Deception Bay is looking good suggest go cheap but you can get top quality water front for your high budget

How about investing in:

uranium
specialised oil and gas exploration equipment suppliers
oil and gas service comapnies
under capitalised uranium miners
under capitalised precious metal miners
small coal seam methane gas suppliers

The chances are that the yield is higher on the two cheaper properties and will put less pressure on your cashflow if that is an objective for you.

The future in Australian suburbs  will be a bleak, dystopian and impoverished society that is facing a breakdown of civil order, caused by widespread oil shortages first there will be revenge, then murder squads then nuclear apocaplypse followed by a robust recovery in the property market.

1923 Weimar Republic inflation: A German woman feeding a stove with Papiermarks, which burn longer than the amount of firewood they can buy.

$60bn windfall to cushion economy

• Darren Gray
• June 24, 2008
• Page 1 of 2 | Single Page View

THE biggest surge in commodity exports in Australia's history will deliver a powerful boost to the economy in 2008-09, swelling company profits and government coffers and cushioning the nation against global shocks, according to new forecasts.

But the next phase of the boom will also have a downside, adding to pressure on inflation and interest rates at a time when many people and businesses are struggling to cope.

The boom will be led by sales of metals, minerals and farm produce, which could earn the nation a record $212.3 billion in 2008-09, up $61 billion on this year, according to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE).

"It's the biggest helicopter drop of money onto the Australian economy that we've seen since wool prices went crazy during the Korean War," declared Access Economics director Chris Richardson. "It means that the world is giving us a pay rise for what we already do."

The ABARE forecasts could yet turn out to be conservative, with news last night that China's steel industry had caved in to demands by mining giant Rio for massive increases in iron ore prices from Australia.

While the boom will particularly boost the resource-rich states of Western Australia and Queensland, economists say the benefits will be felt nationwide.

As mining companies boost production to meet overseas demand, state governments will collect more revenue in mining royalties and payroll taxes.

The Federal Government will be a massive beneficiary, collecting more tax both directly from the mining giants' profits, and indirectly through the additional economic activity and national income generated by the mining boom.

Shareholders in the mining companies will also benefit from higher dividend payments.

Mr Richardson said the record commodity export boost was "bigger than Christmas", with Australian income growing at a rate not seen in a generation.

"Despite all the headlines about US in recession, China and a bunch of other emerging economies, India and the rest of them … they're still growing very fast," he said.

Surging prices for mined commodities such as iron ore, coal and crude oil, combined with higher export volumes, will be the main drivers of next year's boom, with earnings from mineral and energy exports tipped to be $177.9 billion, up from $120.5 billion in 2007-08, ABARE says.

The value of metallurgical coal exports is tipped to jump 123% to $39.1 billion, while iron ore exports are projected to jump 72% to $35.3 billion. Earnings from other minerals and energy groups will also soar. Thermal coal exports are tipped to jump 74% to $15.9 billion, crude oil exports 46% to $15.3 billion and gold 14% to $12.5 billion.

While the top 10 commodity export earners are all from the minerals and energy sector rather than agriculture, the ABARE report contains good news for farmers too. Export earnings from Australian farms are tipped to jump more than 12% to $30.2 billion in 2008-09, largely because of a turnaround in wheat export earnings and continued growth in the value of wine exports.

But the good news for farm exports is qualified. The figures assume a return to normal seasonal conditions after a prolonged drought, which cannot be guaranteed by economists working in a Canberra office.

The increase in total farm sector exports is underpinned by a projected 65% rise in winter crop production, a 13% increase in the amount of land sown for wheat to 14 million hectares and historically high world wheat prices.

ANZ Bank chief economist Saul Eslake said the export jump would have a significant economic impact. "That's a boost of about 5% to our national income, which if you think about it is a very significant increase," he said. "If you think that ordinarily a year's worth of economic growth is worth 3%, this is more than a year's economic growth in normal circumstances."

David Rynne, director of economics at the Minerals Council of Australia, said the export growth would create more jobs and a stimulus for companies to bring forward investments.

"People are going to generate some fairly high incomes and they're going to be able to do whatever they want with that income and create wealth," Mr Rynne said. "It will also create very, very high royalty and income tax collections for state and federal governments."

Good pick up I see that you are smarter than the avearge bear.

the graph was done from the prespective of a FTB and entry level housing as the FTB's does not start of on the median house price. 

Two young ladies from work  have just got married and both bought townhouses in the outer suburbs of Brisbane and theyt are making repayments is it a struggle ? probably no less than when I bought my first home.

Affordability debate warped by outmoded benchmarks

Media is preoccupied with the cost of housing. Affordability is the pet theme of current affairs television and talkback radio, and The Australian has published 63 stories on the subject in the past three months. Even the tabloid press in capital cities has waded in. Yet few of them have nailed the reasons it's more difficult for Australians to buy their first home.

A common benchmark defines "housing stress" as a situation where more than 30% of a household's income is used for shelter. This is the figure used by many popular media "surveys", which then go on to rate causes of poor affordability as including higher interest rates, government taxes & charges and high levels of household debt. Traditional affordability indexes produced by the REIA/Deposit Power and the HIA/Commonwealth Bank calculate that average Australian families are spending between 35% and 40% of household income on home loan repayments.

Property researcher Michael Matusik reveals that the 30% benchmark commonly used to define affordability was produced by the Federal Government for a 1992 conference aimed at developing a national housing strategy. However, it was only ever intended to be applied to lower-income households.

The common use of Census data to define weekly household income should also be under scrutiny, according to Matusik. One in eight people did not state their income in the 2006 Census, resulting in a lower median household income than is actually the case. Matusik says that if income data produced by the Australian Taxation Office is used instead, it provides a more accurate picture. For example the median household income in Queensland was $1,030, according to the 2006 Census. The ATO's figure for 2006 is $1,250 – 21% higher.

Matusik then outlines the Reserve Bank of Australia's three alternative approaches to defining affordability:

1) Surplus income after debt servicing: Rising incomes mean households are able to meet rising loan repayments (devoting as much as 47% of their income to debt servicing) while maintaining (and even increasing) living standards.

2) Household income in the age bracket of typical first-home buyers (25 to 39). The RBA calculates that on this basis the typical first-home buyer could afford one third of the dwellings offered to the market in the last 12 months. Matusik takes this further and suggests this figure could be as high as 40% in Queensland. (The Census approach is to lump all age groups in together for household income purposes.)

3) Investment assets and income: Traditional methods of measuring affordability do not take into account the ratio of household debt to (investment) assets, a common measure used by share investors to assess the level of risk.

"These three measures suggest that housing affordability is not as dire as many fear," Matusik writes in a recent report. He points to a very low level of housing loan arrears (0.3% in 2007). Australia has low unemployment and incomes are growing at a steady pace.

Matusik says housing affordability is "constrained" but not, as the latest salvo of media reports suggest, at crisis levels. "Borrowers are well placed to replay their loans," he concludes.

Nevertheless, we remind readers about a survey published in The Economist which showed Australia is high on the list of countries where housing prices are far above the level that can be explained by economic fundamentals. This could well lead to potential buyers considering not only "can we afford this home?", but also "is this good value at the price?"