When exactly did we decide that helping the next generation requires the generation before them to give something up? Because I'm all for finding ways to make housing more affordable for young Australians. I have kids in my life. I want them to own homes. I want them to have opportunities. But this idea that pensioners have a "moral responsibility" to downsize? No. They don't. I think we're forgetting something about the houses young people understandably want. Many of these homes are now in established suburbs, with train stations, buses, schools, hospitals, shopping centres, parks and decades worth of infrastructure around them. They're also sitting on land that has become enormously valuable. But many of those places weren't like that when older generations bought there. People bought on the outskirts. They lived where the train didn't go, where the bus service was crap (if there was one), where there might have been one doctor's surgery servicing half the area and where the roads and infrastructure hadn't caught up with the houses yet. Then they waited. The suburb grew around them. Infrastructure arrived. Services improved. Their little house on the outskirts became a house in an established suburb. And yes, the housing market today is enormously more difficult for young people in plenty of ways. We absolutely should be talking about that. But why has the solution become "Grandma, could you please vacate the home you've lived in for 40 years because a younger family could make better use of the bedrooms?" There are still homes being built as Melbourne expands. There are still outer suburbs where property is substantially cheaper than established inner and middle-ring suburbs. They're further out. The infrastructure isn't as good. The commute might suck. The train might not exist yet. Yes. That's the point. Previous generations made those compromises too. There's something increasingly strange about the idea that someone who spent 30 or 40 years paying off their home, raising their family in it, maintaining it and building their life around it should eventually discover that continuing to live there is somehow selfish. A society does have moral responsibilities in this way. We should care about each other. We should help people when they're struggling. We should treat others how we'd want to be treated ourselves. And most parents and grandparents I know would crawl over broken glass to help their own families. But your moral responsibility to another generation does not extend to surrendering the things you've worked your entire life to obtain simply because someone else would now like them. The housing crisis needs solutions. Build more homes. Fix planning. Build infrastructure alongside new suburbs. Look at population growth, construction costs, taxes and every other thing making housing increasingly unaffordable. But don't turn pensioners sitting peacefully in the homes they spent their lives paying for into another problem that needs solving. That woman living alone in a four-bedroom house doesn't owe you three bedrooms. They're hers.