6 ms·

So I'm Australian but from the part no one ever visits (ie Perth). I say this because for most visitors Australia = Sydney, maybe Melbourne. Anyway, I've gone

• seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  > Like when the gay marriage issue was decided even the highly conservative former PM Tony Abbott basically came out and said the matter was settled and it's time to move on. Australia recognized same sex marriage in 2017. That was 3 years after after the USA did. I'm not sure I would call Australia as being progressive by that measure.
  • runako 5y ago
    (I am not a lawyer.) The USA recognized same sex marriage in 2015, but we did so via a Supreme Court ruling. The Court's composition has changed since then, and the new Court has signaled a willingness to overturn settled precedents. While our current detent may persist, I would imagine that an action taken by the Australian Parliament would tend to be more durable.
    • relativ575 5y ago
      > I would imagine that an action taken by the Australian Parliament would tend to be more durable. I'm curious to understand why you'd think a law passed by elected lawmakers is more durable than a verdict by judges who have their position for life? Obacare was surely very controversial, but despite the best efforts by the conservative and an ideologically hostile Supreme Court, it remains in place after ten years.
      • eru 5y ago
        > [...] but despite the best efforts by the conservative [...] Those efforts were actually pretty half-hearted. They talked a big game, but they don't actually want to abolish it. (Reminds me of how the UK doesn't really want to face up to a no-deal Brexit, despite lots of brave talk. Or how no government in the UK has so far re-nationalised the railroads, despite re-nationalisation perennially polling high with the general public.)
        • runako 5y ago
          This is a really good point. Conservatives had two full years to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They had campaigned as a party for "Repeal and Replace" for nearly 10 years, but then they didn't repeal it.
      • talaketu 5y ago
        The Australian Constitution is heavyweight on the mechanics of federal government, and how heads of power are divided between the state and federal governments, and the role of the court to adjudicate, but quite lightweight on peoples "inalienable rights". There's no "bill of rights" - though there are certain principals like "natural justice" and "customary law". Parliaments are empowered to legislate, and that's what they do. So it's comparatively rare that the court will discover some basis to neuter legislation - though it does happen.
• AussieWog93 5y ago
  >I really think Australia desperately needs this system but negative gearing is so ingrained in Australian culture now that it's political suicide to try and change it. I believe Labor made noises about this in a recent Federal election and suffered the consequences. The senior ministers of the ALP came to a similar conclusion. Mid this year they announced no changes to negative gearing or capital gains tax offsets. For the non-Australians following along, this means both major parties support rampant speculation on the residential property market.
  • chii 5y ago
    negative gearing allows the average person investing to have the same tax advantages as a company investing (in anything), because for a company, only profits (revenue minus expenses) are taxed. If there were no "negative gearing" for investment properties, then either there would be fewer such properties, or people would have to form businesses to perform such investments (which adds an extra bit of friction with accounting and tax). Making it possible to deduct "expenses" from "revenue" of a person doing the investment makes sense.
    • AussieWog93 5y ago
      > negative gearing allows the average person investing to have the same tax advantages as a company investing (in anything), because for a company, only profits (revenue minus expenses) are taxed. From a quick Google, it looks like companies are not entitled to CGT discounts. This means that forming a business would increase the tax you pay for almost everyone. >If there were no "negative gearing" for investment properties, then either there would be fewer such properties, or people would have to form businesses to perform such investments (which adds an extra bit of friction with accounting and tax). This doesn't sound like a bad thing. It would discourage people from speculating on the property market and outbidding owner/occupiers (which is a net negative for society) and encourage them to invest their money in productive businesses (which is a net positive).
    • jussij 5y ago
      The problem with negative gearing is the 'average person' can't participate in negative gearing. Negative gearing only works for those who have a high level of income with the corresponding high level of taxation. Why it works so well for these individuals is they can greatly reduce their tax liability by using the property deductions negatively gearing has to offer. As a secondary benefit, those same investors also win on the capital gain side of the equation as these negative gearing tax incentives create massive demand for property. Your 'average person' living on the average wage can't benefit from negative gearing as their wage bracket does not attract a high enough level of taxation. In fact it hurts this group of people only because those higher property prices also means they are priced out of the housing market.
• BrissyCoder 5y ago
  I mostly agree with everything here but will point out that SE salaries have risen quite dramatically over the past 10 years in Aus. If you are a (genuinely) senior engineer you should be on $170k+. In a place like Brisbane (if you can handle the summers) that's a reasonably liveable salary. But yeah - I fear it's going to end up like the rest of the country fairly quickly... One of my major gripes is that education here is not at all egalitarian. > Property in Australia is like a game of musical chairs but the music stopped in Sydney in 1978 Can you explain this analogy?
  • brezelgoring 5y ago
    The ones that got chairs back then got them, its not feasible to get property now unless you cheat or someone else gives it to you. At least that's how I interpret it.
  • cletus 5y ago
    The central premise of musical chairs is that there are less chairs than people but every round everyone gets an opportunity to get a seat. So in my analogy, the last round ended in Sydney in 1978 meaning if you weren't sitting then then you didn't get another chance at a seat. I remember seeing property shows in the 2000s and there'd be a young couple in their mid-20s with a baby looking at houses that were up to $800K. You'd really need to be earning $200k+ then to afford that or, more realistically, $250k+. Not a lot of jobs in Australia (even Sydney) paid that then (and still don't for the record). So how were such people affording houses? The Mum and Dad Bank is how. Their parents who were sitting down in 1970s were now sitting on considerable unrealized property wealth and this gets passed along to the children.
    • BrissyCoder 5y ago
      Ahhh right... I didn't realise Sydney got so unnaffordable that long ago which is what I think threw me off.
