Interesting stuff

Yep.
If Australia hadn’t embarked down this unnecessary and politically inappropriate economic shitpipe courtesy of Hawke / Keating then we’d be sitting on a pile of riches from our mining boom which would make Norway look like it’s on the breadline.

And look at the personal wealth the two of them amassed from their PM’s pay. They must have invested their meagre salaries well.....

Not bad for a couple of battlers for the working class. They sold out their entire base yet still like to portray themselves as in the trenches with the proletariat. Keating dressed like a Parisian dandy and his daughter shares billionaires amongst her peer group FFS.

MACROBUSINESS
Heil fasco-housing complex!
By Houses and Holes in Australian Politicsat 12:16 am on September 25, 2019 | 10 comments

Nine years ago I wrote:

Australian housing doesn’t have anything to do with economics. It long since ceased being a “market” at all.

Rather, it is a political complex – a quango – that represents the single largest page in the socio-economic contract between the government, the Australian financial system and an ageing baby-boomer population.

When the baby-boomer generation first took power and reshaped Australia in the 1980s, the promise was for a new kind of meritocracy. The old “Australian Settlement” described brilliantly by Paul Kelly in the End of Certainty – a protectionist social contract between unions, industry, government and the people – was swept aside in favour of a neo-liberal vision. The new world demanded an open, more dynamic Australia. An Australia that rewarded entrepreneurial effort and flexibility. A productive Australia.

For a while it worked. Australia dropped its tariffs, deregulated government enterprise, most especially the banks, and after a false start at the end of the eighties, embarked on an historic productivity boom.

But at some point a distortion began to grow at the heart of the new vision. It’s dark seed was sown by the original architects of the new world when they back-tracked on the removal of negative gearing tax policy for housing in the 80s.

By the late 1990s it had become a cancer eating away at the achievements of the baby-boomer generation and a second wave of bipartisan supporters of the new vision took power only to further deregulate finance and install fabulous capital gains tax privileges on property investment.

As we entered the 2000s, the new vision threatened to stall and the same baby-boomers that had convinced us all to embark on their neo-liberal journey deployed new, more direct subsidies for houses, in the form of first home buyer grants that sought to co-opt the baby-boomer’s children in the same now rapidly distorting vision.

Through the 2000s, the neo-liberal vision became virtually unrecognisable. The dynamic and open Australia mutated into a speculative abomination based almost entirely on houses. Our precious capital, freed in the 80s to find the most productive outlets possible became instead the key stone in a system of offshore borrowing and asset inflation.

The final death knell of the new vision surely came in 2003 when the old national good luck arrived in the nick of time. As the housing quango lay dying in 2003, along came a commodities boom the likes of which nobody has seen in century. The transformation was complete. The entrepreneurial vision of those pioneering 80s baby-boomers replaced with happy-jack dirt salesmen and a bloated entitlement state that now had the money to keep its most hideous progeny, the great, quivering housing sack that hung from its belly, alive.

In 2008, when the world woke up and the mutated vision was revealed in all its horrible form, the government deployed every available mechanism to keep the thing alive. Unheard of guarantees across the financial system, moral hazards like leaves in the wind, wholesale immigration, massive direct subsidies, huge general stimulus.

This might be forgiveable if it was at least honest and openly declared. But it wasn’t and isn’t. Instead, those that had sat outside the system, hoping for a house or sagely planning to swoop when the bubble burst, are insulted with blandishments about how robust the system is, how they missed out on the “market”. Even though this so called “market” long since ceased to bear any relation to laws of supply and demand.

I feel sympathy to my bones for those that are running the buying strike campaign and those that participate in it. I understand completely where they are coming from. A buyers strike is an entirely appropriate and justifiable response to the Australian politico-housing complex. It is a political act targeted at a political system that lies to their face.

Ever since, we have watched the same politico-housing complex throw successive generations into a property mincer that has now consumed the entire economy.

