Who Cares: The 2013 Australian Federal Election Thread

and yet here we are, life renters, because (a) it's affordable, (b) we can save/invest the difference between rent and mortgage payments on the same place (which is seriously 200-250% extra) and (c) because gillard, rudd, swan, howard, costello and keating farm cocks

by that i mean if you rent a place for $400/wk, if you were to buy the same place it'd cost $1200+/wk in mortgage payments

btw we did a stack of ~accountant~ research and discovered that you get tax kickbacks up the goona if you rent out a property to someone else, but if you live in your own house you get fa

i'm angrier than usual because i am unwell and all the windows are leaking

To most people - housing: essential, human right. POlicy is geared towards treating it as any other non-essential commodity, when there are really compelling social and economic reasons to make it affordable to own your own. There are thousands of people who don't want to live in the big cities but feel compelled to, for instance.

I mean, there's a job going in Melbs I'd be perfect for and would have a good chance of getting. The thought of ditching rental life and moving down to, say, Geelong (where the majority of the fam will be in six months anyway) is pretty tempting at times.

what's amazing is how quickly we went from ~the great australian dream~ to germany-style renting is the norm. a major difference is germans don't have their entitled parents hassling their kids to drop 600 kiloeuros on a bedsit in alexanderplatz

xp geelong is definitely better than it used to be but you'd be tied to owning one car per person, and there's only one train line (which you may have heard is not reliable because melbourne)

oh hai gillard, rabbit, these are ~the real issues~, not boats

I may have spent several months in 2010/2011 commuting Geelong to Elsternwick for work, so I am quite familiar with that. I don't drive, so I'm fairly relaxed about slow trains.

ah k

Tho I'm pretty happy with my rental situation tbh, the unit I live in is massive and a bargain for its size and price. Because I'm only on a contract til end of the year it suits -- if situation changed and buying was what I wanted, I'd be stupid pissed about prices. My annoyance at housing affordability is actually NOT selfish right now!

yeah, we won't be buying either (it doesn't make sense in an inflated market)

it is amazing how the very people who are terrified of inflation in every other area (currency, grocery prices etc) just sort of sit and gawp at property hyperinflation like it's perfectly fine. i know it's because they're investors but the hypocrisy is incredible. it also reinforces how incredibly out of touch both major political parties are—most people i know (many quite well off) can't buy into housing and are pissed off about it.

...which brings us round to how soundly democracy is failing

okay, democracy in itself is not failing, but the part about representing every person is failing. another thing about all the people i know is that many of them are disengaged from politics beyond the gladiatorial/spectator sport aspect of it all, because they're being ignored

Oh it's the usual, we have the two closest-together major parties in Western democracy, but the most rabidly partisan, tribal voters.. it was bound to happen. Why are we surprised.

john faulkner keeps telling the alp they've lost touch with the people but they're all 'DUDE SHUT UP, WE'RE TRYING TO RUN THIS WESTERN SYDNEY FOCUS GROUP'

xp the tribalism is utterly utterly whacked. i don't get it. i do not get it. i'm also sick of people who are bolt-on howard lickers accusing me of being a labor shill because i'm not as extreme as they are. it's not even possible to have your own opinions where those people are concerned. if your values don't align perfectly with one of the two majors, you're lying to hide something. that's what amounts to discourse these days.

get a blog adam

oh also there's this thing where gillard/swan might say e.g. 'we will increase family benefits slightly' and the murdoch press runs this with a straight face

http://www.independentaustralia.net/Wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/australian-budget-front-cover_090512125211.jpg

and there goes analysis, out the window

Labor would do better if it professed some level of pride in the product it's selling. Dudes, you've won more elections than you've lost since the eighties, the country is not rabidly against you as an insittution, so quit acting like the last 30 years of history are some kind of clerical error. Oh and Liberals, get some fucking policies, you fuckfaces.

seriously, if murdoch were dead and the profit-haemorrhaging news ltd had been allowed to fall on its arse 40 years ago, we wouldn't be having this race to the right

anyway thanks for listening, i'm of the high horse for the time being

http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/zQAHjDwYq6U/mqdefault.jpg

xp utterly utterly otm. labor has deserted itself along with its support base. no narrative, no consistency, gillard doesn't even respond to the party majority (e.g. marriage equality, which the party officially supports)

Other things I would do if I was dictator: execute everyone involved in Q&A - please note, getting partisans from every side to argue with each other is not balanced, it is retarded.

