...Well Don...Maybe swathes of empty shops throughout Australia could be purchased by Government, handed over to the homeless with a similar to HECS loan, for renovation into domestic living quarters, creating a market for cheap alternative housing! This is less than a stupid idea!

diver dan, yes it is stupid to believe that government is some kind of magical benevolent economising machine, when
a) there is no basis for this belief in reason or evidence; it simply and perpetually ignores the costs which disprove it;
b) government is by far the single biggest cause of homelessness by all its attacks on productive activity in general, and employment and housing in particular;
c) its advocates don't have the most basic understanding of the economic issues they are trying to solve by anti-economic means
d) they display fake moral superiority by being unwilling to fund voluntarily what they are trying to get others to fund under compulsion.

There's the non-stupid answer to your stupid question: You're not willing to fund it - why should others? Why don't you stop doing what's causing the problem in the first place?

Well JKJ:

...I believe our Government does actually have a responsibility to support the underprivileged in our communities. Evidence abounds to the truth of this particular belief; one hundred billion dollars invested into social services PA, are but one of them! Another of course, is HECS funding loans for university students, which is not a concept without precedent, and would be fair to conclude, would be a very practical solution to increasing of homelessness due to (as you correctly state), a Government policy of manipulating a property market, which aids foreign investment (which artificially inflates property prices), over social responsibility!

...Your criticisms of a practical idea I may have glibly proffered, is ambiguous; but I assume you are not in favor of the concept of responsibility of housing the homeless, falling onto the shoulders of our Government! But Don Aitkin’s article does decry the wasted potential of swathes of empty shops in CBD’s across Australia; this glaring waste of a potentially valuable housing resource, is obscene IMO

Wanting something to be true does not mean it is true.

I see you confuse investment with consumption. You can clarify your confusion over these basic economic concepts by simply paying yourself at a loss for the accommodation that you think the homeless should have. What could be more "practical"?

Diver Dan when you use the term government it seems to imply government funds itself.

Why not say we'll get Imajulianutter and everbody else who pays tax to fund whaterever great new idea proposed by some unrealistic dogooder thinks might help somebody.
In this case please wait until me and my mates have bought up all those rundown cbds.

Grumpy codger alert!

Even the town structure that Don describes is ending.
Large shopping centres are already starting to fail in the US.
There is even a web site for defunct shopping centres in the US.

True this is not the US, but we usually go along the same track.
In an era of expensive oil the car based economy will suffer and everything
will become local again. The era of Waltons in the US and a similar
offshoot, Cosco here, is a last hurrah !

The building of projects such as the NorthConnect in Sydney will be a
total waste of money as by the time it is finished it will not be
needed as traffic counts will decrease as commuters will not be able
to afford the weekly tolls and petrol.
Typical tolls and petrol plus servicing are about $300 a week for a
cross Sydney daily trip. And that is after tax money !
Truck drivers will not be able to compete with rail and shipping.

Four motorways have gone into bankruptcy already because traffic
counts did not reach the desired level to repay their cost.
Interesting side issue, the percentage of young people taking out
driver's licences has fallen and they are not buying cars.

It is well worthwhile looking around this subject and some major
changes are taking place.
Many economists etc think the GFC has ended, well it hasn't it has
only just started and will stagger on as it has for a little while yet
before it really becomes a pain.

Yep those were the days. Everyone went to town Saturday morning, & walked up & down the street, looking at everyone else walking up & down.

Then Saturday night everyone went to town, looked in at the town hall where nothing was happening. Of course it wasn't because everyone looked, then went to the cinema. At interval everyone would check the town hall again. Everyone was there, so the dance would start.

Everyone really did stand around clapping, while the few who could actually do rock & roll bunged on a turn.

You parked in the main street, & walked to every shop you wanted to go to.

I hate the way it is now, where each business has it's own car park, & you have to drive to each place, often kilometers apart.

I lived in Bathurst in the early 50s, & raced there in the 60s. It was a great town. I went back in 2002 for a reunion, & it was so depressing. Half the old CBD was closed & some even boarded up. We had to go to the Golf club to find a cup of coffee.

I won't mind in the least if you are right Bazz, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

Sorry Dan, but I too am sick of underprivileged & disadvantaged. I was reading the other day we spend $45000 for every aboriginal in the country, & over $100,000 for every one in remote "settlements". The same goes for every useless drongo in the country.

I'm feeling very underprivileged myself, & inclined to believe the biggest problem, is far too many privileges for the dropkicks among us. I'll prefer my taxes being used for something worth while, & wouldn't want to inflict the dropouts on any poor CBD.

