Put another Aussie on the Barbie
For those that would prefer to watch, a speech based on this essay is here:
https://x.com/matt_barrie/status/1829438530055217330
High resolution Youtube version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGzBwfSFdyY
“Mesmerizing, one of the best critiques of Australia’s immigration policy in a generation. Erudite, brave and uncompromising.” — former Chief Economist ACCI, Burchell Wilson
“This is the most comprehensive take down of what’s going on in Australia I have ever seen. Jarring, poignant and incredibly well researched.” — @MrCable0x
“Like watching a one-hour scream” — @PaulThemas
Australia’s past is a foreign country.
There once was a time where people were proud to be Australian. Where we were proud to wave our flag. When Australia Day was the pinnacle of this pride, a time to come together and celebrate all that made us one.
Once upon a time when the soundtrack of our lives was homegrown, back when Australian music thrived, before the cherished venues that nurtured our soul were demolished to make way for apartments, Aussie musicians crafted anthems that spoke to the heart of who we were.
The encroachment on our society and culture was insidious at first. The politicians enacted “Lockout laws” for our “health and safety” “for our own good” and other nonsense. As a trusting society, we initially believed them. The truth soon emerged- it was never about our welfare, but rather a desire for casino patronage and to clear the way for property development.
There wasn’t a social or cultural institution that the politicians were not prepared to knock down for apartments: nightlife precincts, theatres, churches, cinemas, the local racetrack, Sydney Entertainment Centre, Festival Hall or the Powerhouse Museum.
All to demolish for apartments.. but apartments for who exactly?
Hold this thought, we shall return to it later.
Once upon a time we knew who we were and what we stood for — a laid back, irreverent bunch with a larrikin streak a mile wide. “No worries, mate!”, “She’ll be right!”, “Too easy!”, “No dramas!”.
Now, drama dogs our every step. Australia Day sparks outrage, global events become local crises, and even simply enjoying yourself on a night out can end in controversy. We’ve become a nation on edge, where calm is the exception and conflict the new normal.
Our spirit of rebellion and irreverence, the very essence of what it means to be Australian, has been crushed by a deluge of stupid laws, rules and regulations. No Australian actually wants any of this crap, yet the government keeps ramming them down our throats.
We’ve gone from a nation of larrikins who challenged authority to a nanny state where freedom is on a short leash. Turns out being laid-back was just the first step to lying down and rolling over.
Even the Americans, of all people, laugh at us. We used to say, “Thank Christ they got the puritans.. and we got the convicts!”.
Conservative American commentator Matt Walsh bluntly puts it, “Your country simply needs to be invaded and reverted back to a prison colony”.
Australia, the nation that defined itself by its rugged frontier mentality and its defiant middle finger to the nanny state has become a cautionary tale. We’ve gone from ‘She’ll be right, mate’ to ‘Please, sir, may I have another?’
It’s a master class in how quickly you can lose your freedoms when you stop giving a damn.
We forgot that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Once upon a time it would have been unthinkable that Australia would rank among the world’s worst for government censorship of social media. Yet here we are, with the powers that be conjuring up Orwellian schemes to force ID verification for everyone to log into the Internet, all under the guise of protecting children.
Nearly every day now, the government seems to be spinning a new tale to justify its overreach.
Their latest stretch?
Attempting to connect the dots between a disturbed kid who stabbed a Sydney Uni student, plotted a mass shooting and was in a terrorism de-radicalisation program, with… <checks notes>…
Andrew Tate.
Yes, that Andrew Tate — the ex-kickboxer turned social media loudmouth known for his controversial takes on masculinity.
Like him or hate him, what does Andrew Tate have to do with the price of eggs, you might ask?
Absolutely nothing. It’s a yet another weak attempt to lump together unrelated issues, all in a bid to push for broader censorship and control under the flimsy guise of public safety.
It’d be laughable if it weren’t so concerning.
By drawing such far-fetched links, the government seems to be constructing a narrative that could be used to justify increased surveillance, online content regulation under the pretext of combating extremism.
At the same time, they make us distrust what they say even more.
Make no mistake, this isn’t about safeguarding the innocent; it’s about controlling you, ensuring that every voice, every dissenting thought, can be traced back to an identifiable individual, ready to be silenced at the first sign of deviation from the approved narrative.
Australia already visited a national identity card system in the mid 80s with the Australia Card proposed by Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Yes, we need better online authentication than slinging photos of our ID to every dodgy website.
But let’s not gift-wrap our privacy and hand it to the government. Any new system must be ironclad (there’s a way with Zero Knowledge Proofs). The goal is to securely log us in, not create an Orwellian surveillance state where every click is a performance for the government.
When Bob Hawke tried introducing a national identity card, even his party was divided. One backbencher called it un-Australian and more appropriate to name a “Hitlercard or Stalincard”.
Hawke called a double dissolution over the issue, but the idea was defeated over technicalities regarding provisions that imposed penalties on businesses that failed to require a person to produce their Australia Card, and authorisation of the freezing of bank accounts and social security payments for those who did not produce one.
Now it’s being brought up again under the false pretences of ‘But what about the children?’ makes you wonder what it will really be used for. Nothing instills more distrust in government than constantly being lied to, and Jesus Christ since Covid, hasn’t that been apparent?
It’s not just our online freedoms that are under attack. Our press ranks 39th in the world in the Press Freedom Index, behind South Africa, Namibia and the Dominican Republic due to a “hyperconcentration of the media combined with growing pressure from the authorities”.
It’s not going to get any better with parts of the media dependent on life support from the government.
Once upon a time Australia was a country not only renowned for but defined through our sense of mateship. Tourism Australia used to proclaim it as “the beating heart of the Australian spirit”. Mateship was an “an Australian military virtue”, which the Army Recruiting Centre listed among the “soldierly qualities” it sought to instil, ”A will to win, dedication to duty, honour, compassion and honesty, mateship and teamwork, loyalty, and physical and moral courage”.
Yet today, despite record population growth, the fastest in 60 years, which sees Australia bring in more people each year than the population of Canberra and Darwin combined, our military faces crippling shortages.
Australia has a tiny army at 60,000, yet it’s short by 7%. The Chief of the Australian Defence Force, Angus Campbell, told a parliamentary hearing in February that hiring rates “are below the level required to maintain the Australian Defence Force”. On top of that, the government wants to lift the numbers another 18,500 by 2040.
In an attempt to address the military’s recruitment crisis, the government has resorted to the ludicrous and dangerous prospect of lowering the standards on mental health for new recruits while simultaneously importing the soldiers to fight for the nation from places like Tuvalu. Do you think that’s going to help with recruiting?
Our military challenges are set against a backdrop of increasing global tensions. Several nations are reinforcing their armed forces. Sweden has dramatically expanded conscription to include 100,000 people, including women for the first time. Germany and the UK are considering reintroducing conscription, while the US debates enrolling men aged 18 to 24 and including women in draft registration. Lithuania, Taiwan, and Israel are extending or reinstating conscription.
As if the erosion of our freedoms and sense of self wasn’t enough, Australians are grappling with the highest tax hike in the developed world. Taxes are up 7.6% in the last year alone, while we are also facing the biggest decline in living standards in the OECD with real gross household disposable incomes falling 6.1% in the “worst per-capita recession since the Great Depression”.
Once upon a time we believed in The Great Australian Dream, where home ownership could lead to a better life and was an expression of success and security.
That dream is now impossible for the average person. Not because of one’s lack of talent, skill or ability, but because of mathematics.
In Sydney, houses can no longer be bought by earnings from wages. As of May, it takes 46 years to save not just for the average house, but the average house deposit. So if you start saving at the age of 20, then by the age of 66 you’ll have saved enough money not to pay off the mortgage, but pay a deposit.
Of course, by then the house will have at least an extra zero on the price.
Saving for that deposit in a rising market is like running on a treadmill, the more you save the higher house prices rise. Despite making savings progression, your savings goal continually moves further and further away, leaving young Australians permanently gazumped by new buyers from other countries. Property prices are rising faster than several generations can save a deposit to purchase them.
A saver on an income of $100,000 per annum in 2017 needing to save a 20% deposit on a median priced property of $1.1 million needed maybe 25 years to save the deposit only to find out in 2024, at year 7 in their saving scheme, that they still have 21 years left to save for the new median price.
It’s no surprise that home ownership rates have collapsed, down 30% for 24–35 year olds, the prime child bearing years, since the 1980s. The Great Australian Dream has become a Great Australian Scream. No longer do Australians have a “fair go”, an expression we used to use. An expression that encapsulated the idea that everyone should have equal opportunities and be treated fairly and reasonably.
rate mortgage owner-occupier rate of 4.66%.
Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore, famously said of his country’s founding:
“Soon after separation, I resolved to enable every household to own its own home. If we were going to get the people to take National Service seriously, I could not ask their sons to fight and die for the properties of the wealthy”.
It’s no surprise that people don’t want to fight for the country anymore.
Australia has gone from embodying the selfless “ANZAC spirit” where sacrifice for the greater good and future generations was a sacred duty, to a nation that seems all too willing to sacrifice everybody’s future.
The dream of home ownership, once a cornerstone of Australian identity and aspiration, has gone.
Blind Freddie can tell you this is not sustainable.
Someone on Twitter said it best, “I’m an immigrant too, but is this a country? How can it take 46 years to save a deposit to buy a house? I think I’ll get old while collecting deposits”.
No, this is not a country.
Not by any means a functional country.
Australian politicians have wrecked this great nation.
They have created the mother of all property bubbles on a scale like no other, that is now desperately being propped up by the mother of all immigration programs, causing a cost of living crisis, a deterioration of Australian wealth and a deterioration of our high trust society, a deterioration of our culture and a deterioration of our way of life at a pace unlike anything this country has seen before.
People are being forced to live in tent cities which are “mushrooming all over Australia” as rental vacancy rates “collapse to historic lows”.
