As homelessness surges, councils have been thrust to the frontline of managing the crisis
"Half of councils in the country said they will move people on or clean up belongings. But enforcement doesn’t fix the issue...
“If you’re moving people on, it just moves the problem around,” Clarke said.
“Then you get this kind of domino effect amongst councils where when one does it, it puts pressure on surrounding councils to follow suit.”
Enforcement just entrenches homelessness because you’re disconnecting people from support services, creating mistrust between rough sleepers and authorities and causing psychological harm, he said.
“It increases stress, marginalisation and stigma, which can deteriorate health, which makes it harder to exit homelessness.”
Haywood said the Moreton Bay council has not ended the practice of moving people on, but it has slowed down – and it hasn’t repeated the same large-scale tent city clearance since.
The homeless population today is larger than it was 18 months ago, and some in the community still want them gone. So he believes it’s inevitable that it will happen again.
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This is the direct result of Australia failing to invest in social and affordable housing over the past 50 years. Australia stopped investing in public housing when it decided it wanted to run a Ponzi-scheme, neo-feudal economy prioritising landlords and other bottom feeding parasites.
Budget tax changes to negative gearing and capital gains will “fundamentally change the asset allocation decision for Australian households”
Investors, Morgan Stanley’s estimates, will require price falls of between 15 per cent and 20 per cent to make the economics of investing stack up again.
“We estimate that housing prices would need to fall 5 per cent to adjust to the tax changes (with a permanent reduction in investor demand share), but taking into account the soft starting point for housing with RBA rate hikes, we see a 5-10 per cent drop in national prices as likely – one of the largest price corrections over the past 40 years,” the analysts wrote.
Prices in Sydney and Melbourne have fallen 0.9 per cent and 1.5 per cent respectively over the past three months, although they are still rising in Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide. Nationally, prices were up 1.6 per cent in the past three months.
STILL WAITING FOR A BIGGER CORRECTION.
Remember: house prices (inflation adjusted) have risen 30% since 2016, and 120% since 1996.
Registration form informs patients that if they do not wish AI to be used, they will need their referring doctor to refer them to a differen
“Regulators and legislators need to step-up and provide Australians with a legally enshrined right to refuse AI systems without facing repercussions to our health,” he said.
The patient said people should be able to opt out of scribes and suggested they were not confident the notes made would be accurate. [OR SECURE]
GrapheneOS offers a host of privacy and security benefits over stock Android, but is it worth the hassle? We tested it. Here's what we learn
NB: Only supported on Google Pixel phones for now.
GrapheneOS claims Google's security systems make it harder for alternative operating systems and devices to access apps and online services.
“Control over reCAPTCHA puts Google in a position where they can require having either iOS or a certified Android device to use an enormous amount of the web,” the platform wrote.
GrapheneOS also says governments and banks are increasingly adopting these verification systems for things like payments, digital ID apps, and age verification services.
“Instead of governments stopping Apple and Google from engaging in egregiously anti-competitive behavior, they’re directly participating in locking out competition via their own services,” Graphene said.
Councillors are pushing for a ban on short-term rentals, particularly in inner-city suburbs – where vacancy rates can be as low as 1%
Platforms like Stayz and Airbnb offered society an experiment. The results are in. There are negative consequences.
The next experiment to run: Ban them and then monitor the results. If the results are positive. Keep the ban.
Companies like Stayz and Airbnb love to bang on about how they're innovators: disrupting and breaking norms. Yet when society pushes back, they complain and say it's unfair they're being targeted.
Guess what? Society wants a turn at disrupting and breaking something - namely your shit business model.
Let’s start with a question most people are too polite or too exhausted to ask out loud.
The goal was never smaller government. The goal was captured government.
Not less power in Washington. More power in fewer hands. Their hands.
The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million preparing staffing recommendations for the 2025 government. Not on television ads. Not on voter outreach. On placing specific human beings inside the federal bureaucracy. The Presidential Administration Academy trained thousands of ideologically vetted potential appointees to be ready on Day One. The Mandate for Leadership laid out, in 900 pages of detail, exactly what should be dismantled, what should be restructured, and who should lose their jobs.
They built this over fifty years. They built it while most of us were doing something else, raising children, working, worrying about things that felt more immediately real than the slow institutional capture of a democracy. They built it with a patience that democracies almost never muster, because democracies operate on four-year cycles and this project operated on generational ones.
Gorbachev complained in the 1980s that Reagan was too influenced by Heritage. The Wall Street Journal reported it. Reagan, told of the complaint, said simply: “I read it and liked it.”
Mortgage stress and default risk is rising among new home buyers.
New research shows a growing number of recent homebuyers are uncomfortably close to falling behind on their mortgage.
Nearly one in 10 say they would be left struggling if there were two more rate hikes – a scenario the Big Four banks are predicting this year.
According to a survey from consumer comparison site Finder, 9 per cent of mortgage borrowers surveyed said they would be pushed over the edge to potential default with two more rate rises.
Almost 14,000 Australians rang the National Debt Helpline last month, with most callers saying they are struggling to pay their home loans a
"
Roy Morgan showed that by setting the cash rate to 4.35 per cent, the borrowers "at risk" of mortgage stress will rise to 30.4 per cent:
Equivalent to 1.64 million people.
