House prices to fall because of climate change: Reserve Bank boss Michele Bullock warns Gold Coast, Tweed Heads and Byron Bay in firing line

The new Australian Reserve Bank boss is warning potential homeowners to be wary when buying a home on the Gold Coast or in an idyllic NSW coastal town.

Michele Bullock delivered a climate change speech in Canberra on Tuesday evening, suggesting that 7.5 per cent of Australian homes are in postcodes where climate change could cause property prices to fall by five per cent or more by 2050.

“To map the physical climate risks for homes, climate hazard data was used to measure the expected increase in insurance costs due to climate-related damage – such as more frequent floods and more damaging cyclones – which translated into declines in house prices,” she said. her audience at the Australian National University.

A color-coded map illustrated the regions of the country most likely to be hit by tomato red areas around the Gold Coast and Tweed Heads, suggesting that prices will fall by five to 10 percent over three decades due to flooding.

This area south of Brisbane is popular with people from Sydney and Melbourne who flock there for its warmer climate, making South East Queensland by far Australia’s largest destination for interstate migration.

A colour-coded map of Australia featured tomato-red areas around the Gold Coast in southeastern Queensland and neighboring Tweed Heads. Most of the north coast of New South Wales was colored pink, indicating a two to five percent fall in house prices, with dots of tomato red in Byron Bay, Ballina and Lismore, which have suffered from flood damage in recent years .

Most of New South Wales’ northern coast was colored pink, indicating a two to five per cent drop in house prices, with tomato-red dots in Byron Bay, Ballina and Lismore, which have suffered from flood damage in recent years.

Red tomato dots were also placed on the south coast of NSW in national park areas and towns on the outskirts of Melbourne, Adelaide and the Tasmanian town of Devonport.

Mallacoota, in Victoria’s northeast corner, was also seen, after being the scene of devastating summer bushfires in early 2020.

Areas in regional Western Australia were colored maroon, indicating price drops of more than 10 percent.

This included Geraldton, 400 km northwest of Perth, which is prone to cyclones.

Areas to the north, including Carnarvon, were colored tomato red.

This emerged from a Climate Vulnerability Assessment by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, the banking regulator losses on bank loans ‘would increase in the medium to long term’ but Ms Bullock said ‘this would not cause serious stress’.

Ms Bullock, who replaces Philip Lowe as governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia on September 18, suggested climate change could drive up unemployment in parts of Australia.

“Unemployment may be persistently higher if people are unable or unwilling to leave a region that has suffered extreme weather and associated job losses,” she said.

‘The climate effects vary considerably per region. An impact can be small in total, but extreme for a local community.’

But Ms Bullock has recently suggested that the unemployment rate will need to rise from its recent 48-year low of 3.5 per cent to 4.5 per cent if inflation is to fall within the target of 2 to 3 per cent, down from levels of 4.9 percent in July.

“If unemployment remains too low for too long, inflation expectations will rise, making it more difficult for monetary policy authorities to bring inflation back down,” she told the Australian Industry Group forum in Newcastle in June.

Michele Bullock gave a speech on climate change in Canberra on Tuesday evening, suggesting that 7.5 per cent of Australian homes are in postcodes where climate change could cause property prices to fall by five per cent by 2050

Based on the June labor force figure, 149,309 Australians would lose their jobs by mid-2025, with unemployment rising to 3.7 per cent in July.

Protesters stormed her Sir Leslie Melville lecture in an attempt to hand her a giant job-seeker check.

“Hey Michele, you say 140,000 people should lose their jobs, how do you justify that?” shouted the demonstrators.

“The cost of living crisis is being driven by corporate greed.”

A Climate Council report released last year predicted that 90 per cent of homes in the Victorian town of Shepparton would be uninsurable by 2030 – and now they are seriously flooded.

In October, five months after that report was published, Shepparton in northern Victoria was preparing for a flood peak of 40 feet (12.2 m), surpassing 1974 levels.