Australian Politics
Thursday, February 15, 2024
Finance guru Mark Bouris’s radical solution to housing crisis
This is a reasonable proposal but will not address the supply/demand imbalance. It would probably send prices higher
Don’t expect the housing situation to get better any time soon. We have massive demand – fuelled by record population growth. We have low supply.
The latest figures show that housing approvals have fallen to a decade low. The number of loans to build or buy a new home have crashed to record lows. Construction companies are going broke practically daily.
I don’t see any genuine solutions being tabled.
In fact, the only thing our politicians seem capable of doing is spruiking pie-in-the-sky housing targets … that I suspect even they know we’ll never meet.
What we need are practical solutions.
Reducing immigration to 100,000 people a year (instead of 500,000 a year) should be step one. But I think we keep international students. They are a huge export for us in the education area. This is obvious.
Reduce demand overall, rents go down. It’s as simple as that.
But that doesn’t help mortgage holders. They still have massive mortgages.
They’re now paying off their mortgages at much higher interest rates. As a result, they’ve shut their wallets. And this is hurting the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on them to spend.
So here’s a proposal: make interest payments on mortgages tax deductible.
Hear me out.
Let’s say you owe $500,000 on your mortgage. Let’s also say your interest rate is 7.0 per cent. That means each month you’d be paying just over $2900 in interest alone.
Now imagine you’re in the United States.
Over there, this $2900 monthly interest payment would be tax deductible.
Yes, you read that correctly.
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, mortgage holders get a “home mortgage interest deduction” that allows them to deduct interest paid on up to US$750,000 of their home loan principal.
The deduction only applies to home loans on a primary place of residence. Fair enough.
So why don’t Australians get the same benefit?
If it’s good enough for the Americans, surely it’s good enough for us too?
The PM could pass legislation on this next week.
Sure, you’d have the boffins at Treasury lose their minds over this proposal.
They’d say the tax offset would take too much money out of Canberra’s coffers.
But I’d rather the money be in the hands of mortgage holders who can spend it at local businesses, invest it in good companies and save for a rainy day … instead of having it in under the control of Canberra-based politicians and bureaucrats.
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More Sydney parents than ever opt for private schools
Many government schools are so dire that you can't blame them
The state’s private schools are enrolling more students than at any time on record despite soaring cost-of-living pressures and fee hikes that have pushed tuition costs above $40,000 a year at numerous Sydney private schools.
Official data released on Wednesday shows the proportion of students enrolled in NSW public schools has fallen for the fifth year running, dropping to 62.9 per cent in 2023. It is the lowest share of students attending state schools in the past two decades of reporting.
The exodus from public schools in NSW is being driven in part by the establishment of low-fee private schools in Sydney’s north- and south-west growth corridors, where the construction of new public schools over the past decade has failed to keep pace with population growth.
Most other states and territories have experienced a similar trend, the figures released by Australian Bureau of Statistics show.
In NSW, 785,847 students were enrolled in public schools last year, 267,253 in Catholic schools and 195,356 in private schools. The proportion attending private and Catholic high schools is approaching half of all secondary students, rising to 43 per cent last year.
University of Sydney education researcher Helen Proctor said the issues public schools faced were widely publicised, such as teacher shortages, which could be contributing to parents considering private options.
“There has been a long-term disparagement of public schools, there’s been many people talking them down,” Proctor said. “It is very hard for public school leaders. If they don’t talk about the crisis and the resources, how are they going to get anything done? On the other hand, if parents hear about teacher shortages, they’re naturally going to get very worried.”
A separate snapshot of data provided by the Association of Independent Schools of NSW shows 65,000 students, or 28 per cent of those enrolled in the private system, are attending a school that charges $20,000 or more.
About 60,000 pupils, or a quarter of all those enrolled in the private system, attend a school with fees below $5000 a year. Another 72,000 pupils attend a school that charges between $5000 and $10,000.
Between April 2022 and March last year, repayments on a million-dollar mortgage increased by more than $2000 a month. A survey conducted by National Australia Bank in 2022 found one in 10 parents were relying on family members, including grandparents, to pay tuition costs.
Catholic Schools NSW chief executive Dallas McInerney said systemic schools have grown at the fastest rate since 2013. They typically charge up to $3000 a year, with substantial sibling discounts.
“These numbers are a huge vote of confidence from parents because parents know they get quality and affordable education, and that their children thrive in our schools,” McInerney said.
“We provide high job prospects, further study pathways and create great citizens. It’s a massive contribution to society.”
