Give a battling hipster a home
On Monday Common Ventures founder Damian Damjanovski stood up on Q&A and asked Labor leader Bill Shorten why it was that despite starting a business he could not afford to buy a house aged 31.
Resplendent in a fur-collared jacket, he pointed out he has been working since he was 14 years and nine months old and had “never taken a cent” in government funding. Damjanovski’s passionate prose earned the headlines on the news sites on Tuesday morning (watch the video of his question and Shorten’s answer here).
And it seems it also struck a chord with the public, with someone starting a Go Fund Me crowdfunding campaign to raise $1.2m to ‘Buy a house for an Aussie battler’.
It is a shame that the fur collar has distracted people from a serious issue: Housing affordability.
We have a housing crisis in Australia. Plenty has been written about the issue, but little action has been taken to address it. We are locking an entire generation out of the housing market, and somewhere along the way it has become socially acceptable for adults to live in shared accommodation. It’s not acceptable and will create social issues soon enough. Wake up people! We need a serious dialogue about housing affordability, not personal attacks on individuals based on their wardrobe. Is that the best we can do?
What a tosser.
Good sport
I absolutely agree with you Richard!