Jamo, I’m not sure what you mean by; “Enviromentalism for the sake of enviromentalism is starting to cost big time”

I have total faith in the power of mother nature to straighten us out, but not before she gives us a huge boot up the arse.

In fact as far as the planet goes, I don’t have any real concerns, coz we is just part of nature in the broad sense. The release of locked-up carbon will mean extinctions and other sorts of upheaval, but that’ll be followed by a new and dynamic phase of evolution….just as has happened many times before throughout the history of life on earth. I don’t think mother nature likes boring old balanced systems for too long. She seems to relish injecting a bit of excitement into the whole deal every so often.

But what thoroughly irks me though is our collective inability to look after our own future, despite the heightened awareness of all the factors that are bearing down on us. I especially hate the denial syndrome that our population growth is even a factor!! !! !! !! !!

This business did really get to me a few years ago. But I reckon I’ve found the balance between having an input into these issues without letting it reduce my quality of life. I’m not really some stressed-out old stodge. More of an athletic stodge into daily running, cycling, healthy food and a lot of tripping around the countryside indulging in my passions of plants, birds and rocks!

--
KAEP

Yes let’s stop releasing land in Sydney and SEQ, and other places.

But not just overnight. Let’s plan for limits to growth, within local state and national planning processes, and then gradually wind down land releases until we reach those limits…. and wind immigration back to at least net zero over the next few years and tell Costello where to stick his baby bonus.

NSW economy a brake on Australia's prosperity: PM

http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/NSW-economy-a-brake-on-prosperity-PM/2006/08/31/1156817038230.html

Comment:

New South Wales is losing $3billion of its GST to Howard and WE are killing the economy? I don't think so! And the main reason our economic indicators are down is because of drought. That drought is substantially caused by overpopulation of Sydney with resultant humungous pollution plumes off the NSW coast. These plumes have an associated micro climate which attracts atmospheric heat along with moisture and precious topsoils from the NSW heartland.

Howard is thus beating us with his immigration stick under the young Australian house hunter tissue of lies and softly killing us with drought into the bargain.

John Howard has got it in for us. Why does he HATE NSW so much?

But more importantly, what are we going to do about it in November 2007?

NSW Oi Oi Oi!

The present-day concern about "Housing Affordability" is predicated on a 3 b.r. brick-veneer house on a quarter-acre block; at the outer edge of the suburban sprawl - with all that implies. Taking on a heavy mortgage, and its servicing; imposes a life of petit-bourgeois semi- poverty. This is not an attractive proposition for the upcoming generation. It doesn't have to be like that.

Communications, technology and twenty-first century awareness offer choices other than those hangovers from the Industrial Age.
Intentional Communities recieve education, grants and incentives for putting Life back into the country. It is within this context that cooperating communities can provide houses that are economical, energy-efficient and aesthetically pleasing (together with room for a pony) at a fraction of the cost of a house in the suburbs.
gulliver

All this bulldust about housing affordability.”moral bankruptcy and buck passing blah blah” the usual diatribe of demands for intervention in peoples right to choose what housing they will seek. It oozes paternalistic hog-wash and is a call for the socialization of the national housing stock. All political bluff and if ever adopted, disastrous blunder.

Let us look at the history of housing lending, one of the most significant influences on housing prices. In the 1960’s and 1970’s house lending was controlled by a banking sector who blessed those who it thought could pay the loan back – on what basis – repayments of about 30% of their annual income, which meant, because interest rates were around 12%, 3 times annual income.

What happened in the 1990s and currently, the house lending business was, with the rest of banking, deregulated, the cold war ended and the prevailing economic environment stabilized to allow the inherent “risks” of lending to recede across all activities and the globe, making a lowering shift in interest rates inevitable.

What happens when interest rates fall? Repayments at 30% annual income remain but with interest rates at 6%, half what they were in the 1970’s the “affordable” house loan doubled (5 – 6 times annual income) and all other things remaining equal the demand side of the market, able to afford to pay a lot more for housing than before combined with state government land hoarding and you have the recipe for the housing price surge, as we have seen.

Another point with all this, in the 1970s with higher interest rates and out of control socialist spending, inflation was rampant and annual wage increases significantly higher than they are today. The “affordability” of a housing loan borrowed in one year could well be considered to be 20% cheaper in 2 to 3 years simply through wage inflation effects.

Entering the housing market is always tough in one's first year and easier in each subsequent year. It was as tough in 1970, as it is today

“The present-day concern about "Housing Affordability" is predicated on a 3 b.r. brick-veneer house on a quarter-acre block; at the outer edge of the suburban sprawl - with all that implies.”

Largely true Gulliver.

It drives other things as well, such as increases in unit occupation as well increases in their prices, and relative increases in building of this sort of residence with a resultant increase in urban consolidation, which has positives and negatives.

It also drives up rent as well as the portion of people renting.

But it doesn’t really drive the building of more environmentally-friendly homes, because it is the price of land rather than the dwelling that is really the issue.

It does drive an increase in people moving to places with lower property values, which again is good and bad. As far as I am concerned, this is largely bad, when it means an increased influx into smaller centres such as Cairns, Mackay, Busselton or Broome – centres which can do without that increased growth rate, and which will suffer even moreso than the equivalent amount of growth in the large cities.

The current highly inflated prices are leading to a vast regime of the semi-impoverished, who are likely to become the critically impoverished as fuel prices rise… and it is leading to a real estate elite class, which is likely to be able to survive quite happily through the coming resource crisis. In short, it is strongly promulgating a schism between rich and unrich. This is going to a very dangerous flashpoint, just a various other differences between groups in our society are, as things get tighter.

There must surely be a major imperative for governments to take strong action to reduce prices and even up this wealth gap…. and of course to strongly mitigate the demand for housing… and to NOT significantly free up land releases.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, Ludwig.

Col Rouge wrote: "Entering the housing market ... was as tough in 1970, as it is today".

Col, all the evidence I am aware of, and my own personal experience, tells me that the cost of housing has gone well beyond what even middle class people can afford, certainly if we are talking about detached houses with a decent sized front yard and back yard which was the norm back in the 1970's.

In 2003 the Commonwealth Bank and the AMP produced reports purportedly showing that housing affordability was good. However, Victorian Government economist Alun Breward subjected these claims to the microscope on a talk on "Ockham's Razor" (see http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1335462.htm) and showed that a number of fiddles were employed by the authors of the report. These included:

1. Ignoring of the trend to have periods of loans extended. (and there is now talk of having loan repayment periods to extended to 40 or even 50 years, as compared this to 20 years which was the norm in the 1970's)
2. Calculation of affordability of the price of a median house with reference to a mean measure of income.
3. Shifting of the focus of their assessment towards more prosperous Australians, that is, those who are buying their second or third homes.
4. Ignoring the fact that many of today's mortgages are being paid for with two incomes, rather than one as was the case a generation ago.

Housing costs, in terms of the number of years of income it takes to pay the price of the average house, has risen to the stratosphere. As a consequence, a far more wealth than ever before is being taken out of our pockets and put into the pockets of those in the massively bloated private property sector and associated upstream and downstream industries.

The example, which I referred to above (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4834#53621), of the Housing Trust of South Australia, which never cost taxpayers a cent, is striking proof that we would all be paying considerably less for good quality housing if the housing stock had remained 'socialized'.