Australia’s favourite family, The Heelers, appear to be on the move.
A “For Sale” sign is outside their three-bedroom house, a wooden, semi-elevated Queenslander-style house that’s home to Bluey and her younger sister Bingo.
Enjoyed by millions of viewers here and overseas for its hilarity and warmth, the Bluey series is an engaging fantasy of Australian family life.
But it’s a stark contrast to the reality of a housing crisis that’s making life difficult for millions of local families.
It’s a show
First off, I am well aware that Bluey is a work of fiction
My family loves it and we eagerly await new episodes.
(Although I’m not as devoted as my mate Mary, who has Bluey tattoos and won an episode of Hard Quiz with it as the topic).
What I’m saying is, don’t burn down my “for real life” house because I’m using the show to try to illuminate some of the factors making life tough in our boring human housing market.
But the Heeler family have the same problem as the apartment dwellers in Friends.
Their fictional housing far outstrips the pretend reality of their financial situation.
Sorry Joey, but if you’re an unemployed actor (or semi-employed waitress, masseuse or academic) you don’t get to live in an expansive flat in the centre of one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Work life
The Heeler parents don’t talk about it much, but both have jobs.
Mum Chilli works in airport security, while dad Bandit is an archaeologist and has gone on long site explorations in previous episodes.
Let’s say Bandit earns what the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) calls average wages, which for full-time adults was $1,888 a week, coming to $98,176 annually each.
To make things easier we’ll call it $100,000, and say that Chilli works part-time with Bingo yet to go to school, bringing their income to $150,000 annually.
(This is very generous. The ABS finds that median weekly earnings are $1,300 pre-tax, meaning if you’re in the “middle” of Australia’s 14-million-strong workforce, that’s what you’re earning. The “average” figure includes extremely high wage earners that can skew the figures).
But let’s bump it up even more — Chilli could be a supervisor, Bandit a senior academic — and say they’re bringing home $200,000 every year.
Would they have enough money to buy the home they currently live in? No. Not even close.
Cost explosion
That’s because the price of homes has grown (exploded!) far faster than the growth of the income that you get from working for wages.
My colleague Alan Kohler broke this down in a long essay that’s worth your time.
Since the 1990s, house prices have risen from 2.5 times annual household income to more than six times by 2022.
It’s arguably a lot more than that in hot markets like Sydney and Brisbane, where it is well over 10 times.
With the Heelers’ fictional earnings of $150,000 annually, they would be able to get a loan from one of our largest lenders of around $630,000.
That’s below the current median house price in Brisbane, which is $796,818, which is up 19 per cent in the year to January.
Even if we say they’re earning $200,000 — a mammoth haul compared to most Australian families — their borrowing capacity only goes up to about $900,000.
That’s above the median house price.
But it’s well, well short of what a three-bedroom house in an inner-city suburb will sell for, anything from the low seven-figures ($1 million and up) to closer to $3 million if it’s on a lot of land or close to good schools.
And that’s not even taking in the value of the backyard, which has a fish pond in it!
In fact, a property in Brisbane that brought the Heeler house to life sold for a cool $1.845 million in April 2022 — eight years after it was snapped up for $730,000, meaning Bandit and Chilli would struggle to afford their “real-world” home.
Yep, it more than doubled in value — or cost — in less than a decade.
(We’ll come back to this house in a moment.)
Inner-city pressure
There are other factors in the Heelers’ finances, just as there are in families around the nation.
(For example, Bandit is outraged when the Tooth Fairy delivers Bluey $5 when she loses a tooth.)
On the positive side, the parents met and fell in love in the United Kingdom.
There was a period — when the pound was worth three times the Australian dollar — when workers could travel to the UK and accrue a sizeable house deposit.
Additionally, there’s the “Bank of Mum and Dad” — one of the nation’s biggest lenders — where people are tapping their parents for cash.
This is entrenching inequality, making life choices harder for the elderly and much more as well. But it’s now slowing down and it might be something the Heelers use if they’re looking for a bigger place.
On the negative, when I tried to work out the loan the family could get, I used a bare-bones estimate of their living expenses.
With two hungry puppies, it’s not realistic that their costs would be so low.
In addition, the crippling cost of child care means that many parents are barely getting ahead by working, because the income from their job has to take out the cost of child care while they’re out working.
With Bingo still not at school, that’s a big drain on the family’s finances.
To repeat, I am aware they are a fictional family of cartoon dogs.
Rent rise
Because the Heelers spend more time playing and using their imaginations than discussing their finances, we’ve made a lot of assumptions here.
The house they live in appears to be for sale. But that doesn’t mean they’re the owners.
If they’re renting, the median cost is at a record high at the moment.
New data from Domain has median rents in Brisbane at $620 a week, up 10.7 per cent for the year.
(And the median price will include a lot of houses less luxurious and smaller than the Heeler’s inner-city Queenslander.)
Vacancy rates are around 1 per cent, meaning there’s rental bidding and hot competition for places.
Also, many popular areas have seen huge swathes of housing lost to the short-term rental market, prioritising the profits of landlords and the tourist market over people who actually want to live in a community.
Remember that real-life Heeler home replica in Brisbane?
In an astonishing irony, in February 2022 online short-stay platform Airbnb transformed a Queenslander house into a real-life version of Bluey’s brightly-coloured abode.
Its listing history shows it had been rented for $685 a week in November 2019 and $700 a week in June 2021 before it hit the short-stay market for one weekend only.
Yes, you could briefly stay in a family home that had been removed from the long-term rental market — denying a real family a chance to live there.
Incredible.
What could we do to fix this situation? A lot.
We could change tax settings that subsidise property investors, massively expand the amount of social and affordable housing, expand protections for renters and promote medium and high-density housing in well-serviced areas, just to name a few.
Home sweet home
Bluey is a beautiful fantasy.
I hope they make 10 seasons and a movie.
Many parents watching it would love to share the imagination, energy and joy Chilli and Bandit bring to the lives of their little girls.
If we, for real life, had a more equitable and affordable housing market, more people would have the time, space and security to make the fantasy something closer to an everyday reality.
Stream Bluey’s 28-minute special The Sign at 8am on Sunday, April 14 on ABC iview.