Australian Politics
Kochie tells renters to ‘love your landlord’
Unusual wisdom in a public figure
Former Sunrise host David Koch has weighed into the rental crisis debate, urging renters to “love your landlord” and instead point the blame at governments.
Writing for The Nightly, Koch said it may sound like “heresy, but tenants should direct their anger towards all three levels of government — not their landlords — when it comes to skyrocketing rents”.
“Governments, not landlords, have been derelict in not foreseeing and planning to avoid this rental crisis,” he said.
“It’s complex and there is no silver bullet solution. But so-called ‘greedy’ landlords are being unfairly targeted as the scapegoat. You probably have one in your family, or among your friends, and I bet they have increased the rent to cover rising loan repayments. But vilifying property investors is going to make the crisis a whole lot worse. The reality is many of those landlords are now saying it’s simply not worth it and are selling up, which just adds to the problem.”
Koch noted that there were around 2.2 million landlords in Australia, according to Australian Taxation Office (ATO) data, or one fifth of the population, the vast majority of whom own just one investment property.
“They aren’t property moguls, they’re ordinary Australians trying to build a nest egg,” he said.
He argued the reason rents were rising — in some cases by more than 50 per cent — was not “greed” but a combination of “rising interest rates, a lack of new developments because of a shortage of land, delays in approvals, banks reducing borrowing capacity, and developers going broke”, as well as “a lack of commitment from governments to develop enough affordable low-cost rental housing”.
Koch did not mention Australia’s record immigration intake of 518,000 net overseas arrivals last year, which a growing number of experts have conceded is a key driver of housing demand.
He echoed comments last month from billionaire property developer Harry Triguboff, who said a large reason developers were going broke was the lack of investors due to the low net return of about 2.5 per cent.
“The only way to quickly resolve the rental crisis is to love your landlord and encourage more property investors to make more stock available,” Koch said.
“So when debating the merits of negative gearing, be careful what you wish for. Between 1996 and 2021, private investors provided 1.1 million rentals. Community groups added 41,000 but there was a reduction of 53,000 in government properties. Rather than castigate landlords, governments should be trying to match them in the amount of new properties coming onto the market.”
He added that the federal government’s “much-vaunted $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund will only provide an additional 30,000 social and affordable homes which is tiny compared with what is needed”.
“So private investors will have to continue to do the heavy lifting,” he said.
The piece, for Seven West Media’s newly launched online news site, received mixed reaction online.
“The Nightly — off to a flyer delivering bangers,” former union boss Tim Lyons wrote on X. “Perspectives we don’t hear from new, interesting voices.”
Another user wrote, “This daring pro-boomer pro-landlord position is exactly the sort of fearless principled stand that has been missing from the Aussie media landscape. Well done to the editorial team at The Nightly.”
Anne Crarey, executive general manager of property services at Little Real Estate, told news.com.au last month that the rental crisis was “only getting worse” and “I don’t see anything on the horizon that’s going to change where we’re at”.
Ms Crarey also argued the solution to the crisis has to be “encouraging people to be buying investment properties”.
“I don’t foresee any other way out of it,” she said.
“I don’t think the government’s going to be able to build what we need to build to make the rental crisis go away, so the solution firmly lands with the government in regards to making incentives to invest in properties more enticing.”
Australia’s rental crisis has seen a “marked escalation” with an increasing number of suburbs recording the “highest possible distress score”, according to Suburbtrends’ February Rental Pain Index.
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Incorrectness of ham sandwiches in schools
How ridiculous can you get?
With one in four Australian children classified as overweight or obese and an Australian state limiting the amount of ham sold in schools, what's on offer at the tuckshop is again in the spotlight.
What is sold in state school tuckshops or canteens is governed, or at least guided, by policies set out by state and territory government departments.
Queensland's is called Smart Choices and is run by the state's education department.
In New South Wales it's the Healthy School Canteen Strategy run by NSW Health and South Australia employs the Right Bite Food and Drink Supply Standards developed by its department for education.
What's central to them all is a "traffic light" system that classifies foods and drinks into green, amber and red categories.
According to most policies, red items like pies, pizzas and pastries should only be supplied twice per school term.
Amber items like burgers, muffins and lasagne shouldn't dominate menus, and green items like fresh fruit, vegetables and reduced fat dairy products should make up most items available.
