“Making the perfect the enemy of the good…” Who had “Tanya Plibersek” and 5.44pm February 15 in the sweep for when Labor would trot that one out? It’s a time tunnel to 2009 and the CPRS arguments. What were the other hits from that time? “I Got A Feeling”, “Poker Face” and “Meet Me Halfway”… and “don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good”. The Black Eyed Peas and The Be Good Tanyas*, playing the hits.
This is Labor’s full-scale attack on the Greens for abstaining in the House on voting up the government’s new housing program, ahead of possibly voting against it in the Senate, which would take it down. Labor is mobilising on this, with Julian Hill, member for Bruce, thundering (well, he doesn’t thunder, more observing archly), “Green party hypocrisy is astounding. Pretending to care about affordable housing, but…” Etc, etc.
Annika Wells, member for Lilley, joined in with, “It’s hard to be smug, weak and wrong at the same time, but last night the Greens…” Etc, etc. And Education Minister Jason Clare, a sort of Joker-fied Julian Hill, used the housing plan’s domestic violence provisions to remark, “Unbelievable. The Liberals and the Greens are threatening to block funding to build homes for women and children fleeing domestic violence.” And on it goes.
And will go. Labor is running hard on its housing program — sorry, its $10 BILLION HOUSING PROGRAM — which sounds like a major social democratic big build, really impressive. And it would be if it were true. But it’s a $500 million housing fund, money that will come from sticking $10 billion into the Future Fund and using the sharemarket investment returns to fund house building.
Labor claims this will deliver 30,000 new dwellings over five years, and will accompany its “1 million new homes“, announced last year as part of Jimbonomics New Thought, which involves the redirection of superfund money to housing investment. The Greens argue that the $500 million housing fund will deliver only 3% of the new housing we are going to need in this decade.
Labor is being dishonest about the Greens’ criticism. The mainstream media is reporting the “$10 billion housing fund” po-faced. The Greens, it appears to me, are being a little cute in suggesting the larger chunk of the housing deficit should be filled from public build — and if one applies that, then the Jim’ll Build It Scheme comes out as ludicrously wanting. And Jimbo is presenting the “1 million homes” scheme as if it were mandated superfund spending. In fact, it will simply offer some incentives for super funds to switch their investment, with no guarantee they will do so.
You know what? With the Coalition nowhere in particular, it would be really great if Labor and the Greens could have an honest debate about an issue like housing policy. Labor could make the point that without vastly expanding public spending on an already sickly national bottom line, this is the best way to increase social housing stock — and that the superannuation plan is meant to do most of the heavy lifting on increasing overall housing supply.
The Greens could then counter that the increased cost deficit would be worth it to spend some serious money to make inroads into the particular shortfall of social and public housing, and the general shortfall overall. It could acknowledge that the government has a cunning superannuation plan to fill the private sector provision gap, but also point out that without coercive powers, it’s another Jimbo thought bubble about values-led impactful investment. Wouldn’t it be great to have that debate, with some cost-benefit stuff, rather than Labor’s nonsense rhetoric and the Greens’ mild spin?
But Labor would be desperate not to have that debate. Because there’s an easy place to find the X amount of dwellings the Greens say the government should directly build over five to 10 years, and that’s from cancelling the stage three tax cuts. That presumably won’t happen before the 2025 election, and Labor is equally keen not to extend the deficit. So the housing gap will widen, and will be filled with breast-beating rhetoric about how Labor gets things done, perfect enemy of the stop me if you’ve heard this…
Well, it worked in 2009, and it may work now, to a degree. But it’s not going to work the same way or forever. This figure of 10 billi— 10 BILLION is cynical game-playing with the hopes of many, many desperate people who looked to Labor for some sort of hope, and wanted something a bit more than 30,000 of the 700,000 new homes needed.
This sleazy, too-clever-by-half spin is worse, in some ways, than the brute oafishness of the Coalition in its decadent phase. It combines Labor’s narcissism as the people’s champion, with dishonesty, and a desire to put in a political solution that will hold until the next election, to cover the absence of any real solutions to this decades-in-the-making crisis.