We are lied to and gaslit about the reasons for the astronomical cost of housing. Our immigration minister tells us the problem is that “we need more migrants to build homes”. Master Builders Australia says we have a skills crisis and it needs to be easier to get a visa.
Our former Reserve Bank Governor says no, the problem is you! “The price of land is high.. because of the choices we made of a society where to live, how to tax housing and how to invest in transport”. This is the guy who encouraged everyone to mortgage to the hilt by saying in 2021 that rates would stay at 0.1% until 2024 “at the earliest”!
The actual reason for the housing catastrophe is straightforward, it’s basic supply and demand, but probably not what you’ve been led to believe.
For supply, we build a ridiculous number of homes.
Australia has the fourth highest rate of home building for a major country in the developed world and is second behind Switzerland for the number of new homes per capita built in the last decade. We have been going mental at building apartments and driving a bubble in house prices for decades.
So high is the home building in this country that more than half of newly registered apartments in NSW since 2016 have defects, and the NSW Building Commissioner has had to increase his staff from two dozen to over 400.
You know things must be bad when FriendlyJordies has made a video.
It is clear that nobody in the government sanity checks the numbers. After all, the government has openly admitted to not managing the immigration numbers and having no clue what is going on.
They told us in 2022–3 that initial net migration was going to be high at 235,000. The number ended up being more than double at 518,000. Total migrant arrivals increased 73% to an astronomical 737,000 from 427,000. In 2023–4 they said the numbers would be an all-time record at 315,000. The numbers will end up being at least 150,000 more.
The Minister for Finance, Katy Gallagher, recently admitted in the Senate Economics Committee under direct questioning that “in terms of a specific modelling exercise, looking at the impact of different scenarios of migration through the housing market, I’m not familiar with that myself”.
Have a listen to this. According to Rider Levett Bucknall’s quarterly crane index, in Q1 2024, Australia had 869 cranes on construction sites nationwide, the second-highest count (after 4Q23) in the 24 editions of the index. Sydney alone has 390.
To put this into perspective, New York has 8.
According to RLB, Sydney has almost as many cranes as the entire North American crane index which counts a total of 434 across New York, Boston, Toronto, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Portland, Honolulu, San Francisco, Seattle, and Calgary combined.
Now what do you think is the true level of net additional housing demand is from Australians?
I’ll tell you the answer and you might be a bit shocked.
None.
Zero.
That’s because every Australian woman needs to have 2.1 children just to maintain the population. This is the replacement rate. Australia hasn’t been above the replacement rate for the population since 1976.
Australia’s fertility rate is 1.63.
Critics would say, well what about “population momentum”? This is the potential for population growth to continue even when fertility is below replacement levels, mortality is constant, and net migration is zero.
Fertility rate has been below the replacement rate for almost 50 years.
Fifty.
Yes, we’re living longer- about 10 years more since the 1970s- but this 14% increase in lifespan doesn’t justify our housing frenzy. The chasm between our current fertility rate (1.63) and the replacement rate (2.1) is a staggering 22%.
Population momentum typically continues for a generation (25 to 30 years). Any momentum that Australia had from the pre-1970s higher fertility period has largely played out, and the cost of living crisis certainly isn’t improving fertility levels.
Let’s face it, any population growth from births over deaths is likely coming from new migrants or recent citizens starting families.
Government and mainstream media, the owners of all the property classifieds, can gaslight you all day long, but it’s as plain as day what has caused the cost of living crisis.
Politicians have pursued the path of ‘easy, relentless growth’ for decades, that is to blow a property bubble on a scale like no other, a mother of all bubbles that since 1956 has seen house prices rise in this country 110x.
There is no latent net demand for additional housing in this country.
None.
No, the astronomical demand is entirely coming from a totally reckless, out of control uncalibrated, untargeted and unhinged immigration program.
This is why your local venue, church, race track, bakery or pub has been knocked down.
Behold the damage they have done:
No, your local cinema isn’t getting demolished because we have a baby boom, but because we have a reckless immigration program.
Whatever you think of greyhound racing, they tried to shut down the entire industry just to build more apartments at Wentworth Park- just like they did at Harold Park and are going to do at Rosehill, until they realised they’d lose votes in key country electorates. They’re expropriating a half a golf course at Moore Park because they allowed developers to build an apartment ghetto in Waterloo without any parks. There’s nothing they won’t knock down or steal to keep jamming people in.
I’m sick of being lied to about the reasons for all this, aren’t you?
Unsurprisingly when you have insane immigration policy:
And 2.4 million people in a country of 26 million here on temporary visas:
You have an extreme housing response:
Line up the graphs for population growth next to the growth in rents and they perfectly track.
They’ll try and gaslight you something about “changing household size”, but the average number of people per household hasn’t budged in twenty five years prior to covid. If anything, the cost of living crisis is forcing many to take on a flatmate increasing household sizes.
They’ll also try to pass off that the immigration levels are just playing “catch up” after we closed the borders.
Don’t buy it. Even before the pandemic, our immigration intake was off the charts, fueling a cost of living crisis that was already spiraling out of control. Australia’s housing market was already at nosebleed levels in terms of affordability, indeed it was a House of Cards.
Covid didn’t create this mess — it just paused a runaway train that’s now back on the tracks and picking up speed.
Insane immigration has caused insane rises in the cost of housing. Insane rises in the cost of housing has caused insane rises in the cost of everything.
To keep this ponzi scheme afloat, the beholden RBA refused to lift rates.
Now Australia is the only G10 country where inflation is increasing.
They’re now trying to fudge the numbers by providing temporary rebates off your energy bill, transport and so on.
To genuinely curb inflation, however, interest rates need to be higher than the inflation rate. Otherwise, why would anyone bother saving when their money is worth less by the day?
There’s a nifty tool economists use called the Taylor Rule to figure out where rates should be. Plug in the official Consumer Price Index of 3.6% (as if anyone actually believes the official numbers), and the Taylor Rule says rates should be at least 7%. But where are we now? They’re currently 4.35%.
If you look at the price of gold — often considered a more honest gauge of inflation — the real rate could be anywhere from 7% to a whopping 15%. So the RBA is trying to put out a bushfire with a garden hose.
They don’t want to raise rates because they know it will bring down the housing market, so instead they’re prepared to turn the Aussie dollar into confetti.
The fundamental issue is fertility, and that isn’t going to improve on the path we are on. The cost of living crisis isn’t getting any better, it’s getting worse. Jamming people into shoe boxes that take multiple lifetimes to pay off is going to decimate natural births in this country.
In the December quarter of 2023, Australia’s births were down 6.4% year on year, despite a 2.5% increase in total population. Government policies are destroying the ability for young Australians to not just own a home, but also destroying their ability to have kids.
It’s obvious to say it but research has shown an inverse relationship between fertility rates and the proportion of people living in apartments.
A study from Finland demonstrates that couples in single-family homes show significantly higher fertility rates than those in apartments, even years after moving. Surprise, surprise: spacious, family-friendly housing environments encourage childbearing.
So if we have policies that promote affordable access to larger, family-oriented housing, we will likely get higher fertility levels. Conversely, economic pressures that force families into smaller apartments will likely suppress fertility rates, particularly for second and third children, and we need at least 2.1 children to maintain the population.
So we have to ask ourselves, do we really want to deal with a fertility crisis through mass importation of people from developing countries rather than providing an environment that encourages Australians to have babies?
As house prices blow to the moon, HSBC notes that every 10% increase in house prices leads to a 1.3% drop in birth rates, and an even sharper fall among renters. House prices are going up by over 7% per annum, which means that birth rates will continue to drop by almost 1% per year.
This is the definition of demographic replacement.
Nobody wants to talk about this, but it’s an uncomfortable truth.
The ABS data shows that in 2021 around 31% of the population were born overseas in Australia’s two most populous states. It’s now 2024.
When you look at the age cohorts, you can see that back in 2021 for the entire country that the number is closer to 42% being foreign born for 30–44 year olds.
In fact, it’s likely that in 2024 that the majority of people in NSW and Victoria for some key age brackets are already foreign born, or if not they will be soon. For some strange reason, it looks like we’re already there for elderly males, possibly as a result of family reunification visas.
No wonder the Australian Bureau of Statistics is dropping the proposal to add an ethnicity question in the upcoming 2026 census, despite similar questions being asked in the censuses of the UK, Canada, and New Zealand.
Australian government departments know to not ask a question your masters don’t want the answer to.
In the past year, 737,000 people arrived into the country, the majority from non-European ethnicities, providing the greatest change to Australian ethnicity and total population in our history yet the ABS decided to cease tracking that data specifically in the census.
The government will have no problem asking the last time you scatched your bum, however.
For over 55s, where the proportion of foreign-born individuals is around 35%, the current idea being floated is that over 55s should be encouraged to sell their homes, move out and relocate to concentration camps- ahem- retirement homes to make way for all these new people.
Urban planners say that a median house price to household income ratio of 3.0 or under is “affordable”, 3.1 to 4.0 is “moderately unaffordable”, 4.1 to 5.0 is “seriously unaffordable” and 5.1 or over “severely unaffordable”.
In July of 2017 when I wrote Australia’s Economy is a House of Cards, Sydney was 13x, making it the second most unaffordable city in the world. That’s when the median house price in Sydney was $1,178,417. Melbourne was 9.6x ranking 9th.
In March of this year, according to Domain the median house price in Sydney was $1,627,625 and median household income was around $115,700 making Sydney closer to 14x.
It’s no wonder that despite a booming population that the City of Sydney found that the number of artists, musicians, writers in greater Sydney fell by 11.6% in the 2021 census. One can only wonder at how much further that number has fallen today.
Australia ranks second in the world, after Switzerland, for household debt at 110% of GDP.
After paying a 20% deposit, or $325,525 on that $1,627,625 house and $71,932.50 in stamp duty, a 20 year mortgage will require $9,701 per month to be paid after tax according to the CBA mortgage calculator. For 20 years. About $1 million is just interest being paid to the Commonwealth Bank.
