Dream on .. that was 1950's when the population bought one house and stayed in the one job.
Maybe I've missed something, but I've always considered that having more than one job
at the same time to be fairly unusual. Sure, there are some who will work 9 to 5 then a second job on weekends or of an evening, but certainly the vast majority of people I have ever known have only had one job at any given time.
Obviously nobody expects to stay in the
same job for life these days, but that's an entirely different issue. Likewise most won't stay in the
same house and I don't think that anyone's suggesting that here.
But if someone has
a full time job then they reasonably expect to be able to eventually own outright
a house. Maybe they'll have 10 jobs and 4 houses along the way, but by the time they're 55 or so it's reasonable to expect that paying rent or a mortgage is a thing of the past. It was certainly possible in the past to do that, a great many people have actually done it, and it ought to be possible now in return for the same effort (or less effort given technology and productivity improvements etc).
The whole concept of
buying a house is that at some point, generally before you retire, you own it outright. That along with avoiding the hassles of renting is the primary reason to buy rather than rent. If it takes 40 years to pay off the mortgage then that's getting a bit ridiculous.
You only have to go back to the mid-1990's to find that 41% of Australians owned their primary residence outright and about 26% were buying (had a mortgage). That's ABS data from 1996 and clearly shows that outright ownership is a normal expectation - 41% had achieved it and most of the 26% with a mortgage would be expecting to achieve it at some future date. The majority of those who buy (rather than renting) do indeed end up paying off the mortgage or at least they did in the 1990's.
Go forward to 2011 and the number who own outright has dropped to 32% and 35% now have a mortgage. So it's still 67% of people "buying" a home, it's just that a significantly lower portion of those now actually own it outright and there's a fairly simple explanation - houses have become more expensive relative to income.
That data can be found at the following link. For simplicity I've rounded the figures to the nearest whole %.
http://www.ahuri.edu.au/themes/home_ownership
As for prices in Sydney, yes that has always been the most expensive city but then roughly 80% of Australians don't live there. For most of the country (including Melbourne) the real price of housing, relative to incomes, was a lot cheaper in the past than it is today.