Marriage equality is... uh.. I've got fatigue about the issue. Yes, it'd be nice, but it seems that small-l liberals these days don't do anything to come up with solutions to other problems that need some good progressive thinking. It's all "oh of course I'm a progressive, I believe in gay marriage, and.. I like refugees!". Okay, great, get out there and do some shit to solve some of the easier problems (i.e. gay marriage is all very well and good and I support it, but it mostly benefits the stable, well-to-do in the gay community anyway. Whereas the ones who are discriminated against in the workplace and can't get affordable housing and who have health problems... uh. less so, sorry that was a parenthetical too far)

yeah, nobody ever becomes more informed by watching that inferno of people screaming and tweet-screaming xp

what's amazing is how quickly we went from ~the great australian dream~ to germany-style renting is the norm. a major difference is germans don't have their entitled parents hassling their kids to drop 600 kiloeuros on a bedsit in alexanderplatz

that, and no faeces inspection shelf

mmmm faeces

the two things that really grate with me re marriage equality are

1. it's incredibly incredibly easy to rectify (really, it is an actual administrative change, it's not even a constitutional matter)
2. unlike all the other major 'issues' gracing murdoch's front pages, there's very seriously no valid argument against marriage equality (e.g. at least with boats you can reasonably argue that smugglers are cruel/deceitful/murderous, with carbon tax you can reasonably argue that it doesn't work to solve the core issue or hit the right targets, etc)

(obv i mean the fact of it being an issue is what grates with me, not the equality itself)

Those two things are true. The simplicity of it is the #1 argument. But it's not a magic wand, and gay people will face far bigger issues even after it's resolved in favour of equality - largely because of bigger societal causes that are also the cause of gay marriage not being legal. Marriage inequality is a symptom of a bigger thing.

oh it really is, and the everyday discrimination pales in comparison, but the fact remains that it's p much the only major inequality that's easy to fix

that, and no faeces inspection shelf

cbf checking right now but i'd almost put money on germany having a lower incidence of bowel cancer

maybe... but a shelf!!

Affordable new apartments are tricky though - in the absence of direct govt investment at any rate. Like restaurants etc you're talking about a massive investment upfront on a bet about what the market will bear in future. Some developments are wildly profitable but the risk is high enough that people will only go in on an apartment block venture if they've convinced themselves wild profits are in the offing. This is (one reason) why they're expensive - most of them then drop into negative equity for several years so as an investment proposition they're pretty poor, which is why that market is dominated by foreign investment.

what is that whining coming from the other room, oh it's 'Christopher Pyne', brb after I destroy the television

that guy

every single person who 'likes' pyne falls within a clean subset of the murdoch readership

Yeah Pyne awful as always

twitter is saying he's still butthurt about losing the last election

the affordable housing thing is... vexed to say the least. was talking to someone from the community housing org that I rent my place from, he's fine with negative gearing for example where I thought he might not have been. having written about it for a while in a past life, everybody in affordable housing has their own idea on the problem, and everyone else is wrong.

basically all reasons mentioned so far in this thread play a part in the housing clusterfuck to varying degrees.

i'm sure they do

although surely the one indisputable fact is that housing is inflated

no you're thinking of 'bouncing castles'

you can't LIVE in them

you can't bounce in a house, what's your point

look I concede that there are ways around that

Argh my last post looks a bit triumph of capitalism, didn't mean it that way, more that expensive housing is a clusterfuck with many participants and I don't think there are really straightforward single answers that a govt can deploy short of compulsorily acquiring the fuck out of Australia and giving it all to the worthy.

backing out of increased channels for foreign investors, toning down incentives to buy a million properties per person, balancing out tax breaks for living in own home v putting on rental market

but then all the people who just killed themselves to enter the market will get the shits on when their investment declines in value, even by 0.5% in a year

Economic slowdown is the bigger issue politically I think. Like, that combination of policies would basically freeze the property development industry.

That doesn't particularly bother me but I can see why it would be political death.

something will buckle at some point. current prices are not tenable in the long term: inner city prices aren't likely to drop much but the fringe could easily collapse, even on a 3% interest rate increase. the whole thing's like a game of jenga at this point.

xp yeah, the rich people who determine aus governments would just favour the party that's more sympathetic