Assuming the RBA raises rates again in June to 4.6 per cent, that number goes to 1.67 million people.
"
What Australia needs :
More lending scrutiny when rates are low (e.g. ensuring bigger buffers) because rates eventually go back up.
Government forcing the banks to offer long-term fixed rate mortgage loan products (like they do in most other countries in the world). Australian banks currently have no incentive to offer these products on their own and must be forced to do so.
Unfortunately, these folks who end up in mortgage stress are victims of predatory banks and a frothy media who convinced them to "buy now while the rates are low!" even though they wouldn't be able to afford repayments once the rates went higher.
Silver lining: maybe we'll see some decent price declines in housing if distressed sales start picking up.
The city has asked staff to investigate ways to ban investors from listing entire properties on platforms such as Airbnb following a similar
"So ubiquitous are short-term rentals in Sydney that the Sirius building, the brutalist harbourside block once home to 79 public housing units, now includes a luxury Airbnb on offer for more than $1000 a night.
The proposed ban, which was brought as a motion from the Greens, would affect only entire property listings that are non-primary residences, including investment properties. Those renting out their primary home while they’re away, or listing parts of their residence for short-term stays, would not be impacted."
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This proposal is just splitting hairs and would be hard to enforce with little effect on housing supply.
Comments:
"If a property is a full time short term rental then it should fulfil all of the requirements of a commercial property, because that is what it is."
"We have a genuine housing crisis - a NY type restriction is essential."
"If I want to create a commercial income stream by putting a pie cart in my front yard I would need a huge raft of licences, fees, inspections etc. and the Taxation Department would take a keen interest in my operation. But when I want to create a commercial income stream by running a hotel via AirBNB......Crickets."
The actual solution is to ban these platforms completely nationwide (not just within certain councils or states) and force anyone wishing to rent out their house or unit to register and operate as a hospitality business.
Just because it's "your property" doesn't mean the government can't regulate it. You can't operate just any business on your premises; you can't raze your house and just start drilling for oil.
The pledge we've been longing to hear from politicians:
"I want to see house prices come down, just like I want to see energy and food prices come down. Housing is not and never should be just for investment, housing is for people."
Defenders of the Howard-era discount say ‘if you tax something more, you’ll get less of it’. But less investors in the housing market is a g
The 50% discount on capital gains introduced in 1999 was intended to turn Australia into “a nation of shareholders and entrepreneurs”. It didn’t.
The result?
Share ownership fell from 41% in 1998 to 38% as of 2023
Business ownership fell from 20% in 1999 to 15.3% as of 2025
Negatively geared property investment rose from 50.3% in 1997-98 to a peak of 70.4% in 2007-08 as Australians put capital (fractional reserve magic money) into real estate instead of the broader economy.
The CGT regime changed negative gearing from a strategy about deferring tax, to one that both deferred and permanently reduced tax.
Defenders of the 50% CGT discount argue that investor activity has increased the supply of rental housing - but that's bullshit.
More than 80% of the money raised for investment properties has been for “established” housing – houses and apartments we’ve already got – as opposed to new housing.
When investors rush in to buy housing that already exists, they increase the demand for and the price of that housing.
Australia has been on the wrong path for nearly 30 years. This is intergenerational economic warfare full stop. Australia is long overdue for change.
A report presented to the Gold Coast council says its compliance-led approach has had ‘positive results’
There are 58,927 people on Queensland’s social housing waiting list.
Homelessness is caused by a lack of available rentals, and high rents relative to incomes. Homelessness is a housing problem, not an individual failing caused by drugs, unemployment or mental illness.
There are simply more people than homes, the research says.
Government says it has no legal control over how many temporary visas or student visas it issues. It just processes the queue. Guess we now know the consequences of importing so many people that it displaces those on lower incomes into the street.
Perhaps this is what it takes. Unhousing more people, who then become an unwelcome presence for councils and communities to try to "move on", with the broader community eventually pressuring the Federal government to get their shit together ...
1) Accelerate investment into public and social housing funding by taxing billionaires and hydrocarbon extractors
2) Stop importing an excessive amount of people on temporary visas when we don't have enough housing for everyone. Net overseas migration numbers must be pegged to the amount of net new housing that is set to come online in the next year.
New migration and housing completions data has revealed a shock mathematical reality for the property market.
"Gerard Burg, Cotalty head of research, revealed that five years of sustained rental growth has added roughly $202 per week to the typical Australian household’s rent.
SQM Research managing director Louis Christopher warned that without stabilising population growth or a massive boost in housing supply, rental pressures will remain elevated.
He pointed out that the government is lagging far behind its target to build 1.2 million new homes by 2029, suggesting that migration cuts are the most effective immediate solution.
“If (migration) dropped, you would see rents fall in Sydney and Melbourne,” he said in March.
“Since Covid, there has only been one issue talked about regarding house prices, which is supply. In reality, anyone who has done high school economics, knows its supply and demand,” Mr Lardner said.
