The Australian newspaper has given us the bald and confronting facts faced by our young first homebuyer (FHB) trying to get a foot on the property ladder. And few are getting on to the first wrung!

The paper’s economics correspondent Patrick Commins has accessed data from a National Housing ­Finance and Investment Corporation report — and it’s not pretty reading. But these revelations make me pose the question: which politicians care enough to do anything about it?

As someone who knows a fair bit about the game of politics and markets such as real estate, I’ll argue that if there are politicians who care about our young people’s access to a home they could own, they need to improve their marketing! In case the potential first homebuyer crusaders need a few ideas, I’ll give them some.

Before that, let’s see what Patrick has told us. Here goes:

• 90% of properties for sale in Sydney and Hobart (the hottest Aussie markets) are beyond the reach of most first-home buyers.

• In Melbourne, the 40% of citizens in the lower income brackets could only possibly buy 10% of properties that are up for sale.

• In Sydney, you could be in the second-highest income bracket but only 25% of stock for sale would be buyable.

• On the positive front, lots of Aussies have gone bush since the pandemic let employees work from home using technology such as Zoom. But the sting in the tail is that “regional NSW home values surged by 40 per cent, substantially more than price growth in Sydney at 27 per cent,” Commins reported.

But it’s not all bad news short term, but these temporary supply improvements often discourage political reformers to get fully committed to fixing a problem that I’ve reported on since 1985 when I first started writing columns for the Daily Telegraph while teaching economics at UNSW.

So the good news is that a building boom is here and the NHFIC report reveals because of the pandemic lockdowns and travel restrictions, 550,000 homes will be built over the next three years – a record 184,000 a year. And because immigration is down because of the virus threat, the supply of houses will be 115,300 more than new home buying households wanting to get a home.

In 2023, the oversupply will be 35,200 but then immigration will be making a comeback and the same old problems will emerge for home hunters, and especially for FHBs.

I recently had lunch with the greatest apartment builder in the country and maybe the planet — Harry Triguboff of Meriton fame, who said councils and planning departments need to get real on the new world we’re living in. This was his answer to my question about whether increasingly under-leased office blocks in our CBDs could be converted into apartments.

I call it the Manhattanization of our big cities, which provides accommodation (either to buy or rent) that will breathe life back into the cities infected by the Coronavirus. But it needs new thinking from those politicians who control urban planning.

We’ve had problems with the supply of properties for decades, ever since governments went mad with public housing in the 1960s and 1970s.

And while governments stopped providing cheap housing en masse, many say they made life too hard for developers. Nowadays, developers argue that tougher open space rules are making potential projects unprofitable. Also, community opposition to higher-density projects isn’t helping us beat the supply problem.

Of course, the recent ‘escape to the country’ trend could reduce price growth pressure in the cities, but Patrick Commins pointed to a new problem: “Middle-income households in regional NSW and Victoria were the hardest hit by a jump in rents during the pandemic, going from being able to afford 50 per cent of rental properties, to 30 per cent.”

Historically, developers have argued that a new land and home package price can be 30% less if tax slugs from councils, state and federal governments were stripped out of the cost to consumers.

It’s time some politicians really got serious to fix a problem linked to the one area that most Australians have an enormous passion for — property, and a belief that we want our young people to have access to it at an affordable price.