Australian Politics
Monday, September 12, 2022
Stark evidence of how landlord and tenant legislation has "helped" tenants
In a single-minded attempt to "protect" tenants, the government has made it hard for landlords. So guess what? Landlords are people too so they have got out of the game and sold off the properties they once rented out. Hence the shortage. A government that wanted to help tenants would make it easier on landlords, not harder. I once had six houses that I rented out. I now have none. The battle got too hard
It's an heroic thing when a landlord puts a property worth half a million dollars into the hands of tenants with only a trifling security deposit to protect their interests but it's heroism that is rarely recognized. And no Leftist government will recognize it. Hate and grievance are their themes
Working Queenslanders in the state’s regional communities are being forced into homelessness despite earning a steady income, disturbing both advocates and industry leaders.
Veteran support services have described the dire wave of those squeezed on to the streets as the “new cohort” of Queensland’s homeless.
The alarming reality for those who are employed but displaced was revealed as emergency tents are flown into communities across the breadth of the state, detailing the urgent nature of the state’s housing crisis.
It comes as Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk last week refused to convene a housing summit amid mounting pleas from stakeholders and advocates for the government to work with industry to develop new ideas to address the state’s housing needs.
Anglicare Central Queensland chief executive Carol Godwin said residents in Rockhampton were burdened with the same tightening of the market which has squeezed the community into insecure housing.
She said there are now low income working families presenting for support who she described as the “new cohort” of homeless regional Queenslanders, which “we have never had in the past”.
“What really has surprised us is we’ve seen significant pressures for those that are even working to secure housing,” she told The Courier-Mail.
“If you’re a young person, even if you’re sharing, forget about any private rental being affordable — it simply is not.
“Even if it was affordable, no one would house you anyway — there’s just nothing there for you.”
The vacancy rate in Rockhampton was crunched to 0.3 per cent, according to SQM Research — a desperate shortfall of available housing experienced in nearly all Queensland communities.
In Toowoomba, where the rate has fallen to 0.4 per cent, the minuscule available stock has led to a near 50 per cent rise in homelessness in three years, Lifeline Darling Downs chief executive Grant Simpson said, citing Queensland Council of Social Service data.
“That’s a phenomenal increase (in homeless people),” he said.
“If you go out further west in Queensland in remote and very remote areas, it exponentially increases out there even more.
“It’s just a very significant issue that seems to be increasing and there doesn’t seem to be a short-term solution to alleviate it.”
Finding a rental in the state’s regional market has been getting tougher, according to locals, even if they have the finances to back them up.
For 25-year-old Amity Ellis, securing a rental in Mackay after moving from her hometown in Tasmania has been “very difficult”.
“I work 38 hours a week on casual wages, and I still can’t seem to find anything,” she said.
“I will apply for a property and have it be unsuccessful the next day.”
Being from interstate also means she has limited options to rely on when house applications fall through each week.
“It’s been very difficult. I’m from Tasmania so I only know a handful of people that can offer me support,” she said.
In the meantime, she’s been fortunate enough to stay with her partner and his family, but the 25-year-old receptionist is keen to get a place of her own.
“My housing is very complicated … I can stay with my partner and his family but they just had a new born baby so it’s a little over crowded,” she said.
Amid the crisis, caravan parks have evolved into makeshift crisis centres across the state with the peak body declaring members are being swamped with the highest ever levels of inquiries.
And Caravan Parks Association of Queensland chief executive Michelle Weston said it was “unusual cohorts” of people seeking immediate refuge.
“Parks that I’ve spoken to have indicated they’ve got families who are living in a tent in their park for a period of up to three months,” she said.
“These are families with young children and two parents who are both working — these are not people who would normally be in a situation where they are without a standard rental property.
“I haven’t seen it at a point like this in the past,” Ms Weston said, who has been operating in the industry for at least a decade.
The alarming reality of the crisis has led to Queensland St Vinnies chief executive Kevin Mercer — along with Ms Godwin, Mr Simpson and about a dozen other stakeholders and advocates — demanding Ms Palaszczuk convene an urgent housing summit.
“The whole system needs to be around the table,” Mr Mercer said.
“It needs to be an action-oriented outcome and there needs to be some real results and real action that comes out of it with a serious investment to get the traction we need in the long term.”
Mr Mercer told The Courier-Mail his charity foundation has resorted to handing out tents in the Atherton Tablelands near Cairns as well as Toowoomba, Roma, Warwick and Noosa on the Sunshine Coast.
He conceded this was an “inadequate response”, but it was also revealing of the scale of the crisis.
“It’s better than sleeping on the street and uncovered but it’s not the right response,” he said, adding that St Vinnies volunteers felt the “anguish” of being forced to provide the emergency option.
“It’s working people who have been displaced out of their homes because they can’t afford the rent increase or the landlord sold the property,” Mr Mercer said.
“They’re working in that community; living in that community; kids go to school in that community, but there’s no living options.”
