It was interesting to observe the media coverage of a recently released OECD report featuring Australia, with many commentators choosing to cherry-pick only the juiciest parts while failing to highlight more measured observations.

“Australia’s housing prices about to crash” and “The bubble will burst” were just a couple of headlines linked to coverage of the OECD report. The articles were based on a 3-page extract on the Australian economy from the OECD’s preliminary version of its latest economic outlook.

So what was the big fuss all about? The coverage hinged on one sentence in the extract which read, “the unwinding of housing-market tensions to date may presage dramatic and destabilising developments, rather than herald a soft landing”. The sentence was in reference to the overheated property markets in Sydney and Melbourne and the risks posed should property prices in these cities fall significantly.

While the state and fate of these markets can be left for another discussion, it was interesting to read the extract in its entirety and see other observations that many commentators had failed to highlight. While the OECD report says that policy makers need to maintain “close vigilance” on Australia’s property markets, it states that the associated risks following the east-coast property boom have actually been “receding”, which is far from what much of the media coverage was implying.

The fact that the risks have receded would suggest that efforts by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) are working as intended – to cool the overheated Sydney and Melbourne property markets. “Mortgage credit growth is slowing assisted by macro-prudential tightening,” the OECD report stated.

While I concede the report probably didn’t take into account recent data showing a reacceleration in house price growth in Sydney and Melbourne.

However, if this growth continues, there’s no doubt that APRA will again flex its muscle and force lenders to further tighten their lending standards to pour cold water on the markets. APRA has already shown that it has the capacity to cool property markets if desired after it clamped down on lenders last year and we saw a considerable pull back in price growth.

What was also failed to be highlighted by many commentators was the OECD’s upbeat outlook for Australia. After the OECD recorded Australia’s GDP at 2.5% in 2015, the report projected our GDP to rise to 2.6% in 2016 with another increase in 2017 to 2.9%, which places us among the top performing G20 countries.

The report pointed to the continued and successful rebalancing of the Australian economy following the end of the mining boom. “Growth in the non-resource sector will pick up (in 2017), aided by the dollar depreciation and a steady increase in household consumption,” the report stated, adding that non-resource activity was now driving employment growth.

“Negative effects from shrinking mining investment are set to ease and new LNG production will boost exports,” the report stated.