Moronic Australian housing policies INCREASE the price of housing

Scholars from the University of New South Wales, University of Sydney and RMIT University, with funding from the federal, state and territory governments, examined the suite of first homebuyer assistance schemes in Australia and compared them to measures adopted in seven other nations: the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada, Finland and Singapore.

They found that Australia’s first homebuyer policies were “extremely one-sided”, with the overwhelming majority of programs focusing on demand instead of supply.

And by pumping up demand without simultaneously addressing supply, those programs have caused higher prices.

Some first homebuyers have benefited – mainly those who were already close to being able to afford houses on their own – as have existing homeowners and property investors.

However the bulk of would-be first homebuyers have been left behind.

“When 21st century Australian governments assist first homebuyers, they do so with demand-side schemes that feed further house price increases – and in turn spur calls for more help,” the study’s authors write.

“The present research estimates that more than $20 billion was spent this way by Australian governments over the past decade, allowing households already close to attaining ownership – including, in a growing number of cases, by virtue of gifts and loans of parental wealth – to set a new, higher price in the market.

“Where some see first homebuyer assistance as middle class welfare in relation to the socio-economic position of the direct recipients, it assists none so much as existing homeowners, as both vendors and holders of housing assets.”

The study identified only a handful of “notable” supply-side first homebuyer initiatives that are currently operating, or are under serious consideration, across Australia.

One of them is the ACT’s Land Rent Scheme, which allows people to rent land on which to build a home instead of purchasing it. That reduces the upfront costs for them.

The South Australian government has used its planning powers to require developers to provide a quota of homes at an affordable price point.

Then there is the idea of Build to Rent to Buy, proposed by the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation, which seeks to enable aspiring homebuyers to rent a place while also accumulating equity in it.

“All of these appear to have strengths that should commend them for consideration by other Australian governments,” the authors note.

Otherwise, the major focus of both federal and state governments has been on demand-side schemes such as cash grants, mortgage guarantees and tax concessions. These policies increase the purchasing power of potential buyers without creating more supply. Hence, price hikes.

The study notes that, between 1945 and 1975, “large scale state support” for homebuyers included major supply-side initiatives, which were “undoubtedly instrumental” in causing the home ownership rate to rise strongly.

“Importantly these interventions included major supply side programs – especially direct housing build-for-sale provision, as well as public rental housing privatisation. While largely implemented by state governments and their agencies, these were substantially led and financially supported by the Commonwealth government,” say the authors.

“Such measures were importantly complemented by large scale demand-side assistance, especially in the form of state-backed concessional mortgages, as well as by regulatory preferencing for first homebuyer lending.

“However, over the past 30 years, in tune with the dominant neoliberal mode of governance, the focus has shifted almost entirely to demand-side assistance. The main emphasis now is on boosting first homebuyer purchasing power through cash grants and cash concessions, and on enabling access to low deposit loans.

“Because they enable a marginal first homebuyer to outbid others and set a new, higher price in the market, they fundamentally increase house prices. By comparison with some comparator countries, Australia’s approach is extremely one-sided.

“Unlike some of the counterpart governments in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, Australian authorities have in recent decades largely chosen to eschew mechanisms that directly subsidise or otherwise enable the supply of homes suitable for (or reserved to) first homebuyers.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/australian-economy/glaring-flaw-in-australias-housing-policies-exposed-as-20-billion-spend-backfires/news-story/48f2e23d2e6e2c7ae4616c82bd37fa5b

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Limitations of "Green" energy becoming incresingly obvious

It's the prophecies of skeptics that are coming true

With the energy crisis prompting governments everywhere to turn coal plants back on, wiping out many years of hard won emission reductions in advanced economies, the major limitations of renewable energy have now, at last, been acknowledged by all.

Well, almost all, with Victorian government energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio in late June ruling out paying coal and gas companies to keep them operating as part of a proposed national capacity market, saying that the state’s new offshore wind projects will ‘blow any shortfall out of the water’.

Never mind that the bulk of the advanced economies, many with far higher dependence on renewables than Victoria, have such capacity markets – ideological demands must trump operational experience.

Chief among the lessons about those limitations is the phenomena now known as ‘wind droughts’. Late in 2021 as delegates in the annual climate summit, held in Glasgow that year were noisily demanding more renewable energy, the UK had to turn on mothballed coal-power plants because of a shortage of gas and a wind drought.