      • cletus 5y ago
        Some important context here: this applies to probably every Australian city but is particularly prevalent in Sydney I feel. And that is that the notion of what Sydney in keeps changing. So when I say Sydney became unaffordable in the 1970s, I mean what people viewed as Sydney back then, which is inner Sydney, the North Shore and coastal suburbs. But these have now been so out of reach for people who aren't wealthy for so long that people don't think of them as Sydney anymore. Now when people talk about the affordability of Sydney they're talking about the areas where "normal" people buy. Sydney has expanded far to the West, basically to the Blue Mountains (eg Penrith). It's also expanded south (eg Campelltown). But somewhere like Mosman isn't part of the normal person's mental picture of Sydney property where it was 40+ years ago. This reminds me of something that happened to me in university. I mentioned to someone the suburbs I'd be staying in over the summer when university was out and they literally said "la di da" like it was fancy. To them it was because they were part of a newer generation who lived very far north (I remember they took 3 buses to get to university). To me, it was just where my grandparents lived and had done so for 40-50 years. When they bought that house it was literally the edge of the city, as in the other side of the street was bushland. You see it on the train too. When I went to university the one where all the students and twentysomethings lived was 5 stops from the CBD. 15 years later it was 8-9 stops.
• ientan 5y ago
  All of your points have a left-wing political bias (as expected on HN). The problem with this is even though the left and the right agree on end goals, they will continue to argue with each other and blame the other, and you are an example of that. For example, you frame the housing issue as "the left-wing government tried to fix it, but was stopped!". This will result in constant back and forth between left and right and nothing will change. The reality is that no party even addressed the issue until it was forced on them. I remember that day distinctly. Both parties were completely silent. They had no answer - they all benefit from the current situation. They then both went back to their strategic meetings and came up with some garbage responses. The left was about changing taxes, and I think the right was about lowering the home deposit threshold or something like that. It is all just a play because neither political party wants anything to change.
• walrus01 5y ago
  > Property in Australia is like a game of musical chairs but the music stopped in Sydney in 1978 (in Perth and Melbourne it was more like 2003). Sounds like Vancouver
• thenewewb 5y ago
  With regard to gay marriage - Donald Trump ran and won in 2016 on a platform that included the recognition of gay marriage as a settled right. AU and US aren’t so different!
  • cletus 5y ago
    That's kinda my point. It is of course unknowable but I really wonder if Trump could've won the 2016 election if the Supreme Court hadn't handed down that decision. This has happened before. Dubya largely got reelected in 2004 because Karl Rove tied the campaign to blowback against states and plebiscites in favour of gay marriage.
• Nursie 5y ago
  > It's a shame because Perth and even Melbourne used to have a relatively low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life. I'm British and have just moved to Perth. I am looking at being able to get a house 2-3 times as large here compared to the UK, for similar outlay. Add to that the weather and the sheer space... the QoL here seems so much higher than back home. I have spent time in some parts of the US (about 4 months in Texas, probably about a year in other parts in total), but haven't lived in NYC. It always seemed nice, if you like the big city, but I had my fill of that in London some time ago. Now over east? Yeah housing seems utterly inaccessible in Sydney and Melbourme. But out west here it doesn't look that insane by my (British) standards.
  • eru 5y ago
    Australia by and large is also much less grubby than the UK. (I say, 'grubby' not 'dirty', because I don't know whether the UK is actually dirty. Eg all the buildings just look dirty and drab compared to Australia. Perhaps it's a leftover from centuries of burning lots of coal?)
    • Nursie 5y ago
      I agree, Perth has always seemed sparkling clean compared to most cities in the UK. Other Australian cities I've visited seemed that way as well. I think partly it's the light - it's so bright here in Aus that things look cleaner anyway, but also the light and the heat keep things a little cleaner, UV sterilises and the sun bleaches after all. Aus doesn't have as much of a legacy of concrete brutalism, either, lumpen concrete buildings in the UK that started out grey and end up brown, water-stained from all the rain and oppressive-looking. And also I think better care is taken. Visiting London after having lived here in Perth for a couple of years about ten years back, I was struck by just how often as I walked around my nostrils were assaulted by smells of rotting rubbish or just plain urine. So yeah, bunch of things, but it does feel much cleaner here.
      • eru 5y ago
        Interesting, yes, the UV bleaching things might be a factor. You are right about the smell of urine and pot in London.
• fancy_hammer 5y ago
  > It's a shame because Perth and even Melbourne used to have a relatively low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life. I honestly don't know how anyone does it now. The experience of living in Melbourne in 2000 as someone not on the property ladder is very different to now. In 2000 it was possible to be on the poverty line and still live within an easy bike ride of the CBD. Now everyone I know lives increasingly on the fringes of the city. This change is not unique to Melbourne but I can't help feel something is lost when you go to a house party and the only people you meet are ones who can afford property. I'm increasingly assuming anyone who buys in Melbourne is doing so with the assistance of multi-generation wealth.
  • rainonmoon 5y ago
    I'm at the age where a lot of friends are beginning to buy (in Melbourne). There's basically two classes: the people buying houses in the outer-inner-suburbs that would still be vastly outside their price range without massive help from both sets of parents; these buyers are unfailingly couples. And second, single friends buying without parental assistance, but buying off the plan apartments not much closer to the city but which at least offer a deposit low enough for someone to get on the property ladder. One is taking on a lot more risk than the other to enter the market.
    • fancy_hammer 5y ago
      > the people buying houses in the outer-inner-suburbs that would still be vastly outside their price range without massive help from both sets of parents; these buyers are unfailingly couples. I suspect there is a big difference between the long term wealth implications of buying a house vs buying an apartment. There are never going to be more houses in outer-inner-suburbs. There is going to be a constant supply of new apartments as we move towards higher density living. People who have wealthy parents are in the best position to make better housing investments.