Is property investing ‘morally wrong'? Inside Mark Humphries' biggest project yet

Sydney Morning Herald

3 days ago

'I don't want to get too much into the baby boomer stuff,' Humphries says when asked about the generational tensions at play. 'I know they feel like they're getting slammed all the time. But if your own children can't afford to live in the city that you're in, you lose out, too – emotionally, through a loss of family time, or financially, when they essentially come to you as a bank.'
Though Humphries is well-known for his pointed political work, previously creating sketches for SBS The Feed and ABC's 7.30 (as well as most recently hosting 7News' axed weekly comedy segment The 6.57pm News), this is a rare longer work that allowed him to explore a topic in greater depth and a promising local commission from Binge.
'It's liberating to go beyond two-and-a-half minutes,' he says.
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The documentary – led by director Bill Code (Al Jazeera, The Guardian) and co-written by him, Craig Reucassel (War on Waste), Humphries and long-time collaborator Evan Williams (7.30, The Feed) – is careful to point the finger at the system that created the crisis, rather than the people who benefit from it. But the stories of those suffering the consequences are what Humphries found most affecting.
'We're all aware of the difficulties that people are going through,' he said. 'But it's a different thing to actually sit down with them. When doing the proof-of-concept for this documentary, I spoke with a nurse who has to live an hour and a half away from the hospital. They would travel that long after doing a 12-hour shift.
'There's often this mentality of, 'You should get a better job and work harder.' But how does that work? What is a nurse – an essential worker – supposed to do differently? … If our nurses and teachers can't live in the city where they're supposed to work, then how does society work?'
Other talking heads include rental advocate turned Victorian Socialists senate candidate Jordan van den Lamb, AKA @PurplePingers; former Labor leader Bill Shorten, briefly reflecting on his attempts to change housing tax policy; and ABC finance journalist Alan Kohler, explaining how those tax systems work while drinking champagne in a bath like Margot Robbie in The Big Short. Notably, he is fully clothed.
'I think if he were naked – and I say this with great love and respect for Alan, I'm sure that under that suit, he's a fine specimen – it would have distracted from the actual issues,' Humphries says. 'He was a very good sport.'
But, as Kohler notes from his bathtub, when it comes for solutions to these issues 'there's no one silver bullet'.
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'The big mindset shift that we're pushing for in this documentary is just reiterating that a house is for housing people,' Humphries says. 'The idea that a house is an investment that should increase in value is not something we should be aspiring to.'
'I understand that sort of selfish urge to want your place to go up in value, but I'm not buying into that system. It's not good for society.'
It's something the comedian has actually been thinking about a lot, long after filming.
'The great irony of this is that finally, at 39, I literally have this week moved into my first house,' he says, laughing. 'The timing is obviously not ideal for publicity. But this is something that I hoped I would have been able to do a decade ago.
'Of course, now that I've crossed that threshold, I'm now one of those people anxiously observing the interest rates and living under a different kind of tyranny ... I'm still just as outraged as I was a week ago.'
Does he think fellow Australian home-owners will follow his lead, rejecting the pursuit of endless profit and putting pressure on politicians to create change?
'I'm hopeful, but not optimistic. I want to have hope!'