The mainstream media is taking Labor’s side against the Greens, in the same way it took the Greens’ side “against” Senator Lidia Thorpe — always deny the leftward-most element’s legitimacy. But it’s pretty soft. And 15 years on from the CPRS PR stitch-up of the Greens by Labor and the MSM, the latter have a lot less power than they once did. Labor is not going to be able to spin this PR move nearly as easily as it did the CPRS.
That’s because of two factors. The first is that Gen Z and younger millennials just aren’t reading the MSM, not even slightly. And the second is that they are really angry, and getting angrier by the day. If Labor hasn’t understood that, and I suspect it hasn’t, fully, it may be in for a rude shock. Not immediately, but not in the distant future either. Having posed as the party of mainstream youf in 2022, against the sclerotic Coalition and the supposedly elite Greens, nothing Labor has promised is delivering for the people whom economist Alison Pennington is calling “Generation F’d“.
The wave of strikes and organising in places like Amazon, Starbucks, etc (more in the US than here; perversely, it’s harder to organise a union in the US but easier to strike when they have), and the growing anger around the ludicrous housing situation here, is a product of a certain passage of time. There are now enough people who can see that these conditions are not merely a way-station in their life, renting and scratching for cash, doing McJobs, in your 20s.
Instead, they now see this as the unchanging condition of their lives, within capitalism that no one seems to have an idea of how to kick-start again (Jimbo Thought notwithstanding), with no one in power willing to state that, and with a series of misleading stats — unemployment, as currently measured — being deployed to suggest that everything’s alright.
To that extent, social class being may be reestablishing itself as a primary category, with climate change its equal but other cultural causes falling to third place (in part, because many of them, like same-sex marriage, have been won). If that’s so, then it offers the Greens an opportunity to fuse those two issues in a very tight dyad — for example, that lack of housing is because of high unit cost and poor urban planning as much as other factors, which directly contribute to climate change.
By decoupling (without renouncing) the lead cultural policies from climate change policies, and reconnecting the personal economic issues and the macro issues, the Greens could make an end-run around Labor, while it remains stuck on the old trope of the Greens having their heads in the clouds. This would be particularly so by targeting Labor’s absolute lack of ambition and imagination on these matters, and its fatal tendency to resort to a type of spin increasingly ineffective on a post-truth generation.
That suggests what is required (which the Greens have partly delivered) is a “Green audacity”, which argues for solving the housing crisis by advocating state housing building on a mass scale, targeted at all income levels, with various buy-in models (to preserve investment and maintenance) and consequent changes in urban development and planning, which reverse the old 1960s-1990s relationship between Green politics and low-density development and replace it with a green new deal and scales of economy and ecology. This would make visible the degree to which capitalism is now a rent-seeking machine, steering us to terrible building and development options (steered there by Great Helmsman Jim).
Thus, amazingly, we are not going to get out of this mess by demolishing a Victorian house in Albert Park to build three flats. We need to use vacant, urban, industrial land, to build high-quality, stylish, architect-designed blocks high and dense, with some existing buildings left for place and history continuity. It involves developing outer-suburban hubs as city centres, rather than the McMansion non-places private developers are being allowed to build, and connecting them with short-length, high-speed rail. And of course, it brings the unit cost of new dwellings way down.
Many in the coming generation, it seems, are ready to abandon the house-and-garden model — have long abandoned it — and even the low-rise apartment model, for a European-style of life, in which top-quality high-building and density reduces unequal access to centrality and the cosmopolitan city. Not only because tastes have changed, but also because they will now do anything, anything, to have a chance to own a property that can be paid off, and to gain the life security arising from it.
Politically, this is not for the faint-hearted, since the history of residential tower blocks and high-build is mixed, to say the least. But I’m talking very concrete proposals. I’m talking sketches, models, 3D immersive experiences as to what this could be. In any case, if the UK is any guide, people will eventually be clamouring to buy into the Housing Commission highrises, or centrality, with their terrible look thus becoming, by reclassing, a sort of East Germany retrochic.
Will we throw out public housing tenants to do that, when the time comes? Gee, I wonder… We not only need audacious policies, we need protest, a rally for “affordable housing now”, with Greens MPs and others up the front of it. This might be the issue that could jump people from cultural politics into political-economic politics.
