Finance guru Mark Bouris has issued a warning that the ‘Great Australian Dream’ is slipping away from younger generations, as fresh figures show house prices continue to rise.

‘The Great Australian Dream is slipping and we all know it,’ the Executive Chairman of Yellow Brick Road Home Loans said.

‘For anyone under 40, doing what previous generations did is getting harder every year. 

‘Older Australians will be fine, they own their homes, have lower expenses and higher incomes. Young people are the ones being left behind.’

His comments come amid growing frustration among younger Australians after a viral social media post reignited debate about the country’s declining quality of life.

‘Lately it feels like the quality of life here has been slipping,’ one Aussie said.

‘Cost of living is insane, housing is basically a lifelong mortgage sentence, taxes and rates keep rising, and even groceries are pushing people to the edge.

‘The culture feels like it’s narrowed down to this loop: work, gym, home, repeat. Everyone is exhausted and just trying to keep their head above water.

‘Sure, you can add social hangouts and other things into the week, but it still does not balance out when the cost of living is this high. 

‘We are talking about house prices eight to ten times your yearly wage, university fees, capital gains, the list goes on.’

Bouris suggested introducing a flat 20 per cent income tax to help make life easier for Australians. 

‘In this country, given the resources we have, Australians should not be paying more than 25 per cent income tax – given all the other taxes you hit us with,’ he said in a recent podcast.

‘In fact, we should be paying 20 per cent income tax across the board. For everybody – rich, poor, whoever.

‘The rich will end up paying more by paying GST on their goods and services, because they consume more and they consume more expensive stuff.’

Bouris urged Australians to remain in the country instead of moving to Asia to escape the high cost of living, calling on them to push for lower taxes.

‘We have a personal obligation to remain solid and fight for what this country deserves – not what we deserve as individuals, but what this country deserves and all its people. I don’t see anyone stand up for that,’ he said.

Fresh data released this week confirmed the scale of the housing affordability crisis, with the median Australian home reaching $860,529 in September, while the typical household earned $104,390 before tax.

Sydney remains the most unaffordable market, requiring 16.7 years to save a 20 per cent deposit.

In the eastern suburbs, an average wage earner would need 35 years and would still face mortgage repayments exceeding their entire income.

Deposit timelines stretch beyond 13.1 years in Adelaide, 12.9 in Brisbane, 11.2 in Melbourne, 10.8 in Perth, and 10.6 in Hobart. 

Renters are also under pressure, with households now spending a record 33.4 per cent of their income on rent, the worst level in more than 20 years.

‘For first-home buyers, the metrics are pretty disappointing,’ Cotality head of research Eliza Owen said.

‘There’s this real disparity between where incomes are and where property prices are, a structural shift in who can access the market.’

The surge in house prices has been driven by a mix of factors boosting demand, including pandemic-era stimulus, low interest rates, government incentives for first-home buyers and a rapid bounce-back in net overseas migration after border closures were lifted.

Meanwhile, housing supply lagged behind. Construction sector insolvencies, rising material costs and changing preferences for larger homes and smaller household size didn’t help.

The result was a mismatch of more than one million new households formed in the past five years compared with 880,000 new dwellings completed, according to the report.

As property prices have gone up, homeowners and investors have been able to reinvest their massive capital gains windfalls back into the housing market, creating a larger gap for first-home buyers and those without parental assistance to enter the market.

‘There’s been this extraordinary separation between property prices and income,’ Ms Owen said.

‘It definitely speaks to a widening in the divide of the haves and have nots when it comes to the property market.’

Increased taxes on investment properties in Melbourne have kept home values structurally lower across the city, Ms Owen said.

Melbourne could serve as a good example of how to target housing demand and bring down prices at a time when supply is challenged.

‘It might take some time to tease out exactly what kind of impact the increased investment taxation has had, but I think it’s fair to say it has at least helped to take some heat out of the market, and many people look to Melbourne now as a relatively affordable buying option,’ Ms Owen said.

Daniel Wild, the deputy executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs think tank, said high immigration was behind Australia’s housing crisis.

‘The federal government’s lazy, short-sighted migration strategy is making it harder for Australians to get ahead at a time of acute cost-of-living pressures, and has failed to solve our worker shortage crisis,’ he said.

‘Migration has played a critical role in our history, and will continue to do so, but it must be planned for, and the federal government must deliver sustainable economic growth through increased productivity, not by merely bringing in record numbers of arrivals we cannot accommodate.’