THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Australians have made the wrong choice about housing for the last 40 years

Australians have made the wrong choice about housing for the last 40 years

A lot of hot air below. He says that our wish for comfortable and convenient housing is all wrong and we need to completely re-do how we house ourselves. He is right that there is a housing shortage problem but seems to think that what we do about the problem has to be sweeping in some unspecified way

That is nonsense. There is only one basic problem behind the housing shortage: We are not buiding houses fast enough to match our population growth. And the big influence behind the population growth is massive immigratiom. Put a moratorium on immigration for five years and the problem would vanish. The shortage is a government-created one and with little more than a stroke of the pen, the Federal government could end it

That is not going to happen of course but we should not pretend that the problem is mysterious, complex or insoluble. It is a product of meddling in the market by governments, including local governments that obstruct new building on NIMBY and Greenie grounds.

Abolishing the right of local governments to obstruct new house-building would unleash a surge of new dwellings and thus drive prices down to more affordable levels

The weekend auction battles around suburban Australia are leaving more than just emotional scars on the losing bidders.

Our love affair with property, which has driven the cost of housing to eye-watering levels and left Australians among the most indebted people in the world, is literally destroying our way of life and that of future generations.

The series we start today is not just a response to the high-priced houses and super-sized mortgages we have inflicted upon ourselves this century. It reflects the mounting evidence that one of our most basic needs – shelter – has become a dangerous financial instrument.

People cannot afford to live where they need. Our banks’ business models are based on one asset class – housing. The Reserve Bank must make decisions about the entire economy hamstrung by the huge level of mortgage debt held by ordinary Australians.

We have an army of mum and dad landlords who churn through their properties as they chase a capital gain because of the structure of our tax system.

The young and poorly paid, who a generation ago could afford their own home, now hope for an inheritance or loan from their parents to get a slice of the property market.

According to economists Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood and housing advocate John Myers, housing is more than just the size of your mortgage or inability to find an affordable rental.

They have developed what they describe as the “housing theory of everything”, which argues high-priced housing is at the heart of the many economic ills facing the globe.

Housing costs dictate where people live, the jobs they have, the size of their families and how they lead their lives. They mean we have to spend more on mortgage repayments or rent, giving us less to spend on goods and services. More broadly, people cannot live where they will be most productive. Businesses can’t get access to the people they need to operate to their fullest potential.

The world’s most productive areas, the places where the biggest breakthroughs are made, are in cities. But if we make them prohibitively expensive, the chance of a scientific or technological innovation is reduced.

At almost every point over the past 40 years, when given policy alternatives around housing, Australians collectively have made the wrong choice.

From local council chambers to the federal parliament, the wrong policy road has been taken.

Robert Menzies, and the state governments of the 1940s and 1950s, made Australia one of the great home-owning democracies through their public housing programs. But these have withered for decades.

It’s not just buying a house. Australian renters are, by any international comparison, poorly treated, be it from owning a pet to the length of tenure they might enjoy.

That’s exacerbated by a tax system that effectively encourages investors to own a single property who often struggle to deal with the issues that come with being a good landlord.

This series outlines the problem that is staring us in the face, how we came to make the decisions that created the problem, and some prospective solutions.

The solutions are not easy. If they were, previous governments would have tackled them. Instead, they have again and again kicked the issue off into the future or, even worse, come up with proposals that would make the situation worse.

Unless something changes, we are consigning ourselves to more economic pain. That’s pain that will be passed on to the next generation and the next.

As Grattan’s Brendan Coates warns, we are in danger of repeating the mistakes of the world inhabited by Jane Austen, where property was the way to wealth for just the upper echelons of society.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Australian housing industry cannot continue on as if nothing is wrong.

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/federal/australians-have-made-the-wrong-choice-about-housing-for-the-last-40-years-20230406-p5cyqn.html

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Australians have made the wrong choice about housing for the last 40 years

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