Australian Politics
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
Smiling but lying – if real estate agents won’t tell the truth, I will
Jenna Price (below) is a grumpy old thing. She fails to realize that real estate valuations are very uncertain, which is why auctions are so often resorted to. And note how often auction results are surprising. There'a an old saying in real estate that you only know the value of a property when the cheque clears. I have bought and sold many houses and have generally guessed well but I have had disappointments too
Have real estate agents changed, or have I? You be the judge.
We bought our first house in 1984. It was previously owned by the kind of real estate mogul who knew which suburbs were on the move. It came with a needy neighbour, an outside dunny and was right under the flight path, but we loved it. We made our first baby there and then our second.
It became clear we needed a laundry, an indoor toilet and, spare me your judgment, a kitchen which had room for both a fridge and a dishwasher. I seriously felt I was more likely to survive without a fridge than without a dishwasher. And that was before No.3.
But real estate agents could tell us, more or less, what we should pay for a bigger house in the neighbouring suburb. News in Victoria that an agency is being charged for massive underquoting must act as a warning that all agents should be fair and, more or less, square.
If only warnings worked.
Here’s what I discovered this week. My kids are on the lookout. In fact, I’m friends with an entire generation of parents whose kids are on the lookout, both for their inheritance and the prospect of leaving behind the government-sanctioned malfeasance of renting. Which brings me to this predicament.
A couple of weeks ago, a long-time friend discovered we were planning to downsize. She told me her kid and the kid’s partner were selling their house and could expect to get, according to their local agent, $1.7 million for it. Yes, it’s in one of those newly groovy suburbs, but it’s small and perfectly formed. She sent me the address. Looked great. I’m too old for groovy but whatever.
Imagine my utter lack of surprise when it turned up on your favourite real estate site, with a buyer’s guide of $1.45 million. That’s a quarter of a million dollars less than what the agent guided the sellers. I even wrote to the real estate agent just to check on that buyer’s guide because, you know, glitches happen online. He confirmed $1.45 million as the buyer’s guide. God, you’d love to be issued the seller’s guide as well, right?
In my highest dudgeon, I called the only non-real-estate-agent-real-estate-expert I know – Macquarie University’s Cathy Sherry – filled with grumpiness directed at the real estate agent.
She reminded me that the duty of the agent is to the vendor. They are engaged by the vendor. That means they have to act in the best interests of the vendor.
It’s nearly impossible to get anyone defending real estate agents in Australia, but Sherry said agents can’t ever – really – tell how many people are going to show up at an auction and how much they are prepared to spend. She says the best way to prepare yourself for what you should pay is to look at all the houses.
“Once you’ve looked at five properties, it’s not rocket science,” she says. Mind you, she did agree that my example revealed a big gap.
Now, imagine my utter frustration when one of my own children thought buying it was a possibility based on the unrealistic (and indeed phony) buyer’s guide. If you pop in the top price you want to pay (as you can on these exhausting websites), it comes up as under $1.5 million.
The problem is not the underquoting exactly. It’s the sheer manipulation of the hopes of young buyers drifting around homes which are nearly identical because they’ve been styled. (Please – I beg you – no more white walls, cream couches and AI artwork. And turn off the lights in the middle of the day. We see you.)
Buying property, unless you are a hardened investor with no emotions in the game, is a nightmare. Conveyancers. Maybe lawyers. Building reports. Banks. All under the pressure of time and fear, of not knowing what comes next. It’s a crushing combination of mundane tasks under extreme pressures of time and money. Then you have to do it all again when you fail.
Now this is not a thing where everyone got overexcited at the auction. It’s before the auction. I’ve watched a few of those and understood what happened. I’ve even been the participating underbidder (relieved when unsuccessful). But this agent knows it’s likely to go for much more, has told his vendors it will go for much more, yet is luring people in with the prospect of a bargain.
And it doesn’t just happen to buyers. Vendors often fall victim to conditioning, the practice of being told the place is worth more than it is. It’s how agents win business. Please do not imagine that because an agent tells you they can sell your palace for a huge sum, that will actually come to be.
Likewise, there are no bargains in the groovy suburbs; there is no honour in the real estate market.
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New Vehicle Efficiency Standard welcomed by car industry after tweaks
The car industry has cautiously welcomed the Federal Government’s softer new vehicle efficiency targets.
The New Vehicle Efficiency Standard, which will be introduced to parliament tomorrow, includes concessions for work utes and four-wheel-drive wagons.
CO2 targets have been tweaked for utes, while some 4WDs, which originally had to meet passenger car targets, will be reclassified as commercial vehicles.