Across all dwellings in Sydney, it now takes 127% of a before-tax single income to make the average mortgage repayment.
We are now at the point where you can no longer buy a place to live with a salary in Sydney.
This is leading to record amounts of interest having to be paid.
Even the Commonwealth Bank marvels at Australia’s record high household debt to service ratio, a number that is “extraordinary relative to other jurisdictions”, and rising “more swiftly in Australia than in any other region”.
Of course, this is draining the savings of Australians faster than any western country with savings being drained twice as fast as the US and over three times as fast as the EU.
For CBA to say that is something, as said in The Great Australian Scream, quite the flywheel has been created. The Big 4 and Macquarie are 25% of the ASX200. Every month, 11.5% of Australian wages go into super, soon to cost 12%. 8% of super is invested into property and 23% into stocks, of which 25% of ASX200 stocks are banks. So relentlessly every month, 5.75% of the super bids up bank stocks, which helps them lend.. to mortgages.
This has resulted in extreme market capitalisations for Australian banks.
Australian workers and employers contributed $177 billion in super in the last year, so 5.75% is over $10 billion in banking stock purchases per annum. This is in a closed regulated retail banking quadruply where the Big 4 Australian banking stocks have risen in market capitalisation from $394 billion in 2014 to $499 billion in 2024.
Clearly the majority of share market demand is coming from a structural preference toward the banks from the super sector, parlaying the average Australians investment into a real estate ponzi scheme that disenfranchises existing citizens.
I wonder if Matt Comyn, who I will say is a good bloke, ever thinks twice about why a bank he runs servicing 0.33% of the world’s population has a market cap bigger than Citibank, Charles Schwab, UBS.. after it merged with Credit Suisse, and is sometimes bigger than Goldman Sachs.
CBA is bigger than the biggest Japanese Bank, the biggest French Bank, the biggest German bank, the biggest Spanish bank, the biggest Russian bank and the biggest Saudi Arabian bank.
Talk about too big to fail.
Meanwhile, the banks whine that APRA is too restrictive in lending rules.
If anyone thinks the RBA is coming to the rescue should anything falter in the Australian banking system, they’re dreaming. The RBA has problems of its own being $21 billion in negative equity from loading up on federal and state government bonds during Covid, the value of which have collapsed with rising interest rates.
The US thinks their house prices are in a bubble. Australia’s inflation adjusted house price rise since 1975 is almost double the US. If Sydney house prices dropped to one third of what they are now, they would still be “severely unaffordable”.
The absurdity of our housing market rivals that of Japan’s infamous asset price bubble. At its peak, the grounds of Tokyo’s Imperial Palace were estimated to be worth more than the entire real estate value of California.
We’re approaching similar levels of irrationality where a house in Bellevue Hill could be worth more than a Japanese town.
Australia used to have an economy that made things, but it has instead turned into a ponzi scheme dependent on mass migration to fuel the housing market, drive consumption, and provide a workforce to serve us coffee. In between, to quote Jonathan Tepper, Australia is “the only country we know of where middle-class houses are auctioned like paintings”.
Three of our four top exports in 2023 were dead trees (coal, $109b), dirt (iron ore, $88b) and gas from dead trees (natural gas $67b). Of everything we dig up out of the ground or make, 29% goes to China, an export dependency on par with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gambia and Central African Republic. We’ve managed to simultaneously piss off and become utterly dependent on a country currently weathering a major real estate meltdown.
In return we take 2% of China’s exports. Quite the banana republic.
Our third biggest export, and up with a bullet in 2023 according to the ABS is the export of travel services, which are up a staggering 97.3% to $70.1 billion per annum.
Of this, the biggest component is education related travel services, a euphemism for immigration dressed up as education, which leapt 79.8% year on year to $47.8 billion.
Travel now represents 61.8% of total services exports of which “education related travel” is 68.2%, making this paper-pushing ponzi scheme of selling visas to students 42% of all service exports from the country.
Only that $47.8 billion dollar “export” is not really an export, and as we all know, these “students” are not really students.
Indeed the export of “education related travel services”, according to Dr. Cameron Murray, is nothing more than a “statistical trick”, which the ABS calculates as simply the number of international students in the country, multiplied by an average spend estimate from Tourism Research Australia, added to the total educational course fees, as estimated by the Department of Education, Skills, and Employment.
Normally ABS methodology determines the ‘centre of predominant economic interest’ to determine whether a person is a tourist buying export services or a local resident engaging in the normal economic activity.
Only with international students the ABS cooks the books. Quoting the ABS verbatim “The only exception to this residency guideline is for international students, who are deemed residents of their home economies for the duration of their study”.
So yes, we apparently export “rent”.
International students are supposed to show they are not a burden on society, requiring proof of $29,710 per year to afford to live in Australia, even though I’m not sure how anyone is supposed to live on that.
Additionally $13,502 is to be set aside for educational expenses.
Hmmm.
Surprisingly, the government only requires you to provide proof you have the $29,710, and only once, regardless of how many years you will be studying for, and regardless of how much you really need to live.
Study Australia reckons that if you want to live in a shared house in Sydney as a student you only need to have $292 a week budgeted if you want to live in the city. In the suburbs, the budget you need is $247 a week.
I’m sure you can imagine what that gets you.
When I looked at Flatmates.com.au, there were 4,332 rooms in shared houses available (11 May) in total. Flatmate finders had another 1,455. Setting the filter to $292 a week on Flatmates.com.au reduces the number to just 979.
Looking at the properties for that budget you have a choices of a locker for your things and one of six bunk beds or slum lord accommodation:
Alternately you can pitch a tent in a share house living room.
A limit of $247 per week, which Study Australia says is the budget for living in the suburbs, there’s only 359 rooms available to rent.
If you want to be really special, for $360 a week in Sydney, you can sleep on someone’s balcony and share a toilet. Follow outrage at the news reports on the listing, the government announced they are launching an investigation.
First thing the government should start investigating is.. the government.
Last year there were 786,891 international students in the country and about a quarter of a million students in New South Wales needs housing.
Every dwelling that these international students rent, is considered by the Australian Bureau of Statistics as an export.
Effectively, we import students and we export our housing capacity.
The way the ABS calculates this “export” assumes that each international student in the country is bringing into the country at least $60,745 per annum to spend (Dr. Murray has a higher estimate of around $78,000).
In reality, the assessment of whether students have the means to study in Australia is not thoroughly conducted by the government.
Everybody knows that the money is instead earned through employment once the students get here.
Indeed, in a Navitas survey of the most important factors influencing the choice of study destination for students from South Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa, “quality of education” was ranked last or second to last, while “access to post-study work rights” and “opportunities to work while studying” was first.
As Macrobusiness observes “Australia is a popular destination for international students precisely because it offers very generous work rights and opportunities for permanent residency.. money earned through employment in Australia is by definition not an export. Yet, the ABS, Treasury, the education sector and the media continually assert that it is.
“As a result, during the pandemic, we witnessed the bizarre circumstance in which thousands of international students begged the government for financial assistance and turned to charities when they lost their jobs.”
Youtube and Tiktok are full of videos from international students explaining how to rort free food out of the system.
I’m not sure why we’re providing visas for international students who can’t afford to feed themselves.
This is supposed to be an “export” not a humanitarian program.
The funds to pay for cost of living and educational expenses should be paid into some form of escrow prior to arrival, but they are not.
Meanwhile flooding fake students into the country and causing a cost of living crisis is resulting in Australian kids dropping out of school at an increasing rate, with Year 10 to 12 retention rates dropping 5.4% from 2017 to 2023, undoing two decades of improvement.
Are we the lucky country or the dumb country?
If education related travel services really were a $47.8 billion “export”, surely we would see at least that in cash coming into the country each year.
Digital remittances are the modern way of moving money around the world. These transfers are facilitated by online platforms, apps, and other digital channels, enabling users to send and receive money quickly and securely around the world, for example periodic fund transfers between residents and non-residents, or short-term workers sending money home.
They’re gaining popularity over traditional wire transfers because they are cheaper and quicker, and the primary target users are migrant populations.
Students are always looking for the cheapest way to do things, and if they’re needing to send, I don’t know, say twenty times the average gross national income of their home country per annum to pay for schooling and living expenses, you’d expect this to be the method of choice, as they’re sending a lot of money and they’ll want to do it as cheap as they possibly can.
Surprisingly, when you look at the international remittance volume into Australia, in 2023 the entire volume coming into the country was only $1.94 billion, while outward volume surged to $9.54 billion. We see nowhere near $48 billion being contributed in.
Things that make you go hmmm.
Sure, you might argue that funds are coming in via wire transfers, but digital remittance inflows into Australia are not growing, despite a surging migrant population.
Instead we see $10 billion outward, resulting in a net flow of almost $8 billion being sucked out of the country per annum.
You’d think someone would sanity check basic numbers like these.
I’ll give you another number to sanity check: 12,665 of our students study abroad.
In 1990 we took in 25,000 international students.
Now we take in 786,891.
That sounds like a lot and quite unbalanced. Particularly, when according to UNESCO, there are 6.4 million international students that study overseas in the entire world.
Does anyone wonder why there’s a cost of living crisis, when Australia has 12% of the entire global international student population crammed mostly into two or three cities?
The Universities should be rolling in cash. Yet with 12% of the entire global international student population, every university in New South Wales except the University of Sydney is still losing money.
Universities claim Covid losses, but the pandemic ended in 2021. It’s 2023, and they’re still bleeding cash. Online study prevailed, and enrolments only dipped 25% from 2019’s peak. Even at the worst of times, enrolments were higher than 2016.
Of course, nearly half of the University of Sydney’s students are foreign.
When local students start becoming the minority, it really calls into question why they should receive taxpayer funding and be exempt from income tax.
Why are we importing 12% of the world’s students again?