In an article on the Australian edition of the academic site the Conversation published in October 2021 a researcher in climate risk analytics at the University of Bristol in the UK, Hannah Bloomfield, says that the period of still weather around the time of the Glasgow conference resulted in the power company SSE reporting that its renewable assets produced 32 per cent less power than expected.

In the article Dr Bloomfield says these ‘wind droughts’ can be classified as an extreme weather event, like floods and hurricanes. Researchers in the UK have shown that that periods of stagnant high atmospheric pressure over central Europe, lead to prolonged low wind conditions over a wide area and those conditions may be ‘difficult’ for power systems in future. Further, Dr Bloomfield notes, it is important to understand just how such events occur, as that means they can be forecast and the grids prepared for them. There is no discussion about just how the grids might be prepared for such droughts and, in any case, scientists have enough problems forecasting the frequency and severity of cyclones during cyclones seasons, and are continually taken by surprise by floods, despite studying those extreme events for decades.

But it is known that just like rain droughts, wind droughts can persist for a long time.

During a wind drought in the UK in 2018, wind made no contribution to the UK grid at all for nine days and only slight contributions for another two weeks. In the wind drought of late 2021 noted earlier, there were days when wind made no contribution at all.

Then there are the much shorter periods, perhaps ranging from an hour or so up to a day that can also be found by anyone who examines wind’s contribution to total energy supply to the UK grid over time. However, the short and long-term wind drought phenomena has received some academic attention in the UK, it is difficult to point to any systematic study of the problem in Australia.

A few concerned citizens have looked at the easily accessible figures for wind production on the National Energy Market, the grid for Australia’s east coast, to find a number of periods where the whole of the NEM was in wind drought for periods ranging from a few hours up to 33 hours. But that study was for just one year, 2020. More extensive research could well find wind droughts of much longer periods.

Activists may sneeringly dismiss all of this as having not been done by properly qualified scientists. Very well, where is the independent analysis done by academics with qualifications of any kind? While they are on the job those same academics can work out just how much storage capacity would be required to tide the national market over for a day and a half. The NEM has north of 50,000 MWs (50 GW) of generating capacity. If for the sake of argument, we assume that an average of half that is used (more during demand peaks and less during troughs) in any given period, then the market may need around 900,000 megawatt hours to get through a 36-hour drought without fossil fuel plants.

The giant water battery known as Snowy Mountain 2.0 should store about 350,000 MWh, when it is finished and assuming that it can find enough fresh water, which means the NEM might need three or four Snowy 2.0s at a bare minimum, although only one is being built.

Batteries don’t count. The Hornsdale Power Reserve Battery built in South Australia in 2017 with considerable fanfare, for example, cost $90 million but stores just 125 MWh. The photovoltaic panels now on suburban roofs all over Australia are not subject to wind droughts, but they are at their peak around the middle of day, do not work well on cloudy days or at all at night, and the excess energy still has to be stored.

To make matters worse, grids have to be designed to cope with worse case scenarios such as a very hot day, which also happens to be a calm, cloudy day. Perhaps enough power might be stored to see the grid through one such event, but then when the Snowy projects have expended one load of fresh water through turbines to generate power, it may take days to completely recharge, so to speak, by having the water pumped back into it. What happens if another extreme event occurs soon after the first?Activists insist that all these problems can be overcome simply be building more wind turbines, particularly offshore turbines as planned by Minister D’Ambrosio. In the days of sail, ships might be becalmed for days, but the trade winds which blow down Bass Strait are thought to be different. Well, are they? King Island, well out in Bass Strait, has the King Island Renewable Energy Integration Project, part of which is a wind farm, plus solar power as a supplement to the island’s long-standing diesel generators. Material produced by the owner Tasmanian Hydro estimates that renewable energy now accounts for 65 per cent of the island’s power demand.

That’s fine but what about the other 35 per cent supplied by diesel? Why couldn’t the wind farm supply all of the island’s needs, and was the outcome worth the $18 million spent on the project, all to service the island’s 1,600 residents? The Victorian government could at least produce some material apart from activist assurances that its projected reliance on offshore wind farms will be anything but a disaster.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/transition-loses-traction/

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Hate speech laws silent on Christian attacks

James Macpherson

The Left are always banging on about ‘not offending’ this group, and ‘not upsetting’ that group – words are literal violence.

