Capitalism is only good when our owner class is on the same side as their owner class
Interested for you to elaborate on why you think that is. Personally, I think it's because we're a high-income country and companies would prefer to do it in lower income countries so they can make more money.
Part of this had also come from globalisation and the removal of many tarrifs that once existed.
The tarrif question is tricky though, because in the short-term, it makes everything more expensive if they're just applied immediately all at once, and in the long-term, other countries will apply retaliatory tarrifs, making our exports less competitive.
I'm not claiming to have all the answers, but it seems clear that the "free market" isn't gonna solve this problem, some government intervention seems necessary (tarrifs, for example, are imposed by governments).
Investment into high tech manufacturing could also be an option, but again, it's sure as hell not going to come from the private sector who won't see immediate and excess profits from that endeavour.
Anyway, keen to hear why you think "government" is the reason we're no longer manufacturing much here.
Interesting analogy, considering Tasmania was actually asked, and they voted to join the Federation. Did china ask Taiwan if they wanted to join?
Yeah these two things aren't similar.
Tasmania was a clearly separate British colony, whereas it's much more murky with Taiwan, because the government there is a continuation of - and still (officially) claims to be - the legitimate government of all of a China.
That being said, it's pretty fucking shitty of the mainland to go around saying: Hey! Agree with us, or else...
I hope that the people of Taiwan have a say over how reunification is handled (or if it happens at all). It bears noting that not everyone on the island agrees about what should happen.
So, China giving Australia shit for essentially saying: "hey maybe don't use military force to reunify" is dumb. In my opinion. Heck this diplomat. (hypocrisy of us militarily supporting the USA in Iran notwithstanding),
America sends to be the only country that got the memo.
Press X to doubt this will occur in any meaningful way, or otherwise it will be coupled with an active further suppression of wages vs productivity (wage increases have already decoupled with productivity increases long ago).
America is controlled by moneyed interests even more than us, so I doubt whatever happens there with reshoring won't be mostly positive for the working class. As most Australians will agree, the USA is not a country to be emulated.
In our case, government intervention is necessary, because market forces (where profit is the only incentive) makes rebuilding our manufacturing base impossible. No company will invest it they can't make the highest profit possible.
This is fair, though how do you do things like raise taxes without everyone hating you? It's political suicide in the current climate
This is such a brain-dead move because recognition of indigenous Taiwanese people and celebration of their culture has no impact on cross-straight relations whatsoever (at least, you'd think).
Like, everyone could happily say "the indigenous people of the island of Taiwan" and it have no meaning about the sovereignty of the island between the two different governments claiming to be the "One China".
I know you're just being hyperbolic for effect, but 25% is already extremely high.
It's not surprising we've gotten to this point though. Seeing as we've offshored all our manufacturing jobs in search of higher profits for shareholders...
We don't make shit in Australia anymore. We're a country of holes in the ground and houses as the only economic output 😅
🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
No wonder they're able to lie to you. You haven't understood the graph.
Do you think that if inflation drops from 3% to 2% that things got cheaper?
No, this is not the same concept. Inflation is increase in prices over a set period. (Typically given per year). It's a rate of change. I'll try spell out for you what the graph I linked to means, but it's not showing rate of change per time. It's showing a ratio of current houses, to current population for each given year.
We’re still bringing in significantly more people than we’re building houses to support. Building 400 houses when you brought in 1000 isn’t enough lol.
This is total housing per person at the given year. NOT the rate of change.
Let's take the reciprocal fractions, maybe you'll get it then...
In 1990 there were ~2.65 people dwelling (1000/377). In 2022 there we only ~2.38 people per dwelling (1000/420). At that date, not rate of change like you're imagining.
I'm really hoping you understand now, that per person there are MORE houses than there were 30 years ago, but this hasn't caused the price of housing to drop because this hasn't translated into more available houses (because of aforementioned hoarding) and because of commodification of housing.
After this I'm gonna give up, and be sad that people didn't pay attention in maths because they "weren't going to use it" ☹️
Monitors, but does fuck-all because there are no laws against price-gouging
Except it's still a wank yank tank. We're (Australia) not that far behind you in this stupid arms race, sadly. More and more of these stupid pick up trucks are on our streets.
Fuck uncessarily big cars.
The only solution to traffic is viable alternatives to driving.
Sorry to be such a downer, but cities designed for massive personal vehicles should be called out at every opportunity.
All the folks who don't need to drive and can take public transport are much more chippy. And it saves fuel for the vehicles that actually need to use it (for freight, emergency, disabled, farms etc)
I hate to pull the insulting card, but you started it:
Bro.
What don't you understand about 420 dwellings per 1000 inhabitants being higher than 377 dwellings per 1000 inhabitants?
Did you fail year 6 maths?
What are you not understanding here? Where do you get off implying I can't read graphs when clearly you don't seem to understand the concept. (Or just refusing to acknowledge it?)
More likely, you're just too stubborn to admit that your pre-decided "reason" for the housing crisis is bullshit, and you're just spouting numbers without actually bothering to look up the source. You just feel it's those pesky foreigners.
I really hope it's not that you innumerate. Would be a scathing indictment of our education system
Seems like the Federation of Macedonian Cultural Artistic Associations of Victoria is pulling a bit of a stunt here. If it was clearly communicated ahead of time in the rules that only national flags are permitted, then they knew what they were doing.
Sucks for the performers.
7000 new homes per week? No.
Clearly we must be, otherwise how would the number of houses per person be increasing...?
Something tells me the 7000 per week number isn't correct or otherwise misconstrued. Please link to the relevant study or ABS data page. (There may be some confusion between net migration, and number of ARRIVALS per week, which includes tourists and other temporary visa holders)
they’re not for sale or rent so they’re irrelevant
You are not owes someone else giving you their house to live in. If they choose to buy it and keep it empty that’s up to them, and they shouldn’t be forced to do otherwise. Thinking they should is just jealousy.
Sorry, but I think this take isn't sensible. We regulate a lot of our society. We don't let people do whatever they want, where we draw the line in different areas comes down to what we value as a society.
You seem to value ownership above all else. Never mind the extremely damaging externalities, in your point of view.
If you own a house, and you're not living in it, and you're not renting it out, especially if you own more than 2 (I think holiday houses aren't some sacred thing people NEED, but fine, have A holiday house), then sorry, yes, you should be forced to sell or rent it out. Thinking it's okay to just keep it empty as your personal choice, is anti-social behaviour, and we as a society can choose to disallow it like we do with many other anti-social behaviours.
It's not jealously, it's empathy for your fellow human beings who need somewhere affordable to live. We as a society do get to decide when someone's behaviour is unacceptable. Unless you're not a fan of democracy?
We balance freedoms for the individual with what's best for the collective. Both extremes of hyper-individualism (what you seem to think "FreedomAdvocacy" means) or no personal rights whatsoever are dumb. There's a debate to be had about where exactly we should fall for any given topic, but the extremes seem a terrible way to run society.
We aren’t building enough houses. This is fact.
We have more houses per person, so it is not a fact. We do have a supply problem, because we're not utilising our existing housing stock.
We do have a supply problem, but it's wild you think it's okay for wealthy people to screw the rest of us over. The supply problem is because houses are sitting empty, and tax incentives are such that profiting off of housing makes it an asset class people are pouring money into.
We could just decide tomorrow we're going to keep housing prices nominally stable, make hoarding empty houses illegal (like, someone's "freedom" to profit doesn't trump the rest of our freedom of having somewhere affordable to live... we live in a society, not an anarcho-capitalist hellscape), and remove tax incentives that make housing such an attractive asset class.
