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Comment on In Australia, racist violence is nothing new. But emboldened neo-Nazis form a frightening new spectre

Alright, you want the long answer? Australia is in the middle of the worst housing crisis in our history, and what does the government do? Import record numbers of people to make the problem worse! That’s the opposite of what we should do. When the people point this out by protesting, what does the MSM and government say? “You’re all a bunch of racists! How dare you ask us, your masters, to lower immigration levels!” The Government’s main priority right now should be fixing the housing crisis, not making it worse. You say I have an agenda? Yeah, my agenda is “Being able to live a decent life in the country I was born in”, and right now, the government’s policies are making that harder and harder by increasing demand on infrastructure and services (schools, hospitals and roads) that are struggling to keep up.

Now tell me, what part of this is supposed to help Australia and it’s people and not just help the wealthy elites?

That’s what the protests are about.

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pulsewidth@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Import record numbers of people to make the problem worse! That’s the opposite of what we should do.

And that’s exactly why everyone with a brain is downvoting you. You’re told (by racists) that it’s immigrants taking your homes, and you believe it, without looking at the wider picture or even checking the facts.

Immigration was 10% lower in 2024 than 2023, which would definitely make it not a record, and still recovering from the massive decreases through covid. We have still not made up for those losses though covid - had it not happened, we would have seen a lot more immigrants over the last six years.

There are ~11 million dwellings in Australia - more than enough for everyone once you factor in families. The main problem is that housing has - for a long time - been an investment vehicle. This is an issue throughout the world.

Actual problems worth protesting:

Negative gearing continues to make housing a very effective and attractive investment. Labor promised to remove it in 2019, while grandfathering-in existing homes. As a result they were crushed at the polls and lost “the unloseable election”.

Multiple home ownership is common. I know several boomers that own multiple houses that they do not rent out, you probably do too. Why the fuck do people own multiple homes and ‘holiday homes’ during a housing crisis. Tax it out of existence.

Liberal and Labor governments consistently hand big incentives and payouts to the building and home loan sectors to prop up those industries, because they lobby and donate hard. Every time they do add a rebate or an incentive, housing prices increase by the same value because developers simply pocket it.

Public housing has not kept up with our increasing population, and the HAFF is a monumental joke that the bankers managed to pull on the Australia people. If the government wants to solve the housing issue the simple solution is to build goddamn public housing, not take out a $10 billion dollar loan and then pay incentives with the interest (hopefully, if there is any after paying back the loan interest fees). $10bil of public housing would increase in value faster than sitting it in an investment portfolio too, with less risk.

Zoning laws restrict building high apartments through the vast majority of city suburbs, and approvals of builds and plans for all builds are very slow. Streamline it, and relax apartment height restrictions.

So if you look through this list you start to realize that the problem is actually predominantly wealthy fucks. They own multiple homes, they get tax incentives to buy more homes, they lobby, they don’t want tall apartments in their wealthy suburbs potentially affecting their views, and they run campaigns to vote against any changes to the status quo.

Not immigrants.

If you drastically reduce immigration, you kill the economy, because we are having kids at well below replacement rate and kids and additional people drive economic growth. Economy goes down, forget young people buying a house because they won’t have a job. Add to that more than half of our doctors are first gen immigrants and you quickly see that immigration is helping Australia a lot more than hindering it - which us why these rallies that paint immigration as the main contributor to the housing crisis are dumb as fuck.
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- mtpender@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  So common sense is racist now?
  
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  - Tenderizer@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Did you not read what he wrote. I’ll give you a chart to make things easy for you.
    
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yistdaj@pawb.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Some people I know who supported the protests do so because they’re upset at the upcoming spare bedroom tax, which aims to bring more homes on the market to lower prices. They don’t care about housing people, they care about profit.

I’m also not convinced cutting immigration would help at all when it would only discourage construction, which is already below what’s needed to support birthrate + people moving in from rural areas. Immigration isn’t the cause of the crisis, so cutting it isn’t the solution.

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- mtpender@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Australia built 180,000 homes in 2024
  
  Australia’s immigration numbers were around 500,000 over the same period.
  
  But no, that totally doesn’t have any negative impact on housing affordability. /s
  
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  - appetizer@lemmy.today ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That’s 500,000 coming in via immigration. This includes returning citizens. What is the number that left Australia during the same period? The data is available at the same location. You need to subtract one from the other and then look at that number and how it has changed over the last decade.
    
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  - Nbard@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    What’s your source for these numbers?
    
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    mtpender@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Australian Bureau of Statistics
    
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  - yistdaj@pawb.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You seem to be under the impression that we will just magically build and build if people are gone, but that’s not realistic. My point was that reducing immigration would significantly cut the number of houses built under the current housing market. We may be building too few homes now, but I doubt much at all will be built after cutting immigration either.
    
    The problem is not that we have a housing market that’s too big, it’s that we have a broken market. Housing entering the market in this country may be insufficient when demand is high, but it’s straight up not entering the market where demand is low, and housing prices are higher than ever everywhere. We need to figure out why the market is broken and fix that if we even want so see housing prices stabilise for an extended period, let alone fall. Reducing immigration is a distraction at best.
    
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    mtpender@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The number of people coming in to the country is FAR exceeding our ability to build. The first thing we need to do is reduce our intake (reduce demand) so we can catch up. I’m not saying we need to stop ALL immigration, just that right now, reducing immigration is one of the few levers we have to help alleviate the crisis. Then we can talk about removing Negative Gearing and Capitol Gains Tax Concessions, maybe even put some limits on property investing.
    
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Taleya@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Bullshit

None of those were mentioned once at the protests. Instead you had a literal neonaxi speaker (sewell), signs screaming about silent invasions, “Go Home”, sovcit bullshit and general twattery.

There’s a lot to be angry about. But prancing around shouting random crap with a right wing fist up your arse like a demented puppet is not the fucking answer.

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- mtpender@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You mean the plants from the government? Funny how the MSM didn’t show footage of all the people at the protest booing the glowies. Funny how the MSM didn’t show the violence committed by the Pro-mass-immigration protesters. You can swallow the MSM narrative with your full throat if you want, but it’s not gonna solve the problem or change the facts-on-the-ground. House prices will continue to rise, locking future generations out of the market and dooming them to being “forever renters” a.k.a. surfs. Our infrastructure and services will be stretched thinner and thinner until they break. But hey, at least the wealthy elites bank accounts got larger! Never mind that working Aussies are being made homeless!
  
  Go ahead and call me whatever you like, people like you have been calling anyone with a different opinion *ists and *phobes for so long, it no longer holds any meaning.
  
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  - Taleya@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Lmao “plants”
    
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    mtpender@aussie.zone ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Let’s see you laugh when your the one that becomes homeless.
    
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