The plain fact is that this housing debate is substituting a housing policy question for what is a demography policy question. We are either going to taper down immigration and freeze or lower the population (we’re not), or we’re going to keep the spigot open, to become a country whose population is merely small, rather than miniscule, in the East Asian area.
Given that we all know we’re going to do that, we’re going to need to have a really major capitals-and-regions development plan, something with multipartisan support that can project decades into the future, and merely be subject to variation with the politics of changing governments. Ideally that would see “audacious” height and densification as simply a step along the way, to the creation of new mid-size communities, combining farming, making, thinking and living in new ways.
But I’ll take whatever vision I can get at this point. I suspect there are a lot of people, watching their future fall away, who will agree. And will go where the vision is. Rather than approaching housing policy with a lump in the stomach over impossible options, we could see the possibilities within it, to live a new and better way. It’s exciting. It’s attractive. It’s a love story, baby, just say yes (No 3, 2009).
*now this is perfection.
Labor and its rustedon voters are beyond tedious. This is a Clayton’s housing policy and the rustedons treat Labor like a favourite football team, with unquestioning loyalty no matter how bad the policies are. It’s time they started fact checking and holding Labor accountable instead of screaming at The Greens. Labor wants to invest $10bn in the Future Fund, squandering a fortune to fund managers, and use the interest earned to pay for housing. Last year this fund lost money. This policy will worsen the shortage of affordable housing, but it will create income for Labor’s donors.
As for the endless bleating about Rudd’s CPRS, it was bad policy. It gave $$ to big polluters and would have taken many years to achieve any gains. Rudd thought he would be clever and avoid negotiating with The Greens, so he turned to Turnbull instead. That led to Turnbull’s downfall as other key Liberals, including Abbott, thought that they should be opposing Labor, not working with them. Christopher Pyne indicated in his book The Insider that Abbott’s policy was war on all fronts; oppose everything.
The Greens and Independents teamed up with the Gillard Government to introduce the effective price on carbon. The Gillard Government passed more Bills than any other Australian government in history. The misogynists within Labor are silent on this, because admitting it also means they have to admit that The Greens worked with Gillard, and that doesn’t suit their narrative.
Continuing to attack The Greens over the CPRS and now over Labor’s dud housing policy shows us that Labor are utterly useless. They serve their big donors, not the people of Australia, as both majors have been doing for the last 40 years. Death to the two party system can’t come soon enough.
As has been noted elsewhere, Albanese doesn’t seem to realise that a small target strategy only works in Opposition. Govts are there to make the big calls, or we’re all wasting our time.
Its definitely a puzzle especially since the “small target” wasn’t a winner while Green preferences were.
Yes – they need to start being a Labor Government, not just a better one than the incompetent LNP rabble!!
If only they would bite the bullet and introduce the big one……………….
………not repealing Morrison’s bullshit tax cuts – introducing a progressive Capital Gains Tax on ALL housing.
Giving a discount for length of occupation would differentiate between the genuine home creators and the players in the multi-billion dollar tax-free lottery that the Australian market has become (the vast majority of whom would be the ultra wealthy anyway).
Why should making a million dollars from an investment in shares attract a 50% tax rate, when doing absolutely nothing but sit on a property for a year and making the same profit tax-free be treated differently?
I’d have thought it would be a pretty straightforward sell to the bulk of the population on pure equity grounds.
Ignoring the hysterical bleating of He Who Must Not Be Named might take a touch of resolve though.
(Simply solved by requiring all media proprietors to be solely Australian Citizens………)
I think being slightly more palatable then LNP seems fine with them. Why bust a gut when they don’t have to.
I always hope they’re going to be better and then they aren’t.
For goodness sake they have been there 10 months surely that’s enough time to fix all the problems built up over the past 10 years.Dr No and the fairies at bottom of the garden the Greens with their Pie in Sky thinking have also been a great help.Not.Just give them a bloody chance.
Their housing and climate change policies could be a lot more courageous as well as more effective. They don’t have to go to an election for more than two years. Do things that work and that most people want.