Very few of these students here are from high income countries. Indeed we are hosting at least 15% of the entirety of the global international student population from low-middle income countries, that is to say countries where Gross National Income is between US$1,136 and $4,465 per capita.
This when Australia’s total population is only a one third of one percent of the world’s population.
The number of “students” is totally out of control by any comparison, over five times the density as the US, which is the most attractive market.
Now it would be a great thing if these students coming in were the world’s best and brightest. For example, from the likes of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, which is harder to get into than MIT, as 1.2 million students compete for 10,000 places. But that isn’t what we are getting. The top undergraduate students from IIT go to the United States for further study, just like our top students do.
Education in India is now a $117 billion a year industry. The students that Australia receives are more likely coming from the quality of institutions described in the Bloomberg article Worthless Degrees Are Creating an Unemployable Generation in India. This quoted a former Indian secretary for school education who described that for “16,000 colleges handing out bachelor’s qualifications for teachers, a large number existed only in name”. A former Dean of Delhi University said “Calling such so-called degrees as being worthless would be by far an understatement”.
If those 786,891 here studying were really students, where are our Nobel prizes? Where’s the mountains of technological and scientific research that should be spewing out of our universities?
Where are all the undergraduates from MIT, Stanford, IIT or Cambridge that should be doing graduate study in Australia’s top universities?
Australia punches above its weight with scientific research output, ranking 12th in the Nature Index, even though it is completely woeful at capitalising on commercial outcomes from that research.
But for the better part of the last decade, even though international student numbers have gone tilt, the number of students enrolling in doctorates has been declining.
In the last report from Nature, India has now overtaken us in research output, with our score dropping by 14% from 2021 to 2022. “That’s just one more sign of a scientific slowdown in a country facing many challenges”, said Kylie Walker, Chief Executive of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.
Where’s the research funding for science? ARC Discovery Project funding has halved in twenty years.
What sort of education is Australia actually providing to these students?
The Department of Immigration in May upped anticipated educational costs from $9,661 to $13,502. Doesn’t this sound a bit low when the University of Sydney charges over $50,000 for a degree and Australian students accrue on average a HECS debt of $26,000 over their period of study?
Now you only have to look at the country of origin of the international students we have studying here to think something is a bit funny.
China is first. OK.
India is second.
Third is Nepal, a country less known from its academic output but well known for powering Australia’s kitchens and nursing homes.
Fourth is.. Colombia?
Where no satisfactory explanation exists for why a country at least 30 hours and three or four flights away by plane, is the fourth largest country for international “students” coming into Australia.
Higher than, I don’t know, Indonesia?
In completely unrelated news at the same time 253 kilograms of cocaine washed up on New South Wales beaches in the single month of January.
Just a month before $1 billion dollars of the stuff was found in an apartment in Ryde.
Four Corners says cartels are bringing it in by the tonne.
It’s not just the volume of people coming into Australia that needs to be carefully considered, the countries we bring en masse should similarly not be a crap shoot.
Mass immigration and asylum policies in Western European countries have led to notable significant cultural changes. These changes have been met with a range of criticisms. As with Australia, the proponents of these policies argue that any perceived disadvantages associated are offset by the positive economic impacts.
It is an uncomfortable truth, however, that not all country’s immigrants are equal in terms of the net financial contribution to their new country. That’s where the net financial contribution of a person is simply their total contribution to the state finances, minus the total costs to host them.
The Danish government analysed this in a Immigrants’ net contribution to the public finances in 2018. It comes as no surprise that children and the elderly tend to be net beneficiaries of public resources, as they typically require more support in the form of education, healthcare, and social services. To balance this, it is imperative that individuals in their peak earning years make a significantly positive net contribution to the system.
The report found that immigrants from some countries never produced a net positive financial contribution to public finances, presumably because of differences such as wealth, education, skills and values.
There are researchers who question whether immigration in aggregate to Europe has resulted in positive economic impact at all. In short, they argue, open borders and a welfare state is a recipe for disaster.
Where are the students from western or high income countries?
There’s a trickle from Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan.
The Americans have vanished. Between 2002 and 2021 we had in total 157,765 American students come and study in Australia, in 2022 we only had just 2,162.
It seems we have devalued the reputation of the Australian education system.
Cheating is up over 1000% in two years at the University of Sydney.
Guy Curtis, an academic integrity expert from University of Western Australia recently detailed the “intersection between visa and admission fraud, and contract cheating organised crime groups” in a SMH interview,
“The system would be such that a person coming into Australia who might be involved in a low-paid job or sex trafficking, comes to Australia on a student visa,” he said. “And part of the package for people who are exploiting that student as a worker is that the student’s enrolment in university is maintained by the fact they continue to pass courses, because the work is done by other people”.
Instead of American students that we used to get, we have mass student immigration from Colombia where the GDP per capita is US$7,330. Our second biggest country is now India where the GDP per capita is less than half that at US$2,730. Third is Nepal, where GDP per capita is half that again at US$1,400.
What sort of education can students from these sorts of countries afford?
The sort you find crammed a dozen at a time in C grade office towers between immigration lawyers and migration agents.
Of the 786,891 international students in the country, 271,676 are enrolled in vocational programs (VET), and 79,078 to “study english” (ELICOS).
The top two areas of study by the numbers are “Management and Commerce” courses in NSW and Victoria, not at universities, but at VET programs where the educational content is lower quality than the back of a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box, attendance is optional and the value of employment by “business” in “management” is nil outside of running a petrol station.
Picking the first “business” college from a tenant listing of a random building in Pitt Street, Sydney, I found the Crown Institute of Business and Technology. Their “Advanced Diploma of Leadership and Talent” syllabus is enlightening.
As is the actual course content, for example how to interview for a job, and making sure that employees aren’t overworked.
We’re bringing in 15% of the world’s international students from poor countries and they’re mostly here to study courses like this?
Where exactly does anyone think this pantomime of education leads to?
What outcomes would anyone reasonably expect to achieve from an “Advanced Diploma of Leadership and Talent” from one of a dozen “business” colleges crammed into a random building in Pitt Street?
Does anyone expect that this qualification will lead to better opportunities when the student returns back to Colombia, Nepal, India or China?
I’m not sure why we flooding the country with hundreds of thousands of students studying junk courses and “english” when Australians are choosing between “Heating or Eating”?
Where in some local government areas, international students consume up to 24% of the rental market?
Where in the Melbourne Local Government Area they consume 21.8% of rental properties and in Sydney 14.6%?
Where the national vacancy rate is 1.0%?
Where potentially four out of five new homes will be consumed by these students by 2028?
When 77% of renters and 51% of mortgage holders are in financial stress as of May with outgoings greater than incomings, according to DFA Analytics?
Where the “skilled” migration program is no better and where despite what we are told, less than one third of permanent migrants to Australia are selected “even partly” for their skills?
Where the largest category of permanent residents coming in by far are partners of immigrants in the Skilled Stream and partners in the Family Stream, over 100,000 per annum where no skill is tested?
There is only one skilled category in the Australian Migration program where candidates are targeted for quality and skills.
It’s called the Global Talent Program, a migration pathway for individuals with outstanding achievements, particularly high-earning individuals in future-focused sectors such as artificial intelligence, hydrogen technology and precision engineering.
Yet last year we allowed a total of 5,000 people into the country under it, and next year it is being cut to 4,000.
Huh?
Instead our “skilled” migration program targets illustrious categories such as Goat Farmer 121315, Amusement Centre Manager 149111, Antique Dealer 142112, Betting Agency Manager 142113, Dog or Horse Racing Official 452318, Hairdresser 391111, Librarian 224611, Florist 362111, Recreation Officer 272612, Make Up Artist 399514 and believe it or not, Migration Agent 224913.
Goat Farmer, ironically, is probably the most important of that list.
We’re bringing in migrant migration agents to help run our migration program. What could possibly go wrong? A migration program that is totally out of control, perhaps? Clogged with appeals?
You really can’t make this stuff up.
Are these really critical skills that we must import, or are we potentially importing future welfare recipients?
I mean, look at yoga instructors.
There are only 2000 yoga instructors listed on Yoga Australia’s website.
Australia recently signed a Free Trade Agreement with India that guarantees visas for another 1,800 per year of “culturally significant occupations” which specifically calls out yoga instructors and professional traditional chefs in a special category of visa which lasts for four years and allows extensions.
I’d expect we are already bringing in yoga instructors from other countries other than India as well.
In June of 2024, Jobs and Skills Australia released a draft list of jobs that will be prioritised for fast-tracking visas. On the “Confident On-List” for critical skills to import are, yes, you guessed it, yoga instructors.
On the “Confident Off-List” are Manufacturers, Farmers and Microbiologists.
This defies logic and common sense.
The whole immigration program is a circus.
Brickworks, the largest brick manufacturer in Australia, is demanding that we bring in more migrants as bricklayers- to build houses for migrants.
Yet, the CFMEU says that there is no tradie shortage in Australia.
None.
CFMEU National Secretary Zach Smith said in a News.com.au interview that the data is twisted to show that we need more overseas labour.
“[It is] bulls**t that is designed to hurt Australian workers,” Mr Smith said, “We have exposed the blatant lie that Australia is suffering from a tradie shortage that must be fixed through migration”.
According to the CFMEU, for most construction-related professions, the indicative vacancy rate is below 1%. Their research states that in February, despite a national workforce of 27,600 plasterers, only 56 job ads were listed, and with 300,000 bricklayers and stonemasons employed, only 111 job ads were posted, suggesting a vacancy rate of just 0.4%.
When I took a look at SEEK (12 June), there were 25 positions posted for Bricklayers (and lots of adjacent and irrelevant hits which you have to filter through), another 151 on Gumtree, and 16 on Indeed.
I’d expect more on Facebook and other locations, but it doesn’t seem like we need tens of thousands.
I never thought I would say it but the CFMEU is correct.
