Does owning property make you more moral?

Generation Z is the first generation since the war to start out with less claim on the country than their parents.

You might believe this story is just all about economics. Negative gearing, property investment, supply and demand...

But there's an older, even ancient, argument that says that says a country where people own nothing will eventually become a country where people are nothing.

That owning property doesn't just confer wealth. It's moral training. When you own, you own up. This was the vision of Prime Minister Menzies who spoke of responsibility for "homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual".

So was Menzies right? Does owning things make you more responsible, even a better person? Or is that the convenient story owners tell themselves, while the rest of us try to find this weeks rent?

GUESTS:

James Vitali is a political theorist from Cambridge University, now a Conservative Party councillor in Dorset in the UK - His new book The Ownership Society: How Bourgeois values can save Britain.

Max Jeganathan is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. On the Labor side - He advised the Rudd and Gillard governments.

This program was made on the lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation