In short: housing is extremely expensive in Australia; we may well be in line for a major correction in house prices; and there appears to be an oversupply of housing, not the oft-cited undersupply.

It’s very interesting to note that for all the talk of how Gen X/Y should just tighten their belts, learn some financial discipline and put in the hard yards to save money if they want to purchase a house, the ratio of income to housing in Australia is far, far worse today than it was in the 1980s, or indeed up until about 1997.  It will be a disaster for the future of the country if an entire generation is talked into excessive debt and then left with houses worth only a fraction of what was paid for them, rising unemployment and rising interest rates.  If that does happen I trust that the real estate institutes, bankers and politicians who constantly talk up the housing market will be the first against the wall.

Similar issues are canvassed in this piece in today’s Age, which is also a good read (and less economics-heavy).

It’s often tempting to think that politicians are all the same and that the Obama administration in reality represents only a miniscule shift towards the centre.  In reality, this seems to be another sign that the Obama administration is prepared to operate in wholly “reality based” environment rather than the “faith based” administration of Bush (and Blair).  In Obama’s America, a war on a concept is seemingly no longer a valid way to describe foreign policy.

The War on Terror has dominated our lives in the West for nearly a decade now.  I doubt many will mourn its passing.

The USA has been subjected to a torrent (get it?) of this kind of crap in recent years, but we have largely been spared. It is deeply troubling to hear a Federal Minister directly reading from the RIAA/MPAA/local variant script.

And of course, every single person who copies a movie would definitely have bought that movie, which means that the following statement is entirely correct and not a total load of bullshit:

The Federal Government says DVD piracy is costing the entertainment industry more than $1.7 billion.

The reasoning behind this political posturing is (as usual when it comes to terrorism) dubious.  Hicks was detained by an foreign, non-judicial tribunal of doubtful legality and held (and tortured) without charge for five years.  At the end of that he was offered a politically motivated deal whereby he pleaded guilty and avoided a show trial at which he might have received life in prison.  Now, on the basis of that plea, he is treated as a convicted terrorist by elements of Australia’s political and media organisations.

Here in the free world we have strong laws to protect criminal suspects from confessions which are obtained by ‘verballing‘ that is, off-the-record threats, intimidation or physical violence being used by the police to elicit incriminating statements from a suspect.  How can someone who has been through what Hicks has been through possibly be exempt from the same principle?

We live in an era of instinctive, reactive and ill-informed leaders and followers, marked by contempt for truth, living by the dictum that the end justifies the means. It hardly matters whether that view is driven by cynicism or ideology.

Jones urges a return to the era of the public intellectual, where serious issues are put on trial in a public arena through relatively spin-free, objective debate.

Activists in public life – politicians, academics and journalists – must make a commitment to restoring the primacy of reason, rejecting a paranoid view of history and telling truth to power. As he lay dying, Leo Tolstoy reaffirmed his commitment to rationality: “Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two plus two does not make six.”

The piece is light on detailed suggestions of how we can turn the situation around – like many progressives and rationalists, he is good at identifying the problem but not so good on suggesting realistic ways in which it can be addressed.  Nevertheless, it is well worth a read.

While we’re on the subject, the ABC persists in referring to David Hicks as a “convicted terrorism supporter” in its reports. Hicks, of course, has never been before a legitimate court of law and has never been convicted of anything, other than a guilty plea he entered before an illegal and non-judicial tribunal which had through its agents been torturing him and depriving him of human rights for several years.

Bazooka Circus is what the whole world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.

- Hunter S Thompson

The initial questions asked in the media were, of course, (a) how the hell did it happen in the first place and (b) how does it take 3.5 hours to realise you’ve lost enough nukes to take out a smallish country?

However, the plot thickens. As this article observes, Barksdale is the US staging post for sorties to the Middle East. The obvious target there being Iran, towards which the US has used increasingly belligerent language of late. The real questions therefore seem to be:

• Was this in fact a deliberate decision to move nukes to a location where they could potentially be used on Iran, and did someone on the inside therefore leak the information to warn those outside the military/Bush administration?
• Alternatively, was this a deliberate decision to stage manage a ‘mistaken’ shipment of nukes to Barksdale and consequently leak the information to the press in order to rattle sabres at Iran?

And of course, those questions go to the more fundamental question:

• Is the U.S. being run by an increasingly belligerent and out of touch administration who realise that nothing can save their party electorally and who are therefore prepared to do whatever they please, however unpopular, in the time between now and the end of the Bush presidency in 2008, including a hare-brained scheme to launch strikes against Iran and send the Middle East into full blown regional conflict?

…the fate of journalists will always be linked to that of the whistleblowers who provide them with the information. If there is no protection for whistleblowers, hopes for a better balance between government secrets and the public’s right to know will be unrealised. And the slide towards less accountable, less transparent governments will continue unabated.

Read on…

Edit: fixed bad link.

The ‘logic’ employed appears to be that, in order to sustain the current number of wrinklies in their retirement, society requires a greater number of youngsters to be working, paying taxes, and generally slaving away making the economy grow.  At this point it should be recalled that the population is already growing at a more-than-replacement rate, and so an assumption is being made that the number of younger people required to support retirees is such that our population must grow even faster than it already is.  The problem, of course, is that those youngsters eventually become oldies themselves, and therefore will require even more new youngsters to support them in their retirement. And so it goes, until we all live in one square metre of desert apiece and live exclusively on Soylent Green.

One fallacy inherent in this reasoning is that economic growth requires population growth. Another is that a population cannot stabilise at a growth rate of zero and still adequately provide for its older members.  A third is that the positive consequences of increased population will automatically outweigh any negative consequences.

In Australia we currently have chronic water shortages, an impending energy crisis, major transport problems in all of our capital cities, and the most unaffordable housing in our modern history. Adding further population will only exacerbate these problems, yet their impact on our ability to support retirees is typically ignored in this debate.

Business interests continue to push hard for an increase in Australia’s population. This paper provides some background on the Business Council of Australia’s efforts, and also critiques the position from an ecological viewpoint. The BCA has established the Australian Population Institute (“APop”) which attempts to keep a straight face while calling for “debate” about a “greater Australia.” This paper also refers to other groups with a vested interest in increasing population, such as the Housing Industry Association, driving the population growth agenda.

Australia does need a debate about population growth: one including a rational consideration of the economic and scientific implications of a system based on endless expansion, the likely consequences of unchecked population growth, and a recognition that, as a matter of logic (the Earth being finite in size and we having no prospect of getting off it any time soon), we will eventually have to establish a society with a stable population level.