A growing cohort of Australians who buy later in life and are facing rising interest rates and cost-of-living pressures will retire with outstanding housing debt, increasing the pressure on policymakers to reform the pension system and to increase housing supply.
Refinancing inquiries among those aged 55 and over surged 12 per cent year-on-year in February, the fastest growth in any cohort, according to credit bureau Equifax. Among borrowers aged 46 to 55, inquiries rose 8 per cent.
First home buyers Cameron and Chantelle Hill, pictured with their duck Peanut and dogs Loki and Lexi, feared being forced to rent for life so they made huge sacrifices to buy a house. Dan Peled
Australians are paying off mortgages much later in life, and an increasing number do not expect to retire mortgage-free. More than 40 per cent of those surveyed by Loan Market Group, a brokerage that claims a 25 per cent national market share, do not expect to have paid off their loans before retirement. Almost one-quarter do not even have a financial retirement strategy.
Australia’s aged pension system was designed with the idea that people would retire owning their home. The family home is not counted in means-testing for pension eligibility while financial assets are, and pension payments are too low to cover private rental market costs.
Boosting ownership, which has fallen from a peak of 71 per cent in 1966 to 67 per cent at the last census in 2021, is one argument for reformsto curb tax breaks on housing investment.
Another is to reform pension eligibility, says Matthew Bowes, a senior associate in Grattan Institute’s Economic Prosperity and Democracy Program
“We’re going to see more renters retiring in future,” Bowes said. “At the moment, they are disadvantaged if they have savings outside the family compared with people having savings in the family home.”
The think tank advocates for the value of a family home above a threshold of $750,000 to be included in the pension means test, a measure it estimates could save the budget about $4 billion annually.
“We’re seeing increasing concern by Australians about intergenerational equity and this is one reform that could go towards alleviating that,” Bowes said.
Without major changes, the trend of older home buyers is likely to continue.
The average age of a first home buyer is 34, with one in five first home buyer loans issued last year going to people aged over 40, according to Westpac, suggesting that fewer Australians will be free of their 30-year housing debt at the end of their working life.
Chantelle Hill and her husband, Cameron, rushed in February to buy a three-bedroom house in the semi-rural suburb of Bellmere, on the outskirts of Brisbane’s north, for $825,000.
The couple, both 30, compromised on property size and location, moving more than an hour away from their family and friends, so they could get into the market before house prices rose above their borrowing capacity.
“We had to get into the market now or else we wouldn’t be getting into it. We were just desperate to find what we could get into. This isn’t really going to be our long-term house,” Chantelle Hill said.
“I just felt like, if we didn’t get in now, then we weren’t going to get in and we were just going to be left behind and be stuck renting for the rest of our lives.”
The national median dwelling value is $930,000,according to Cotality. There are no affordable entry-level houses in any Australian capital city, the type suitable for first home buyers looking to start a family. In Sydney, 55 per cent of suburbshave medians more than nine times higher than the median household income.
The generational divide is clear in the declining home ownership figures. Baby Boomers are three times more likely to have bought a house before turning 40 than Millennials, according to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data.
The decrease in home ownership and increase in Australians retiring with home loan debt will have knock-on effects for wealth planning and the superannuation system.
Hill said she and her husband had not thought about retirement when they bought their home.
“We just believe we’re still young, and that’s something for maybe 10 or so years down the track to think about,” she said.
Grattan Institute’s Bowes said people with high super balances could use some of that to pay off outstanding mortgage debt when they retired.
“As Australians retire with ever larger super balances, it’s appropriate that some of those savings are used to pay for housing,” he said.
But the big housing challenge that governments needed to tackle were ensuring there was greater choice of housing available for downsizers in cities, boosting rent assistance to support retirees who rent, and shifting away from stamp duty as a tax base, he said.
Wealth adviser Patricia Howard said getting into the property market was the most important step to having a financially secure retirement, even if it meant making compromises.
“It’s really important, even for people in their 40s, if they can take that first step on the property ladder, to do that,” said Howard, managing director at Howard Osmond Financial Services.
“The worst situation you could find yourself in is if you decide, ‘I’m never going to buy the house of my dreams, so I’m just going to ignore the property market and just going to let my super accumulate and hope that it will look after me’.”
The people likely to struggle most in retirement would be those receiving the full aged pension and Commonwealth Rent Assistance, she said.
“The rental supplement in this country is so insufficient that no age pensioner can survive on it, even living in a caravan park. It is just that bad.”