Nationally, corporate insolvencies are the worst since records began twenty-five years ago. Construction is the leading category with over 1913 firms going bust to March 2024 in “one of the worst storms since the mid-1970 crisis” according to one builder. Solvencies are double that of the next worst sector, hospitality.
Employment in the entire construction in the last 18 months is up by only 4,677 which is around 0.3% up on the 1.35 million working.
Despite all these people coming in that you would think would need to eat and buy things, accommodation & food services jobs are down 50,993, wholesale trade is down 29,259 jobs, and retail trade down 21,768 jobs.
Where are the jobs being created?
Almost entirely the NDIS economy.
This completely out of control freight train of a program is only a decade old, spending $42 billion a year and pisses more money up against the wall than aged care ($36 billion), Medicare ($32 billion), federal funding for hospitals ($30 billion) and the pharmaceutical benefits scheme ($20 billion).
It’s growing at 20% per annum and set to cost over $100 billion by 2034.
With 650,000 on it means that the average NDIS recipient is costing the taxpayer over $64,000 per annum.
Which some are spending on sex, sex toys and tarot card readers.
Somehow 12% of boys between 5 and 7 years old are on the NDIS.
Overall, Australia spends about $84 billion a year (3% of GDP) on disability across the NDIS, disability support pension, and carer payment- double what the United Kingdom and Canada spends.
And it’s the NDIS, together with the immigration ponzi and government jobs to oversee the whole mess are the only things creating jobs in this country.
Here we are, effectively open borders and a welfare state.
Fellow Australians, behold the NDIS:
Tinder sux, so the NDIS should pay for sex.
A net 165,079 jobs were created outside of healthcare and social assistance, and 102,270 of them were in education & training added to keep the education immigration racket running.
Arts & Recreation Services added 58,511 like yoga teachers, although I suspect these jobs will primarily be some form of rehabilitation providers for the NDIS.
Administrative & Support Services which provided travel agents, migration agents and employment services (for NDIS) for the ponzi added 53,817 jobs.
Public administration and safety added 51,577 jobs.
Every industry outside of that added bugger all or lost jobs. Technology added- wait for it- one hundred and seventy seven jobs.
We’re bringing one person per minute into the country, or 10,000 a week, and there’s no jobs for them outside of supporting the immigration ponzi itself or the NDIS. There is no job creation outside of those industries.
Finance is negative, manufacturing is negative. Even the government has had to concede that the garbage the NDIS is paying for isn’t sustainable.
The country is cactus.
NDIS Minister Bill Shorten, the guy in charge of it believe it or not, said:
“We want to issue regulations which can’t get rolled … which say you don’t get to spend your money, and I kid you not, on cryptocurrency or steam rooms, or in one case people trying to organise 20 people to go to Japan. It’s not on.”
Outside the NDIS, job advertisements in Australia are down between 20% and 30% in the last year.
Not surprisingly, the unemployment rate of recent migrants is higher- particularly for females which is 5% higher- as they have to find a job in a new land in very tough economy.
But it is even harder for Australians with Chief Economist Tim Toohey from Yarra Capital reporting that migrants are, in fact, taking their jobs “employment growth among non-migrant workers had dropped to ‘essentially zero’” as “net migration is currently supplying 1.4 people for every job created”.
Despite the so called “skills crisis”, recent migrants are less likely to work in managerial or professional roles, 50% versus 66%.
They are also on lower salaries, between 8 and 13% lower.
We’re not importing skills, we’re importing skills shortages as a result of the ponzi itself.
Just to support the ponzi, every ten weeks we will need 1,200 teachers, 1,200 nurses, 600 in allied health, 420 doctors, 75 dentists, 70 firefighters, 55 paramedics, 380 hospital beds, the list goes on.
The government will have to provide these jobs as 70% of private hospital groups are loss making. Over 420 medicines are listed in shortage by the TGA.
The problem is, State governments are out of money.
Australia’s largest employer, the New South Wales government which employs about 10% of people in the state is slashing jobs, with some departments cut up to 60%.
In Victoria, two of the largest health services, Northern & Western Health, that together employ 20,000 staff, have implemented immediate hiring freezes, no new capital works programs, a ban on travel unless paid for by external sources and a reduction in elective surgery. The Victorian government also scrapped a promise to provide 40,000 more elective surgeries a year. Alfred hospital has told staff to turn the lights off to save money.
Society is also powered by civic functions that rely on the goodwill of volunteers. Just as there aren’t people willing to join the army to fight for the country, other civic duties are suffering from the drop in national identity and cost of living crisis.
The number of firefighting volunteers have dropped 20% over a decade. The number of boy scouts has dropped from 115,457 in 1979 to just 70,000 today despite the total population increasing 80%. In fact, in the 2021 census, 2,933,646 Australians reported that they were doing unpaid voluntary work, which was a 19% from the 2016 numbers. This represents a 24% collapse in the rate of volunteer work among the population.
The flood of so-called ‘skilled’ migrants, including yoga instructors and dog groomers who aren’t required to bring any funds, combined with the influx of international students, each needing to demonstrate a paltry $29,710 in financial capacity just once, a sum supposedly sufficient to cover rent, food, and education expenses, places an immense burden on state governments responsible for providing essential infrastructure and services.
The combined contribution of these groups provide a paltry sum that is woefully insufficient to cover the true costs associated with accommodating the huge growth in population, leaving state coffers to bear the brunt of the burden.
From healthcare and public transport to law enforcement and social services, every aspect of state infrastructure is impacted by this surge in population.
Victorian Government debt will balloon to $187.8 billion by 2027–28, which will represent 25% of the value of all the goods and services produced in the state in a year (gross state product or GSP). They plan to turn this around by lifting taxes by 39% from 2022 to 2027. It doesn’t plan on cutting any spending. If you think the cost of living is going up, well the cost of dying in Victoria is also going up.. by up to 650% to enact a will.
Brisbane now ranks 12th out of 900 cities for the worst traffic in the world ahead of Bangkok in the 2023 INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard, with drivers losing on average three days of their life each year sitting in traffic.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow for State governments and their constituents, who are left to pick up the pieces while the federal government trumpets the illusory benefits of this “export industry”.
It’s not much of Federation.
The $29,710 figure is not merely insufficient; it is an insult to the hardworking taxpayers of each state, who are effectively shouldering the burden for the lifestyles of students and many economic migrants while their own quality of life crumbles.
To get a feeling of the true cost, the Australian Government spends about $640 billion annually across defence, education, health, social security & welfare, Housing and other general public services. With a population of around 26 million, this equates to around $24,000 per capita.
How is a student bringing in $29,710 to live on paying for their share of this infrastructure? The current arrangement is a perverse inversion of what a rational, equitable system would look like.
Instead of the hardworking taxpayers of each state subsidising the lifestyles of students and economic migrants, shouldn’t it be the other way around?
Wouldn’t a far more sensible approach be to levy a substantial infrastructure fee on these groups, commensurate with the true costs they impose on our society?
A figure in the ballpark of $50,000 per annum per student or unskilled family reunification visa recipient would be a good starting point for an infrastructure fee, a sum that reflects the immense value of the services provided by this great nation. Likewise, welfare should not be available for a substantial period of time.
If a student truly is exceptional, we can provide fellowships and scholarships, but only for exceptional people and only for high quality educational providers.
Such a fee would serve multiple purposes. First and foremost, it would ensure that those who benefit from our world-class education system, healthcare, public transport, and other services are contributing their fair share to the maintenance and expansion of these critical assets. It’s a matter of basic fairness: why should the burden fall on the shoulders of Australian taxpayers alone?
Moreover, an infrastructure fee of this magnitude would act as a much-needed reality check. It would separate the genuine students and skilled migrants, who are prepared to invest in their future and contribute to our society, from those who see Australia merely as a convenient backdoor to permanent residency. It would get rid of the sham visa factories we are running from the garbage third-tier educational providers. It would also ensure that only those who are truly committed to our country and have the means to support themselves are welcomed into our fold.
Critics might argue that such a fee would deter international students and migrants, damaging our economy. I’m not sure what damage that may be, given they’re not bringing money in and there’s very little in the way of job creation going on. But the truth is, any economic benefits derived from these groups are illusory if they come at the cost of overburdened infrastructure, strained public services, and diminished quality of life for all Australians.
Instead Australians are supposed to live with a deterioration in quality of life and economic circumstances and the mathematical impossibility of the average Australian being able to buy the average house.
A salary is now useless to buy a house in Australia.
The solution, according to the media, used to be to load yourself up with debt. Leverage your $254 a week income to a $12 million portfolio they proclaimed with stories like “Garbage train driver reveals how he built up a 13-home property portfolio worth $12 million while earning less than McDonald’s workers”.
When that no longer worked, they pushed articles like “I’m eight years old and already own a four-bedroom home in Melbourne. This is how I became Australia’s youngest property investor — and the secrets I learned from my savvy dad”.
The secret, of course, was to have a father be the CEO of a property investment company and to borrow the entire sum for the house purchase from him, minus $2,000 he gave you in pocket money.
Now, the economic tsunami facing this country is such that not even the bank of mum and dad can save you.
Australia has plunged so deep into this economic ponzi that we now find ourselves in the late stages of Weimar Republic-style perversions, where not only the currency hyperinflated, but moral decay and societal degradation ran rampant, as the very fabric of the nation unravelled in the face of financial ruin and desperation.
To the left, the Herald Sun offers “Generation Z OnlyFans stars buying up big in Australia’s property market”.
To the right, the Sydney Morning Herald proposes “Unable to crack the housing market, I went looking for cocaine”.
Which way, young Australian, to the Great Australian Dream?
Stripping on the Internet or beachcombing for cocaine.
They reckon there’s 650 kilos still floating out there for grabs.
The moral fabric of Australian society is being destroyed.
“There is no way I could have bought property on a normal income”, Aussie Mum Reveals She Turned to Onlyfans to Buy a Home. There are hundreds of these articles in the Australian press.