Don’t misgender a trans woman. And don’t start a meeting without acknowledging the Aboriginal people – even if none are in the room. Don’t imply disabled people are in any way disadvantaged. And don’t criticise adult men in fishnets reading stories to preschoolers as anything other than perfectly normal.

But, of course, there is one group for whom the normal sensibilities do not apply.

‘Inclusiveness’ means excluding Christians. ‘Diversity’ means everyone except Christians.

And so it was that absurdity ensued when Nine News reporter Lana Murphy was handed a pro-abortion sign at a Melbourne protest that read: ‘Mary (the virgin) should have had an abortion.’

Now, abortion rallies are not exactly known for their niceties. And, let’s face it, people wanting to kill Jesus is hardly a new phenomenon. But this sign was beyond the pale.

Murphy evidently thought it was hilarious and posted a photograph of herself in fits of laughter holding the sign on Instagram.

Imagine the reaction if you went public with a sign saying, ‘George Floyd’s mum should have had an abortion’. The Left would be rightly enraged.

Keeping the comparison to religion, would Murphy have thought a sign ‘funny’ that suggested something similar regarding the Islamic faith and its most-revered individual?

Not if she valued her life, she wouldn’t. Not only would Australia’s human rights watchdog come for her, she would likely spend the rest of her life surrounded by police protection, living in terror like a French cartoonist working for Charlie Hebdo.

In this case, however, the tasteless joke was directed at Christianity. The rules of respect and tolerance don’t apply to the Christian faith.

The Left decries every kind of phobia under the sun apart from Christianophobia, which – like biology – they don’t believe exists. It’s this double standard that exposes Leftism for what it is – a shameless assault on Christianity.

Christianity is the one minority (according the latest census only 44 per cent of Australians now identify as Christian) that can be ridiculed, insulted, and mocked with impunity.

I personally support the right of anyone to mock anything they like. If free speech doesn’t apply to speech I don’t like then it is not free at all. And if Jesus is real then He is well able to deal with his detractors.

If a Nine News reporter wants to take in hand and laugh along with a sign like that, that’s her business. It’s the double standard that I take issue with. What happened to equality?

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said last year: ‘All forms of hate are unacceptable and have no place in Victoria.’

I imagine a sign saying that the founder of the Christian religion should have been poisoned in the womb and sucked into the trash before ever drawing breath would be reasonably hateful?

I look forward to Premier Andrews coming out tomorrow to condemn this hateful, vile, disgusting attack on the Christian faith.

I’m joking of course. It’ll never happen. Daniel Andrews is no more likely to defend Christianity against hateful attacks than he is to remember who recommended the security team for his failed hotel quarantine program.

Victoria’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act makes behaviour that incites or encourages hatred, serious contempt, revulsion, or severe ridicule against another person or group of people, because of their race or religion, unlawful.

Will Murphy be charged with a hate crime? We all know she won’t.

It’s Jesus who is being mocked, not Muhammad. It’s Christianity that is being pilloried, not Buddhism. Play on…

For the record, I think hate speech laws are absurd. It’s not the government’s job to protect my feelings or to adjudicate on my enemy’s emotions.

Again, it’s the double standard that insists hate is terrible except when directed toward Christians who should not be so sensitive that I object to.

Some Christians took to social media demanding Murphy’s employers sack her. If Israel Folau lost his job for saying homosexuals would go to hell, Murphy should lose her job for saying that Mary should have had access to um, health care.

This is foolish. You can’t complain about cancel culture and then demand the cancellation of people you don’t like.

As for the double standard, perhaps Christians shouldn’t be too upset by that either. That Christians are expected to turn the other cheek and to forgive every slight against them is the unintended compliment the Left pay to the Christian faith and to its founder who, when nailed to a Roman cross, said only, ‘Father forgive them, they know not what they do.’

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/07/hate-speech-laws-silent-on-christian-attacks/

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NZ: An example not to follow

If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride, as the old saying goes. And if calling a time-honoured political accounting process a “wellbeing budget” were enough to ensure that it improved the lot of the populous, New Zealanders would be many times blessed, having been graced with four of them in recent times.

Unfortunately, wishes and words do not confer wealth or wellbeing. Indeed, since the Ardern government handed down its first wellbeing budget, real outcomes in New Zealand have stagnated or gotten worse.