Debate about healthy eating at school often flares up in term 1, but this year it's been helped along by Western Australia's review of its traffic light system which has resulted in ham being shifted into a new red category.
The Queensland Association of School Tuckshops (QAST) said it's time the Sunshine State's policy, which was written in 2007 and updated in 2016 and 2020, was also reviewed.
Ms Wooden said a QAST audit in 2022 examined the menus of more than 250 school tuckshops and found none were fully compliant with Queensland's traffic light system.
"At the moment, we know that the policy is not being implemented the way it should be [and] there's no incentive or mechanism to make sure that it is."
Principle nutritionist with Health and Wellbeing Queensland Matthew Dick said Western Australia's new rules on ham at school tuckshops were in line with expert advice.
"They want to limit it to two times per week, which is exactly the same message we as nutritionists are giving," Mr Dick said.
"Don't rely on ham all the time. It's okay as an occasional filling in your sandwiches but relying on processed foods like ham, bacon and sausages can start to become a problem."
Mr Dick said ham and processed meats were often high in fats, salt and additives and are considered carcinogens by the World Health Organisation.
"Long-term consumption of processed foods can contribute to cancers in people and that's one of the real concerns with them."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-04/tuckshop-menus-explained-school-food-nutrition/103521758
***********************************************A reality check for climate alarmists: net zero is impossible
A stable energy supply sourced from wind and sunshine was obviously impossible from the beginning but the Left have always had big problems with the obvious
One of Australia’s richest mining magnates, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, says you can already feel climate change, it has caused “deaths, devastation and hardship” all around the world already, Australia has “run out of time” and he knows how to fix it.
Forrest’s prescription promises “economic growth over generations” along with “full employment” and a “pristine environment” with “cheap energy being produced everywhere in our country”. Too easy; the only resource lacking, he says, is the “courage to get on with it”.
To deliver this energy and environmental nirvana he wants the coal, oil and gas industries to be “taxed out of existence”. Strangely, he does not include his own iron ore industry, which relies on fossil fuels for extraction, transport and blast-furnacing into iron and steel.
This simplistic combination of rampant alarmism and magic pudding economics is not rare. It is omnipresent in the rantings of Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, Greens leader Adam Bandt, Extinction Rebellion and the teals, but it is unusual coming from a titan of industry, albeit one in receipt of substantial government subsidies here and abroad for “green hydrogen” projects.
We were warned by the weather bureau and climate alarmists last spring that this summer would be extraordinarily hot and dry. Given that all turned out to be a damp squib, they are turning their forecasts a little further afield with the Nine Entertainment newspapers (in cahoots with the Climate Council) offering an online tool this week to show us how many days over 35C we can expect in our suburbs in 2050 and 2090.
It is as if these people have become so bored by the lack of public debate about their Chicken Little claims that they have opted for self-parody to amuse themselves. Not only do they seek to raise the fear of Gaia over these long-range predictions, they implore us to “take action” to make sure our particular postcode can keep the mercury below 35C for a day or two more in the summer of 2090.
The Greens voters of Penrith and Broadmeadows might be pretty cheesed off in 2090 when it still turns out that it’s only those affluent coastal postcodes that get the sea breeze. The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald might encounter some sweaty subscribers with buyer’s remorse in the autumn of 2091.
In this climate of fearmongering and idiocy we need more reality checks. For starters we might ease the sense of crisis by levelling with the public that the prime reason many heat records have been broken in Australia in recent decades is because the Bureau of Meteorology revised most of its early temperature records downwards and because it ignores any records before 1910, thereby eradicating from calculations known hot periods such as the Federation drought. (It argues this was scientifically valid and necessary, but the fact it has been done is worth sharing more widely, for context if nothing else.)
Still, temperatures will do what they will, and global emissions are still rising. It is a scientific fact that whatever Australia does on emissions cannot affect global climate, and natural climate variations can easily override any human interventions, good or bad. From the upper echelons of state and federal governments we are fed two strands of argument that are seldom challenged. The first is the alarmism and the other tells us renewables are the only way to deliver the emissions cuts required.
“So, while moving towards a renewable grid is a massive transformation,” Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says, “it is necessary for our economy, for our energy security and for the climate. Stop the delay, distraction, deception and denial. Get with the program.”
