Australian Politics
Home Building Set to Grind to a Halt under new regulations
The new National Construction Code takes no account of costs. Yet another example of how government creates housing shortages
No one wants anyone to be living in substandard conditions, and we all want the disabled to live full lives, but how far can we go in making this possible?
The National Construction Code (NCC) has taken it one step too far. It will result in less affordable houses, and insoluble design issues, even making certain types of housing extinct.
It is socialistic bureaucratic overreach, robbing homeowners of individual choice and making it harder for first-home buyers to get into the market.
I grew up in a two-bedroom worker’s cottage on a 400 square metre allotment—10 metres (33 feet) by 40 metres. Raised on stumps, it had storage underneath and was built to one side of the allotment to allow a car to run down the other side.
Mum and Dad raised three children there. A third bedroom had been added to the rear of the house, and when my younger sister arrived, Dad enclosed the front veranda to make a bedroom for her.
Some of the rooms had a tongue and groove lining, and some had nothing. Nowhere in the house was there anything that you could call insulation.
Brisbane was full of houses like this. Stumped houses suit hilly terrain as they minimise the need for terracing and retaining. In flood areas, they also provide a buffer against rising water.
The construction was cheap but sturdy, and you didn’t have to be too handy to add an extension or modify something in line with need or increasing income.
Sure, it was a bit cold in winter and hot in summer, but this is Brisbane, where extremes are moderate. We coped using sweaters in winter and sweat in summer.
Most importantly, these houses were affordable for working-class people, like the children of labourers, tradesmen, and newly arrived immigrants I went to school with in East Brisbane.
You can still enjoy this style of house, ours is well over 100 years old, structurally sound and is still standing. But under the new NCC, not only couldn’t you build a house like this anymore, but not even the modern versions will pass muster.
First Issue With the New NCC
The new accessibility conditions present the biggest problem, and here you have to bear in mind that most of these requirements are specifically to allow for wheelchairs.
Only 193,600 people use wheelchairs in Australia, and if you generously assume that there is only one of them per household and none are in nursing homes and retirement villages, then that represents 1.78 percent of the total housing stock.
But to accommodate these people we are being told we need to change how we build the other 98.22 percent of our housing.
This is nuts.
By making housing more expensive it will push more people into homelessness, and there is not a lot of accessibility in a tent, car or caravan.
At the same time, it makes life more difficult for all home buyers. And for what?
If you’re afflicted by misfortune, you can either modify an existing house or move to one that fits your changed circumstances.
We do all of these things now for work, lifestyle, children or old age, so why not for disability?
Amongst the changes that will need to be made are ramps to handle slope and lifts to handle height and slope. Bathrooms will need to be made larger and corridors wider.
This will multiply costs on small lot subdivisions—themselves a device for lower housing costs—and in places with steep terrain, like Brisbane and Sydney.
The house I live in now would be non-compliant—26 steps to the front door over 6 metres, and nowhere to site a ramp. But it suits our needs at the moment.
The two-story walk-up unit, which underpins Brisbane’s affordable housing market, would also appear to be at risk unless it incorporates a lift. But lifts add not just capital but maintenance costs, which is one of the reasons this style of unit is often favoured over higher-rise ones with lifts.
Then there are the larger bathrooms and wider corridors. Not only will these squeeze some other rooms out, but they will make it difficult to build a house on the 10-metre frontage common in old Brisbane and in small lot subdivisions.
Once you’ve set your side walls back 1.5 metres each, you have only seven metres to play with. Wider corridors make that even harder.
What Else?
Then there is the requirement to raise energy efficiency to seven stars. Not only will this require a lot of insulation, but it will make it mandatory to have concrete slabs in the higher stories of any multi-level residence instead of more economical lightweight systems, like timber.
Seven stars are also difficult to attain without good solar orientation, yet even the best-designed subdivision has a number of non-optimal blocks. Not everything can be north-south.
But what is the problem with a less energy-efficient house? We’re planning to be CO2 neutral in our electricity generation by 2032, so if a house uses slightly more power, it will all be renewable power. Why should a building authority care how much of it is used?
And why shouldn’t householders be able to trade off heating and cooling costs against capital costs and other forms of adaptation?
Gabriel Poole was a Queensland architect renowned for his innovative lightweight structures. It’s doubtful many of them would be seven stars efficient.
And this must surely be the greatest objection to these new building code rules—that they rub out innovation.
How can a national authority think it is so all-knowing that it can guess the needs, preferences, and budgets of builders and consumers, as well as the ability of the industry to adapt and innovate?
