Many Australians in Labor's prime constituencies are the poorer for Shorten's shallow opportunism. The immunity of the family home from most taxation appears to be one of the great sacred cows of Australian politics. It needs no shoring up. It may well, indeed, be so entrenched, and so susceptible to political scare campaigns, that serious minded policymakers give up and look instead for other, even somewhat less efficient, sources of revenue.

There's a tendency, moreover, to think that taking into account the value of a house might somehow interfere with, or frustrate, another great Australian sacred cow - the desirability of owning a house. One way or another, however, the exemption costs the revenue about $30 billion a year, and about the same as the other great source of entitlement heavily skewed towards the already well-off - superannuation tax treatment. Its very existence is depriving more people of equitable access to the housing market than it is protecting.

The effective exemption of family homes from taxation is one of the factors which are increasingly pricing younger people, and younger families out of the market - particularly when they need it most. House prices are at absurd levels. Most younger people have too little to pay down, and not enough to pay a mortgage. They may ultimately be able to afford a house, but it will be when they are in their 50s and 60s after their children have left home and their parents die, and they inherit, or divide their parent's estates.

The historically high real cost of buying a house is also making a massive contribution to two other problems. A good many older Australians are asset-rich (almost invariably from owning a home in a major city housing market) but cash poor. Because the value of their home is not counted for age pension purposes, more than 250,000 Australian households with assets of more than $1 million are receiving welfare payments totalling about $800 million a year, according to estimates made by Natsem published in The Australian yesterday. (The same families, precisely of the classes that the Treasurer, Joe Hockey, does not have in mind when he talks of people hooked on a culture of entitlement, receive more than $6 billion a year of benefits in kind from the taxpayer.)

Hockey is now arguing that the modern structure of government and inbuilt deficit represents intergenerational theft on a grand scale. Baby boomers - the first of whom are moving into retirement - are said to have so arranged things that they get everything that they want while leaving future generations to pay the bill. The entitlements received by poor people (if not by constituents in electorates such as North Sydney) are more than the economy can afford, or at least is raising as revenue. Debt is a form of robbery of future generations, is the theme.

Yet, as the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, argued when as Howard's health minister he was trying to protect Medicare from a different cost-cutting Treasurer, most public expenditure, whether in health, education, defence, infrastructure or social welfare is in fact an investment in the wellbeing of younger generations of Australians. It is simply wrong to regard every piece of government spending as instant consumption and destruction of wealth which might otherwise have been transferred, via the tax system, to prop up the superannuation entitlements of a Hockey constituent.

An equitable treatment of home ownership, indeed generally of house ownership, would not necessary be a great impost on most Australians, or necessarily lead to higher overall levels of taxation. Indeed it could serve a host of probably beneficial public purposes.

It is, for example, notorious that the wealth of Australia is concentrated among older Australians. Much of that wealth is in the form of real estate, especially tax-exempt family homes. Yet economists worry first, about the distortion of the Australian investment markets caused by the favourable tax treatment of homes, and the disincentives for (live) people to their gains. There are further distortions caused by income and asset-shifting associated with purchasing aged care and securing pensions.

For richer Australians, the distortions resemble those created by other forms of entitlement tax avoidance via trusts, nominee companies, the conversion of income into assets by legal prestidigitation and alchemy, and the shifting of assets and profits abroad. It was, probably, even worse 40 years ago, when the richest Australians engaged in legal gymnastics to avoid death duties and estate taxes, with the cheerful acquiescence (and applause) of the Barwick High Court.

Death duties were ultimately abolished, for no particularly good public policy reason, and there is little prospect of them returning, given the power of those who would be affected to pretend that it would be stealing from widows and orphans (albeit very rich ones). Britain, the United States and Europe have death duties.

Most baby boomers - people of my generation - benefit from the special tax status of home ownership. What is often ignored, however, is how it also unfairly benefits their children - Gen X - at the expense of younger Australians. It is unlikely that Gen Y, or its children, will benefit in the same way as the Gen Y class dominating the Abbott government.

The notion that one should be able to leave substantial assets to one's children was, until about 1900, very much a shibboleth of the aristocracy alone. The overwhelming majority of the population inherited only personal effects, or, at most divided among (generally far larger) families, the modern day equivalent of a few thousand dollars. Only the rich engaged in "estate planning" or systemic tax avoidance designed to avoid having to pay taxes on the transfer of property to a new generation.

From World War II, however, ordinary Australians began to aspire to home ownership. Public policy was focused on the cheap provision of land. The first into the market had grown up in the uncertainties and miseries of the Great Depression, and those memories put a high focus on saving, prudent stewardship and, in a very short space of time, a focus on accumulating wealth that could be passed on to the next generation - the baby boomers. Many of the baby boomers benefited from family help in getting into the housing market, and, later, as their parents died, from the division of family homes. But they also tended to develop some idea of both right and duty to hold on to, and transfer property, to the ensuing generation. Indeed many older Australians have been reluctant to make sensible decisions for their own comfort and lifestyle because they are oppressed by some notion that they would be depriving their children of their rightful inheritance.

It is not only the federal government which should make serious inroads into a systemic deficit by removing the special status of home ownership. State governments should be levying land taxes on own homes as much as on investment houses. The result might, over time, slow the relentless trend of ever increasing house prices (by diverting spare cash away from the market). The beneficiaries would be those who presently cannot get into the market at all.

The first intergenerational report, five years ago, made hardly any reference to the distortion of the housing market, and its role in intergenerational wealth transfer, particularly for the half of the population who characterise themselves as "lifters". It's a fair bit that one already ready for tabling, when it is politically opportune, will not either.

But those being told that "we" cannot sustain Medicare, or university development, should understand that the omission is deliberate, because it will not help the government's cause. Nor, alas, Labor's, since it, like the Coalition, is petrified about punishing the middle class and, increasingly, more representative of haves than have-nots. Coercion and homelessness is for Aborigines, single mothers, and refugees.