Which brings me to my point. The evolving new level of real estate bastardisation, irrationality and power in the nation’s capitals is more totalitarian in nature than the exercise of interests over government. It has moved well beyond the simple influence of lobbying or spruiking in the press. The politco-housing complex has evolved into a structure so complete that it is now a world view, a complete, closed-loop ideology, bound up with nationalism, geopolitics and power.

There is an inexorable logic to this. It was obvious to anyone with eyes that the politico-housing complex had become a parasite killing its host. The complex had so distorted the underlying economy, had so corrupted national identity, and had so compromised national security, that it was either going to die or had to evolve.

The first of the great challenges to the politico-housing complex was economic. Over the past two economic cycles, the politico-housing complex has flattened households under a mountain of debt that has killed inflation and monetary policy. Thus the complex has become ever more dependent upon fiscal support for life, both for funding and supporting a gutted underlying economy.

The second great challenge to the politico-housing complex was that its core pillar, mass immigration, was directly undermining Australian living standards. Wages growth has been destroyed. Public services like roads, rail, health, education and law have been crush-loaded and debauched. The Australian backyard is history and the great outdoors itself is gone as shoddy apartments have predominated in dwelling construction. All of this has happened without a vote for it. Indeed, all polls indicate strong resistance to further population growth.

The third great challenge for the politico-housing complex was political. The last election presented a generational threat when Labor sensed the marginalisation of younger voters was a political opportunity.

But, from the verge of extinction, the politico-housing complex suddenly evolved to confront each of these three challenges. The key moment was a Property Council of Australia coup at the last election, with its former head of research, Scott Morrison, appointed PM. That has entrenched the power of a cabal of public and private oligarchs that have taken control of national interest policy in the name of real estate. The first order of business has been to capture fiscal support for the economy and more credit. The coup has been followed up with the co-opting of regulators using classic fascist techniques of show trials and personal favours. Next underway is the cultural war to bring all “business” into line as well. Daily now, business leaders are bashed by marauding ministers of the new ‘fasco-housing complex’.

The second feature of the newly formed fasco-housing complex is to sustain mass immigration no matter the cost to economy, living standards, democracy or security. In classic fascist practice, the deleterious impacts are disguised through the use of relentless mass propaganda, disseminated forcefully by oligarchic aligned media. Its greatest trick is to endlessly debate solutions to the destructive flow of peoples as if that is the answer, while misrepresenting any and all resistance to the flow itself using public shaming, via such tags as “racist”. A terrific example of this is underway today at Nine’s metropolitan newspapers as it conducts a gala event around how to manage population growth. Fresh from running fasco-housing complex fund raisers for Property Council Generalissimo ScoMo, Nine has dedicated days of debate to the topic without once mentioning that we could simply cut the migrant intake. The truth is that there are no solutions to the fallout from overly fast immigration within the Australian system, nor are there intended to be. The debate only serves to provide the illusion of choice as the putsch goes about its daily business of building shoddy apartments for money-laundering Chinese and propagating new generations of ‘fasco-housing complex youth’.

The third leg of the fasco-housing complex is political transformation. Since the election of the Property Council PM, the fasco-housing complex has set about distorting the results in every way possible. The truth is that the Property Council PM only fell over the line thanks to Queenslanders who voted for nationalist fringe parties seeking tighter borders. But that has been completely repackaged as a fulsome embrace of “aspirationalism” – read fasco-housing code for higher house prices – permanently erasing any prospect of future political push back against the complex. Yet behind that lie is the truth that the Queenslanders were right. We do need tighter borders. The political system is reeling from an inundation of cashed-up foreign influences, mostly sponsored by the Communist Party of China and, again, revolving around property. These are now distorting the political system itself to more and more resemble the mobster patronage system of the CCP, the world’s greatest fascistic state, not to mention sailing Australia further into its sphere of influence. Freedom itself may end up being the ultimate casualty of the fasco-housing complex.

