Hi JD,

One thing that crops up a lot is "After Pay" for many its an alluring trap. One lady, a single mum, was telling me that to get her 3 back to (public) school cost a fortune. Did get some from the uniform shop, but had to buy new shoes and more which combined cost over $200, just the shoes. Told me from experience the cheap Kmart don't last and don't fit well, so its the $70 a pair.

"...Now its about not being able to afford the latest Nike shoes for your kids..."

You really have no concept of what being poor is do you?

"Pervasive shamelessness in the modern society"

Hmmm, wasn't that the sort of thinking that brought the Islamic Republic of Iran into being?

I think it incredibly dangerous to blame the failures of society on the way people think as it can lead to some people believing that all you need to do is to remove people of a certain persuasion or outlaw unclean thoughts and your society will thrive.

Albo's mad bill attempt was a step down this path, and the recent hate laws (passed with the help of the moronic Libs) shows that such laws make enforcement not about suppressing hatred but an instrument of political control.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1siil2ihDVQ

Have laws to protect people by all means, but I believe that freedom of ideas and freedom of communication is necessary for civilisation to prosper.

Paul, I'm sure that housing is a big part of any increase in poverty in Australia, which is why I'm spending so much of my time on housing issues. This is a problem entirely of our own making. There was the COVID catastrophe with the whole country taking a gap year, and logistics being gummed-up. There was interest rates too low, and for too long. Excessive government borrowing for crazy projects - like replacing the whole electricity generation system with a new, expensive and unreliable one. And building standards have been made unrealistically high, rezonings and approvals too time consuming and difficult, the cost of infrastructure offloaded onto developers. Onto all of this we've pushed a ridiculously high immigration rate. And we have record low rates of productivity due in large part to union demands.

So in five years housing has gone from historically average levels of affordability, to record levels of unaffordability. But none of this has to do with Ezhil's topic. I agree with a lot of what he says, and I blame a rich society and a postmodern education system, but I'm fascinated to know what he thinks the cure is.

For me it would be a more Christian society, not a less Christian one. Yet he seems to be pushing for less Christian. What is his alternative?

Poverty can be measured empirically or it can be measured by hand-waving.

Measured empirically, absolute poverty (as opposed to relative poverty) has been on the decline for two centuries in most parts of the world.

Looking at one expense (housing) and saying that's gone up and therefore the poor are worse off is just ignoring the data. But if you want to hope that things are worse then ignoring the actual data is definitely the way to go. Some things are relatively more expensive while others are relatively less expensive. And the data proves the later exceeds the former by a wide margin.

Hand-waving or actual data. Difficult choice.

But back to the main issue - shamelessness.

Personally I don't buy that it is on the rise as opposed to being more obvious. Now I guess its possible to argue that a society where a girl can become rich and famous by discussing her fellatio technique (the Hawk Tuah Girl) on mass media is one that has lost any level of shame. And it certainly shows a society where inhibitions, sexual and otherwise, no longer hold sway. But is that because the morals or lack of shame are greater or is it because the mass media makes it more obvious?

I'm not at all sure why a shameful society is inherently better than a shameless one, although it could be said a shameless society is more honest society.