Why not put emitters on notice that they need to start progressively reducing their emissions instead of letting them buy permits? I I suppose they are still scarred by Tony carbon-tax Abbott’s scare campaign even though the price on carbon was doing its job very well and painlessly.
Why not start to restrict new fossil fuel developments rather than letting them all go ahead?
As for housing, why not spend more directly on housing (and not outsource it to the private sector) instead of investing in the Future Fund?
Best response yet. Practice 2. Federal Govt should just take over public housing policy and pay the States to build them.
Elephant in the room – available land. We are a dry country. Environmentally sensitive. Do we keep going outwards or go into the centre and go up. This is not good either and poses other problems not the least of which is congestion. And environmental problems are intensified as air conditioners and clothes dryers operate all hours of the 24 hour day. The regions hold the key but then many if not most of the problems associated with capital city urban living will be visited upon these poor regional centres who may not know what hit them until it’s too late!
Oh please, not that old furphy. We have plenty of land, even plenty of water. Just stay within a couple of hundred Ks of the coast.
“Old furphy”. Good grief. Next thing you know it’ll be “we need mass immigration to defend our vulnerable Simpson desert”.
Please.
We have the greatest species extinction rate of any country on earth-along with one of the greatest population growth rates.
Something has to give.
Damn right. I’m sick of these growth for growth sakes mob. And it’s dumb too. Population growth is the lazy man’s way to increase GDP.
It’s a contrived example, but to make a point – literally every family in the country could live in a freestanding house on a classic 1/4-acre block within a few km of the sea and it would stretch from about Townsville to Melbourne.
(Probably a bit more than that now, it’s a few years since I did the calculations, but the fundamental point remains.)
Interesting. Can you source any one for that assertion. 1/4 acres block is larger than most urban house blocks, it is 1000 sq m, but it matters not since that so many of us live in units and a lot further than a few kms from the sea. I believe you but it’s a false argument. A straw man that the rabid growthists would put up. For the reasons I have suggested.
There are approx 10 million households in Australia
So 1/4 acre for each = 2.5 million acres
Or a bit over 10,000 square kilometres (or 1 million hectares)
Use google maps to create a route sticking as close to the coast as possible from Townsville to Melbourne – about 3,400km.
10,000 / 3,400 = 2.9km
So a strip of land approx 3km wide along the coast from Townsville to Melbourne is the equivalent of every household on a 1/4-acre block.
Obviously this is an incredibly simplified calculation (eg: there will be more coastline than the road distance). But it illustrates the fundamental order-of-magnitude point. The Tasmania comparison is easier to visualise and work out because the land area of Tasmania is a bit under 70,000 km^2.
Also, I’m in no way pushing a growth perspective. I’m just trying to make the point that by any practical measure, land available for housing in Australia is infinite. The only land “shortage” we have is an artificial one created to pump up land prices. There are good arguments against high population growth, but “not enough space” isn’t really one of them.
Similarly, land clearing due to housing isn’t even enough to qualify as a rounding error. More land is probably cleared in Queensland alone each year by people just for the hell of it, than for actual houses, never mind farming and mining.
(The total land cleared in Queensland in 2019-20 was 400,000 hectares, or about 4,000 square kilometres. In ONE YEAR.)
That’s wrong as well. The Great Dividing Range buts into the coast at various points going all the way from Daylesford to the Torres Strait. There are large national parks and mountains within a few kms of the coast let alone within a few hundred kilometres. Floods and water management during droughts are our biggest challenge. We can barely do this with 25 million. Why make it worse?
For practical purposes, the supply of land in Australia is infinite. Urban land use is <1% of the country.
Every family in the country on a 1/4-acre block is equivalent to about 1/7th of Tasmania. Allowing for people who actually want to live in medium- and high-density dwellings and it’s probably not much more than the whole ACT.
In short there’s no land shortage. The land shortage we have that’s driving the bubble is artificially induced, through developer land banking and zoning restrictions.
I read somewhere that one of the bigger listed property development companies had EIGHTEEN YEARS-worth of land locked up………….
The supply of land may be infinite, but not the supply of native animals and the supply of infrastructure to service this spread population.
