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So much for the Lucky Country

If this article in The Sunday Age is even half-right, things are going terribly awry out there in the mortgage-belt. This situation may well be the "bbq stopper" - but not positively for the Government - John Howard & Co.keep on babbling on about:

"Victorians are taking out as many as 12 credit cards at a time and using all of them at once, as their personal debts spiral out of control.

Waiting lists for free community financial counselling have blown out to as long as three months, with middle-income earners seeking help from services traditionally used by low-income workers.

Ian Mackintosh, executive director of the Financial and Consumer Rights Council, the main body for Victoria's 130 financial counsellors, said that significant personal debt problems were no longer the province of the "working poor".

"You are seeing people in what we might call 'the middle class' who are being afflicted by the same problems," he said. "I think the demographic is changing — it's creeping up the scale."

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