Prosper Australia

The I Want to Live Here film comp is on next Wed Dec 3rd at The Order of Melbourne, Level 2, 401 Swanston St (opp RMIT)

Comedian Rod Quantock will help get us in the mood as we settle in to digest some of the zany films entered. The content will be good motivation for those of us interested in the economic reasons to affordability pressures.

Share households certainly do get themselves into crazy situations!

The first prize winner will receive a $3000 cheque and a big kiss from all renters.

Come and support our local film makers and whilst you are at it, support handmade local craft from the crew at the Melbourne Craft Cartel. They will have stalls set up so you can buy your christmas presents and support local economies over sweatshops, keeping the money in Oz and avoiding those consumer miles (goods flown around the world polluting).

RSVP appreciated

photo credit: Cosmic Kitty

With auction clearance rates plateauing at 54% for the 3rd consecutive weekend, property pundits are doing all they can to avoid doom and gloom perceptions. The market has ‘found a new level’ is the positive spin.

Let’s hope most First Home Buyers are biding their time wisely, watching and waiting for the looming swell of sellers. Sellers are desperately trying to maintain their market power by refusing lower bids at more realistic levels vis the earning capacity of the buyer.

Concerns must be raised at Rudd’s move to billow first home owners with cash via the expanded FHOG. Will these buyers feel suckered when they realise they have bought at prices 30% higher than they should be?

When Christmas approaches and the sharemarket drops below 3200, sellers will be keen to replenish their cash flow, accepting bids at more realistic levels.

But the big questions is why should buyers have to bide their time during one of the worst housing crises ever? Why should sellers have so much market power when housing is supposedly a human right?

By increasing holding charges on land, the ability of sellers to dominate the market is reduced, encouraging all sites to be used productively, rather than withheld for speculative profits. Then our freedom is enhanced and pesky taxes can be culled.

photo credit: GFX69

Prosper Australia’s long time Executive member Bryan Kavanagh had this excellent article published yesterday in The Age

NOTHING changes. In the 1970s, the collapse of Mainline Corporation and Cambridge Credit heralded a recession after the 1973 real estate bust. In the early 1990s it was Pyramid Building Society, Tricontinental and the State Savings Bank of Victoria after the 1989 real estate bust.

We will no doubt learn shortly which building developer or bank will come to be seen as the harbinger of this particular financial collapse.

Why don’t we simply end these damaging real estate bubbles? As recent US experience confirms, bubble-affected mortgages offer lenders no real security, so why didn’t the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and the Reserve Bank act to protect Australians and their banks?

Read More

Karl Williams

July 2008

It’s one thing to calmly read statistics about climate chaos but a completely different experience to hear the frightening stories from the disaffected.

In the remote north-eastern Thai province of Nan, listening to a 60-year-old café proprietor relate how the climate has changed in her lifetime, visions of a freaky future of climate chaos hit me in a way that no peer-reviewed scientific forecast would ever do.

In this woman’s entire childhood, summer temperatures had never risen above the low thirties, but now the mercury hits 40 and beyond most summers. Moreover, whereas the monsoonal rain season used to last for a good five months, now it’s usually about three. Such changes haven’t progressed gradually, but have exhibited wild gyrations that are evident in the very landscape.

While wealthier residents of Bangkok can today still mask these unsettling climate changes with a casual adjustment of their air conditioner, those in the countryside are forced into a personal concern with what they’re suspecting is just the beginning of climate chaos spinning out of control.

Yet the economic reason why we’re rushing headlong into the abyss is not hard to fathom. Without fully costing the consequences of our use of fossil fuels, we effectively provide a set of subsidies to keep on wreaking environmental destruction.

Looking on the positive side, we have real hope in the form of the elegantly straightforward geoist principles of applying natural resource charges which would force each polluter to pay for the consequences of their actions and hence provide a stiff disincentive against further polluting.
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