...I am not surprised by many of the points made above on this subject. My concern for the waste that the decaying building infrastructure of dead CBD’s exposes, stems from a long involvement in the building trade.

...Too often homelessness is a chosen lifestyle, but In many instances it is not! The homeless are a disparate collection of those folk unfortunate enough to have forced on them, the need to prioritise a meager resource of money, in order to eat. It is not a case of pity, but a more bazaar case of Government failure to ensure the basic welfare of the society with which it is invested, does not go hungry and un-housed through Government neglect, by implementing policies which skew markets in the wrong direction, and thus become a direct cause of homelessness!

Well Hasbeen, no one can say it will all fall over on 21st March 2017
but what can be said with fair accuracy, simply because it can be calculated,
that significant change will occur in the period 2017 to 2020.
It is not known accurately because China may abandon some of its programs
and India may not continue improving the lot of many of its citizens.

In Australia we have probably lost the race to transition our economy
smoothly because the politicians all believe that there are no problems
ahead that cannot be solved by playing monopoly.
The penalty will be paid with high unemployment and the politicians
will have lost control of the economy but the economy will control the politicians.

That is where we disagree Diver.

Every one is offered the opportunity to gain an education, adequate to earn a reasonable living. If people chose not to use that opportunity, or will not work hard enough to be worth employing, that is not the taxpayers fault.

It should never be a function of government to hold the hand of every lazy bludger, or incompetent in the world. It is just that system that is now destroying western democracy. Any country that follows that policy is heading for bankruptcy.

We have seen the old Roman technique of bread & circus, perhaps without so much circus in places like Egypt & & Indonesia, with government subsidised food & fuel, & it always leads to society failure.

...Bazz does the summing-up of opportunistic Government policy accurately. The social implications of markets skewed towards wins for the prosperous in society is short sighted, and is not without repercussions such as waste and homelessness, overcrowded jails filled with alcoholics and drug addicts, and not forgetting to mention escalating gun crimes in the major cities, as dispossessed in our communities find alternative resources in the black market!

Diver Dan,
The politicians are still aiming for significant growth.
That is the problem in a nutshell.
They should be planning to introduce a steady state economy that before
it undertakes a major project looks to see how energy intense it will
be after it is finished.
An example is motorway construction versus railway realignment and
electrification.
Which when finished is the most energy intense and/or economically viable ?

The likely answer to that is made obvious by CSIRO's prediction of $8 a litre for petrol by 2020.

Diver, I just read Henry Thornton's blog and he illustrates just what
is the problem.
He discusses the problems that Australia faces but his whole discussion
is about money and finance. He misses the point entirely.

It is all about the cost and availability of energy.
Cheap energy has finished and until that is recognised they will just be flapping around.

…Both “majors” (Bazz), have presided over the stampede of industry to Asia; to the ever increasing foreign investment into a free-for-all in the housing market; a blinkered view of immigration and it’s negative side, (and, on your theme of energy crisis, super abundant natural gas in Queensland, has been rendered unaffordable by the the Government obsession with world parity pricing, which totally ignores domestic realities of need)!

…Both parties are as guilty of hiding the problem of unemployment under the cloak of Social Security payments, corralling the unemployable into dead-end lanes of hand-outs; and lo, now those same recipients are to be blamed for the (apparently) bad state of the economy, and loudly castigated as the cause, not the effect, of the problem!

…As we know Bazz, the real and abiding problem with Australia is not the people, it is without doubt the caliber of those in the control of the political agenda.

Dan Diver said;
…As we know Bazz, the real and abiding problem with Australia is not
the people, it is without doubt the caliber of those in the control of
the political agenda.

Well I have to disagree with you here.
I have given a few, very few, talks on the risk to oil supplies and it
is interesting to hear the responses.
Typically to those who have even heard about it the response is;
"Oh that could never happen the government would never let it happen."
That group at the suggestion that the airline industry may be ending is
horrified at the very suggestion.

Another group that is better read on this sort of thing insists that
there is more oil than we could ever use.
Some quote a new oilfield discovered somewhere at say 5 billion
barrels and are shocked when I say that would last the world 58 days.

Another will say there are many oil wells that "they" have just
capped in the outback just to keep the price up.
They have no answer when I ask, why would they drill miles under the
ocean floor at enormous expense when they could just run a pipeline
to the capped wells ?

They also cannot accept what society might be like when we cannot
afford to buy petrol for our cars.

That is the public the politicians are dealing with.
What politician will say that he is planning a rationing system and
that you might only get 20 litres a week.

Oh God, How am I going to drive to work ?