Personally, im not asking for immediate solutions. Actually the opposite. Im suggesting both Labor and Greens start admitting how difficult and piecemeal it all is – and not spin a $500m spend into a $10 BILLION ON HOUSING blah blah, when thats just the capital fund. Its just cynical and wearying
Hmmm. Sarcasm detection meter is flickering…
Nah!
Ten months is more than enough time to come up with something better than this $10bn sham, when in that time nobody in the country’s stopped talking about the ever-worsening housing crisis, and many haven’t stopped talking about the stage 3 tax cuts, which Guy links together in a pincer movement to skewer this timid government. You’ll be saying ‘give them a bloody chance’ in 2025 when the next election’s due: ‘They’ve only had one term in office, you can’t build Home(s) in a day’. I’ll bet not one house has been built when we next vote.
No one is expecting everything to be fixed right now. There’s nothing preventing Labor from having better policies, except their unwillingness to give up corporate donations. Albo was very critical of the Morrison government when in opposition. The response to covid was inadequate, NewStart was not enough to live on. Then as soon as Labor was elected it was more of the same. When will people on JobSeeker be able to afford to eat 3 meals per day so they can be healthy enough to look for work? Labor couldn’t care less about them now. The ridiculous mutual obligations are still required. Labor’s policies in this space are intended to keep a foot on the heads of the people who are down, while its donors profit from the misery of the unemployed. Climate policies are grossly inadequate and Labor lacks the intestinal fortitude to stand up to energy companies that are fleecing us. It won’t do anything to jeopardise those donations. In 10 years’ time Labor supporters we’ll be in a worse position than we are now and Labor supporters will still be saying “give them a chance”.
How much is enough time for them to emerge as actual progressives? One year? Three (given that a big part of the rest of that will be taken up by the run-up to the next election)? Ten? If they score majority government again, they will have zero incentive to do any better than “we’re just like the Coalition, only slightly less criminally irresponsible!”
Nah, I knew the election would be followed by The Great Disappointment. And so it comes to pass.
When did the great disappointment set in 1 week,1 month ,3 months or 6 months after election.Perhaps the result of the election was the disappointment.
Anyone who has followed Australian politics for the last 40 years predicted The Great Disappointment before the election.
Yep. I did. I said it’s every man for himself like it was during the Great Depression. Circle the wagons and break out the rifles and ammunition. The Great Disappointment is here. We don’t need KRudd telling us to have a warm cocoa drink (what a Dag, honestly) but we need to be eternally wary and vigilant and tell the truth no matter how unpleasant.
Just about everyone that subscribes to Crikey knows that this is another Neoliberal government , a corporate captive. There is another obvious element to this, most our corporate ownership is US owned and therefore largely impacted by US parties, neither want a shining jewel of publicly owned and funded and more efficient model than what they have at home.
This conversation needs to be had and outed before useful progress can be made.
When they ran their small-target election campaign, we were told that they’d do great things once they got in, but look, we’re getting just what they promised and aggression at any request for them to do more.
I talked to a bunch of Labor supporters and Greens voters yesterday on Twitter. I turned up late to the party, so the blue was well and truly on. Felt like one of those family gatherings. You know the ones I mean. Everyone’s several drinks in, someone brings up a slight, someone else chimes in with a grievance, then it’s on for young and old, like the Dimboola wedding. Luckily I packed a referee’s whistle, but I only used it on Greens voters. Why? Because they’re my people and Labor supporters want change as much as we do, but they’ve been taught to hate and “other” us. If we can’t reach them, we’re all rooned. The Labor supporters just got the facts from me, as I understand them. Just the facts, ma’am.
Citation required.
For years now we have been bombarded with big lies, repeated so often that even moderates have begun to repeat them as if they were true. The rejection of the Rudd’s weak CPRS (negotiated with the LNP to the exclusion of the Greens) is a perfect example. The catch phrase ” the perfect is the enemy of the good” created an earworm that is now repeated over and over again. Similarly, the ” Pink Batts fiasco” took hold despite the contrary evidence. There are others circulating almost too numerous to list. Among the worst is the belief that the LNP are better economic managers; a lie that many have come to accept despite the evidence of the last ten years. The untruths so often repeated have also affected foreign policy, as Howard used the WMD argument to justify invasion of Iraq and the Tampa to justify punitive treatment of refugees. We are now told that China is engaged in genocide of the Uigurs. and that Putin’s ill-considered invasion was unprovoked. Are these things true or just more propaganda?