At the same time, News.com.au laments that young Australians are bored, don’t go to the pub anymore, don’t have kids, don’t socialise and are depressed. I wonder why?
Tales from Weimar Germany reveal the absurdity of hyperinflation: a college instructor’s salary skyrocketed from 10,000 marks per month to 10 million marks paid twice per day in less than two years’ time, while factory workers were paid daily wages at 11am thrown in bundles from atop a truck, had to scramble to the shops to buy anything available before their money lost all value.
Hyperinflation is a loss of value in currency of 50% per month. We’re far from that now, but to bring a dose of reality to anyone who got sucked into the housing ponzi in the last decade or so, SQM Research calculates that Australian house prices have gained in value by 7.1% every year, on average, for the last 10 years.
Before you pat yourself on the back for being a real estate investing genius, hazard a guess at what rate our currency is being devalued, as measured by gold, on average, for the last 15 years?
You guessed it: 7.1% per annum.
Welcome to Project Zimbabwe, where everyone’s a millionaire.
Just not the way you thought.
Government policy has inflated the cost of everything.
Because jamming the country full of people to suppress wage growth while driving up the price of everything else is a “deliberate design feature of our economic architecture” worth boasting about.
House prices have gone up almost triple the rate of wages since 1998.
Australia is a developing economy pretending to be a first world economy.
We know how this ends.
We’ve been here before, although, everyone’s long dead to remember it.
In the 1850s, the discovery of gold near Bathurst sparked the greatest gold rush in history. Half a million economic migrants flooded into Australia, seeking fortune and igniting an unprecedented property boom. Sydney land values shot up 80% in four years flat, while Melbourne doubled.
Overbuilding, reckless lending, and an influx of foreign capital created an unsustainable boom. When the global economy soured and British investment dried up, the house of cards came tumbling down. Banks failed, land companies went bankrupt, and house prices halved.
The resulting depression was deeper and more prolonged than the Great Depression of the 1930s. If you were unlucky enough to buy at the market’s peak in the 1890s, it took seventy years to break even.
History, it seems, doesn’t just rhyme — it repeats with frightening precision.
This time, the stakes are substantially higher.
Government is supposed to maintain social order and stability. and provide things that benefit society as a whole but would be underprovided by the private market alone: infrastructure education, public health, defence and environmental protection.
It’s supposed to improve the quality of life for its citizens, and it’s supposed to represent the will of the people.
The current government is not just failing at these fundamental duties- it is actively undermining all of them. Instead of maintaining social order and stability, it has divided us into race versus race, gender versus gender, divided our national parks and plunged us into economic chaos.
Rather than providing the essential public goods that benefit society as a whole, it has created a mass migration disaster and thrown the problem of providing these goods onto the State Governments, which have been forced to go into extreme levels of debt in the struggle to provide basic infrastructure.
It has allowed our education system to be overrun by a sham immigration scheme, our public health to buckle under the strain of overcrowding, our defence forces to be hollowed out, and our environment to be ravaged to make room for all these new people.
At the same time, many people are probably wondering when they want to buy a ticket to see a band, “Where the hell is Eora and Naarm?”
Quite a number of people have started to get upset that they don’t feel like they’re living in their own country anymore.
Every public event you go to these days, even if it’s the opening of a supermarket, seems to have a Welcome to Country. Primary school student are being forced to chant “Always will be Aboriginal country”.
Citizenship ceremonies that celebrate new citizens becoming Australian being cancelled in 81 council areas on.. wait for it, Australia Day.
Australian supermarkets celebrating Diwali, Eid out of nowhere but not.. Australia Day.
What the hell is going on?
It’s pretty strange when even the fact checkers have to admit that Welcome to Country was invented by the comedian Ernie Dingo in 1976.
To be honest, that’s actually a pretty Aussie thing to do!
Well, what if I told you that there’s a lot of sophistication behind projection of government policy to the populace which goes far beyond mere rhetoric?
The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) is a central agency in the Australian Government. Its role is to service as the lead policy adviser to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet.
It might surprise you to know that within the PM&C there is a government ‘nudge unit’, very appropriately named BETA. The Behavioural Economics Team of Australia (BETA) within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet uses sophisticated behavioral economics techniques to subtly shape citizens’ thoughts and behaviors.
Here’s its mission statement:
Specifically, its objectives are to “support application of behavioural science to public policy”.
What hypothetically would be an example of this?
Consider the recent trend of renaming Australian cities and restricting access to national parks. While presented as gestures of reconciliation or conservation, I would not be surprised if the systematic erasing of familiar place names and limiting access to iconic Australian landscapes, are ‘nudges’ designed to weaken the Australians connection to their homeland.
What would the goal of that be? To create a populace less likely to oppose mass migration, as they no longer feel truly native to the land.
Is that what is actually happening? Who knows, but it all seems pretty damn strange that this all came out of nowhere, doesn’t it.
Why would the Prime Minister need his own BETA nudge unit?
BETA works on some pretty weird stuff, like trying to convince people their energy bill isn’t that expensive and they can always switch providers , and ‘nudging’ elderly people to get a covid vaccination.. a project started in <checks notes>.. err, 2024.
Far from improving the quality of life for its citizens, this government’s policies have sent the Australian middle and working classes into poverty- a downward spiral of astronomically unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, a cost of living crisis, and mounting despair.
Perhaps most damningly of all, it has utterly failed to represent the will of the people, instead prioritising fudged short-term economic “gains”, the interests of big business, developers and foreign nationals over the long-term wellbeing and prosperity of its own citizens.
Anglicare says that only 289 homes in the entire country are affordable for renters. Meanwhile, 1580 residential properties are being sold to foreigners every three months, mostly to China, where citizens are prohibited from sending more than US$50k a year overseas and where it is illegal to own foreign property outside of China.
In theory, foreigners are only allowed to buy new homes in this country, but the well known trick in the real estate industry is, as auctioneer Damien Cooley uncomfortably revealed, to just make demolition of the existing structure a condition of sale.
After all, Transparency International rates Australia the worst money laundering property market in the world, giving examples of property money laundering by “Sudanese generals, Chinese high rollers and Malaysian bankers”. Australia is one of only five countries which doesn’t require real estate agents to report suspicious transactions.
The Australian Crime Commission estimates the total value of the Australian drug market is $12.4 billion, all of which needs to be laundered. Last year when the AFP confiscated assets, 65% was real estate. Only now, with much opposition from the real estate industry, is consideration being given to looking into the problem.
They’ve really manage to stuff it up for young Australians. If they want to rent, they’re competing with the world’s poorest, who are coming in and sleeping in bunkbeds, on balconies or in tents. If they want to buy a house, they’re stuck on a never ending treadmill trying to save for a deposit, competing with both the world’s wealthy and hot money flowing in from all over the place.
The consequences of this reckless policy extend far beyond the physical landscape. We’re witnessing the erosion of Australia’s social fabric, transforming us from a high-trust society to a low-trust one.
Last time I was in Japan, the biggest news story was a school principal that was caught at a 7/11 pouring himself a large-size coffee while only paying for a regular-size coffee. When caught, he admitted he had paid for a regular coffee sold seven times before, but instead pressed the button for a large, a difference of 72 cents.
The 59-year old high school principal was fired from his job and lost his $200,000 pension. Such is the value placed on honesty and integrity in a high-trust society.
Meanwhile, in Australia, people are being stabbed on a weekly basis, sometimes murdered, by people unknown to them at shopping centres, university, the church, the bus stop and while fishing.
A decade ago it would have been unheard of to have terrorism signs warning about armed offenders at the shopping centre, yet here we are.
This deterioration of social trust is a direct result of rapid, reckless demographic change. We’re sacrificing the very qualities that once made Australia a great place to live, trading our high-trust society for a low-trust one.
For what?
This is not just a failure of governance — it is a betrayal of the sacred trust between a nation and its leaders. A path that is politically untenable, morally wrong and a national disgrace.
One can only wonder why the government has continued so far down this path of destruction.
One ostensibly hoped it was Hanlon’s razor- never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity- that would correct itself quickly when some adults stepped into the room. But no adults have arrived.
It makes you really wonder what the hell is going on.
The first thing the ALP did on coming into power was to push The Voice. Why did Albo spend almost half a billion dollars of taxpayer’s money without bipartisan support, when prior to The Voice, only 8 of 44 referendums in history had ever got up, and all of them had had some form of support from both major parties?
The Voice aimed to constitutionally enshrine an unelected body to participate in government decision making matters, meaning successive governments can’t overturn it. The Voice would have the right to make representations on any legislation, which parliament would have to consider seriously.
While perhaps not a “third chamber” of government as Malcolm Turnbull originally thought, the chance of getting up a mechanism for a body that would be permanently influenced (if not, totally controlled) by the ALP to permanently frustrate all future legislation might well be worth a $450 million punt of the public purse, even if the odds were low.
The second thing Albanese has done is ramp immigration. Prior to being elected, Albanese said that 160,000 new migrants a year was too many. “I also know [immigration] shouldn’t be a substitute for training Australian workers for Australian jobs”, he said, adding “we should not be a country where Australian workers are cut off from job opportunities”.
With no mandate from the Australian people, Albo hiked new migrant arrivals to 737,000. In fact, the second he got elected he went full berko on immigration increasing permanent migration to 195,000, abolishing the skills list, guaranteeing 2.1 million temporary migrants a path to citizenship, halving withholding tax on foreigner developers, mulling rent caps, and allowing New Zealanders citizenship.
I mean if you’re going to be pissed off about 1,300 people coming to Australia in the First Fleet and 160,000 convicts coming in over 80 years, surely you’d be more pissed off about 980,000 people coming in over the last two?
Why would Albo push things so far that tent cities now sprawl across our cities, and the Suicide Prevention Australia now quarterbacks RBA interest rate announcements?
