I looked for some official statistics, and while I'm not sure if I'm in the right place, it paints a rather different picture from yours. The figure for housing costs implies a typical home value of more like 300K USD or 400K AUD.
Also, if this is accurate, Australia is more of a nation of homeowners than of renters.
It also says housing costs for renters have increased 51% in 20 years (to 2018) which is an average of 2% annually.
"housing costs are defined as the sum of rent payments; rate payments (water and general); and mortgage or unsecured loan payments (if the initial purpose of the loan was primarily to buy, add, or alter the dwelling)"
Australia's housing market, like I'm guessing many others, is quite heterogeneous.
Sydney and to a lesser extent Melbourne are both completely unaffordable (A$1m+) to new home owners on an average income unless you're prepared to live in a unit or commute 2 hours a day to the CBD. Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth on the other hand are significantly cheaper and one could still afford a nice family home.
Also worth noting is that the huge boom in prices only really started in the early 2000s. People who bought prior to that period make up a disproportionate number of owner occupiers.
This appears to be a data provider oriented towards entities with large real estate portfolios, and they specifically say on their website that their "hedonic" index is not meant for affordability calculations, for what that's worth.
It's difficult for me to tell which index is in the article, but the note about the missing data under the chart implies to me that the article is (inappropriately) using the hedonic index. I wonder how much difference it makes.
'this month's figures from CoreLogic did not include Perth or regional Western Australia "pending the resolution of a divergence from other housing market measures in WA" '
"Rather than relying solely on transacted sale prices to provide a measure of housing market conditions, the CoreLogic Daily Home Value Index is based on a ‘hedonic’ methodology which includes the attributes of properties that are transacting as part of the analysis."
"The fact that median or other percentile based series cannot be used to track changes in value of a market portfolio does not make them wrong: it is simply that they have different applications than hedonic indices. For example, median price series are useful in answering economic policy questions relating to housing affordability."
Interesting points RE the hedonic index, I'm not sure what the intended use case is but we can approach it from another angle if you would like.
A more up to date government source has the following;
> Weighted average (mean) of the eight capital cities Residential Property Price Index... rose 16.8% over the last twelve months.
We could go on forever trying to work out the exact numbers. The main thing I want to do is show non-australians how quickly our prices have risen and are rising!
The median home price in Australia is about US$725k. So no.