I would say neither to your last question – they are exaggerations.
Actually, I believe both propositions are false. Surely Ukraine joining NATO would be considered provocation by Putin. (I’m not suggesting approval here). And the claim of genocide by the Chinese is not based on evidence.
Ukraine didn’t join NATO. If Putin feared it would, that’s a pretty slim excuse for a war.
And there’s plenty of evidence of Uighurs being detained and coerced, but genocide is hyperbole.
Do you think that exaggeration and hyperbole is OK, especially when we are trying to gain acceptability for political policy?
See Nuri Vitachi’s powerful essay in yesterday’s Pearls and Irritations.
I see your Hong Kong journalist’s article, and raise you my Melbourne Uni podcast:
https://www.thecitizen.org.au/podcasts/the-little-red-podcast/page/2
You have to wonder how much new housing for the poor could be built if $36BN of Jobkeeper overpaid to corporations was rightfully clawed back. It astonishes me how few people are outraged by this.
It’s also an outrage how few are astonished.
Of a piece with the lack of beating Albo back to the stone age over stage three tax cuts.
Extending the AML provisions to Lawyers/Accountants/Real Estate Agents would have a similar effect……………..
…………..by the Government’s own figures, an estimated $30 BILLION of dark money is laundered through the Australian housing market every year.
Pretty hard for first home buyers to compete with that.
The legislation has been promised since before Abbott took over, and is required by international treaty (the required amending legislating has been languishing since the appalling Brandis was in the hot seat)
I could understand the lack of action by the Coalition (who wants to piss off their core supporters?), but the LNP lack of action is truly disappointing.
Damn straight, Guy.
GREEN NEW DEAL, BRING IT
Greens need to lift their game and kick Labor right in the soft underbelly.
Well if we were to have a five-year moratorium on immigration then we might have time to catch up with housing supply. But, of course, the Australian economy is literally a Ponzi scheme of the kind that would be illegal and jailable if run by anyone other then the Government, so that seems unlikely.
But that is what is needed. A zero population growth model for some time.
The problem with the Greens is that while they easily have the least-worst housing policy – in no small part because they seem to be the only party that actually grasps the scale of the problem – they are otherwise incapable of solving it.
* Their policy and rhetoric is almost entirely focused on public housing. While absolutely important, there are thousands upon thousands of people who aren’t so poor they need social housing, but absolutely not rich enough to not be crushed by mortgages and rent.
* At a local politics level, Greens generally oppose most development to expand supply, be it urban infill or (especially) fringe growth.
* At a macro level, they – like pretty much everyone else – refuse to countenance that a major driving force of the housing shortage is extremely high immigration rates.
I am generally a support of the Greens, but this is a policy space in which they have a lot of cognitive dissonance, if not outright contradictory beliefs. Though as I said above, even that is streets ahead of the “problem, what problem?” approach from Labor & the Coalition.
Increasing public housing will remove the poors from the private market, and the reduced demand will lower those exhorbitant rents for the remainder of the people in the private rental market. It’s the only sensible housing policy that currently exists. Housing policies from the major parties are intended to give the appearance of doing something useful, without upsetting those making huge profits from the housing market, and won’t improve the situation for those on lower incomes.
I agree with you re: the cognitive dissonance and the housing shortage caused by migrants.
Also need to get rid of the incentives to investors that price buyers out of the market.
There was an election 4 years ago which killed that as a foreseeable Labor Policy.
I dont agree on the Greens being anti-development. My feeling is that in inner city councils, theyre too willing to accomodate developers at the expense of heritage. I think yr talking of an earlier Greens period.
I agree with you on the excess focus on public housing, as opposed to overall solutions
The bloke in the middle of this photo (https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=564700979035492&set=pb.100064867834001.-2207520000.) appears to be Max Chandler-Mather.
Which is some pretty breathtaking irony/hypocrisy (depending on how generous you’re feeling), given the Greens tend to be very gung-ho about high-density development as a “solution”.