If there’s anything we need a referendum on, it’s a Voice on immigration levels. And if there’s anything the Aborigines should be pissed off about, it’s recent immigration policy.
Some argue that the insane immigration push is designed to prop up the headline GDP figures, creating a facade of economic health, despite GDP per capita declining the worst in 40 years.
Given the damage and lack of economic viability from mass migration from poor countries, with the Australian economic, social and cultural way of life deteriorating so quickly, this explanation alone seems insufficient.
A more cynical interpretation is that the government is engaged in a calculated effort to reshape the electorate by mass immigration from countries with significantly lower per capita GDPs because when they eventually gain citizenship they will likely become future left-leaning voters, permanently tipping the vote in favour of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) on a two-party preferred basis.
The Labor primary vote has been on one way trip down for decades. It seems that the last ditch effort to find voters has been to import them.
Under this theory, all Australians are suffering the destruction of the Australian way of life and the worst loss in wealth since the Great Depression so one political party can hold grip onto power.
Meanwhile the economic immigrants being brought into a country face out of control costs, few jobs for them outside of wiping bums in an aged care home (a shitty job with 17–25% turnover per annum, requiring the Prime Minister’s ‘nudge unit’ to try to sell it), being chronically underemployed and underpaid, and housing so expensive that 85% of migrants go immediately into rental stress, representing the highest demographic for stress in this country.
Can anyone think of why else would Albanese be doing this?
By process of elimination we arrive at the only plausible excuse left, which is exactly what many allege Biden is trying to do:
Open up the border to gain more votes.
Elon Musk recently said “[…] when the census is done, the census is based on all people in an area, whether they are citizens or not. If there are a concentration of people who came here legally, in a particular state, that state will actually then get an increased number of House seats. The House seat apportionment is proportionate to number of people, not the number of citizens. The illegals overwhelmingly go to places like California and New York, and if you just look at the math, if you look at the apportionment with and without illegals, I believe California would lose… I believe there will be a net loss of blue states of approximately 20 seats in the House.
[…]
This also applies to the electoral college. You say this also applies to electing the president because the electoral votes are also done by apportionment the same way that House seats are done.
This theory gains credence when one considers the shifting priorities of the Greens, the “environmentalist” party.
I would think most Australians when they go to the polls stare at the ballot and think to themselves, “Who’s going to stuff this up the least”?
Unlike some jurisdictions that have booklets in the polling booths explaining what each party plans to do, Australia runs a guessing game.
I would suspect that many votes for the Greens come from apolitical voters disenfranchised with the two major parties, who feel warm and fuzzy that at least their vote may be put to good use doing something good for the environment.
They may be surprised about where their vote is actually going.
After all, when’s the last time the Greens pushed an environmental policy?
The Greens used to be overwhelmingly for a “sustainable population”, but now seem preoccupied with foreign conflicts and want to, remarkably, raise immigration.
The Greens clearly see an opportunity to aggregate marginal groups together in their campaigns for lower house seats, this follows a trend right across the west to harness marginal immigrant communities by aggregating together to face off against traditional voters.
Muslim groups both in Australia and in the UK, for example, are being asked to vote as a block in marginal seats to force through a more radical denunciation of Israel.
The Greens clearly see political advantage in exploiting the ethnic conflicts overseas for political advantage in Australia, thereby importing these conflicts into Australia.
As a result, the Muslim Times recently published a letter calling for all Muslims to vote for the Greens.
A Roy Morgan poll found an overwhelming number of Australians (49%) think the Australian government should stay out and not take sides in the Middle East conflict, while the proportions thinking the government should do more to support Israel (17%) or Palestine (19%) were near equal.
As Green MP Max Chandler-Mather recently wrote, the Greens are not just supporting these marginal groups right across Australia, but effectively financing them through provision of material support.
This aggregation and collectivisation of marginal groups is designed to leverage them politically against the majority. Using the preference system marginalised groups voting as blocks could turn the next election into Labor’s “Teal” moment potentially making it hard for Labor or the LNP to form a government without radicalising their own policies. You can clearly see that the waning primary vote for the ALP is causing an increasing dependence on Greens preferences.
It’s clear that central to the Greens pathway to power relies on increasing mass immigration and the collectivisation of those immigrants into a political force.
Many Greens voters would be surprised to know that, and similarly surprised that they have abandoned their primary mission of protecting the environment above all else.
I mean, has anyone from the Greens looked at a satellite map lately to see how much forest they’ve cleared for houses in this country?
Australia requires the fifth-highest rate of land clearing in the world to support the fourth highest home building program in the OECD.
In 2023 alone, 400,000 hectares have been cleared which is equivalent to about 40% of the Greater Blue Mountains Area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in New South Wales which covers an area of about 1,030,000 hectares.
This is the kind of ecological destruction that would have once sparked fierce protests from Greens of Bob Brown’s day. Yet today, amidst this rampant deforestation, the silence from the Greens is not just deafening- they are actively lobbying for more immigration, which will lead to more environmental devastation.
They’re clearly currently winning votes in the switch from an environmentalist focused party to an immigration focused party- but it may ultimately end up in tears, especially when two of their core voting blocs are clashing with one another in the streets.
We all appreciate the sentiment but the Greens have never really known what they are doing. Most Australians would think that hydroelectric power is a core form of renewable power generation. Only the Australian Greens were formed around a protest of hydroelectric power in the Franklin Valley.
The Teals aren’t any better, the group of independents that dress the same, pretend they are a party but act more like the investor relations arm of a few wealthy investors in bird blenders and horizon-hogging solar panels, both of which require more mass land clearing for installation and transmission lines.
It’s pretty obvious from the Teals complete lack of policy and outright dismissal of any consideration of nuclear that the ‘green’ future they’re peddling that’s more about greenbacks than green spaces.
Monique Ryan, the MP from Kooyong, even wrote a letter to Albanese calling for an early election, not because of the cost of living crisis- the number one concern of the Australian public for the 27th consecutive month according to polling- but because all this debate about nuclear might threaten a few companies’ ability to raise money.
Yes, I kid you not, that is the reason she urgently wants an early election. If nuclear is going to be built, renewables can’t compete, and their masters are terrified.
If it is indeed Albanese’s strategy to pursue mass immigration to tip the two-party preferred vote to Labor, it may backfire spectacularly.
The dildo of public policy rarely arrives lubed.
As we’ve seen overseas, some immigrant communities prioritise their ancestral homelands’ interests over domestic concerns.
When these groups feel that mainstream parties aren’t adequately addressing their specific needs or international priorities, they often splinter off to form their own ethnically or religiously aligned political parties.
In a classic case of blowback, the seats most at risk are those in inner Sydney and Melbourne, urban centers that have long been Labor’s bastions of power.
This isn’t speculation. Already, a ‘teal-style’ Muslim Vote movement is taking shape, explicitly targeting federal Labor seats.
The movement’s convenor has announced plans to field candidates in two Western Sydney seats, with the first announcements expected imminently. These safe Labor seats, currently held by high-profile ministers Jason Clare (Education) in Blaxland and Tony Burke (Employment) in Watson, also boast the largest Muslim constituencies in the country.
You reap what you sow.
Pouring kerosene on identity politics and turbocharged demographic change ignites a firestorm of your own making, while the inferno of inflation and housing costs immolates the dreams of everyday Australians.
This self-inflicted conflagration engulfs both the political landscape and the economic well-being of the nation.
The current system of granting permanent residency is a tinderbox of political exploitation. Albanese’s actions have laid bare the dangers of allowing such critical decisions to be made within a single election cycle.
This brazen reversal of pre-election promises of controlled immigration not only betray the trust of the electorate but also underscores the urgent need for a more robust, long-term approach to immigration policy — one that can’t be manipulated for short-term political gain.
Permanent residency must be the product of careful consideration, not a political tool to be passed recklessly between political pyromaniacs.
Switzerland has a more sensible approach with two main paths: a regular residence permit (B permit) for work, study, or family reunification, and a short-term residence permit (L permit) for stays up to one year. EU nationals can apply for permanent residency (C permit) after 5 years of continuous residence with a B permit, while non-EU nationals must wait 10 years. Some cantons may grant non-EU workers a C permit after 5 years, but only if they are highly qualified and well-integrated, two things the Australian government does not consider properly.
Only a leader completely out of his depth, in desperation, tries to silence dissent through laws when the consequences of his actions come home to roost. But that’s the third thing Albanese has done.
Two decades ago, it would have been unthinkable that Australia would today rank among the world’s most egregious offenders in government censorship of social media. Yet, here we are, with the authorities conjuring up Orwellian schemes to force every user to provide ID verification, all under the guise of protecting children.
But make no mistake, this is not about safeguarding the innocent; it’s about controlling the masses, about ensuring that every voice, every opinion, every dissenting thought can be traced back to an identifiable individual, ready to be silenced at the first sign of deviation from the approved narrative.
If there’s one thing that Covid has done, it is that more people have started to think for themselves rather than have the blind trust in what the government or mainstream media tells them. If anything needs to be rectified for “mis- and disinformation”, it’s the politicians.
Instead of focusing on the things that matter, the government’s actions seem singularly focused on consolidating power, regardless of the cost to the democratic foundations of our nation — the integrity of our legislation, the sanctity of our vote, and the freedom of our speech.
Make no mistake, this is a war against Australian citizens executed by Australia’s political parties. In this war existing Australians lose everything- their culture, economic security, housing affordability and democratic say in their own affairs.
Let’s be clear: nobody agreed to this level of mass immigration, which is running at 1.7 per minute into this country. There is no possible way we can be building a house every 90 seconds to cope, nor should we when there is no net new demand for housing whatsoever from Australians.
There’s been no real debate on its implications, no genuine discussion about its long-term effects on our society and economy. There’s no clear economic benefit from importing unskilled economic migrants and masses of students studying pantomime qualifications.
Our GDP per capita is rapidly declining, with Australians facing the greatest decline in wealth since the Great Depression.
