Smithy, I did some research today. on the growth of the financial services industry
in the last 10 years. They now employ around 160’000 in Sydney alone and pay
them 20% more then anyone else. To ignore this as a factor in the housing finance
story in Sydney, is to kid yourself.

http://www.business.nsw.gov.au/industry/financeandbusiness/

Wiz, my point was that if people had a safe and credible option to real estate as an
investment, many might choose it, thus taking pressure off the housing market.
If your sister could double her deposit savings for a home, through sensible tax
policy, that would have to give her a large advantage in the market, as she competes
with others.

Daggett, I could list you a whole string of things that labour supports or the liberals
support, that I am in favour of, but its not getting to the core of the debate.

So lets focus on the core. Market economics today IS mainstream, although you can
finetune this or that. You it seems, are against market economics itself, preferring
some utopian socialist dream. So its time for you to spit it out. Are you for or
against market economics?

I have always argued for every woman on this planet to have access to family planning.
I don’t believe in forcing people, but giving them choices. Hundreds of
millions of women still don’t have that choice, so our global population keeps
growing at 80 million per year.

As to population, it needs addressing globally, not locally. WA’s population is
around 2 million. 10 days of population growth is all it needs to replace every
single one of us in this state. Its time you looked at the global picture Daggett,
not get bogged down with minor details.

Given the mere 2 million in WA, covering a third of Australia, the parlous state
that you refer to is not here in the West. We are less then half of the population
of Sydney, yet carry Australia’s export achievements on our shoulders. You
should thank us.

Yabby,

Once again (& again):

‘Their focus is on the word “investors”, not speculators’

This really is pointless repetition (& pure semantics). I refer you to:

My 2nd post on Page 30 (start & finish)

Re “the financial services industry” in Sydney

They are variously the superannuation industry, the monopoly profit & inequality industry (hello Macquarie bank) and last - but not certainly least, the debt industry (absolutely booming).

Their disproportionately rising incomes (some of them) have had some influence on the price of upmarket properties & the emergence of that entirely unprecedented phenomenon known as the “2-speed..” or “2-track property market” that I referred to in my 2nd post on Page 11 of this thread.

Nevertheless (once again) the Deutsche Bank report referred to in the article:

“City house prices easily outstrip wages” (Financial Review 25/9/07)

originally mentioned on Page 14 of this thread does a perfectly good job of formally quantifying what we already knew with regard to prices & incomes throughout the market generally .

If there is any irony in the fact that the incomes of lenders are (in some way) contributing to housing inflation, then it is not one that has escaped me.

I haven’t ignored any factor, suggesting that I have as a pretext for repetition is a technique that hasn’t escaped my attention either.

On the subject of debt there is some irony in the fact that you continually refer to “savings” in this context when the housing bubble is largely responsible for a near tripling of household debt. Savings & debt are hardly synonymous.

Nonetheless I have no argument with the idea that there shouldn’t be disincentives to saving. That in no way deters me from the matter of productive economic policy, social & generational justice.

As such I generally concur with Wizofaus’ last post.

It's all been covered before.

- Mr Smith

Cacofonix,

Off the top of my head (before I read Margot Kingston’s article)

In answer to the question "Is it reactionary to oppose immigration?"

I would say no.

Of course no one opposes immigration per se. There will always be people coming & going but when it comes to continually increased immigration it depends on your motive.

If the motive is racist, that’s reactionary. If the motive is water (or the lack of it) that isn’t.
There are practical limits to Australia’s population capacity - especially considering the ongoing drought & long-term climate change effects.

I have been reliably informed that some people favour increased immigration (& population) merely to put downward pressure on wages & upward pressure on property values.
They should be dealt with in no uncertain terms, one needn’t inhibited by irrelevant notions of reaction or racism.

Your observation that:

“the debate does not appear to have been spoilt by repetition and various other debating tricks”
is reassuring in a way. I suspect that your capacity for kindness & patience may greater than mine.

Two of these ‘tricks’ or approaches that have most particularly come to my attention concern pointless platitudes.
When I say pointless, I mean literally pointless, being generic & abstract they don’t make a specific point.
They merely indicate contempt for the points that are being made or a disregard for the entire topic while pretending to show an interest.

As far as I can tell the 2 main varieties involve

Personal value judgements - that broadly suggest that there is no real cause for concern, that the topic has no validity & merely reflects an immaturity. lack of thrift, diminished work ethic, excessive complaint or naivete on the part of those involved.

Universal ‘insights’ - indicating that “its all relative”, that’s just the way it is, overall its always been the same.

When quite clearly things do actually change otherwise there wouldn’t be a premise for this or any other topic.

There are other ‘tricks’ & then there’s the repetition.

- Mr Smith

I see that Yabby has once again dodged my simple question, and has elected, yet again, in spite of his protestations of not have enough space on OLO, to restate positions that have already stated over and over again, here and elsewhere and countered over and over again.