Association of Independent Schools of NSW chief executive Margery Evans said the bulk of the growth in independent schools was in the lower and mid-fee bands under $10,000.
“The main growth has been low and mid-fee schools, many in Sydney’s north-west and south-west growth areas. We’ve also seen increasing numbers in regional schools including in Tweed Heads. These schools are affordable for parents paying off mortgages, and appealing because they are kindergarten to year 12 campuses,” she said.
“There are also almost 20 faiths represented in the independent sector across 350 schools, including Christian, Buddhist, Islamic and Jewish schools. These schools provide an education that reflects parents’ values and beliefs. Forty years ago, there weren’t any Islamic schools. There are (now) 29, with 22,000 students.”
NSW Education Minister Prue Car said over the past five years, NSW has seen the biggest drop in the country when it comes to the share of students in government schools.
“It is no coincidence that we have had 24,000 students leave the public system at the same time the previous Government oversaw a teacher shortage crisis,” she said. “The government is undertaking urgent work to repair the states’ education system, by investing in our teaching workforce and addressing the chronic teacher shortage facing our state.”
Mother Jasmine De Leon chose to send her youngest two children to a local private school, Norwest Christian College, near her home in Quakers Hill, partly because it was a co-educational pre-school to year 12 campus.
“My kids have been going to the same school since they were four years old, and having that pre-kindergarten year was what really interested us,” De Leon said.
“There is also a big sense of community and a structured environment. They also offer smaller classes and a variety of extracurricular subjects.”
She considered having her two children sit the public selective high school test, but after five years at their current school they “had become comfortable and had established strong friendship groups.”
“It’s also at the lower end for private school fees, and it was affordable for us and worth it when considering what the school could offer”.
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Drop Makarrata Commission to avoid further antagonism, says Ken Wyatt
Former Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt has warned Labor against pursuing a Makarrata Commission to oversee truth telling because this would further “antagonise” Australians and stoke division, following the failure of the voice referendum.
The first federal Aboriginal cabinet minister said embedding truth telling in school curriculums – as Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney suggested on Wednesday – would not work in isolation as a means of helping all citizens understand the nation’s history before and since settlement.
“School curriculums alone will not do it,” Mr Wyatt said.
“I wouldn’t go with a Makarrata Commission, not based on the African model. Because in the face of the No vote you don’t want to antagonise. I think the Prime Minister has lost a lot of kudos and ground on the voice failing. His leadership has to have a question mark over it.”
Mr Wyatt has been a long supporter of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart’s call for an Indigenous voice enshrined in the Constitution – followed by treaty and truth telling. He quit the Liberal Party over its position on the referendum.
Ms Burney said on Wednesday she was still talking with communities about the outcomes of the referendum and “what the next steps would be”, but would not put a timeline on truth telling and what that could look like.
“I’m having discussions with the cabinet about that … the issue of truth telling is incredibly important,” she told the ABC.
“There are many, many ways in which that can happen including the school curriculum.
“There’s not a particular model that I’m favouring at the moment … I am very open, as the government is very open, to what it might look like.”
The Australian understands there are no discussions between federal and state governments on implementing truth-telling into curriculums, with the national curriculum not due to be reviewed until 2026-27.
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures were already key priorities in the curriculum.
“The Australian curriculum version 9.0 includes a range of additional content that recognises the experiences and perspectives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples,” a spokesman said. “The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures cross-curriculum priority aims to deepen all students’ understanding of the histories and cultures of First Nations Australians and their knowledge of important aspects of our national history.”
Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership acting chief executive Edmund Misson pointed to professional standards that required teachers to demonstrate how they promoted reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the classroom.
Australian Primary Principals’ Association president Angela Falkenberg said enormous strides had been taken in the curriculum over years to embed Indigenous history and culture into teaching and argued truth-telling efforts should be focused on adults.
Kevin Donnelly, who reviewed the curriculum under the Abbott government, said he believed the pendulum had swung too far away from teaching children about Western history and values, detracting from their “national pride” as part of a left-leaning agenda.
Opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson echoed Dr Donnelly’s comments, saying: “Classrooms should remain a place for education, not a forum to foster division and activism.”
While Mr Wyatt was a supporter of a constitutionally enshrined voice, as minister he toed the Morrison government’s line and did not pursue the measure. Instead he oversaw work on a legislated voice, resisted calls for a truth commissioner and believed in “organic and evolving truth telling” rather than formal hearings such as take place in the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa.
Mr Wyatt said Labor should commission a series of documentaries through the ABC on Indigenous history and repurpose the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies for a couple of years to develop “historical monologues”. He believed the arts, the media, schools and universities all had a role in helping Australians learn the stories of where they live.