Clearly we need to address the practical reality of moving to net zero, and the pretence that this can be done easily without a heavy economic cost. We can start with the International Energy Agency, which works closely with the UN and is all on board with the net zero zeitgeist. In its Global Energy Transitions Stocktake it recognises that “half the emission reductions needed to reach net zero come from technologies not yet on the market”. Got that? We cannot ever get to net zero unless we develop technologies that are “under development” or yet to be invented.
Czech-Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil is the author of 40 books mainly focused on outlining complex realities and dilemmas. His 2022 book How the World Really Works contains bad news for those climate activists who just want to “do something” about climate change and believe the solution is easy – just decarbonise.
“The real wrench in the works,” warns Smil, is that “we are a fossil-fuelled civilisation whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.”
He is not a complete pessimist, just anchored in the reality: “Complete decarbonisation of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near miraculous technical advances.”
This is because we rely on fossil fuels not just to generate most of our electricity but to fuel our road, rail, air and sea transport, heat homes, power industry, mine minerals, create chemical and plastic products, manufacture fertilisers and grow food. While wealthy countries such as ours can make some expensive changes to improve efficiency and reduce emissions, more than half of the world’s population is still racing to get the energy it needs, massively expanding global energy demand.
“Annual global demand for fossil carbon is now just above 10 billion tons a year,” writes Smil, “a mass nearly five times more than the recent annual harvest of all staple grains feeding humanity, and more than twice the total mass of water drunk annually by the world’s nearly eight billion inhabitants – and it should be obvious that displacing and replacing such a mass is not something best handled by government targets for years ending in zero or five.”
Other practical realities deepen the dilemma. The challenges for renewables relate largely to scale and efficiency. Smil again: “Large nuclear reactors are the most reliable producers of electricity, some of them now generate it 90-95 per cent of the time, compared to about 45 per cent for the best offshore wind turbines and 25 per cent for photovoltaic cells in even the sunniest of climates – while Germany’s solar panels produce electricity only about 12 per cent of the time.”
Other researchers have tried to quantify the mineral resources needed to manufacture enough turbines, solar panels, batteries and electric engines to get to net zero.
In his paper Mining for Net Zero: The Impossible Task, Alan G. Jones finds we will have to dramatically increase the mining effort, which is already higher than at any time in history.
“For example,” Jones writes, “one estimate is that there needs to be as much copper mined over the next 20-25 years as has been mined to date.”
Another geoscientist who has been based in Finland and Australia, Simon Michaux, has warned about the scale of replacing fossil fuel energy with renewables and hydrogen. “So, we are discussing bringing in a power system significantly larger than the one we have now,” Michaux reminds us, “with power systems that are not as effective and more expensive.”
Michaux has run detailed calculations on all the key resources such as lithium, nickel, copper and cobalt required globally, and the amount we are capable of extracting. The results are sobering.
“We don’t have enough mining production or mineral reserves to manufacture the first generation of renewable technology,” he finds.
But it is even worse than that because, as he points out, all the kit, from wind turbines to solar panels, from electric engines to batteries, will have to be replaced within 10 to 25 years, and again and again.
Chris Greig, a senior research scientist from Princeton University in the US, has costed the transition for Net Zero Australia. “Such is the level of investment required to build out new-generation storage facilities such as batteries and pumped-hydro, and transmission lines, that up to $1.5 trillion will need to be deployed by 2030 to put Australia on track to meet its 2050 commitments,” declares the study he co-authored. That is an amount proximate to the size of our entire GDP to be invested over just the next six years. Good luck.
And if the resources, innovation and funding required do not make this all fanciful enough, try considering the land, approvals and practicality of installing it. Bowen has boasted about needing to install 22,000 500-watt solar panels every day for eight years, as well as more than one 7-megawatt wind turbine every day connected by at least 10,000km of new transmission lines across the same period.
Most of this will be in regional and coastal communities that do not want them. And all of it, spread diffusely across the country, will be vulnerable to disruption by storms and bushfires.
Yet they seriously try to argue that nuclear power, sited compactly on existing industrial/generation sites, requiring no additional transmission lines, will be too slow and expensive.
It is time to take the ideology and fantasy out of energy policy and address the reality.
The climate and renewables zealots are in denial.