The stark reality is that our economy has flatlined, universities are haemorrhaging money, and state governments are drowning in debt. Our culture is being eroded, and quality of life has collapsed for many Australians. Yet the government claims they don’t control immigration levels, nor do they model its impacts.
This is either gross incompetence or deliberate deception- neither of which is acceptable.
The neglect of young Australians and the disdain for the older generation are palpable. Job advertisements are down, and the few jobs we do create are being taken from Australians, yet we continue to import more people. This madness needs to stop until we get to the bottom of what’s really going on. We need a national conversation, a genuine debate about the direction of our country. Without it, we risk losing everything that makes Australia unique.
This crisis of governance extends far beyond immigration policy, permeating nearly every institution meant to serve the public interest.
It is an utter disgrace how captured the Australian government institutions have become, bending to political agendas and vested interests rather than serving the public with unbiased, factual information and policy recommendations.
The politicians are sleepwalking the country into ruin.
Australians should be the wealthiest people in the world. We used to be. In the 1880s, Melbourne was the richest city in the world.
You’d think that a country sitting on 1200 years of coal supply, hoarding 28% of the world’s uranium and dominating the global LNG market as the second-largest exporter with 20% share would have the cheapest and most reliable electricity in the world.
You’d also think a country with a population density of 3.46 people per square kilometre would have cheap housing.
You’d also think a country with an iron grip on 56% of the global iron ore trade, the very backbone of modern industry, that Australia should be a colossus on the world stage. A nation whose might is forged in the steel of its own making from iron ore, coal and cheap power.
You’d think a country that produces 47% of the world’s lithium, the white gold of the 21st century and the third largest producer of cobalt, fifth largest producer of nickel, sixth largest producer or copper would be a titan of electrical and mechanical engineering.
You would also expect that with a river of gold flowing from its mines as the second largest gold producer in the world, that Australia would be a land of immense economic prosperity.
All of this potential with the dumb luck of a commodities boom from Chinese industrialisation, a war between the energy powers of Russia and Ukraine, and supply shortages.
“No other developed country, even other commodity producers, has had anything like Australia’s terms of trade boom,” said IFM Investors chief economist Alex Joiner, “Australia’s fiscal metrics should be the envy of other advanced economies”.
Just imagine the wealth Australia would have if we manufactured these raw commodities into higher, value-added products. We have the raw materials in this country to make just about anything.
Due to the catastrophe created by the cost of living crisis, Australia has the highest casual wage in the world at $24.10 per hour, although that’s still not high enough to be able to live anywhere near many people’s place of work.
So if Australia is to have a manufacturing industry, we better produce sophisticated, valued-added products.
Yet after Uganda and Armenia, we rank 93rd in the world in the Harvard Economic Complexity Index, a measure of how many different products a country can produce and how many countries are able to make those products.
Indeed Australia’ manufacturing’s share of GDP is 5.39%, under a third of the world’s average, on par with Equatorial Guinea, an economy so underdeveloped that the country doesn’t have a single cinema.
For manufacturing you need at minimum cheap and reliable energy.
While we are an energy superpower in uranium, coal and natural gas, we’re restricted from using them.
Nuclear power plants are prohibited in Australia under the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act 1998, which stops the construction or operation of nuclear power plants. Yet we already operate the OPAL Reactor at Lucas Heights for nuclear & medical research, and are about to build nuclear powered submarines under AUKUS.
Qatar’s largest export by far is LNG, the same volume as Australia. Yet Qatar generates enough wealth from this trade that residents pay zero income tax, zero property tax, zero corporate income tax, have free healthcare, free education, have subsidised housing and plentiful access to cheap electricity and petrol.
Similarly, Norway, another resource-rich nation, has leveraged its oil wealth to create a sovereign wealth fund worth over $1 trillion, ensuring long-term prosperity for its citizens. Australia’s failure to create comparable benefits from its resources highlights a critical policy shortfall.
In Australia, most of our export facilities pay no royalties at all to the state or federal government.
Before the Russian pipelines supplying natural gas to Europe were blown up by someone’s fairy godmother, and the Americans had to fortuitously tank in LNG, the east coast of Australia was the seventh most expensive market in the world for gas.
Australians currently pay $11.67/Gj wholesale. The Americans pay $2.34/Gj, and Qataris even less. But that’s only because the government stepped in and forced a $12 price cap as prices got to almost $50 in last year.
In June, the Australian energy market regulator, AEMO, warned that the east coast could run out of gas in winter.
Despite being a gas superpower, what Australia does is export it to China and Japan, who don’t actually need it and resell it. China resells about a third of what we need domestically. Half the gas we sell to Japan is resold.
Imagine Saudi Arabia telling their citizens they can’t have cheap petrol.
This absurd situation hasn’t gone unnoticed internationally. As Tucker Carlson said in his recent tour, he was
“asking dumb questions, you know, you have the world’s largest deposits of iron ore, from which steel is made. I said, you know, how many steel mills? Well none. Why? Because energy is too expensive. I said well, too bad you don’t have any thermal coal here. Oh, wait, you have the world’s largest deposits of thermal coal? In the world? So why do you have such high energy costs?
Well because we sell our coal to China, which uses it to make ‘renewables’, which we then buy back. Okay… whoever thought of that hates you, I’m just being honest. That’s not an accounting error! That was not a mistake made in good faith, it sounds like the accountants over at Parliament House, or whatever they call it, look at the books one day and say, you know, all those estimates we had about wind farms, it actually doesn’t add up.
That we sell our country’s resources to a far away country to make something that doesn’t work, and then pay extra for it. Like they knew that wasn’t going to work when they did it.
Obviously, because that’s insane, that’s prima facie insane.
The fact that you have high energy costs is reason enough to get rid of the people who are running your country.”
This is why, under the deception of net zero, they are phasing out natural gas connections to new homes in Victoria. They tell you that you can’t have a gas stove because of the “environment”, but in reality, it’s just being shipped overseas to be burned. You can’t cook or heat your house or hot water, because they’ve completely screwed Australia’s energy market.
It’s the same for coal, none of the restrictions on coal fired power generation are for the environment whatsoever, all the coal is still being dug up, it’s just being sold overseas and someone else is burning it. You’ve been sold a pack of lies.
The green in the following chart is what natural gas we keep for industry in Australia, yellow for residential and commercial, and red for power generation.
This results in energy prices being triple what they were before Albo.
The mismanagement of Australia’s energy resources extends beyond mere policy decisions to the very institutions tasked with overseeing our energy future.
The Australian Energy Market Operator doesn’t mention nuclear in their 2024 Integrated System Plan, because like all government bodies in Australia, they are captured.
Just like the CSIRO fudged its figures in the GenCost analysis of nuclear, the RBA not raising rates to stop the most out of control housing market in the world, the ABS removing ethnicity from census data, the TGA saying Ivermectin didn’t work or that the mRNA covid vaccines were safe and effective when it was clear reading the academic research contemporaneously being published that it was the opposite, or the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research which tried to convince Sydney siders that alcohol fueled violence was an epidemic when in reality they wanted to bulldoze Kings Cross for apartments for an increasingly unhinged immigration program.
While these institutional failures are concerning, they are symptomatic of a broader issue: Australia’s failure to leverage its natural resources for economic prosperity.
It’s also clear that the future of warfare will rely on manufacturing supremacy. While other nations are bolstering their defenses, Australia lacks the manufacturing base to support a strong military.
The problem for Australia is that there’s no such thing as a low-energy country that is wealthy. That’s an issue when Australia manufacturing as a percentage of the economy is on par with a financial haven like Luxembourg.
The solution, according to the Australian Government, is to pillage the planet in an attempt to beat the second law of thermodynamics by building high material, low energy power generators that generate less power over their lifetime than the power needed to construct them.
There’s another small problem with this, which the market regulator has pointed out. Retiring 21 gigawatts of coal, because it’s being sold overseas for someone else to burn, will require 130 gigawatt of solar, 69 gigawatts of wind.. and 13 gigawatts of backup gas because of unreliable power generation.
This means we will need between 30 and 40 gas generators between now and 2050. We’re also going to have to figure out how to get the gas from Queensland, as the Northwest Shelf, where Australia has its greatest natural gas reserves, is not connected to the east coast by pipeline.
The energy market regulator warned that eastern Australia’s gas supply is running so low that emergency diesel fuel supplies would need to be built next to each new gas plant.
There’s a bit of a problem with that as well.
Australia, the resource titan, has a fatal flaw — a gaping hole in its economic armour that could bring the entire nation to its knees in a few days.
Without this resource, perishable goods such as fresh produce, dairy and meat would start running low in one to two days. Within three days iron ore, coal, and other mineral extraction would grind to a halt. Public transport would be in crisis. Within three to five days many frozen and refrigerated goods and popular non-perishable items would exhaust.
By the end of the week planting, harvesting, and transportation of crops would cease and livestock management would become extremely difficult. Waste would begin accumulating in urban areas. Building projects across the country would stop.
In one to two weeks the majority of supermarket shelves would be empty and any remaining stock would be rationed.
As Doomberg wrote in No Worries, Mate:
“What is the Achilles heel of one the world’s most important economies?
Australia has practically no capacity to refine oil and relies on imports to meet the vast majority of its demand for diesel, the fuel that makes its entire supply chain work:”
We import 90% of our liquid fuel through just two operational oil refineries, which only survive through federal government support and hold 49 days of fuel stocks onshore, well below the 90 day minimum requirement.
We have 21 days of diesel and 27 days of petrol.
Australia runs on the smell of an oily rag.
While we’re screwing around looking like idiots appointing a Parliamentary Secretary for for Men’s Behaviour, a world war could start and everyone would be surprised.
It would take a three week sea blockade and Australia would stop.
Maybe it’s time to stop putting Aussies on the Barbie and start getting the utter mess that’s been created in this country sorted out.