They include vehicles such as the Ford Everest, which is essentially a Ranger ute with a roof, and the popular Toyota LandCruiser, which is used extensively by farmers.
Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries chief executive Tony Weber, who was controversially frozen out of government briefings and the press conference because of his strident criticism of the standard, said the new target was “a step in the right direction”.
“The FCAI has made its position clear on this issue and it’s good to see that government has moved in part to our position to get a better outcome for consumers,” he said.
Car industry heavyweights Toyota and Hyundai, who both attended the announcement, were supportive of the new plan, which will take force from January next year. Penalties and credits won’t be introduced until the middle of next year.
The Motor Trades Association of Australia was upbeat about the new standard.
Chief executive Matt Hobbs said the association was pleased the government had made concessions based on industry feedback.
He said the changes would reduce the “very real risk” of price rises and reduced access to popular vehicles.
The amended standard would “better reflect the country’s love of utes and SUVs while preparing for an EV future,” he said.
“We all intend to do our part in decarbonising the country’s transport sector. But consumers must come first, and we believe the adjustments to the policy strikes this delicate balance,” he said.
He said the proposed standard was still “ambitious and challenging” for the industry but “workable.
Toyota, which was a vocal critic of the proposed standard in its original form, welcomed the changes.
Toyota Australia President and chief executive Matthew Callachor said the company supported an “ambitious fuel-efficiency standard that is calibrated to the unique requirements of the Australian market and leaves no-one behind”.
“We welcome the willingness of the Federal Government to consult on this important public policy and to make changes that represent a positive step forward,” Mr Callachor said.
“Even so, Toyota and the industry face huge challenges that must be addressed before these significant reductions can be realised,” he said.
Hyundai chief operating officer John Kett said the standard struck “the right balance between ambition and practicality”.
“With this standard in place, Hyundai dealers will have great vehicles to sell, customers
will have great vehicles to drive, and the automotive industry will be playing its part to
reduce emissions in line with Australia’s commitment to decarbonise,” said Mr Kett.
Tesla and the Electric Vehicle Council, who also attended the press conference, backed the plan.
Electric Vehicle Council chief executive Behyad Jafari said the announcement was “a great day for Australia”.
“Everyone wants these standards in place so we can get on with providing Australians with lower fuel bills and a greater choice of particularly the most efficient, the latest and greatest electric vehicles,” he said.
Tesla policy and business development boss Sam McLean, said nobody “had left with everything they wanted” in discussions with the government.
“This is a very moderate standard that takes Australia from being really last place in this transition to the middle of the pack,” he said.
He described the new plan as “a very solid compromise”.
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Fatal flaws exposed in the Net Zero transition. What is to be done?
According to NSW’s Ausgrid, the most recent AEMO draft Integrated System Plan (ISP) for electricity supply will require $325 billion for transmission to meet Net Zero emissions by 2050.
Aside from blowing the lid on this element of Net Zero’s cost, the call for submissions on the draft ISP allowed a sliver of realism to be voiced.
Electricity suppliers, including the major generation businesses, (who are also beneficiaries of renewable energy subsidies), warned the government and its appointed advisers that their time-frame for closing down coal and most gas generators is impossible.
However, businesses have to work with the government and were understandably guarded in expressing their reservations:
AGL addressed a lack of adequate reserves
Alinta discussed ‘significant challenges’ and practical issues facing the transition
Delta stressed an absence of long-term storage is a risk to AEMO’s favoured path and ventured to say that coal generators must be retained
EnergyAustralia also discussed the need for more storage and for gas to counter the risks posed by intermittent renewables
According to Origin ‘the underlying generation pathway that incorporates key risks’ should be modelled to make it easier ‘to understand the implications for the transition should these risks not be addressed’
It was left to some independent submissions to fully specify the fatal flaws in the push to the energy ‘transition’ that is being orchestrated.
A comprehensive analysis by a group of 16 Independent engineers, scientists, and professionals minced no words in stating:
‘The transition of the NEM, which has been accelerating for several years, will lead to a collapse of system reliability should any more reliable baseload power generation be retired without prior implementation of the means to maintain proper positive dispatchable reserve margin under worst case conditions.’
23 years on from when renewable energy electricity generation was declared an infant in need of temporary nurturing, Australian governments (mainly the Commonwealth) are spending $16.5 billion a year in regulatory requirements and other subsidies favouring wind and solar generators. That is equivalent to one-third of spending on national Defence.
Unlike other government spending, there are no benefits accruing.