Like all fascistic systems, the fasco-housing complex is pre-enlightenment, preferring religious zeal to reason in the formulation of national goals. It uses force to bring objectives to fruition, including ultra-nationalist bullying of conscientious objectors, the use of mass brainwashing propaganda via an effectively nationalised press, and the seamless fusion of public and private elites in a unified oligarchy of nationalist destiny.

That it revolves around realty is a uniquely Australian evil, best left as a banal footnote in the history of such systems.

Oh , gawd. Another fiction based coup attempt by the formerly electable party known as the Democrats.

This’ll answer all your questions.
Edit : this link is better https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/23/like-russian-collusion-ukraine-hyst...

That is surprising that a Democratic senator from California would promote the latest unfounded attack on Trump.

Said no one ever.

The crowd in Australia hasn’t been duped , they’ve just been denied an alternative.

Stu - If there’d been a viable major party , not just a protest vote , which offered relent from the overwhelming neoliberalism, would you have voted for them ?

Brexit and Trump were the first and only electoral options which weren’t limited into useless submission by their respective nations. Trump particularly so after the false hope of Obama.

I do respect the wisdom of Aussie voters and like myself they rejected the “ biggest promise of wealth distribution in a generation “ for the sophistic margin fiddling it was.

For every near respectable policy the ALP presented they put forward another that eradicated any and all gains and then basically ceded to the neoliberalist status quo.

They were not an alternative, they were a couple of degrees off the LNP at best. At worst they were all this and then even more complicit in the China appeasements.

The only genuine wealth distribution guaranteed by the ALP was the wealth of future Aussie generations into foreign hands.

Yes , fiddling at the margins .

What was the purpose of franking credit , capital gains and neg gearing reforms? To repair the budget and increase home affordablility . That was their only function.

The return to the budget of all of these measures would have been about 1 billion per annum maximum.

And yet the ALP wanted to INCREASE the immigration rate ! And what is the result of this increase ? Demands for new infrastructure- not including increased maintenance requirements for existing infrastructure - from current population increase is the tune of 200 billion per annum ( !!!! ) .

The costing of the uncapped family reunification visa rort alone would have appropriated every single dollar of savings reaped from self funded Aussie retirees and handed it straight to the imported elderly relatives of Chinese students . And that would only be the start of paying that bill.

And what about house affordability? Well , subtracting the price falls from the already subdued residential investor market from the major influence of the huge demand from increase population equals house prices still rising and unaffordability increasing massively.

Fiddling at the margins . Nothing more . Illusory bait and switch If closely inspected.

Like you said , there isn’t any party that gives myself , or the rest of Australia, what they want. The Australian people have no options. Not a Brexit-style fuck you or even a Trump - style” Hail Mary -and -hope -against -all -evidence “ roll of the dice. That’s my point.

Australians aren’t lazier or less wise or more aspirational, they’re just denied the outlet for their situation.

Bullshit.

Australians were forced to choose between faeces and diarrhoea, don’t add insult to injury by accusing them of coprophilia.

And here’s the full transcript, Westof.

The beat- up levels are way beyond rational. There is nothing even remotely remarkable about this conversation, beyond perhaps the fact that a President is expressing concern about corrupt behaviour by a fellow politician, which seems strange in this day and age. Admirable, but strange .....which is sad. Even if the concern is driven by political expediency.

Please learn a lesson about the partiality of the media from this. And just when you were starting to get over the Russiagate hoax .......Unbelievable.

And the charge against him was “ undermining belief in the country and it’s institutions . Full irony.

The media don’t care about how obvious their complicity is anymore, they have a job to do and there’s no accountability so they just go harder.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/the-full-transcript-of-donald...

And here is Biden ( at 52 minutes in ) publicly detailing how he refused to give a billion dollars of aid to the Ukraine unless a prosecutor who was pushing a case against his son’s corrupt activities was fired and replaced with a pet prosecutor who would drop the case.