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Russian government hackers broke into thousands of home routers to steal passwords TechCrunch. Help me. Fancy Bear was debunked LONG ago regarding having any actual Russians involved, let alone the government. So propaganda inflation
Follow up to What is BrowserGate? See alsoBleeping Computer: “A new report dubbed “BrowserGate” warns that Microsoft’s LinkedIn is using hidden JavaScript scripts on its website to scan visitors’ browsers for installed extensions and collect device data. BleepingComputer has independently confirmed part of these claims through our own testing, during which we observed a JavaScript file with a randomized filename being loaded by LinkedIn’s website. This script checked for 6,236 browser extensions by attempting to access file resources associated with a specific extension ID, a known technique for detecting whether extensions are installed. This fingerprinting script was previously reported in 2025, but it was only detecting approximately 2,000 extensions at that time. A different GitHub repository from two months ago shows 3,000 extensions being detected, demonstrating that the number of detected extensions continues to grow….LinkedIn’s site uses a fingerprinting script that detects over 6,000 extensions running in a Chromium browser, along with other data about a visitor’s system.
This is not the first time that companies have used aggressive fingerprinting scripts to detect programs running on a visitor’s device. In 2021, eBay was found to use JavaScript to perform automated port scans on visitors’ devices to determine whether they were running various remote support software. While eBay never confirmed why they were using these scripts, it was widely believed that they were used to block fraud on compromised devices. It was later discovered that numerous other companieswere using the same fingerprinting script, including Citibank, TD Bank, Ameriprise, Chick-fil-A, Lendup, BeachBody, Equifax IQ connect, TIAA-CREF, Sky, GumTree, and WePay…”
Bleeping Computer: “U.S. victims lost nearly $21 billion to cyber-enabled crimes last year, driven primarily by investment scams, business email compromise, tech support fraud, and data breaches, the Federal Bureau of Investigation says.
The figure continues the year-over-year record trend as it is up 26% compared to 2024, when Americans lost $16.6 billion to cybercrime. A similar uptick was recorded in the number of complaints the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received, which surpassed 1 million last year, up from 859,000 the year before…”
American Crisis – “The moment I saw Trump’s crazy and dangerous Truth Social post on the morning of Easter Sunday, I could imagine the freakout in newsrooms across the country. The essence of it would be something like this: “How much of this do we publish? How do we report this without breaking with every one of our standards and traditions?”…Based on my survey of regional-newspaper front pages on Monday morning, very few came anywhere near rising to the occasion. Many chose not to feature the story at all on their A1, or to give it much emphasis. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times did relatively well, leading their front pages with it.
Both used Trump’s full language high up in their front-page story. There’s been a lot of talk — including here — about the media’s disastrous tendency to “sane-wash” Trump. It comes down to this: The press, because of its own conventions and time-honored practices, normalizes him, and thus fails to get across the extreme nature of this president’s behavior.
Ten years of sane-washing have had their effect. He remains in power, reelected, undeterred.
On seeing Trump’s post, I thought immediately of Mark Jacob’s October piece about how the media is missing the biggest story there is — Trump’s apparent mental illness. Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, wrote: “It keeps getting worse, and the mainstream media keep making the same mistakes in their coverage of the King of Crazytown.”
After Trump claimed he “predicted” 9/11, Jacob wrote on Bluesky that “the media need to be writing about his mental unfitness every day until we get rid of him and save our country.” But of course, that didn’t happen then, and it didn’t happen this time. And now, with this horrible Easter morning development, we’ve entered new territory. But let’s get real. If traditional techniques and language (“emphatic threats”) aren’t getting it done, what actually would work? I’ll make three suggestions, and would be happy to hear yours…”
Another Giant Leap Reminds Us How Small We Are
A mission that took four astronauts farther than any human has ever traveled in the history of mankind has made people feel a little trippy.
By Ruth Graham April 11, 2026
In the beginning, Artemis II was about science. The mission, which ended on Friday with a clean splash into the Pacific Ocean, carried four astronauts who gathered data, took photographs and tested life support systems as they orbited the moon. But for the astronauts themselves, and millions of people who checked in on them from hundreds of thousands of miles away, the mission also elicited meditations on more profound matters.
“You just look up and feel wonder, grandeur and smallness at the same time,” said Jim Davis, a pastor in Orlando, Fla. He was having dinner at a restaurant with a small group from his church when the mission launched on April 1. The group stepped out into the parking lot to admire the rocket blasting upward into the early evening sky.
For 10 days, people admired the vastness of the universe. The frailty and interdependence of the human species. The sheer awesomeness of the moon.
“I just had an overwhelming sense of being moved by looking at the moon,” Christina Koch, a mission specialist on Artemis II, reported to mission control this week. “It lasted just a second or two, and I actually couldn’t even make it happen again, but something just threw me in suddenly to the lunar landscape and it became real.”