The subsidies to renewable energy (mainly wind and solar) are intentionally designed to force the replacement of low-cost, reliable coal and gas generators by high-cost alternatives. Accordingly, the costs they entail are far in excess of the measured regulatory costs.
The annual subsidies to renewable energy have more than doubled since the last year of the Morrison government, but it would be mistaken to exonerate the Coalition from participating in the damage. Morrison went to the 2019 Glasgow Climate Change conference with a ‘Net Zero’ pledge and the Coalition had previously done much to reverse course from the climate policy back-peddling that Tony Abbott had embarked upon – indeed, Abbott’s resistance to further harmful climate change policies was a major factor in the Liberal Party voting to replace him with Malcolm Turnbull.
In this respect, the Liberals were in a similar position to that of the UK Conservative Party, currently in power but expected to lose in a general election. Some UK Conservatives are having doubts about the wisdom of Net Zero, but the party’s policy is almost identical to that of the Labour Opposition. The Australian Liberals and Nationals are seeking to differentiate themselves by pursuing nuclear as an alternative low carbon emission policy, but this faces formidable opposition on spurious safety grounds as well as massive impediments from the regulatory framework which has been developed.
Commercial and regulatory reality will likely force some reversal of current policy stances. This is already evident with governments shifting to subsidise some coal plants that are adversely affected by the subsidies to their renewable energy competition and to create special exemptions for energy-intensive industries like nickel smelting.
However, an efficient energy policy requires a more radical change of course. Although Alexandra Marshall suggests the present lamentable course in energy and other policies stems from poor political leadership, the major parties’ policies are formulated by carefully researching what the voters want. As when they buy breakfast cereal, in the absence of a crisis, few voters put effort into reviewing all the options before them. At present, the dominant voter paradigm is: greenhouse gases bad; wind/solar clean and cheap.
Changing this is difficult in view of prevailing attitudes in the media and other institutional elites. Changing it also confronts a political establishment and a profession of bureaucrats that see no attraction in simply holding the ring for private enterprise to pursue Smithian economic prosperity, especially when there are obvious cracks to fill.
It is difficult to see a new political consensus focusing on competition policy and disengaging public business enterprises from political oversight which allowed an efficient energy industry structure to be created. For the Labor Party, this would mean a return to an ahistorical Hawke-Keating belief in market capitalism. For the Coalition, it would mean politicians seeking to implement notions that they presently regard as window dressing.
More likely is Australian policy being re-formed by overseas developments.
Already Europe is seeing a backlash against socialist interventions in national elections, which are likely to be reinforced in EU-wide elections in June. But it would take a Trump victory in November to bring about an early change. A Trump Administration would abruptly reverse the many energy subsidy programs in the Biden Administration’s misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act as well as abrogating the Paris Agreement on climate change. Australia and the rest of the world will have to follow this.
Even so, this will not be easy for Australia where regulatory inertia rules. Restoring a sensible energy policy will entail longer-term measures that dislodge the many agencies – regulatory and propagandatory – that live off the public purse. Immediate-term measures will require:
Removal of all subsidies
Defunding of many government agencies (under Gillard/Rudd, the CSIRO used to claim that half its programs were global warming oriented)
Requirements on banks, finance houses, and superannuation funds to cease discriminatory energy policies
Reform of planning laws that embrace climate change in evaluating development proposals
Use of the State Grants Commission to prevent state governments from using climate (and other environment policies) to penalise productive activities
This is a formidable program for the handful of politicians, with – unlike the Hawke-Keating government – no bureaucratic support favouring the dismantling of the economy-throttling measures on which they have built their careers.
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"COVID Revisited" Conference to Shed Light on Australia's Pandemic Response
Almost four years since the pandemic began, COVID-19 continues to leave its mark on Australia, affecting healthcare and society in general. While the vaccines offered some degree of protection, controversies remain around the pandemic response. These include a case brought against pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Moderna and calls seeking transparency from the Australian government about its pandemic measures. TrialSite has reported before on Australian analysts challenging the pandemic narrative driven by the government.
To discuss the lessons learned and examine past challenges, the Australian Medical Professionals’ Society (AMPS) is organizing a conference named “COVID Revisited: Lessons Learned, Challenges Faced, and the Road Ahead.” The event aims to provide a platform from which to discuss the government’s decisions during the pandemic and policies to guide future responses.
As time passes, the controversies surrounding the lockdown measures and vaccine mandates in Australia seem to intensify. TrialSite previously reported on a legal case filed against Pfizer and Moderna in the Federal Court of Australia accusing them of lacking transparency regarding alleged DNA contaminants and GMOs in their vaccines. This case was filed by Dr. Julian Fidge and handled by lawyer Katie Ashby-Koppens and former barrister Julian Gillespie.