---

Yabby, One thing we certainly don't need is yet another sermon about how the free market is the answer to all our problems.

Let's get back to the point. You have attempted to sidetrack the discussion, by labelling my views as 'extreme left wing' on the one hand and by attempting to pass off your own extremist free market viewpoint as 'mainstream' on the other. To give some credibility to your claim, you claimed that our politics were "a mix of both labour and liberal".

My response was that just because 'Labor' governments have, invariably without having consulted their own support base or the wider public, adopted extreme free market policies (for example, the economically incompetent Iemma government's (http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2007/12/12/state-of-decay/) current attempt to flog of NSW's publicly owned electricity generation infrastructure - http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2007/12/21/iemmas-power-failure/ http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2007/12/12/nsw-electricity-privatisation-a-quick-look/) that does not make those policies any less extreme.

I pointed out to you that if you are truly mainstream and "middle of the road", there should be some Labor economic or industrial policies which you support, which are truly Labor policies, and not policies, which have come from the Liberal Party and, before that, Milton Friedman's Chicagao School of Economics.

It's a simple question, Yabby. Are there or aren't there?

---

Yabby wrote "Given the mere 2 million in WA, covering a third of Australia, the parlous state that you refer to is not here in the West. We are less then half of the population of Sydney, ..."

This is a sweeping statement which takes no account of WA's ecology. Do you also happen to think that Antarctica is underpopulated? Or Greenland?

The fact is that both WA and Eastern Australia are overpopulated as neither have enough water to sustain their existing populations without recourse to unsustainable fossil fuel-dependant desalination.

(tobecontinued)

(continuedfromabove)

WA's population is far higher than it has been for most of human history. It has only been possible for WA's population to reach 2million because of consumption of non-renewable fossil fuels not available to the Aboriginal society

Yabby wrote "... yet carry Australia's export achievements on our shoulders. You should thank us."

You have already said this and I have already answered this on the above-mentioned forum "Skills shortage imported workers vs local" at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1040#18668

If your intention was to honestly debate this topic you would have acknowledged that.

I note also, that you are, yet again, attempting to prettify the quarry economy that WA has become as an 'export achievement'.

One moment you attempt to portray this as a virtue. Invariably, when this is challenged, the virtue becomes a necessity.

Australia has no choice, you insist, but to export its entire mineral bounty now in order to pay for its imports. Interesting that this sorry state of affairs was brought about under the stewardship of John Howard and Peter Costello, which you insist was brilliant (see, for example, your over-the-top adulation of Costello at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6685#100078 http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6685#100351).

Whatever, there is no consistency from one post to the next except for an intention on your part to bring about unquestioning acceptance of the rotten status quo.

---

MrSmith,

It would be difficult to establish precisely what the contribution of immigration-driven population growth to housing hyper-inflation is. Clearly it has to be at least a very substantial component and I believe that it is therefore no accident that property developers and land speculators lobby so hard to bring it about.

In regard to the speculative component, would you not accept that some of it is anticipation of population growth? For example a speculator who buys a free standing house will often do so in anticipation that the block can subsequently split or even have high rise apartments erected in place of the original dwelling. (And, of course, as ever more of of us are forced to live in cramped sterile concrete boxes our quality of life will continue to plummet.)

Daggett, you sound confused :) One minute you preach the dreaded threat of
peak oil, next minute when we decide to drill and develop some gas discoveries
in WA, which are a huge improvement on coal, you still complain. Who said
that we are selling everything in decades ? In the 60s we thought we had no iron
ore, then discovered that the Pilbara is made up the stuff. We’ve so far scratched
the surface of the very top grades, that’s about all.

You want housing, you want things made of steel for your own use, you want steel
so that we can use it to solve our energy problems, other people do too, not just
you. When we mine a small fraction of iron ore, you complain. I’ve come to the
conclusion that you just like to complain lol.

As to mine and others political views, what is mainstream and what is not, I suggest
you post your views on the “What the Left believes” thread started by Wiz. Then
we’ll see how mainstream your views really are. I agree with his 10 points.

You certainly did not answer what would happen to our economy without mining.
You claim to pay your bills, but without mining, the economy that you depend
on for a living, the taxes and jobs generated, would more then likely not be there.
You would live in a banana republic, not the cushy lifestyle that Australia provides
for you. But then perhaps you’d prefer a Cuban style banana republic.

As to water in WA, desalination is the cheapest option right now, to guarantee
supply in Perth, because water has not been used wisely and cost effectively.
Lots is wasted in agriculture, due to lack of a trading market and water that is
simply too cheap. That’s now slowly changing. WA as a whole has huge
quantities of water, but they are in the north, much of the population is
concentrated in the South. Pumping it is simply too expensive, desalination
is far cheaper