We could be using these piles of money invested into unproductive assets (the house just sits there, the actual value from living there is far, far exceeded by the current price) and invest them in actual productive assets like companies and research.
Housing needs to be for people to live, not to profit.
We are building enough housing per person, that's a fact, and I've given you the data to prove it. Yes, even with how many people were bringing in (which I agree, we ought not just aimlessly do).
But it's plainly obvious that the reason housing is expensive is not because of the number of houses we have.
To be clear we have more housing per person than before, so the 7000 per week figure (also, is that net?), doesn't really prove your point at all.
I think we're roughly on the same page here, but I'm slightly confused. Mostly because I think our conceptions of "The Left" differ, and that "the left" never asked for laws clamping down on freedom of speech. Certainly not for the last 20 years or so. (Just opposing the brain-dead calls for 18c to be removed).
These specific laws to ban these phrases from this post was passed by the QLD government in Queensland.
I can still say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free because I'm not in Queensland.
The federal government, being stupid, recently passed extra "hate speech" laws which I believe will end up simply being used against political opponents. Right now it's anyone calling for the government to stop supporting genocide, but who knows what they'll be used for in the future.
Currently, the federal legislation doesn't ban specific phrases, as far as I'm aware.
It's all stupid, because racial hate speech was already illegal.
"The left" (which I don't include the Labor party as a part of, they're centre at best, and centre right if we're being honest), never asked for extra stupid laws like this. And the biggest targets currently of our new hate speech laws will likely be leftist groups, since they're the ones who are in opposition to Israel's genocide, and the lobby groups from Israel who are basically telling our government what laws they'd like them to enact.
To be clear, these other groups of people on "the left" (centrists) talking about identity politics are stupid, and playing right into the hands of "the right" doing the same thing, only on opposite sides of "the debate", meanwhile oligarchs are bleeding all of us dry...
Do these laws clamp down on Nazis (the far right) too? Sure, but I don't actually believe that was the intended target, since again, Nazi speech was already illegal.
I hate the way politics is going in our country...
You and I don't seem to agree on much, but I'm happy at least we can agree that laws clamping down on political speech is dangerous and should be fought against at all costs.
I'll preference the Greens over Labor because the Labor party is a centre-right party, but fuck, the Greens had such a sook when they lost at the last federal election, even claiming that preferential voting was somehow unfair.
Like???
Wtf.
Git gud The Greens, Christ.
P.S. I think single member electorates ought to be expanded to 3 member electorates (and maybe increase the number of lower house MPs by 50%), to mitigate against a party getting less than 50% of the vote (after preferences) but more than 50% of the seats and therefore 100% of the power.
I'm not for state-wide proportional in the lower house though, because it'll make forming government too difficult in my opinion (evidenced by Tasmania and a bunch of European countries where that's a thing). I think having a proportional upper house with Hare-Clark is pretty decent as a tempering.
You've written those in the wrong order for Australia. Greens are not an anti-capitalist party. There are a lot of tree tories in the Greens in Australia, unfortunately.
Still a way better choice than Labor though.
So, let me get this straight. We have more housing per person than any time in the last 30 years, and you're saying we're not building enough houses?
How is more demand from more immigrants a problem, but low supply from people literally hoarding houses, a human need, not a problem?
It's crazy how people, including you, don't have a problem with people hoarding, and will let the elites convince you it's foreigners.
Like???
She was arrested. Stupid enough, and a chilling affect on political speech
Labor friends of X and Labor against Y groups really ought to see the writing on the wall and join parties that actually reflect their values.
We have preferential voting, doing so has no downside, unless you are foolishly loyal to a particular party.
The Labor party is a misnomer at this point. It's the "More-friendly-to-labour-than-the-Liberals Party".
P.S. In my opinion, it's not a sensible point of view to be loyal to a party. Support a party, sure, become a member, work for it, as long as it mostly still aligns with your views. If it doesn't, you should leave and join others, or start your own. The Labor party is beyond reform at this point.