Month: July 2006

We have seen quite a lot of hand wringing over housing affordability this week. And there will be more next week if the Reserve Bank, against good sense, puts up interest rates.

Everyone is in on it. Social-welfare do-gooders want cheap housing for the poor; the housing industry wants more construction and more immigration to fuel it; the real estate industry wants more transactions. All have a point.

A two-day conference in Canberra looked at affordability (dreadful word) in the same week that the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey came out. It was fairly damning of Australia.

It seems bizarre that Australia with low population and high land mass should do so badly.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 29 July 2006 housing”

I needed/wanted a kitchen cupboard with pull-out drawers so you can see everything. It would put an end to buying a second, third or even fourth jar of mustard or mixed herbs or whatever because the earlier lot had disappeared in a jungle of jars, bottles and packets.

And so in the month of the publication of (ital) Not Buying It. My Year Without Shopping (end ital), I found myself at the Ikea store in Sydney.

Here was a more accurate glimpse of our times than the spikes and troughs of extreme and unusual events that occupy the pages of newspapers and the waves of the broadcast spectrum.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 22 July 2006 ikea”

Last week I sat before the most humungous television set I have seen in my life. It dominated a lounge room wall – like a cinema in the home.

As an experiment we flicked backwards and forwards between the standard-definition digital and the high-definition digital transmission.

Communications Minister Helen Coonan and Prime Minister John Howard might be able to discern a difference, but I couldn’t.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 15 July 2006 media changes”

It used to be those devilish socialists who wanted to concentrate power in Canberra so they could impose their Nanny-State-knows-best philosophy on the rest of us.

But this week a voice from the opposite political direction was calling for more central power.

Treasurer Peter Costello called for greater Commonwealth power over all key parts of the economy – infrastructure, especially ports, and tax.

Not since Gough Whitlam ran his ill-fated referendum to get Commonwealth power over prices and incomes has a federal leader (Costello sees himself as an economic leader) sought such sweeping powers for the Commonwealth.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 8 July 06 federalism”

In the past 10 years Australia has been a poor international citizen. Since 1996 Australia has thumbed its nose at any criticism of its human rights practices from abroad.

It has arrogantly paraded the view that human rights in Australia are second to none and everything is perfect.

This week it reaffirmed its commitment to detention without trial and with dodgy court procedures when it said, again, that it would do nothing to protest against the detention without trial of David Hicks. The reaffirmation came after the British Government said it was a matter for Australia because Hicks was an Australian when arrested (kidnapped?) by the Americans in Afghanistan five years ago, even though the British Courts have affirmed his right to take up British citizenship.
Continue reading “Forum for Saturday 1 July 2006 human rights”

Anybody out there that’s listening, tell your little ones that you love them every day because tomorrow they may not come home.”

Is this a parent talking from a war zone or after a natural disaster or some terrorist attack?

No. It is an Australian parent of an eight-year-old boy killed crossing a road with his 11-year-old sister. The girl is now in a critical condition in hospital.
Continue reading “forum extra media rules 1 july 2006”