So here we have genuine, unapologetic corruption by a Presidential candidate,using US aid money to blackmail the Ukraine government into ceasing application of the law towards his son and the media ignores this to focus on Trump’s encouragement of the Ukraine to apply the law.

What more evidence do you need to admit that the media is colluding to end Trump’s presidency by any means ?

PS Biden’s son was kicked out of the Navy for drug use and then somehow, despite no business experience whatsoever, landed a US$50,000 / month job “ consulting “ with a Ukraine energy company. Anything to do with the fact that his father was Vice President at the time ? Pure corruption.

Verbatim transcript and your inability to point out a single inappropriate sentence speaks volumes about the levels of hype over substance involved.

Would you have thought it inappropriate and criminal if Kevin Rudd had discovered that Tony Abbott had threatened to withdraw $1B of aid to Indonesia if they didn’t sack the Indonesian prosecutor who was appropriately charging Abbott’s daughter with corruption and Rudd had then encouraged the Indonesian President to continue investigations ?

This after Abbott had publicly and proudly bragged about his illegal intervention in the Indonesian justice system using Australian taxpayer’s aid money as blackmail to save his daughter from criminal prosecution. On TV he bragged about it for all to hear ! Whilst he was previously in office and he is running to be Prime Minister !

Of course not . This is proper use of the Prime Ministerial directive to route out criminal activity by an Australian official. Irrespective if it’s politically beneficial, it’s the correct thing to do and it should be lauded.

Instead , we have an inverted distortion of reality where the pursuit and prosecution of corruption has become the condemned act.

Only in the bizarre anti- democratic world of the Never Trumpers could this perverse interpretation of events be considered. The fact that an undisguised coup attempt is supported by the media is scary I reckon.

Crazy shit.

It’s blown me away the headlines I’m reading. At least with the Russiagate hoax , the allegations were able to be doctored by the Democrats, this false accusation is openly and obviously utterly spurious and the attackers don’t give a fuck. It’s an unambiguously illegitimate push to remove a democratically elected president from office and it’s globally supported. FFS.

Oh , for sure , mate.

Just like the Russiagate hoax , the Democrats have irrefutable, smoking gun evidence , but they just choose to not reveal it.

There is NOTHING to even remotely hint that Trump has done anything wrong, yet you have convicted him just like the rest because......well fucking why exactly ?

Because you don’t like him and that should be enough.

Ridiculous state of affairs.

And what of the example I gave above re Abbott and Rudd in the same circumstance ? Would you be calling for Rudd’s resignation and ejection from office ?

Westof said “ It seems like he wasn’t just requesting Zelensky investigate Biden. It looks like he was unsubtly trying to strong-arm him into doing it by leveraging US military assistance.“

Please provide the relevant quotes from the transcript to support this ridiculous conjecture.

When you’re calling for the extraordinary expulsion of a democratically elected head of state it should be based on something a little more substantial than your opinion, don’t you think ?

Don’t you find it strange that , like the Russiagate hoax , these allegations are already bogged down in the ream of unsubstantiated bullshit and third hand rumour ? Thats not happenstance, it’s the structural design of this attack on a political opponent that they’ve no alternative way to deal with.

Face it , mate. This is just another Hail Mary attempt at a coup with the stated bonus of hampering the President’s ability to perform his duty

AKA the exact same treasonous undermining of state institutions and confidence in the government that the Democrats consider to be a criminal act.

This “ resistance movement “ is a complete rejection of respect for democracy , an illegitimate expression of democratic opposition and an act of social bastardry. Pouting children who refuse to get off the supermarket floor until the adults placate their entitled whims and supplant their power for a minutes peace.

Theyll continue to push spurious accusations until they are confronted with consequences.

Come on guys.

Come clean.

You’re geeing me up aren’t you ?