This is not something you would have heard at the Australia New Zealand Leadership Forum, attended by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the Australian prime minister and treasurer this week.

Ardern, who is preparing for an election next year, will be hoping that the Albanese government’s plan to adopt wellbeing budgeting creates the impression that the New Zealand government’s vision is inspiring the world. Australians should fervently hope that when Treasurer Jim Chalmers promises to “learn from the experience of New Zealand friends” in talks with his NZ counterpart, it means he’s taking the NZ experience as a cautionary tale.

From a political perspective, this would be wise. Ardern is struggling in the polls at home. Her Labour/Greens alliance government is trailing the National/Act NZ coalition by 43 per cent to 50 per cent. Moreover, 50 per cent of New Zealanders now believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.

In their second press conference in the last month, Prime Ministers Anthony Albanese and Jacinda Ardern announced progress has been made in a citizenship agreement between Australia and New Zealand.

That by itself would suggest that New Zealanders aren’t feeling the feels of wellbeing budgeting, but just to underline the disaffection, a new survey finds that 1 million Kiwis are actively considering leaving New Zealand. Of these, 44 per cent said it would be in search of a better quality of life or because the cost of living is lower overseas. And by “overseas” they mean here. Fancy fleeing to Australia for a cheaper lettuce.

But, of course, budgeting should not just be about politics. As Chalmers says, “measuring what matters” requires the government to “judge our policies, including our economic policies, against markers of progress”. If the Ardern government were judging the outcomes of its policies against the markers of progress that matter to most people, it could no longer keep up the pretence that it is delivering wellbeing budgets.

Take education, the most important policy area in any nation which believes in social mobility. A 2022 report by New Zealand education think tank The Education Hub found that 40 per cent of 15-year-olds in New Zealand are currently not achieving the most basic level of reading. Damningly, the report found student achievement in reading and writing actually decreases over their time at school. In particular, the reading attainment of Maori and Pasifika students has declined significantly since 2000.

Child poverty reduction, one of the specific goals of NZ’s wellbeing budget, has remained intractable. While the government claims there has been progress, both the Child Poverty Action Group and the Salvation Army question its assessment. New Zealand’s strict and extended pandemic policies pushed 18,000 children into poverty, according to the Child Poverty Action Group. In this area too, Maori and Pasifika children continue to do worse than the rest of the population, with estimates suggesting they are 10 per cent more likely to live in poverty than other children.

Mental health is another area specifically targeted for improvement in New Zealand’s wellbeing budgets. In 2019, the Ardern government allocated $NZ1.9 billion to addressing mental health, including bringing down the nation’s high suicide rates. By 2021, this funding had bought an extra five (yes, one hand of fingers) acute mental health beds.

In March this year, the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission found there had been no change in access to mental health services since 2019. In July, Stats NZ released its 2021 Wellbeing Statistics which found that the percentage of the population reporting poor mental wellbeing had increased by 5 per cent since 2018.

Maori had worse mental health outcomes than the general population. Goodness only knows where the money went, but the commission recently undertook a rebranding and renaming exercise which went live at the beginning of July. It is now called Te Hiringa Mahara and sees its role as “to work in the spirit of Te Hiringa Mahara (positive energy and thoughtfulness) with agencies across the system to support, transform, guide, and monitor a mental health and wellbeing system that prioritises wellbeing and that has people and whānau at its heart”.

At the time of writing it was unclear whether the Maorification of the website would improve the mental health of Maori, or of anyone else.

This goes to the heart of the problem with the wellbeing budget, says Oliver Hartwich, the economist at the helm of think tank The New Zealand Initiative. “They’ve replaced serious policy work with fashionable sloganeering. The wellbeing budget is all PR and marketing with no serious cost-benefit analysis.” Hartwich points out that economics has always been about wellbeing, “but we didn’t talk about it like that before, we used the term utility”.

It’s fair to say economists have different beliefs about what leads to wellbeing and some may be wrong or have differing notions of what it looks like. There is no reason why a treasurer shouldn’t lay out exactly what wellbeing means and how it will be measured – no reason, that is, other than that he will then be held accountable to those measures.

The measure of our treasurer will be whether what matters is delivered and that we don’t end up like New Zealand. In the end, the wellbeing of the Albanese government’s electoral prospects will depend on it.

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/australia-shouldn-t-blindly-follow-nz-wellbeing-budget-model-20220708-p5b084.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed

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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)

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