The Importance of Long Run Price Indexes

The Australian Bureau of Statistics only began publishing national house prices in 1986. Nigel Stapleton, a fantastic academic at the University of New South Wales, did the first long run price series for Australia going back to 1890. But it is misleading because two-thirds of that period overlap with an historic housing bubble so you're going to give a disproportionate sense of capital appreciation compared with if you took a longer run price index. They're combining real estate versus shares and I think bonds are to say that the returns compared to shares are like just as good but the period cuts off in 2016.