I think you’d need to look pretty long and hard to find many Greens advocating more urban sprawl (ie: freestanding houses on decent-sized blocks), be that on the fringes of major cities or regional towns.
You might want to provide some details about the specific campaign the federal member appears to be getting behind in this photo, and how it might sit with his and his party’s broader policies on urban development, before labelling it breathtaking hypocrisy. The sign he’s holding says ‘Vote no to over development’, which is probably context specific…not ‘any development’.
It’s a protest about building Townhouses in Holland Park mate. Nobody’s there because someone has proposed a 50-storey highrise, they’re there because they’re living in bog standard houses on bog standard ~400-800m^2 blocks and don’t want developers knocking down a few of them to put in a dozen townhouses all over the suburb.
Which is a viewpoint I can 100% get behind – but it is in fundamental conflict with many Greens policies and attitudes.
But do you agree on the need to address the issue of mass immigration? We need more journalists writing about this and how the right have hoodwinked everyone.
Here’s some more: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/overdevelopment-bludgeons-us-out-of-our-homes-say-residents-20230208-p5ciwi.html
That is so true. It is the Greens all over. They support high rates of immigration but not the housing infrastructure to in turn support and sustain this number of people. They are NIMBYs to a person. Mind you there are enough empty industrial land sites that could fit. It is, just like southeast Sydney around Mascot, Alexandria, Rosebery, Botany, Matraville, etc, there are plenty of sites but these areas lack social support. Many were built as “dry” areas of Sydney. Historically. You know. No pubs. And not much of anything else for that matter. They were large scale industries, and some smaller ones as well, that people used to walk to or commute to from other parts of Sydney and the Illawarra. They are rapidly filling up with the housing the Greens like but these places are the converse to the suburban non-places of Australian legend. Instead of dormitory suburbs in Sydney’s west, the Central Coast and the Illawarra, with soulless McMansions and no social focal point of reference, these inner-city tower blocks are devoid of commercial opportunity, social amenity like schooling and childcare, public transport and large-scale attractive parklands – unless you call the Eastlakes Golf Course or the Long Bay shooting Range green oases. These tower blocks of concrete, steel and flammable components are what has ruined the London city scape among others. They are doing the same to Sydney as well just as surely as its urban fringe.
I would be grateful for evidence that the Greens support high levels of immigration. What I see from their policies in that area is reform to the national policies on asylum seekers and on family reunion visas. They insist that temporary migrant workers should have better pay and conditions, but there is nothing in their policy statement about increasing overall levels of immigration.
Yes but this is the effect of Greens policies. They believe that people should be free to live anywhere. That means moving here in large numbers and demonising those who urge restraint in immigration intake. They think, and I have seen this in their population policies, National and State based, that the most important issue is consumption not numbers when it comes to environmental sustainability. They have ignored this elephant in the room because they don’t want to be labelled racist due to the overwhelming numbers of white ANGLOS that constitute the party. I have seen and experienced this. I used to be one of them. The Greens had a working group dedicated to exploring issues around population – one of many working groups and committees. Those who opposed this WG forced some members out and some members of branches even asked for a list of names of Greens members in this WG. You see, they think anyone that questions high immigration numbers or call for discussion on population numbers is either a eugenicist or a racist. Take my word people, they are that hysterical and fanatical!!
It’s more that they never, ever oppose existing extremely high levels of migration.
And their proposals to increase refugee and family reunion intake are on top of those existing numbers.
Wasn’t always this way: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/greens-change-their-immigration-policy
This is a damned good link. One of the best and one that can be referenced back to the Greens. This period of the late 1990s is a pivotal moment in left wing politics when they changed their position, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that population growth was getting out of hand, that it was presenting environmental and social problems and that containing its growth was a good idea as a matter of policy and principle. Simply put the left wing, including the Greens, were taken over by the 3rd World oriented puritanical left who hated the West and its permissive society. These people took up and adopted foreign causes, Venezuela, Palestine and this became confused with Islamic groups in their contest with the West. The left became a more global organisation and oriented accordingly. Australia was too boring for these smelly, poorly dressed, hirsute left-wing armchair adventurers. These 3rd World left wing groups were often religious in their basis if not culture with continued adopted cultural practices, arranged marriages, adherence to Islam (with a human face), abstinence from drinking and pre-marital sex, dislike of pornography and permissiveness, ambivalence on local western issues re; SAME SEX ISSUES. And high levels of immigration for largely self-interested purposes as well as cultural purposes. This late 90s epoch was the beginning of the end for the Left and why the Greens support high immigration in practice if not in policy.
