HomeMate.com.au

Australia’s conservative party focus groups  new spin, “housing affordability crisis” to describe home buyers reluctance to buy over priced homes. Australia does not have a housing affordability crisis. It has a housing and land price bubble that savvy home buyers know about and are using it too drive prices down. The Housing affordability reality. Housing [...]

Australian homeowners and renters on hurting over mortgage rates, reduced family support, housing bubble concerns. Maybe we won’t be seeing an interest rate rise in June, even thought its likely and we predicted it last month.

Mortgage Managers may get special exceptions. In December last year, the Labor Government announced plans to ban exit fees on new home loans from July 1, 2011, in response to outrage of the major banks lifting rates above RBA rates. At that time I thought it was a bad idea for home buyers and homeowners [...]

Whilst I recommend the article, there is a annoying reference to mortgage brokers at the beginning of the article that riles me, here.

Mortgage brokers hip deep in profits handed out no-doc mortgages to people with fictional incomes. Wall Street shopped bundles of those loans to investors, no matter how unappetizing the details. And federal regulators gave sleepy nods.
That world largely collapsed under the weight of its improbabilities in 2008.

This home loan product [Uhomeloan] is aimed directly at it main two Competitors, Westpac and CBA, because it is a mortgage refinancing only product.
Another giveaway is that the new home loans attract no fees on the standard variable loan.

The Labor Party has been the driver in Banking Reform in Australia.

In fact it was always the Australian Labor Party who have reformed the banking system and opened up the mortgage industry to competition which saw the banks reduce their interest rates by over 2%. That is a lot of monthly savings for every Australian Homeowner with a mortgage.

Late last year, Mr Swan announced a bank reform package, including banning price signaling between banks and scrapping bank exit fees, in a bid to lift competition.

Mortgage exit fees are the name given to deferred establishment fees, these fees are to offset bank costs for setting up the loan in the first place.
They have a long standing history of being charged, even though one would reason that this was the purpose of charging interest rates [to cover the cost of such work.]
By deferring the establishment fees, and letting them disappear after the loan was 5 years old, or even less, it had three effects.