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‘Extreme Risk’: Australia’s Oldest Hot Water Company Says Grid Not Ready for Net Zero
One of Australia’s oldest manufacturers of hot water system suppliers, Dux Hot Water, has warned a Senate inquiry that demand for electricity will increase faster than projections, meaning moves to shut down coal-fired power stations are too risky for the stability of the grid.
When it was acquired by Noritz in 2015, the Japanese company said Dux had an annual turnover of around $70 million (US$45.8 million).
It is the oldest water heater manufacturer in Australia, and provides a full range of electric water heaters encompassing electric storage, gas storage, gas continuous flow, solar, heat pump, and commercial water heaters.
In its submission to the Senate Economics References Committee Inquiry into Residential Electrification, Dux said it “fully supports the government’s net zero emissions by 2050 target” but it believes the Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) estimate for how much electricity the country uses is too conservative.
It points out that since the AEMO study in 2002, the Victorian government has banned gas connections in new homes and apartments this year. Victoria is Australia’s largest gas-connected market.
“Supply chains are shifting to electrical appliances sooner than was previously expected. The market is aware of a clear signal of electrification,” Dux said.
“Australians already have an incredibly high demand for electricity. In November 2022 ... an International Energy Agency report show[ed] Australia to be the world’s second-largest [per capita] consumer of electricity in 2020. Australia’s demand for electricity will accelerate with the replacement of gas appliances.”
As a result, the government should be wary of closing coal-fired electricity generation stations too soon, the company said, pointing out that Australia is still very reliant on electricity from that source.
In 2023, at least 50 percent but typically over 60 percent of the National Energy Market was powered by coal.
Closing Coal Power Stations Has Pushed Prices Up: Dux
“Electricity producers and their stakeholders are motivated to close coal-fired power stations and justifiably reluctant to invest capital into their maintenance,” the company said. “Hazelwood power station in Victoria closed back in 2017 resulting in a huge spike in wholesale electricity pricing.”
It quotes the Australian Energy Regulator (AER): “In Victoria, average spot prices for 2017 were up 85 percent on 2016, and up 32 percent in South Australia for the same period. New South Wales and Queensland were up 63 percent and 53 percent respectively.”
Further closures will only exacerbate the issue, Dux said.
“Liddell power station in NSW closed in April 2023. Origin has provided the required regulatory notice to close Eraring power station in August 2025. This is Australia’s largest power station supplying 25 percent of NSW’s electricity.
“Similarly, AGL has announced the closure Loy Yang in Vic and Bayswater in NSW. The NSW and Victorian governments are aware of the heightened supply risk and negotiating for some of these coal-fired power plants to remain open at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Not Ready for a Full Renewable Transition
There were also shortfalls in storage capacity for renewables and in the transmission network.
“Renewables like solar and wind energy are weather dependent, so Australia needs significant firming capacity for when the wind doesn’t blow or when the sun doesn’t shine. Sufficient firming capacity from batteries, gas-fired power stations and pumped hydro doesn’t currently exist,” Dux asserts.
“Australia’s current transmission network, especially in NSW and Victoria is based around centralised power generation in the La Trobe or Hunter Valleys. Renewable energy solar and wind farms aren’t in these same locations.
“They’re located in areas like Central West NSW, New England, Bendigo, Ballarat and require 10,000 kilometres of new 500kV transmission lines to be connected in this decade. Difficult land owner consultations, planning delays, skills and materials shortages have made for slow progress,” the submission says.
The company also complains that conflicting signals from the government have made it very difficult for manufacturers to plan.
For instance, electric storage water heaters are banned in new homes in the National Construction Code 2022 (NCC), despite there currently being no restrictions on their installation in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Tasmania.
“I don’t know that you could identify an appliance subjected to the heavy hand of government more than a water heater. In 2007, the Australian government announced a proposed ban on electric storage waters from 2010 in favour of gas.
Electrification of products represents a u-turn in policy direction. Hundreds of thousands of new homes have been built with gas appliances over the last two decades,” said Dux CEO Simon Terry.
Referencing Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s prediction that the energy market will be ready to deliver 82 percent of power from renewable sources by 2030, the submission asks: “If 82 percent of the electricity supply in less than a decade is going to be from renewable sources, why is the installation of electric storage water heaters still restricted in some states” noting that South Australia first outlawed new installations of electric water heaters in 2008, meaning over 95 percent of installations over the last 15 years were of continuous flow gas water heaters.
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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
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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