“We did a fair bit of work on (truth-telling),” he said. “What I was in the process of bringing together is all of the national bodies that hold records of Indigenous Australians, seeing what they had in their collections including the film archives. I was looking at some of the work out of the frontier wars by Rachel Perkins. And then I was looking at how do we translate that into … not a catalogue, but an understanding of what history we have.”
Mr Wyatt said all of the work he had progressed for truth telling would be available to Ms Burney.
“The National Indigenous Australians Agency would have all of that and I’m surprised they haven’t come forward and said ‘Minister (Burney) the previous minister had us working on this stuff’,” he said.
Voice campaigner Sean Gordon said truth telling could not occur effectively without a regional and local voice model first being set up.
The Greens and independent Indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe called on the government not to walk away from Makarrata, treaty and truth telling.
However key architects of the Uluru Statement from the Heart did not pushed for national truth-telling hearings during the voice campaign last year.
Instead, Uluru Dialogue co-chair Megan Davis warned against “performative story-telling” led by government.
Professor Davis advocated for local truth telling projects such as the Carrolup Elders Reference Group and its Centre for Truth-telling.
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Diversity must be irrelevant when selecting judges
Right now, nobody knows the religious or racial breakdown of the federal judiciary. And in the age of doxxing, that is how it should stay.
As the Jewish community has learned, there is no shortage of racist ratbags in this country who are prepared to single out people for malicious mischief based on their race or religion.
This is why the federal government needs to be very careful about its proposal to start collecting statistics on the “diversity” of the judiciary.
The only possible reason for collecting data on the ethnic or religious background of judges would be to use it as a benchmark for future race-based judicial appointments.
Collecting this data might seem well meaning, but it misconstrues the role of the judiciary, would feed racial division and would inevitably hurt the standing of the very people it is intended to benefit.
At the moment, the community knows that all judicial officers are selected based on their ability to do the job. They are not selected because of their race, religion, sexual orientation or disability.
They are there to do a job of critical importance. They are not there to represent anyone or provide special treatment for those of the same race or religion.
Inherent characteristics such as ethnic background are simply irrelevant to the question of whether candidates for the bench are fit for office.
But it is easy to see how that would change if statistics on judicial diversity were ever introduced.
Politicians would inevitably brag about their successes on this measure, while criticising their opponents who fall short.
Merit might remain the formal criterion for appointment – but in name only.
The commitment to measure judicial diversity was made by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus in September 2022 when he accepted in principle a series of recommendations from the Australian Law Reform Commission.
He committed the government to promoting diversity on the bench and introducing what he described as a more transparent process of appointing judges.
This forms the context for this week’s push by the Australian Institute of Judicial Administration to promote diversity and cultural awareness as key considerations in selecting judges.
So with the push for diversity on the bench gathering strength, it is worth considering what sort of selection system would achieve this outcome.
In its 2022 report on judicial impartiality, the Law Reform Commission did not recommend any particular method of selecting new judges.
But that report does single out one proposal which, if enacted, would restrict the discretion of the attorney-general and hand real influence to an advisory panel.
This system would have the effect of imposing a political penalty on any attorney-general who departed from a list of candidates drawn up by an advisory panel.
The composition of the proposed advisory panels would be diversified – “potentially including lay members”.
And if an attorney-general departed from the panel’s short list, a public explanation would be required by law.
Instead of allowing each federal government to choose its own method of selecting judges, the method outlined in the commission’s report would be entrenched by statute.
Compare this to the view of Marilyn Warren, a former chief justice of Victoria. In 2007 she told a conference hosted by the National Judicial College that the predominant experience was that the current appointment system had worked well.
She warned against removing the judgment of the executive branch of government – whose core is the ministry and the Governor-General – and “imposing a mandatory community-based selection model”.
“Transparency for the sake of satisfying modern pursuit of accessibility of process will make the process more open and public but political and, inevitably, controversial. Look at the American experience,” Warren said.
The selection system outlined by the Law Reform Commission seems to come very close to the sort of “bureaucratisation” that has been opposed by Robert French, a former chief justice of the High Court.
In 2017, when French retired from the court, he made it clear he supported the current system in which judicial selection is a matter for the executive.
“The question is, first of all, should that selection process be constrained by a limitation to a number of names put up by some sort of panel? Or should the executive simply have a process by which it receives the best possible advice?” French said.
“I am inclined personally, although there are others who would debate this, not to favour bureaucratisation of the selection process.”
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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 conservative Australian political commentator
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My son Joe at ANU
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