For many people back home on Earth, the mission was a brief reminder of the sheer scale of outer space, and a prompt to contemplate both our power and our powerlessness. It turned all of us into children at camp, lying supine and looking up at the stars, thinking very big thoughts.
It’s a paradox that scientists, philosophers and poets have tried to capture for centuries.
“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are humans that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” a writer of the Book of Psalms asked of God.
“When I search for the numerous turning spirals of the stars, I no longer have my feet on the Earth, but am beside Zeus himself,” reads a text attributed to the second-century astronomer Ptolemy.
Andrew Davison, a theologian at the University of Oxford who has written about the implications of extraterrestrial life, said in an interview that one of the “great provocations” of the cosmos is that, in it, “human beings seem unbelievably small, but also it bears witness to our greatness.”
He added, “We are a kind of being that can have that whole universe inside us, in our thoughts.”
For many astronauts, what begins as a scientific endeavor becomes something spiritual. Frank White, a space philosopher, coined the term “the overview effect” in 1987 to describe the shift in perspective that some astronauts said came from viewing Earth as merely one small sphere in an endless expanse.
Ron Garan watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 as a small boy with his family, and was struck by the sense that “we had just become a different species.” For millenniums of human history, all life on Earth was constrained there. Then suddenly the rules changed, the boundaries expanded.
Mr. Garan grew up to become an astronaut who spent six months on the International Space Station in 2011. In space, he was overwhelmed by the realization that everyone on Earth is also in space already, together.
Now back on solid ground and working as a consultant and writer, he attributes the emotional impact of space travel in part to the phenomenon of weightlessness. If a person is sitting on a beach looking at the sunset, or is perched on the rim of the Grand Canyon, gravity attaches them to the scene they are admiring, Mr. Garan said.
“But when I was in space, for the first time in my life, I was outside the frame of the masterpiece looking in,” he said. “That changes everything.”
Mr. Garan compared space travel to a psychedelic experience (though he declined to say whether he knew this first hand). Astronauts over the years have described crying, worshiping God and experiencing utterly new feelings of almost disembodied awe while in space.
When the Apollo 14 pilot Edgar Mitchell was on his way back from the moon in 1971, he was overwhelmed by the thought that “the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft had been manufactured in an ancient generation of stars,” he later told an interviewer. “It was a subjective visceral experience accompanied by ecstasy.”
Back on Earth, he researched various spiritual traditions to try to understand the experience and eventually found a term in Sanskrit that captured it: savikalpa samadhi, a state of deep meditation.
The Artemis II astronauts seemed at times to be undergoing similarly mind-expanding realignments of reality.
“You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth,” pilot Victor Glover mused in an interview with CBS News on Easter Sunday. “But you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos.”
Skeptics question whether the overview effect is anything more than a passing emotion.
Space travel remains a highly unusual human experience. Private space travel companies, like Blue Origin until recently, have taken dozens of tourists on brief flights above the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space about 62 miles above Earth. Traveling farther, to Earth orbit and beyond, is still out of reach for all but government-sponsored astronauts and the wealthiest space tourists.
The growing list of people who have technically gone to space includes billionaires like Jeff Bezos, pop stars like Katy Perry and space-coded celebrities like William Shatner, who concluded that the “vicious coldness” of space contrasted with Earth’s warmth and filled him with “overwhelming sadness.”
But celestial epiphanies have always been accessible to those who can’t physically travel outside Earth’s atmosphere.
“Since the dawn of our species, every human society has looked up at the stars,” said Jo Marchant, the author of “The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars.”
Stargazing has influenced religion, philosophy, art, science and politics. Isaac Newton’s discovery that laws of motion and gravity affect everything equally influenced democratic beliefs that kings to commoners should be subject to the same rules, Ms. Marchant said.
With the encroachments of light pollution and screen-based distractions, human beings in the 21st century arguably spend less of their time contemplating the night sky than ever before.
Troy D. Allan was an Army chaplain in Afghanistan when he began intentionally spending time outside at night. He knew little about astronomy or constellations, but found that simply staring up into the sky helped him find peace in a period of his life otherwise marked by turmoil.
Mr. Allan now heads a program at Utah State University that facilitates camping trips for teenagers and others to contemplate the night sky, and their place underneath it. His campers set up their tents, then lie back and watch the stars come out. At first, time moves slowly for young people accustomed to clicking through life at the pace of TikTok. But gradually, they warm to the experience.
“What happens to humans when we encounter vastness, silence, beauty and mystery?” Mr. Allan said. “It’s the recalibrating of our lives.”
After the stars come out, Mr. Allan’s group goes on a hike, with the Milky Way stretched like a banner above them. Then they stop again for a long time and look up.
Ruth Graham is a national reporter, based in Dallas, covering religion, faith and values for The Times.