The job of the Australian Building Codes Board should surely be to ensure that buildings are structurally sound and not much more.
The housing industry is fearsomely innovative and competitive, with designers, builders and suppliers looking for edges to make their products better designed and better priced. An overly regulated market destroys this innovation by removing the ability to make trade-offs.
Queensland decided to adopt all of these changes before the other states. They’ve now pulled back and made some exemptions because of the uproar from the industry.
Let’s hope for the sake of future buyers and owners and for innovation and progress, that this moves from pullback to abandonment and that the other states pay attention. If Victoria can ditch the Commonwealth Games, Australia should easily be able to ditch the changes to its building code.
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A journalist records Covidian Australia's pandemic over-reach
Medically idiotic, economically ruinous, socially disruptive and embittering, culturally dystopian, politically despotic: what was there to like in the Covid era? Billions, if you were Big Pharma. Unchecked power, if you were Big State. More money and power over the world’s governments and people, for the WHO. Template for action for climate zealots. Dreamtime for cops given free rein to indulge their inner bully. Anguished despair, if you were a caring, inquisitive reporter.
In Australia Breaks Apart, John Stapleton, a retired journalist with over 25 years’ experience with the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian, chronicles the collective madness that suffocated Covidian Australia, but also the resistance movement that began hesitantly and grew organically. It is a tale of the many villains complicit in tyranny and the few heroes of resistance. ‘What will you tell UR kids? Did you rise up or comply’, asked a sign during the Canberra protests. It’s a story of venal, incompetent politicians and brutish police – thugs in uniform – acting at the behest of ‘power drunk apparatchiks’.
If you want to know or recall what happened, read the book. If you questioned and resisted from the start, take heart at the documentation for the record. If you belong to the Covid class in slow retreat from the wastelands you created and now leave behind, take evasive action. An extract was published in the Weekend Australian. Among more than 900 online commentators, one quoted Tony Abbott that in two world wars, many risked their lives to protect our freedoms, but in the last three years, so many gave up freedoms to prolong lives. Some took Stapleton to task for failing to thank our great and good leaders and public health authorities for keeping us safe through the terrifying ordeal of the ‘rona wars. The persistence of the last attitude justifies the book’s publication. It’s an effort to chronicle and, if possible, come to terms with how an entire population was terrorised into fearing a virus and complying with arbitrary and draconian rules. Stapleton laments this is not the Australia he knew and loved. There evolved a co-dependency between the uber surveillance state and a Stasi-like snitch society in which ‘we are all guilty until proven uninfected’.
The unleashing of state violence on peaceful protestors included militarised responses on the streets and in the air that drew gasps of disbelief from around the world. State over-reach included ‘an insane level of micromanagement’. All was done without providing any evidence and cost-benefit analyses in support. It’s all here in grim detail, possibly with generous dollops of hyperbole. But who can blame Stapleton, writing amidst the ‘height of totalitarian derangement’ syndrome.?
Stapleton uses the narrative device of a fictional character called Old Alex who watches what is happening with detachment and growing disenchantment. In 444 pages divided into 19 chapters, he provides a comprehensive catalogue of the milestones, lies, and obfuscations on the relentless march to medical tyranny and vaccine apartheid. He puzzles over the left’s embrace of the Pharma-state’s over-reach. Struggles for words strong enough to convey the depth of contempt for the ‘shameless’, ‘odious’ and ‘loathed’ Scott Morrison, whose name became synonymous for some with the act of defecation as shouts were heard from inside a lavatory: ‘I’m doing a ScoMo, I’m doing a ScoMo’. Readers will encounter many writers from the Spectator Australia and Brownstone stables, which clearly sustained Stapleton through the dark Covid years with emotional connections to many of the world’s leading fellow-dissidents. They will be reminded of many characters whose horror stories were illuminated briefly during the long darkness, such as Anthony and Natalie Reale who run the Village Fix café in Shellharbour, NSW. I wrote about them in the Speccie on 15 January 2022. We encountered the big-hearted and generous family on the drive up from Canberra to our new home in the Northern Rivers in December 2021.
Australia broke apart most obviously in the way in which the Morrison government was complicit in the fracturing of the federation into mini-fiefdoms run by wannabe warlords aka Premiers and their palace courtiers of CHOs and Police Commissioners, some of whom have since been pushed upwards into Governors’ mansions. But it was more. Trust was also broken, perhaps irreparably, with respect to parliaments, the judiciary, human rights machinery, police, medical establishment, experts, and the media. The significant switch to independent media reflects disillusionment as much with social media’s Big Tech platforms that turned into narrative enforcers as with the legacy media that turned into fear-mongering Big State mouthpieces and Big Pharma shills.
