser Report - The Australian Dream Is Over

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

With house prices continuing to grow across the country, Charles is pretty smug about being a homeowner of over 17 properties (that we know of). However, there's one socialist communist dystopian state with the audacity to try and bring house prices down, so it's time to take a stand.---Order the 2025 CHASER ANNUAL: https://chasershop.com/products/the-chaser-and-the-shovel-annual-2025-preorderListen AD FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Now Charles, some interesting news about house prices, the most astrayan of all topics to discuss. Yes. Normally one would be lamenting that they were going up and up and up and it was becoming even more impossible to buy a house. But you have some news that will give hope to a very, very small number of people who can very almost, afford to buy a house in Australia.

Yes. No, it's really good news. It's excellent news. And basically, it's all solved, Dom. Really? Yeah. It's all solved. It's good news.

We're just going to have to, yeah, just... There's one tiny, tiny, tiny little, little tiny detail. But other than that, it's perfect. It's really good. It's really good. Let's find out what that detail is after this. There's one city in Australia where house prices are going to. down everywhere else house prices are skyrocketing there's sort of talk about how maybe next year

they won't go up as much because interest rates are going to go up again and blah blah blah is this you coming in off the long runoff is this you coming in off the long run up charles to shit on adelaide again because if it is i'm here for it no no actually the thing is adelaide's house prices for some bizarre reason and in fact i actually know the reason why adelaide's house prices are going up, which is that apparently Sydney's house prices are now so stupid that economists are saying that the reason why house prices are going up in Perth and Adelaide and stuff like that is because people are moving out of Sydney and seeking out. They're so desperate. They're refugees. They would move to Adelaide just to get a house. I mean, imagine, I mean, that is human

misery, right there. Well, unless you take the long view, Charles, which is that, um, In an Australia with decent high-speed trains, what is Adelaide but a future commuter suburb of Sydney? You're right. It's just around the corner. Yes, exactly. Just a little hop-away. It's a little...

It'd just be like... Well, if it was China or something like that, it'd be like a three-hour trip or something. Three-hour trip. Yeah. Very commutable. With lots of Wi-Fi and you go to Adelaide, you know. You go to Adelaide, you know.

If we've got a hyperloop, it's probably an hour away. Yeah. I think that must be what it is. But there is one major Australian city where if you want to buy a house, you should just go there because the house prices are coming down across the state, actually. Seriously. Which is, yeah. And so, well, before I tell you, there is just one tiny problem, which is that you would have to move to Melbourne. Melbourne?

To lock in. Yes. So Victoria realised a few, about a year or two ago that house prices were stupid. And so what they did is they, and this is quite an interesting thing that they did, they did something about it, right? They used the government there used laws and legislation to change the way investment properties are treated under tax. And they implemented two taxes. They implemented a land tax for second houses and investment properties. And they also implemented a like a vacant properties tax.

So if you leave a house vacant, then you get whacked with extra charges or whatever. Are you serious? He's saying that the much-wanted third rail of Australian politics, which is doing anything about housing and tax, was touched? Aren't they all just electrocuted down there? See, this is why you sort of, you know, like how Trump is about to invade Venezuela? I think it's not an exaggeration to say that Jacinta Allen is the Maduro of Australian politics. And, yeah, well, just in terms of, you know, populist, far-left socialist, sort of authoritarian, probably deeply corrupt.

I mean, I don't know if she is, but, you know, like, we can pull that accusation at it. One way to find that is by calling her that on a podcast and seeing if she sees you. So, well, though. No, look, I said I don't know. I said I don't know. Yeah, that's totally legally reliable. But I suppose what I'm saying is I think that Albo

and in particular Richard Miles the defence minister who really should be called the war minister really should start sending the air force in to bomb any leisure craft or boats

off the coast of Port Melbourne that would help with housing prices even more if an active war zone you'd imagine that prices would plummet and then I think we get the Navy to just sort of start building up a presence. I think maybe we also do what Trump did over the weekend, which is unilaterally closed down the airspace over Venezuela,

to say, you know, ahead of a likely invasion. And so we just shut down all the planes going into and out of Melbourne. I don't think there'd be any problem with that. Close the airspace. Well, Jet Star has done its bit already. Yeah, no, exactly. Yes, exactly. The Airbus has already sort of led the charge on that with the software update.

