Another planet

How many times have I said that good ol’ astronomy is now as dishonest as paleo anthropology? It’s getting worse.

Your recent articles ‘‘Long and Strange Year in the Land of 3 Suns’’ and ‘‘Mars Shared Life with Earth Says Scientist’’ ably demonstrate this. The one states half-truths presented as truths and the other is a blatant exercise in pure conjecture couched in the language of certainty.

A three-star system with a fourth object four times the size of Jupiter? Sounds like a quadruple system to me. There are many such systems.

Even Alpha Centauri, our closest neighbour, is a triple system. These things go all the way up to globular clusters, which contain thousands of stars. As for the Mars item, did anyone count the indefinites in the text? I counted 18. This is panspermia rebooted and it’s leading light has been Dr Francis Crick of DNA fame.

But even he changed his tune and late in life proclaimed life to be seeded by extra-terrestrials. Now if that’s not science fiction then what is? For all the cries of anguish about rampant house prices it’s only been in the past few months that I have started to seriously doubt my children’s ability to buy a home in the future.

It’s increasingly looking like a privilege afforded to the wealthy as home ownership rates fall. I worry they and others growing up today will be locked out of their own country.

I always thought my children would be alright. It may sound naive but hear me out.

We’re a ‘normal’ (hugely complex at times) middle-class family and home ownership has always just happened. My sisters, my cousins, mymumand dad and my grandparents, on both sides, all own homes or did.

So I thought I’d get planning a few years ago when I decided to grow up a bit myself.

I opened KiwiSaver accounts for my children in 2011 thinking that would go some way towards a deposit for their first house.

I put in $20 a week. Every week. Without fail. They now have close to $5000 saved.

The sum inches ever so slowly up each month, then backwards thanks to the negative returns every now and then.

But the truth is I’m bloody depressed about it. Their accounts are dwarfed by the rising cost of housing.

That money would barely pay for their legal fees. In a decade it still won’t be enough.

I can’t keep up. The more I save the more I fall behind and the more out of reach it becomes for them.

When I opened KiwiSaver accounts for the kids the average cost of a house in Auckland was $550,000 and they would have needed just a 5 per cent deposit – about $27,000 to buy that home.

Now the average price of an Auckland house is an astronomical $970,000 – and they would need close on $200k to get a foot on the property ladder. Of course they wouldn’t be able to service the mammoth mortgage so I can’t see how on earth they’d buy the house.

It’s not just Auckland: nationwide, the picture is only slightly more affordable.

The average price in Wellington

fears for his children’s future.

incentives. But that’s only added to the demand.

So the Reserve Bank had no other option this week than to do something to cool the market – although the experts aren’t even sure it will work, it’s more targeted at banks and who they lend to. The truth is investors have been creaming it.

More than 40 per cent of all sales nationally now go to investors – and 80 per cent of all sales in South Auckland

We just aren’t paid enough to keep up with the rising cost of housing. We live in a country that doesn’t build enough houses, where immigration is rampant and where land hasn’t been released and developers have land banked.

Thank goodness my children will always have their KiwiSaver retirement accounts to fall back on right?

It’s just a shame they’ll still be working in their mid-80s to service their mortgage.