It was important for someone to write this instant history under time pressure, an accessible work of record, lest we forget. Or rather, lest they be allowed to forget and move on. This is neither a book by nor for academics. Therein lies some of its failings and much of its strength. ‘The Government is my enemy’, laments a disillusioned citizen. Do not trust politicians and bureaucrats. ‘They lie for a living’, says the cynical reporter. In the years to come a flood of scholarly tomes can be expected, analysing in excruciating detail the excesses of lockdowns, masks, and vaccines and systematic assessments of their successes and failures. Given the paucity of critical journalism, it’s useful to have a record of contemporaneous events before memories fade and stories are conveniently rewritten. The journalistic strengths include on-the-ground reporting from protests like the Canberra Convoy, observation skills, an eye for the human interest story, jargon-free writing, and analysis uncluttered by theoretical explorations. His stories of the personalities encountered during the massive Canberra protests in early 2022 bring out vividly the electric atmosphere, energy, and camaraderie of what became a festive, exultant celebration of shared emotions and commitments to securing the freedoms of future generations of Australians.
This is a book to read, display prominently on the coffee table or discreetly on the bookshelf, recommend for purchase to the public library, and spread awareness by word of mouth. It contains many literary quotations and allusions. It’s appropriate therefore that I am left at the end recalling these lines from Dylan Thomas that apply very much to ‘Old Alex’: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-government-my-enemy/ ?
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‘Far Right’ or Traditional Liberal?
Alex Antic
When it comes to avoiding the intellectual rigour of constructing and prosecuting a cogent argument, those who occupy the left of the political spectrum are often shamelessly ill-equipped. It is much easier to latch onto the latest leftist buzzword of the day than to give an issue due consideration.
In this superficial world, a person who stands against vaccine mandates is an ‘anti vaxxer’, a person who believes in the free market is ‘anti worker’, and a person who is appalled by the concept of terminating a baby at 39 weeks is ‘far right’.
Luckily, the nuances of such political fairy floss often fails to escape the smug beltway world of the political elites. The man on the street couldn’t care less about the latest political epithet of the day.
It would be impossible for me to recount the number of times that salt-of-the-earth people running small businesses, volunteering in their communities, and raising families have thanked me for defending traditional Liberal values.
I don’t say this to signal virtue, but to highlight my experience since becoming a Senator – a position I am grateful to hold.
The Forgotten People, to borrow Sir Robert Menzies’ famous phrase, are tired of being overlooked and want to see politics that invests in the next generation of Australians and fights the reckless policies of the left which are driving this nation into the ground.
I firmly believe there is no universe in which mandatory vaccinations, especially with treatments lacking long-term safety data, are consistent with Liberal values. But it isn’t just vaccine mandates that have hurt Australians. People are fed up with the drift of politics in general. They are tired of alarmist rhetoric about climate change and its endless failed predictions, not to mention the way that Net Zero policies are accelerating the current cost of living crisis. They are tired of the suggestion that Australia’s history is entirely negative and that they are not allowed to be grateful for their heritage. They are tired of their children being exposed to highly sexualised material and of the undermining of the traditional nuclear family, without which society cannot function, let alone flourish.
Dissenting from the identity-politics narrative of the political and cultural elites gets one labelled all kinds of ‘isms’ and ‘phobias’, and this has kept normal people, who hardly have time for such nonsense, politically disengaged.
Much like these ‘isms’ and ‘phobias’, the label ‘far right’ is one that leftists use to denigrate their opponents to avoid the hard work of formulating an argument and engaging in reasonable, respectful debate. You don’t support the Voice? You must be a racist. You don’t support Net Zero? You must be a ‘climate denier’.
Well, the Forgotten People, who know that the insults of the left are the last resort of those who lack good arguments, have had enough. Those who hold the genuine Liberal values of defending the nuclear family, minimising bureaucracy, incentivising private innovation, and upholding freedom of speech are getting involved in the machinery of politics, as is their right in a liberal democracy.
Over the past few weeks, the term ‘far right’ has been bandied around here in South Australia. Those who use it show zero insight, zero understanding, and zero ability to mount a cogent argument.
Those of us who do believe in Liberal principles will continue to strive for a better future for our nation, while Labor and the Greens enrich themselves and disempower hard-working Australians with their senseless Net Zero and identity-politics agendas.
