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The Forum > Article Comments > A crisis in housing affordability > Comments

A crisis in housing affordability : Comments

By Andrew Bartlett, published 28/8/2006

Intellectually and morally bankrupt buck-passing has continued for years, while housing affordability has grown steadily worse.

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Ah, but with respect daggett, it was you who reopened the discussion. I just knew you would feel the need to have the last word.

Which, regrettably, is just as incomprehensible as your first.

In your logic, because I asked "why France", it necessarily means that I believe "nothing of interest to people who wish to solve the housing affordability crisis can be learnt by examining how France managed to keep housing affordable to all its citizens whilst Australia did not."

I specifically did not draw that conclusion. For all I know, something of interest might well be learnt from France and its housing policies. But certainly not by pretending we share a common foundation, and using that to force-fit some pet theories.

>>In regard to population size and land mass, I hold that the differences are not so great when considering arable land mass.<<

Australia has nearly three times France's area of arable land. France has three times the population of Australia. How can these differences be "not so great"?

Also, where is the link between arable land, population distribution and housing strategies anyway? You can list as many "facts" as you like, but somewhere amongst them all has to be a connection. Without that connection, there cannot be a supportable conclusion.

Ultimately it comes down to this.

It is impossible to argue for or against something that makes no intrinsic sense.

So I chose to try to find out whether I was missing a linkage somewhere, some aspect of two apparently unrelated entities (France; Australia) that would enable the connections to be made, and the thesis to come into focus.

And only now, after all this correspondence, do you have the honesty to admit:

"...it would almost certainly have not mattered which country Newman had chosen ..."

So, if we rewind to my original question, "why France", we get a different - and far more credible - answer.

"No reason. Any country would have done just as well."

Altogether a pretty fair summing-up of the value of Ms Newman's thesis.
Posted by Pericles, Thursday, 26 October 2006 5:55:09 PM
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Pericles,

Any lingering doubt I may have had about your motivation for participating in this discussion has now been removed. Clearly you are bent, above all else, on discrediting and smearing those with whom you disagree, no matter how low you have to stoop and no matter how much of everyone's time you have to waste in order to achieve this.

How you imagined you could have ever gotten away with your wanton self-evident misrepresentation of my most recent post is beyond me. You wrote: "And only now, after all this correspondence, do you have the honesty to admit:

"'...it would almost certainly have not mattered which country Newman had chosen ...'

"So, if we rewind to my original question, 'why France', we get a different - and far more credible - answer. ..."

Then you put the following words into my mouth:

"... 'No reason. Any country would have done just as well.'"

This is an open and shut case of taking a statement out of context in order to deliberately misrepresent what was being said.

My actual words were: "However, it would almost certainly have not mattered which country Newman had chosen as other equally striking differences with nearly every other country on the planet could have been cited."

You know perfectly well that I never 'admitted' that it did not matter which country was used for the purposes of Sheila Newman's thesis. What I said was that given your objections to France being used as a 'comparator' I don't see how you could not have similarly objected to the use of any other country with similar immigration and housing polices.

I would suggest to you that if you finally did what you undertook to do three posts ago and made yourself permanently scarce from this thread, and preferably from Online Opinion altogether, you would be doing an enormous favour to the vast majority of those who use Online Opinion
Posted by daggett, Friday, 27 October 2006 3:04:50 AM
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Your concept of an "open and shut case" needs re-examining, daggett.

>>This is an open and shut case of taking a statement out of context in order to deliberately misrepresent what was being said<<

Compare and contrast your original long-winded:

>>it would almost certainly have not mattered which country Newman had chosen as other equally striking differences with nearly every other country on the planet could have been cited.<<

with my succinct precis:

>>'...it would almost certainly have not mattered which country Newman had chosen ...'<<

summarised as:

"Any country would have done just as well"

It takes a great deal of imagination to turn those into "wanton self-evident misrepresentation", but I guess that is your forte.

It has to be said daggett that your politician's trick of firstly failing to answer the question, then making an outrageous generalisation that is only obliquely relevant to the question, and following it up with some good old fashioned ad hominem insults is not only transparent, but very boring.

You invariably complement this tiresome mix with a hastily-drawn straw man, just for the sake of completeness:

>>What I said was that given your objections to France being used as a 'comparator' I don't see how you could not have similarly objected to the use of any other country with similar immigration and housing polices [sic].<<

Which of course, is a nonsense.

First of all it is not clear whether you mean "policies similar to France", or "policies similar to Australia"?

Then of course you have managed to ignore the fact that comparing policies should come at the end of the process, once the two baseline similarities have been sufficiently established.

N'est-ce pas?
Posted by Pericles, Saturday, 28 October 2006 8:11:17 AM
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Pericles,

Your hair-splitting and prevarication may serve your purpose of preventing some people from learning what is really happening in the Australian housing sector, but anyone who takes the time and effort to read this thread with an open and enquiring mind will be able to see your deceitful ploys for what they are.
Posted by daggett, Saturday, 28 October 2006 8:53:54 PM
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My purpose, daggett?

>>Your hair-splitting and prevarication may serve your purpose of preventing some people from learning what is really happening in the Australian housing sector<<

I doubt that our little side discussion on the value of Ms Newman's thesis has had, or will have, an ounce of impact on the genuinely enquiring mind. And quite why you view its prevention as my "purpose" is beyond imagination.

What is "really happening" in the Australian housing sector is exactly what you would expect in a normal capitalist economy. People will spend their money on goods and services of their choice, and at the moment there is a feeling that in the booming economy that we have been experiencing recently - and which could reverse itself at any moment - property is an appropriate destination for a proportion of the wealth they feel they have.

I am aware that you favour a form of socialist housing (South Australia and all that), where the roof over the head has priority over lifestyle, but this is not everyone's preferred option. And while this is the case, market forces will dictate that an increasing percentage of our disposable income will feed the housing sector.

When you give people choice, and the means to exercise that choice, this is what happens. Only by restricting or taking away that choice, or making it unaffordable, will it change.

Affordability is, after all, exactly what it says: it is the state of being able to afford, in the sense of to buy, something. All around us, every day, houses are being bought. If houses were "less affordable", fewer people would be willing to buy them.

>>anyone who takes the time and effort to read this thread with an open and enquiring mind will be able to see your deceitful ploys for what they are<<

No ploy, daggett. Simply an attempt to keep the arguments rational.
Posted by Pericles, Sunday, 29 October 2006 1:04:49 AM
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Pericles,

It's interesting that six posts ago you complained "I can't keep on giving you these opportunities to present your evidence, there are only so many hours in a day, and days in a year." (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4834#59016)

... and that five posts ago(http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4834#59082), you undertook to stop posting to this thread.

... and yet I find that you still persist in this discussion, which according to you, has not had "an ounce of impact on the genuinely enquiring mind."(http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4834#59635).

No doubt, if I don't let you have the last word, you will still be filling this thread with obfuscation, self-contradiction, deliberate misrepresentation (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4834#59327), and long-winded obscure analogies which shed absolutely no light whatsoever on the subject at hand when Christmas 2007 arrives.

Glad that you have chosen to give over so much of your valuable time in order to "keep the argument rational".
Posted by daggett, Monday, 30 October 2006 8:10:59 AM
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