A composite of houses and a tear-out of an ABC article (Images: Adobe/ABC)
A composite of houses and a tear-out of an ABC article (Images: Adobe/ABC)

Yesterday the ABC published a piece looking at the various impediments to home ownership faced by different generations. It features (among many other voices) Kerrie Boylett, 68, who recounts the struggle and sacrifice she faced buying a home in 1995.

“It was really hard, really hard — I mean, I remember once I had the electricity cut off for three days,” she recalls.

There were no holidays until my daughter was 13. I would have dinner parties at my place for friends, instead of going out, by buying two kilos of meat and making a salad and spaghetti bolognese and a cake. And that’s how I had friends and entertainment — at home.

They [millennials] want, you know, the latest mobile phone, the latest iPad, they want a nice car, they want to go on holidays, they still want to go out to restaurants. They pay $20 or $30 for a drink if they go out, have a nice time …

You can fill the script from there. Any piece featuring a boomer who has some strong views on why young people can’t afford a house (and suggests it’s a bit their own fault) might as well have been cooked up in a lab to get the angriest reactions from Twitter and elsewhere.

Some readers pointed out that the median house price when Boylett bought was about 6.7 times higher than the median single income, but in 2022 it was a whopping 16.5 times more. Others focused on the eye-watering increase in average house prices to well over a million dollars, even for a unit, in Coogee where she bought her first home for just $150,000.

The ABC piece also features voices from a new millennial homeowner and a host of experts, and concludes that it is indeed harder than it’s ever been to buy a house.

But of all the people to represent the boomer contingent — we’re not saying they shouldn’t be asked, before you accuse us of a hate crime, Jane Caro, and indeed, older women are hit as hard by the housing crisis as anyone — Boylett is, shall we say, a colourful option.

Yes, this is not the first time she has made the news.

She was — after her struggles in the mid-1990s — the general manager for John Hemmes’ hospitality behemoth Merivale for more than a decade before his death in 2015. The “trusted lieutenant” inherited $2 million from Hemmes’ fortune. Merivale is facing a long-running class action lawsuit on behalf of workers alleging more than $100 million in wage theft.