Far from being ‘far right’, my beliefs are reflected in the fundamental principles of the party Menzies founded. That is why I joined the party and that is why I am a Liberal. There is nothing ‘far right’ about that.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/far-right-or-traditional-liberal/
************************************************Workers threatened by Tony Burke’s terrible tango with unions
Employment Minister Tony Burke and his close union associates are getting themselves into a terrible tangle as they pursue left-wing industrial relations agendas in a commercial society that needs productivity increases to lift the level of wages.
Sometimes the outcomes are bizarre.
For example, unions want casual labour curbed because full-time employees are easy to organise, but it has suddenly becoming apparent that what they are really advocating for is a reduction in take-home pay for the hundreds of thousands of people currently on casual employment.
I will detail how this works later, but one of the reasons why casual work is very popular among those with big mortgages is that they end up with more cash in their pocket to meet mortgage payments.
A second agenda is the popular concept that everyone should receive the same pay for the same work.
In the public service there is an attempt achieve this by slotting everyone into grades and it is one of the reasons why productivity in the public service has been held back.
In the private sector, if enterprises do not pay experienced people with great skills at market levels then they will lose that person.
Another person might be doing the same job but without the same skills and experience, and so simply does not receive the same pay rate.
Trying to turn the private sector into a massive public service system would absolutely kill private sector productivity in Australia.
But there is one area where the unions are particularly anxious to attack – labour hire companies in mining projects.
Labour hire companies usually have different enterprise agreements to mining companies.
Some miners have their own labour hire company with a different enterprise agreement to the base miner.
It would be a disaster for the nation if in targeting this activity, the legislation expanded public service labour classification practices into the whole of the private sector.
Perhaps the most dangerous of the proposed industrial relations changes stem from proposals that envisage labour laws should conflict with the commercial contract laws of the nation.
Australia has some of the most advanced and clearest rules in the world to determine whether a person operating under contract, and so is subject to commercial law, or whether a person has an employment relationship so is part of the labour laws.
In the past the Australian Taxation Office tried to classify genuine contractors as employees and were made to obey the law by the courts and community pressure.
Nevertheless sometimes people claim to be the operating under contract but are clearly employees but the clarity of our rules, which have been backed by High Court determinations, is reducing such incidents.
The vast majority of self employed people who work under contracts know the commercial law rules and make sure they obey them.
Their activities are governed by the laws of contract and that includes regulation by the ACCC; unfair contracts; provisions fast payment and so on.
The relationship covers the whole ambit of long-established commercial law and is totally different from the rules that cover employment relationships.
We have not seen the legislation but the government seems to thinks self-employed people are selling themselves short and their commercial law contracts should be controlled by Fair Work Australia and be part of labour law.
If that is put into legislation it will be a total disaster for the nation because these are two very separate ways of generating commercial activity.
Australians understand the difference very well and when they hire a tradesperson they first obtain a tender price and the payment is made under the terms of the contract.
Australians entering into contracts don’t want to be trying to look after superannuation and holiday pay, which is part of an employment relationship.
The contractor incorporates those rewards into the tender price and it’s a system that generates great productivity because the contractor is always looking for better to perform the task.
In many ways it’s the essence of the nation.
The independent senators have an incredible responsibility to make sure that the governments embrace of union agendas does not throw into chaos the nation’s commercial contracting system.
And this is also important in the casual area because the casual pay rate is 25 per cent above the permanent employment level.
That effectively means casuals receive cash instead of holiday, long service leave and other full-time employment entitlements.
Casuals receive superannuation entitlements usually calculated on the higher casual rate.
Employment entitlements usually add about 20 per cent to the cost of a standard before tax wage so the casual is receiving an extra payment.
Employers are prepared to pay the extra money for the flexibility that casual employment delivers.
And many casuals prefer to have cash in their pocket rather than entitlements.
The great danger in messing with these laws is that casuals will receive employment entitlements and still receive their higher cash rewards – an effective double dip.
That would destroy casual employment in the nation.
Without seeing the legislation, if a person who has been working as a casual for six months and has been receiving very regular hours and wants to take a pay cut and become classed as permanent then they should be allowed to do so, especially as ending a casual arrangement is nearly as hard as a so-called “permanent” relationship.
Remember there is no job in the country that is permanent unless backed by specific legislation.
As public servants in debt-ridden Victoria are discovering, they too can be retrenched if a government borrows too much money.
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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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