Sunday 8 May 2016

Federal Election 2016: Malcolm Bligh Turnbull and housing affordability


On 4 May 2016 this on-air exchange occurred between ABC 774 Radio presenter Jon Faine and Prime Minister Malcolm Bligh Turnbull:

JON FAINE" Yeh but my question was specifically about the intergenerational aspects of it. It’s  [negative gearing] creating conflict with effectively the kids of your and my generation, who can't get into the market and they're saying oh for goodness sake you baby boomers, you just want everything and you're locking us out.”

MALCOLM TURNBULL"Are your kids locked out of the housing market?"

JON FAINE"Yes"

MALCOLM TRUNBULL"Well you should shell out for them, you should support them, a wealthy man like you"

JON FAINE"That's what they say" [laughing]

MALCOLM TURNBULL"Exactly. There you go. See you've got the solution in your own hands”

JON FAINE: “That’s hardly national policy”

MALCOLM TURNBULLYou can provide a bit of inter-generational equity in the Faine family"

There is a reason why Turnbull can be so casually dismissive of concerns about home ownership and housing affordability and, it can be found in his privileged background.


Title records show that Mr Turnbull was a law student at Sydney University when he spent $17,000 on a worker’s semi on Newtown’s Wells Street. At the time he was far from a struggling student kicking around the backstreets of the inner west. He was already a Point Piper resident, with corporate records showing he lived in the Longworth Avenue apartment owned by his late father, hotel broker Bruce Turnbull.
That Newtown investment property was likely Mr Turnbull’s first windfall from the Sydney property market. He sold it in 1981 for $68,000, quadrupling in value over the three years.
The year after his Newtown purchase title records show the Rhodes scholar (or “student” according to the property transfer) bought a terrace on Redfern’s Great
Long before Malcolm Turnbull ascended to the highest political office in the country and took the keys to his official Sydney residence Kirribilli House, he had already amassed a fortune – much of it from Sydney’s property market.
The 29th prime minister has come a long way from his 1978 first-home purchase in Newtown, to his $50 million-plus trophy waterfront home in Point Piper.

Privately educated Malcolm Turnbull was 23 or 24 years old, son of a successful property speculator and a recent university graduate, when he purchased his first property in 1978.

By the end of 1982 this now married practicing lawyer was a member of the Liberal Party, had inherited an est. $2 million in assets, become a grazier and acquired a second investment property – all the while residing in a Point Piper flat owned by his father.

Five years later he was an investment banker at Whitlam Turnbull & Co. Ltd.

By the time he entered parliament as the Member for Wentworth in 2004 he was reputedly worth $133 million.

Turnbull’s fortune continues to grow.

This is a man who has never known Struggle Street. 

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