Inevitable, really ...

It's a bit like being the guy who waits around outside one of those claw machines at `Timezone', watching some poor sod spend every cent he has in 20c coins to get a fluffy bunny into perfect grabbing distance, only to come round the corner and win it yourself for 40c.

As backbenchers quoted in yesterday's rather unhappy article about Carl Scully's decade-long push for the NSW Labor leadership, said, "You sneeze and Carl's there with a tissue.", yet all Morris Iemma needed to do is flick the unpopular vendor tax and possibly the pokie tax.

The property vultures are going to LOVE this. Nitwits like 2UE's John Edwards, whose job is to talk the property market up so they don't end up in the poor house themselves, and don't care what sort of Generation Xers or Yers get trampled in the stampede, are going to LEEEERVE it.

The fact of the matter is, before the property taxes were introduced, housing affordability was at its lowest point on record. Young people didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of buying a house. These taxes rebalanced the market away from investors - who buy houses to rent them to young people - towards young first home buyers. Nobody can argue this is a bad thing.

Nobody, that is, except a voracious industry that profits from a high, constant turnover of real estate rather than young couples buying one house and living in it for 30 years.

And who's got the louder, shriller voice to lobby the government? I wonder.