Mr Lardner pointed to Canada and New Zealand as examples of countries that successfully reduced home prices by taking their “foot off the accelerator” on inbound migration.
Of course, those who wish to retain the unsustainable status quo (enriching the parasite class of landlords, bankers, etc) will retort with one of the following ploys:
Attempt to frame "immigration reduction" as somehow 'racist' or 'xenophobic' (NB: the politicians who reduced immigration in Canada and New Zealand are not racists btw)
Wave their hands in the air and say 'It's just too complex, it would destroy sector du jour and/or implode the economy…' (NB: can you imagine the economic uplift when instead of people sending 40% of their income to landlords, they spend more of that money on other things in the economy?!).
We simply need more time to think about the policies we really want! (NB: We've been facing this issue for over 30 years, anyone who claims that more time is needed has no intention of ever changing their position).
It's really very simple.
Australians are done waiting for policy wanks to connect the dots.
Australians (when given the choice) are going to vote for radical right-winged politicians who commit to reducing immigration, and to hell with the consequences.
And yes, some of those politicians are probably racist - but Australians are going to hold their nose and vote for these politicians because they are fed up with the bullshit talking points that continue to keep Demand-side solutions off the table.
Couple drops $760k on an apartment for their nine-year-old
Frustrated that everyone else is making the housing market worse, this couple decides to also make the housing market worse.
Australia is full of idiots like these.
Properties are being bought and held by people who DO NOT NEED THE PROPERTY simply out of fear of RISING PRICES - thus locking out buyers who actually NEED THE PROPERTY and driving prices even higher.
The government needs to hunt these morons down and prevent this sale from closing. Then create a register of idiots like this couple that actively prevents these morons from ever owning a second home.
Universal Basic Income (UBI) is no longer a liberal fantasy, but a necessity to prevent social fracture and buy time as AI continues to repl
A sobering warning from Geoffrey Hinton (an architect of modern AI): AI capability is effectively doubling every seven months.
Not every decade.
Not every few years.
Every seven months.
The social consequences of mass displacement — crime, despair, radicalization, resentment — spread. They destabilize everything.
We are approaching a moment where the question is no longer whether AI will replace jobs, but how a democratic society survives when it does.
That conversation needs to begin now, while there is still time to shape policy deliberately rather than in panic.
NB: UBI is an interim band-aid to prop up capitalism which is doomed to fail in the face of full automation via AI and robots.
Capitalism will not survive the automation revolution. And western governments are in such deep denial they can't even look at UBI solutions let alone solutions required beyond UBI.
In a sweeping and provocative macro-analysis titled "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis," Citrini Research has outlined a sobering vision o
1. AI Triggers a Structural Economic Shock
AI to rapidly displace white‑collar labour, collapsing the economic value of human intelligence and triggering a deflationary loop where productivity rises but household income falls.
2. Market Peak Before the Fall
The report (issued before the war) imagined a euphoric 2026: S&P 500 near 8,000 and record margins. Beneath the surface, job losses accumulate.
3. The 2028 Crash
By June 2028, unemployment hits 10.2% and the S&P 500 falls 38% from its highs as markets finally price in collapsing labour demand. NB: Other experts have warned that any economy with unemployment nearing 10% is doomed (e.g. expect rampant crime, riots).
4. Ghost GDP Emerges
AI-generated output inflates GDP figures, but because machines don’t consume, the gains don’t circulate through households, weakening demand.
5. Corporate Moats Erode
AI agents eliminate friction across SaaS, legal, travel, insurance, real estate, and delivery platforms. Brand and convenience advantages evaporate.
6. Payments System Disruption
AI agents route transactions through stablecoins, bypassing credit‑card rails and undermining interchange‑fee‑dependent business models.
7. Private Credit Stress
AI-driven revenue compression in SaaS triggers defaults in leveraged buyouts. Life‑insurance‑funded private credit vehicles become a systemic risk.
8. Housing Market Vulnerability
Not a subprime crisis—this time incomes collapse at the top end. High‑earning professionals lose wage stability, undermining prime mortgages.
9. Fiscal Strain and Social Tension
Labour’s share of GDP falls sharply, shrinking tax receipts while social support needs rise. Political gridlock prevents redistribution.
10. Conclusion: A Painful Repricing, Not a Total Collapse
The report argues the crisis is structural, not cyclical. Traditional monetary tools can’t fix technological substitution. Investors must distinguish between assets tied to atoms vs bits.
For Australia
Australia's white color economy will tank: across finance, consulting, legal, insurance, real estate, and government administration sectors, AI will automate these first and fast. Expect consolidation across all these sectors. Expect wage stagnation in high‑income urban professions, reduced graduate intake, pressure on CBD office demand (Sydney, Melbourne).
Australia’s export base is dominated by atoms, which will remain resilient because AI cannot replace physical extraction.
High‑income job losses in Sydney & Melbourne could weaken top‑quartile borrowing capacity, reducing appetite for CBD apartments and tax revenue for states and federal governments. Resource‑state cities (Perth, Brisbane) may outperform due to commodity strength but only relatively.
Expect super returns for pensions to be reduced, especially industry funds with large offshore allocations.
