Mike Hosking: Foreign house buyer ban 'xenophobic bollocks'

So your house is now "sensitive". And in making it sensitive, the Government has got around the obvious issue they refused to acknowledge during the campaign - that you can't just go round making up new rules that breach already established trade agreements.

Not that they told us that in the lead-up to the vote. No, they were simply going to march up to Korea and tell them what was what. However, whatever the mechanism, it achieves their goal. But here is the real question: just what is their goal?

Is it to sink the house market? Is it to stall the house market? Is it to get more first-home buyers into the market? None of it seems clear.

And that's before you get to the poor old home owner. You put your house on the market, some bloke from America offers you $1.3 million, and if he's now banned because he's foreign scourge.

Then, that leaves Bill and Sheila from down the road offering $900,000. So what's your house worth? And how much equity has the Government just ripped out from under you?

Further, in making existing houses sensitive, that means the foreigner presumably can still build a new house. And once again, we must remember these so-called 'foreigners' don't actually add up to a large number of players in the market.

When they get around to sorting out the data, they will find, like they found with economist Tony Alexander's work on foreign investors a year or so back, that the number in his study was a mere 3 per cent. In other words: not a number to make a dent.

But it doesn't end there. If foreigners can still build houses what effect does that have on the market? None. How do I know this? Because this is exactly what Australia did. And it made not one jot of difference.

And then we get to the other myth in all of this: the poor old first-home buyer. Stats out last week showed there haven't been as many first home buyers buying for 10 years. So how does that dovetail with the sob story that every young person is locked out of the market? It doesn't. It's made-up bollocks.

This so-called ban is window dressing, it's xenophobic, made-up political bollocks for expediency purposes and nothing else.

It's the move you make to make you look like you're doing something, when in reality it's for headlines and coalition promises - not for any real effect.

It's the work of inexperienced amateurs.