Most of what we file under prevention is not medicine at all; it is wealth and company. The things that reliably buy a longer, better old age, a secure roof, enough money not to ration the heating, somebody to notice when you go quiet, sit well upstream of any clinic, and we fund little of it as health. Loneliness, on the Holt-Lunstad numbers that Vivek Murthy made famous, carries a mortality risk on the order of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. It is, arguably, the most under-priced health input we have.
Now set two Australian problems side by side, because they turn out to be the same problem wearing different clothes. On one side, an older generation that owns the housing, around three-quarters of over-65 households own their home outright, rattling around four-bedroom homes they will not leave, with the spare rooms empty and the company gone. On the other, a younger generation locked out, a deposit on a median home now a decade of saving, paying half a wage for a room in someone else's house across town. One has shelter without connection; the other has neither. The isolation of the widow in the big house and the lock-out of the young renter are not two misfortunes. They are one unmet trade.
So let them trade. A young person moves in with an older homeowner and gives about ten hours a week, the bins, the lifts to the specialist, a shared meal, the simple fact of another heartbeat in the house after dark, and in return earns, quarter by quarter, the deposit on a home of their own. This is not a new idea so much as a dormant one: Homeshare Australia already matches householders with housemates on roughly that ten-hour basis, and Britain's Shared Lives schemes have run regulated, inspected live-in support for decades. (The credit for pointing me at this belongs to my colleague Annemarie, who has been noodling on the mechanism for longer than I have.) What is missing is the money.
Here is where the design earns its keep. The payment is not cash and not rent forgone; it is equity, a sliver of the home the young carer is helping the older owner stay in. Each quarter completed safely vests a slice, up to around five per cent of the home's value over five years, into a locked first-home account. On a median Melbourne house that is roughly a deposit under the Commonwealth's new 5 per cent Deposit Scheme, enough to cross the threshold that a decade of saving could not. The cash to fund it comes from a patient lender, a super fund is the natural candidate, advanced against a charge on the title and repaid when the house is eventually sold. The householder never writes a cheque. They pay in the one asset they have in surplus and cannot otherwise spend: the walls around them.
Look at who gains, because the arithmetic is unusually friendly:
- The older owner gets company and ten hours of help a week, which is often the exact margin between staying home and a residential-care bed that costs the system north of $100,000 a year. The years of independence it buys are the whole point.
- The young carer gets a roof now and a deposit later, earned through care rather than inheritance, which is a rather better moral story than waiting for someone to die.
- The super fund gets a long-dated, asset-backed return secured on residential property, the sort of patient, unexciting yield a lifetime-income book is built for.
- The state gets deferred aged-care spending and one more first-home buyer, without a new program to run or appropriate.
The honest weak link, and every one of these ideas has one, is tax. As the law stands, equity vesting to the carer would most likely be read as income and taxed, and the whole thing falls over. So it needs a ruling, or a small legislative carve-out, that equity earned under a registered homeshare scheme and spent on a first home is exempt, in the same spirit as the granny-flat capital-gains exemption granted in 2021. That is a real ask of a real parliament, which is the thing I would flag to anyone tempted to call this easy. The matching and safeguarding is the other hard part: vetting, supervision and a clean exit for either side are not optional niceties but the core of the product, and the Shared Lives inspection regime exists precisely because getting a stranger into a vulnerable person's home is a serious act.
Set against those, though, is a politics that is almost suspiciously neat. Thomas Piketty has spent a career showing how housing wealth, once accumulated, calcifies and passes down bloodlines rather than moving, widening the gap between those who own and those who merely rent; here that same frozen equity is turned into a rung for someone outside the family, and into health for the person who owns it. Andrew Scott, whose work treats a long life as an asset to be invested in rather than a cost to be managed, would recognise the move immediately: it turns the family home from a store of frozen wealth into a working instrument of two people's healthspan. And it pulls on what Harvard's Study of Adult Development, now eight decades deep, keeps finding to be the strongest single predictor of a long and happy life, which is not cholesterol or income but the warmth of your relationships.
There is a deeper reframe underneath the plumbing. The property ladder has become the thing that curdles a generation's faith in the whole settlement, the sense that the game was won before they sat down. Turn it, instead, into the mechanism by which the young earn a stake by caring for the old, and the ladder stops being a wall between the generations and becomes a rung each helps build for the other. That is a better story than the one we are telling, and it costs the budget close to nothing.