Providing an update in a February 2024 Substack article, Gillespie explained that the presiding judge, Hon Helen Mary Joan Rofe, had at the time delayed a final decision on the defendant's application for a case dismissal. However, on March 1, 2024, Rofe dismissed Fidge’s lawsuit against Pfizer and Moderna. For the time being, this ruling has put a halt to any likely legal challenges gaining traction against the mRNA vaccines.
We also reported in February 2024 that Australians were demanding a COVID-19 Royal Commission to investigate the vaccine mandates and pandemic measures implemented in the country. Ashby-Koppens was among those calling for this Royal Commission. According to Gillespie, the Senate Terms of Reference Committee is currently deliberating this.
Despite Rofe’s ruling, the critics are not backing down. With the AMPS’s conference looking to help people learn and discuss better ways to handle future pandemics through the “COVID Revisited” program and the ongoing process at the Senate Terms of Reference committee, the critics believe that the upcoming conference “reflects the Australian people's wish for a review of the government response to COVID-19.”
The “COVID Revisited” conference
The conference is scheduled for April 2, 2024, and will take place in the State Library NSW Auditorium. According to AMPS, top medical and academic professionals from around the world will be in attendance, with the event garnering support from notable organizations like the National Institute of Integrative Medicine (NIIM), Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine (ACNEM), World of Wellness International (WOW) and Children’s Health Defense Australia Chapter (CHD).
Speaking about the conference’s mission, AMPS secretary Kara Thomas stated, "Our mission is clear. We aim to generate tangible policy recommendations that substantially influence the management of future pandemic crisis situations."
Emeritus Professor Robert Clancy, one of the speakers, provided insights into the event’s structure and its focus on examining the government's handling of the COVID-19 response. “This symposium is structured to reflect the collective views of those involved in this response,” Clancy said, “with a particular focus on lessons learned as to mistakes made and how best to go forward with the best plan to handle health challenges of similar ill when next encountered.”
He further stated, “Presentations from professionals covering these disciplines will be followed by an interactive workshop with an expert panel charged with identifying outcomes. The day will conclude with a reception allowing informal discussion amongst participants and attendees. A book including presentations and outcomes will be published.”
According to AMPS, the conference will produce a set of well-defined resolutions, to be shared widely with practitioners, public health authorities and government bodies. These resolutions will identify practical measures to ensure safe and effective responses. In doing so, they aim to reduce mishandling in crisis management that could potentially compromise Australians’ health.
Another speaker, Professor Philip Morris, highlights the offerings attendees can expect: “deep-dive sessions into key aspects of pandemic response, insights from top-notch experts in the medical and public health fields, interactive workshops fostering collaboration and idea exchange, networking opportunities with like-minded professionals and access to cutting-edge research and best practices”
Who are the speakers?
One of the keynote speakers at this event is a retired nurse, John Campbell. Campbell is based in the UK and has a YouTube channel with over three million subscribers where he shares about COVID-19-related topics. The conference will be divided into three sessions.
Progress achieved and challenges faced during the pandemic
The Australian government’s pandemic measures yielded a mixed set of outcomes. The Financial Times reported that while Australia’s initial zero-COVID strategy showed positive results in containing the virus, some critics argued that it was too strict with potential adverse economic implications.
The government’s actions included closing international borders to non-residents and, at times, restricting internal state border crossings. Widespread testing and contact tracing enabled authorities to suppress community transmission and by June 2021, Australia had recorded low COVID-19 case numbers compared to other countries.
However, these actions by the government had some negative impact on businesses and families, as business owners complained that the lockdown lingered for too long. According to a Lancet study, the Australian government was accused of discriminatory travel restrictions against specific countries, leaving many Australians stranded abroad for long periods. Moreover, as new variants emerged, maintaining zero-COVID became increasingly difficult. The Australian authorities then shifted their focus to pushing vaccination campaigns and moved from their zero-COVID policy in September 2021.
A call for investigations and open dialogue
The safety of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and the Australian government’s response to the pandemic are still being discussed in the Australian medical community. While critics like Gillespie are challenging pharmaceutical giants and calling for transparency, the AMPS has created a platform for open dialogue to discuss policies that will help guide future pandemic responses.
By bringing together experts and stakeholders, the upcoming conference aims to shed light on the lessons learned, address ongoing concerns, and chart a path forward for better preparedness.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a 
Sahara Ray is undoubtedly a good-looking woman. Since she is Australian-born there is even a possibility that we may be distantly related
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