And then what we do is we invade Melbourne to reverse this terrible socialist, horrible policy of affordable housing that's leading to houses going down in price. I mean, that is not the Australian. It's so un-Australian. Why has nobody thought of the property investors in all this, the people with multiple houses and negative-go? Are you saying negative gearing is no longer a massive tax haven? Oh no, no, no, no, no. Negative gearing is still a tax haven. And they still have the discounts on capital gains. That's all administered by the feds. But what they're doing is they're providing countervailing pressure by introducing a land tax. So basically they're saying if you do own a property that's not your own, it's an investment property and you're renting it out, you need to pay a bit extra because you're sort of getting all these gammy tax advantages and subsidies. We're going to actually desubsidise. investment property. Charles, won't that emboldened young people to try and buy houses? Well, this is the problem. This is exactly what's happening.

Houses which should be earmarked for property investors to rent to them instead. No, exactly. They're locking property investors out of the market. These up-and-coming 20 and 30-something families often? Like, I mean, it's just disgusting. What sort of role model is it for a family with young kids, and they're watching their parents actually locking property investors out of the market, like actively turning up to auctions and outbidding the property invests. Or actually, what's happening is because the property investors are all selling their properties, right? So these poor destitute property investors are getting basically stolen. They're getting their properties stolen by young families.

And they're out on the street. I mean, not literally, of course, because they own their own residence elsewhere. They go to their own house. But technically, their title is out on the street. Yes. And Charles, you know what this means? All those families who should be prime customers for the build to rent market, paying the likes of Merritton and Murvac a lifetime of rent in new property investments,

they're not going to be able to do that because their money will all be, you know, tied into paying off a mortgage. So wait a minute. So this is sort of, this is undermining the Australian dream. which is to rent till you die. And in some cases after you die. I mean, I look, I don't want to, you know, like I feel like I don't want to go too far. But, you know, the whole March for Australia movement.

I do. I feel like they should be starting to focus on things like this, because this is so unpatriotic. This is, like, I feel like this is an issue they could really take up and make their own, the idea of helping out property investors. I feel like. I'm looking at the. charts, Charles. Murvac's share prices have plummeted since mid-October.

Why don't somebody think of the investor class, the shareholder class, is not just the property investors. The people who, admittedly, until this point, have made a massive amount of money off Murdo. I mean, to be fair, within this year, it's still well above where it was in January. But that money's already been spent, the money they've made in the past.

It's all about the future, Dom. You can't. No. No. The Chaser Report, news you can't trust. Is there something we can do just within the podcast to sort of, like, should we set up a little go-fund me or something for Murvac? Yeah, that's not.

Yeah, just donation buckets. And the mums and dads, the mum and dad investors with 27 investment properties. You know, like, it's not, these are just, like, ordinary everyday millionaires. Like, I sort of, I don't know even where. to take this because it's just it's sort of like maybe they should all maybe just cinder Allen should just move to new zealand or i don't know or venezuela yeah just send them all to venezuela they can all get on with their socialist paradise and and leave us to our but also i think we should clarify because in the past listens to the podcast might know that charles's

kind of policy prescriptions in this area this might have been one extended piece of heavy-handed sarcasm for about 10 minutes from Charles. But in fact, what you have to realize is that Charles is now wealthy from the huge success of Wanganconomics, which I understand, by the way, we've got some very good news about that in a moment. But you have funds. I mean, you wanted to buy into Melbourne, didn't you? You wanted to buy Melbourne.

I've just got money sloshing around. I mean, getting out the front door at my house, which I own, well, you know, with a mortgage, is really hard nowadays because there's just cash, just struthing. Because I don't have time, you've been to my house, I just don't have time to tidy up all the cash that's just sloshing around on the floor. It's not worth my while. A sea of cash, it's just sitting there. Sea of cash from live shows.