In outlining the urgency of the need for the state government to convene a summit, Mr Simpson said it was crucial the private sector were included to allow various specialists to contribute to the solution.
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Evidence-free assertions about climate change
If there is evidence for your case, you don’t need activists to glue themselves to the road to try and convince others to believe in your ‘cause’. Armed with evidence, you don’t need to bluster and disparage your political opponents. If you have evidence for your case, you don’t behave like a smug, arrogant ignoramus, inside or outside Parliament.
It was an enfant terrible of the climate alarmist Michael-hockey-stick-Mann, who years ago labelled the climate alarmist movement as a cause when he derided dissenting climate scientist Dr Judith Curry for her views, saying, ‘It’s not helping the cause. Nor her career…’
Mann should be reminded that science does not exist to support ‘causes’.
I am motivated to make these points in the wake of a series of overheated, under-informed comments by the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, The Hon. Chris Bowen.
He is so loud and derisory in his Parliamentary outbursts on matters to do with his portfolio that his behaviour invites ridicule. One might say that he exhibits the unquestioning confidence of the truly ignorant.
Confucius once said, ‘Real knowledge is knowing the extent of one’s ignorance.’ And while I’m quoting people, it was Charles Darwin who said, ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’
Back in 2010, 43 Fellows of the Royal Society (The United Kingdom’s national academy of sciences, a Fellowship of some 1,600 of the world’s most eminent scientists) wrote to its then president, Paul Nurse, to complain about the unscientific tone of the society’s messages on Climate Change. Eight years later, a group of 33 current and former Fellows of the Geological Society wrote an open letter to their president in similar vein.
The letter notes:
‘The IPCC position matches observations that almost half of the warming that has occurred over the last 150 or so years since industrialisation, had already happened by 1943, well before the rapid rise of industrial carbon dioxide. This difference of opinion is critical, for if carbon dioxide did not cause the pre-1943 warming, the claimed consensus that Catastrophic AGW is caused by human carbon dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution, which is supported by GSL, must be mistaken.
‘As this letter makes clear, it is not true that 97 per cent of scientists unreservedly accept that AGW theory is fixed, or that carbon and carbon dioxide are ‘pollutants’ and their production should be penalised; how can the primary nutrient in photosynthesis be a pollutant? We also note that 700 scientists have made submissions to the US Senate expressing dissent from the consensus and 166 climate scientists issued a challenge to Ban Ki Moon on the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 to provide proof of human-induced global warming, which he did not do.’
My point here is that there are plenty of scientists whose work in the wickedly complex field of climate science is available for scrutiny. Ministers should avail themselves of all relevant information to their portfolios before playing with policy blocks.
Not far behind Bowen in blustering rhetoric is the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese. Several times he has summoned up the angry gods of extreme weather events as examples of the dangerous ‘Climate Change’ that his government dragon will slay with the Net Zero mantra.
For example, in early July 2022, Albanese was commenting on the floods which had devastated large regions in Sydney’s northwest. He told the media how Climate Change was causing ever-increasing extreme weather events. He repeated this at a news conference in early September.
My concern is that the Prime Minister is making emphatic public statements that are simply wrong and swiftly contradicted by history. Perhaps he has not been properly advised on this topic? His alarmism flies in the face of the IPCC’s SREX special report of 2012 on extreme weather, which conceded that warming could well reduce extremes, rather than increase them – another glaring contradiction. Further, it would be 20-30 years before any climate effects on extreme weather would even be detectable against natural climate variability, if ever. The 2013 IPCC report broadly endorsed those findings.
While the Prime Minister and his ministers continue to peddle false alarms about ‘Climate Change’ using ordinary weather events which contradict even the questionably reliable IPCC Bible on the subject, no one dares to call them out. Does the government have any advisers who can steer them off such … well, inaccuracies?
When the IPCC was set up over 30 years ago its objective was ‘to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [i.e., human-induced] interference with the climate system’.
The original mandate from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for the IPCC was to address ‘dangerous human-caused Climate Change’. That set the agenda, which became the ruling orthodoxy, a circular argument that starts with the conclusion it is trying to prove.
The main dogma of Climate Change science is stated in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
‘It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in GHG concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period (Figure SPM.3).’ (IPCC 2014)
Chris Bowen, Anthony Albanese, and the whole Parliament wrapped up in the narrative of climate terror may like to heed the words of biosciences researcher Dr Javier Vinós and petrophysicist Andy May:
‘There is no evidence confirming this dogma. It is based on computer model results that were programmed with the same assumptions that emerge from them, in a clear case of circular reasoning.’
https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/show-us-the-evidence-minister/ ?
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$1bn “golden ticket” visa scheme to be axed over concerns its gives criminals a pathway to citizenship
The $1bn-a-year “golden ticket” visa scheme will be axed following concern it has given criminals a pathway to Australian citizenship without proper checks and growing evidence the program has a profoundly negative impact on the economy.
