With first home ownership increasingly becoming a wistful dream rather than an expectation, and with so many mortgagees battling to meet loan repayments, I feel not only sympathy, but a touch of guilt as well.

Somehow, my home-buying life has been charmed. I’ve bought half a dozen homes in 55 years and maybe due to Lady Luck, but certainly not to my financial expertise, interest rates have never got in the way, except once when I had to get bridging finance at a nightmarish 24% - scary.

And now, as I read all the stories about the giant chunk that mortgages chop out of average family incomes, I wonder how many would-be home buyers have been locked out of the market by investors from overseas.

Cashed-up foreigners have been pushing up real estate prices for years, and although the market has subsided a bit due to more cautious borrowing, continual interest rate rises, not to mention soaring petrol and food prices, are making the mortgage mountain unclimbable for too many young couples who are working their insides out, only to find that their dream house has become either a mirage or a nightmare.

How would Aussies fare, I wonder, if they tried to purchase real estate in the countries whose nationals have been buying up Australia for years?

The appalling White Australia policy has long been dead, except perhaps in the minds of a few rednecks, but a Keep Australia policy could have legs. Would it be all that unreasonable to make Australian citizenship be a requisite for owning more than a stipulated slice of Australian real estate?

Profiting from gambling
IN the ocean of gambling, I’m a tiddler.

I used to fancy myself long ago, when, aged 18 and covering the barrier trials for the Toowoomba Chronicle, I had a few good wins on the horses and thought this was the way to Easy Street.

Needless to say, it was beginner’s luck and now my only flutters are the occasional scratchie. But the other day, I lashed out on impulse for a Gold Lotto ticket.

Predictably, I didn’t win the $4million, or even $4, but that almost unimaginable major prize set me thinking.

In these increasingly tough times, couldn’t the great Aussie gambling spirit be put to good purpose? (It was once, of course, when the Golden Casket largely funded Queensland’s wonderful free hospital scheme.)

Why not cap the pay-out on any of these giant lotteries to, say, a still tempting $1million, with the rest going straight to a sort of community chest to be divvied up between the charities that help people doing it tough?

Eye-ctaching headlines

Words on words: Newspaper headings are often the stuff of unintended delight to sharp-eyed readers. I’ve just added these from a Sydney paper to my fat file of things that could have been better put:

Kids make nutritious snacks
Iraqui head seeks arms
Prostitutes appeal to Pope

rich.29@bigpond.net.au