And you want to just scoop all that up and just... I buy a tiny unit in Melbourne and you can't because you do your money. No, I'd do my money. I mean, if I was in that, like I would have lost money if I'd been a property investor. I mean, you could have just dumped all that money. into the metro tunnel. That's what the Victorian government's been doing with its money. It's finally just open, $14 billion later.

Oh, apparently, though. I love the journalism on that, because you can so tell that all the journalists want to criticize, because the whole thing is the Victorian Labor government is terrible, right? But everyone who's tried the metro, like all the journalists who got to ride on the metro go, yeah, I mean, yeah, admittedly, it is good. like it is quite good but this is why it won't solve anything

well I saw some guy posting a picture of the video going yeah 14 billion dollars he was standing outside of the tunnel and going 80% of the current trains won't fit in this tunnel and I was just thinking back to the Sydney Metro which is the most beloved thing

I think it's been built in Sydney since the op-house and just thinking that a hundred percent of the previous trains wouldn't have fit in that because they got new trains yes but also that is a good thing You don't want old fucking smelly, graffiti chewing gum trains in your metro, bespoiling your metro.

And you know what worries me about this, Charles, is that if governments keep building big infrastructure projects and get universally loved because they work really well, it'll encourage them to do more. It'll embolden them to keep building stuff that people like. And then, yeah, and then what do you end up with? You end up with Venezuela. Like, I mean, all. paths lead to Venezuela at this point.

I'm getting really depressed about the trajectory of Australia, really. I mean, luckily... I hear that's going to be pretty cheap to invest in Venezuelan property pretty soon, so maybe that's where you should dash your cash. Now, look, let's just, yeah, let's leave this to one side because you have some amazing news to gloat about that we've saved until the end of the podcast. Yeah, so over the weekend, you know,

how you get emails from your UK publisher. all the time telling you about your success. I don't know what that's like at all. So what happened over the weekend is it was Black Friday sales and everything like that. So there's lots of books being sold, especially books about Wankanomics, apparently, because our book in the UK moved to 43rd best-selling book in the UK, right? At all books, 43rd, right, which, you know, I mean, it's good. We're in the top 100.

But guess what the 44th best-selling book is? Do you know? Harry Potter. No, Harry Potter? We are now bigger than Harry Potter in the UK. Wow. Which Harry Potter? No, I think all of them.

It's like the box set. I'll show you the photo. All of them? Yeah, all of them. It's like you now buy, if you want to buy Harry Potter, you buy the Harry Potter Children's Collection. Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah.

And this suggests to me, first, that you've succeeded far beyond anybody's wildest dreams, congratulations. And second, J.K. Rowling really has hurt her personal brand. Yeah, they're trying. So if you want to fix this problem, Charles, just have some thoughts on turfs. No, it's really lucky that we didn't do that whole transphobic set in our last show, because otherwise that really would have tanked the sales. So, yeah, no. Congratulations.

Forty-third. By-thouse. Yeah, 43rd. Imagine that. Now number, we should write a song. Now number 43. You should. Well, so there you go.

Isn't that excellent news? Excellent news for people who want to buy a house. Terrible news for rich people who want to buy houses out from underneath other people. So terrible news for me. But then good news for me because my economic is going so well. I mean, I love that you have, by parodying rich people, become a rich person. I am.

It's just sloshing cash. It's the fringe shows that really... Yeah, and selling books, we know, is such a successful business. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's... I think Warren Buffett doesn't... Didn't Warren Buffett, you know,

make his first billion out of selling... Paritying his first 500 million. That's right. We're part of the iconic class network. Dom, this is actually... And this is a little secret. This is actually the second show we recorded. for today's episode because the first one was so shit.

But I think we redeemed ourselves here, Dom. I think this is good. By talking about you. Thank goodness. And property prices. Come on. Yeah, that was pretty on brand in both senses. Say ya.

See ya.