Imagine if you could claim the interest you pay on your mortgage as a tax deduction. While you can’t in Australia, you can in Sweden. Why not here?

At present, deductions can be claimed on home loans in Australia but only where the house is used to generate income, such as rent. You cannot claim deductions for interest on your own private residence, unless a portion of the house is used for producing income, such as a business. And if you do, that portion may be subjected to capital gains tax when you sell the property.

Despite home ownership being quintessential to Australian culture, aside from popular conceptions stemming from the movie The Castle, our homes are not enshrined in legislation as being outside the purview of government control. When it comes to the law. home ownership is little more than ‘the vibe’ and capital gains tax on our private residences is something the Greens want to see happen.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 66 per cent of Australians own their own home, either outright or with a mortgage. This is the lowest percentage of home ownership since it peaked at 73 per cent in 1966, the same year Sir Robert Menzies retired as Prime Minister.

In NSW today, the figure is only 64 per cent. The rates of home ownership of younger people are even lower.

One of the ways Anthony Albanese touted to help with home ownership before the last federal election was a scheme where the government would pay for 30 per cent of an existing home or 40 per cent of a new build. To be eligible, a single person had to earn less than $90,000 per year.

According to a recent newspaper article, most people earning around $90,000 per year today would struggle to be approved for a mortgage of over $458,000, which means the total dwelling cost with the government’s contribution would be about $655,000.

The current median house price in Penrith in Sydney’s outer west is $875,000. To buy a decent house for $655,000, you would have to move to regional NSW. Of course, the job opportunities in the less populated regions are limited, so either long commutes to the city or renting are increasingly the only viable options for many people.

This is a tragedy for many Australians. Owning your own home is part of Australian culture.

And while many academics will tell you that Europeans have no problem renting a house for their entire lives, it doesn’t really cut it here. We want our own piece of dirt. It’s one of the many things that makes us Australian.

There is a movement in Australia to encourage people to get rid of their cars, live in high-density housing, and use public transport to commute. This might be an affordable solution for young people, but it doesn’t quite cut it when you have a young family or you want to have chickens and a vege garden.

Being cooped up in an apartment and doing your shopping or taking the kids to sport on a tram is impossible.

Home ownership is key to enabling young families to flourish. Perhaps if we could claim our interest as a tax deduction, it might make home ownership affordable and arrest the decline in home ownership that has occurred since the mid-sixties.

The problem with the Albanese plan is that the government gets a stake in your house. It isn’t clear how you would pay back the government if you decided to sell. If the house sold for less than you paid for it, would the government take the loss, too?

Or if you paid for renovations, how would this impact the amount you had to pay back to the government for their 30 per cent stake in your house? What if the government would not let you sell if the sale made a loss?

These are legitimate questions, and they are part of the problem when government gets involved in your personal financial decisions.

But if you could claim your interest payments as a tax deduction, this would provide a similar effect without necessarily needing you to hand over control to the government. Such an idea, however, is closely tied to the current attempt by the Greens to cancel negative gearing.

The very term ‘negative gearing’ helps the Greens’ cause. It is not a ‘thing’, it is a simple principle of our tax system. You can only claim deductions for expenses that relate to income earned. If your expenses are more than the income from your rental property, then the loss you made from your rental property can be used to reduce the tax liability from your other taxable income.

The simple fact is that to remove negative gearing is to say that you cannot claim a loss from your investment income related to rental properties. It’s not some magical rort – it is a fact of our taxation system.

To remove negative gearing would be to say that the government can take your money when you do well, but still take your money when you don’t. It is anathema to the principles of our tax system.

The problem with our current system and the idea of claiming a tax deduction for our home loan interest is that when we sell, logically, we would then have to pay capital gains tax on the family home. Never mind that the Greens want you to do this anyway.

Tax-deductible home loan interest could be one policy option. However, much like the NSW government idea of stamp duty, where you either pay stamp duty or you forgo paying stamp duty and pay an annual land tax (which the Greens support), it’s not really ownership.

But in a country where some three-quarters of families once owned their own homes – which is now only two-thirds and declining – something has to be done. The Swedes deduct their home loan interest, so why not us?

And wouldn’t it be grand to import something positive from Europe for once?