Yeah, nah, that’s mostly going on inside your head.
The Greens changed policy to avoid being wedged by Hanson. It’s literally written there in the article.
In the bigger picture, climate change became the overpowering focus of “environmentalism”, which means the first and in many cases only issue if of significance is CO2 emissions. In this context population is only seen as a global issue, not a local one, and there’s very little you can do ethically about global population in a useful timeframe.
The problem with the mainstream left (eg: old Labor) is that it got taken over by Centrist neoliberals like Keating (Blair, Clinton, etc – not sure of the Canadian or NZ equivalents). It has certainly infected the Greens to a degree as well, but nowhere near as badly as New Labor.
This supply-side, market-first economics is the root cause of high immigration levels, and since supply-side, market-first economics has comprehensively and utterly dominated the field, There Is No Alternative. In as much as anyone is likely to do something about this at all, the Greens are the most likely to improve the situation simply by being focusing on workers rights, minimum wages, insecure work, etc, etc, that reduce the exploitability of immigrant labour.
“In the bigger picture, climate change became the overpowering focus of “environmentalism”, which means the first and in many cases only issue if of significance is CO2 emissions. In this context population is only seen as a global issue, not a local one, and there’s very little you can do ethically about global population in a useful timeframe.”
Well this is a problem for a start. I think you have wedged yourself in your own argument. CO2 emissions are just as much a global issue as population. In fact we in Australia have more control over our population than our CO2 emissions. Laws can be enacted to restrict immigration or to source it differently, so its influx is not too great. So I don’t know what you are trying to argue here. Many countries use this practice. Japan for one. In fact, CO2 emissions are a global issue or problem and it has been put by the denialists and the go-slowers on climate action that we are 3% of global population and global emissions and so what we do due to our limited influence overall for GHG emissions is not important.
You are right about differentiating from Hanson but it was a stupid move as they were differentiated anyway on racism, environmentalism and many other issues. No one who was a Greens or a Democrat voter would vote for One Nation. It was and still is a party for disgruntled Nationals, Liberals and conservatives broadly speaking. No one believed that Howard was going to slow immigration significantly and One Nation gave the coalition their support helping them win 3 elections, particularly 1998.
Your last paragraph is overly optimistic. The Greens I think these days will make the problem worse and very few of them are members of any union except that NTEU.
To clarify:
“Overpopulation” in contemporary environmentalism is only a problem in a global context (ie: there are too many people in the world). Individual country populations are “irrelevant” because it doesn’t matter where they are or go, CO2 emissions as a whole will be largely unchanged.
Now from a climate change perspective, this is a point I largely agree with, but, it’s not an excuse to ignore the other environmental consequences of large localised population growth, and especially the infrastructure, economic and social consequences of Australia’s basically unmanaged mass immigration scheme, given that Greens parties tend to be the contemporary champions of social and economic justice as well.
I don’t disagree with that, but I’ll highlight the ongoing idiocy vis-a-vis the Greens, CPRS and “no action on climate change for a decade” as an example of how facts can have little bearing on perception. Libs and Labor might have some public disagreements, but one thing both they and the mainstream media can agree on, is that any shift away from a two-party national narrative would be disastrous.
Consequently any third party with even a sniff of success ends up with just about everyone in the establishment trying to screw them over. And that’s before even considered that the same establishment considers high immigration to be unquestionable due to the there-is-no-alternative of supply-side neoliberal economics.
The Greens position, I believe, is that you shouldn’t have to be in a Union to have good working conditions (and this is something I agree with wholeheartedly). Which is why I say they are the most likely to improve the overall situation, given about 90% of the workforce is not unionised (and if you think this is going to change markedly, “overly optimistic” wouldn’t even touch the sides).