The move follows revelations by The Australian that while more than 7000 Chinese citizens have been granted the $5m Significant Investor Visas, not a single applicant in the past 10 years has been rejected under the character test designed to help exclude criminals or those with suspiciously obtained wealth.
The scheme is expected to be killed off within the next year as the government pivots sharply to give priority to skilled worker visas, a move that will cause serious ructions in the multibillion-dollar business investment visa industry, where financial advisers, migration agents, banks and specialist investment firms have reaped huge rewards for a decade.
The government signalled a move away from business investment visas at the Job Summit, with the number of visas in the program halved for this year, in part because the enormous backlog of applications was thwarting attempts to process visas for desperately needed skilled workers.
Experts have flagged concerns over a class of Australian visa that has operated for 10 years with zero rejections.… More than 7,000 Chinese citizens have been approved for the Significant Investor Visa scheme, which requires a minimum investment of $5 million. The so-called 'golden ticket' visa confers an More
On Sunday, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said the significant investor visa scheme was “a really big problem” in the immigration system.
“I think most Australians would be pretty offended by the idea that we’ve got a visa category here where effectively you can buy your way into the country,” Ms O’Neil told Sky News.
“I don’t see a lot of great benefits to the country currently … some really important journalism has pointed out that there are some potential security issues here in this visa.”
Figures obtained by The Australian show 2370 super-rich Chinese nationals have been granted primary visas, along with more than 5000 family members, under the Significant Investor Visa scheme, which requires a minimum investment in Australia of $5m and confers an automatic right of permanent residence.
None of those who applied has failed the “character test” since the scheme was introduced in 2012, and just 23 were refused for failing to provide accurate information.
Investors can gain citizenship even if they spend only 40 days a year in Australia and unlike other visa holders, they are not required to learn or speak English. There is also no upper age limit.
Australian Treasury calculations suggest a business investment visa holder will cost Australian taxpayers $120,000 more in public services than they pay in taxes over their lifetimes.
“The lifetime impact on the Australian budget is negative because these are people who generally are coming in at quite a late stage of their life, often at the end of their business career, and are coming to Australia basically to settle down and retire,” Ms O’Neil said.
“It is a visa program that I think isn’t adding value to the country and it’s something we will be looking at in the context of the review of the immigration program I have just announced. At the moment, I can’t see a lot of reasons to maintain it as part of our program.”
As governments around the world shut down passports-for-sale schemes in a bid to stop organised crime syndicates and corrupt regime officials hiding their loot, police and security agencies fear Australia has become the go-to destination for those with big enough wallets.
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The most stupid decision of Palaszczuk’s team will hurt Qld
In a field as big as the Melbourne Cup, the most hare-brained, stupid, appalling decision of the Palaszczuk government has just emerged, and it will have far-reaching impacts for the prosperity of Queensland.
Whoever signed off on the great land tax heist, both the bureaucrat and the relevant minister, should be banished from Queensland forever, tarred and feathered, never to set foot across the border ever again.
Here’s how the new land tax levy works. From June next year, the Palaszczuk government is raising property tax on investors who also own land interstate.
The new tax will not affect investors who own land in Queensland only, however, if you own a property in another state or territory, you will be handed a bigger bill.
For example, in a case study provided by the government, say you own a property with a land value of $745,000 in Queensland and $1,565,000 worth of land in Sydney – not uncommon at all – your land tax bill will go from $1950 to $8422.
The government has passed new laws, which now allow it to bill you for the total value of the investors’ land holdings.
Property experts say the “double tax’’ will reduce home values and force up rents.
Economic experts say that it’s a “money grab’’ designed to bolster the government’s coffers at a time when it is trying to deal with a $100bn debt.
The problem is it will come back and bite the government on the bum as interstate investors abandon Queensland.
It’s certainly a disincentive for investors in the southern states to buy Queensland property, and maybe that’s all part of this peculiar and wider plan, to drive down prices to make housing more affordable.
Maybe it’s just another extension of Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Covid-19 plan that “Queensland hospitals are just for Queenslanders’’.
Now, it’s Queensland houses are just for Queenslanders. It takes that xenophobic, jingoistic State of Origin mentality that the Premier plays on so heavily to a whole new level.
Treasurer Cameron Dicksaid before the last election there’d be no new taxes. Except of course for mining companies, corporate bookies and now people investing in Queensland property. Is it constitutional? Surely a smart lawyer would tear it apart in the High Court.
Doesn’t the Constitution’s key mandate suggest free trade between the states and territories?
It reinforces the notion that this government will do anything, say anything, to raise extra cash because it needs to keep feeding the addictive, bloated and ever-expanding public service bureaucracy.
This is the same corpulent public service that pays union fees to the same unions that donate huge amounts to the Labor Party to be re-elected. Did somebody say Ponzi scheme?
More Coverage
Fears Palaszczuk land tax grab could drive investors away
It is bad policy from a government that now doesn’t even pretend to govern with competence, ethics and morals.
They pretend to care, yet with failings in health, integrity, waste, juvenile justice, the economy and now the property industry, they simply don’t.
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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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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
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