Housing Affordability

Or “Justin makes idle chit chat with mortgage brokers all day and comes to conclusions about things.”

Interest rate rises and skyrocketing housing prices are making it more and more difficult to service a mortgage, and indeed to get one in the first place. Over the last couple of days Prime Minister Rudd has said he’s going to tackle it, but hasn’t specified exactly how (maybe we’re importing land from the Moon?). Either way there’s been plenty of stupid suggestions, so it’s been hard to choose just one to rail against, but after reading this story I think I’ve found a clear winner:

The REIA advocates doubling the First Home Ownership Grant (FHOG) as a short-term measure to assist potential buyers out of rental into home purchase.

“With the First Home Owner Grant pegged at $7,000 for the past eight years, despite house prices doubling in that period, it no longer provides the support required for first home buyers”, Mr Dyett said in a statement on Monday.

The problems here are thus:

1. There are two reasons you need to place a deposit on a house. The first one is so that the Loan-to-Value Ratio (look it up) is below the appraised value of the house in case you default on the loan, so that the bank can take the house and sell it to recoup the entire balance owing, even if it’s dropped in price. The second is that it proves you can exercise self control and put money aside every week for a significant period of time, much the same as you’d be doing when you’re servicing the loan. If you can’t do this, you probably can’t service the loan, and as such paying large parts of people’s deposits for them will increase the number of people who default on loans (hint: loan defaults are what caused the sub-prime crisis). There are other reasons for having a deposit such as stamp duty and mortgage insurance, but there’s no need to elaborate on those here.
2. When you have 2 or more people with their first home buyers’ grants turning up at an auction, they’re each going to bid significantly higher than they already would have without the grant (duh, cause they have more money to spend). With an average 10% deposit and a $7000 grant this means up to a $70 000 jump in prices at such auctions, which drives housing prices up, makes it harder for anyone else to buy and makes the weekly repayments of the first home buyer higher as well. Doubling the grant only exacerbates this problem.
3. At certain stages of your life you should be renting, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re pushing people who should be renting into buying, you’re just making it harder for the people for whom it’s more effective to own a home.

Moral of the story is that, aside from releasing more land for residential purposes, there is no way you can use government intervention to make housing more affordable across the board, and I’m hoping to Jesus that Kevin Rudd realises this.

Monkeys? What? India does not make sense

The second test between India and Australia flared up yesterday when Harbhajan Singh singled out Andrew Symonds, the only player with black heritage in the Australian team, to attack him with monkey sledges. Now it confused me last year to hear Indian crowds were doing something similar, and it still seems to me to be a very literal case of the pot calling the kettle black. Further, given that he hails from the only country that I know of to have troupes of the little primates running around flinging faeces at residents of their capital city, and one whose primary religion dictates that the monkey is in fact an animal to be revered due to its resemblance to a Hindu god, this is just blatantly retarded all round.

The Indian team should stop failing at being racist and get back to something they fail even harder at: playing cricket.

Gay on.

Monosyllabic Muckraking!

We’re back after a sojurn to Melbourne. Yes, that’s right, check Landeryou for the whole situation. Interestingly enough the Melbourne Young Liberals are about as mentally balanced and as physiologically damaging as tertiary syphilis. Aspersions on their possession of long-incubated STI’s aside, I’ve returned to the greatest City in the land, Sydney, only to be confronted with a maelstrom of bullshit bordering on a tsunami in a portaloo.

Let us begin.

Authorities will have powers to conduct body searches, confiscate vehicles and evict people from World Youth Day events.

State Parliament has invoked powers similar to those introduced during the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum this year and the Olympics in 2000, giving police and other officials control over a range of issues, from air space to unauthorised advertising.

The World Youth Day Amendment Bill was passed last week to smooth the way for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI during the Catholic Church’s six-day youth pilgrimage in July.

It grants the Catholic Church unrestricted access to Randwick Racecourse for the closing papal Mass, which the church estimates will be attended by up to 500,000 international and Australian Catholic pilgrims.

The bill goes beyond access guarantees, with the inclusion of a controversial clause that can delegate power from Parliament to the Government. It allows the State Government to introduce regulations that permit police and private security guards to conduct searches of pilgrims and their bags, and any cars at World Youth Day sites, and bar entry to anyone.

I’ll allow you to let that sink in. APEC, and GWB’s lance through the heart of our right to, you know, walk around unimpeded aside, it appears that the Hat-Wearing ÜberCatholic himself Pope Benedict XVI has been left so unprotected by the furious will of the Lord that it’s been left up to timid Boris to do Christ’s dirty work for him.

My honest answer (And I’m sorry for all the cheap shots) is what directives do the police have against the pilgrims? Are all Condoms and Hormonal Pills to be confiscated as part of the iron fist of an irate deity? Will the fines be commuted if the guilty say their rosary several times? If you feel earnestly sorry about your egregious infraction of reactionary law-lavishing (ED: As the parliament En-Cunts the police [Dictionary: In, or relating to the process of promoting cunt-like behaviour]) will the police be forced to forgive you and tear up their gleefully scrawled ticket?

More on this to come, oh and yeah the article came from the SMH, you know this, I know this, it’s pretty much the best fucking paper in the country except for the Australian, so live with it.

What the fuck, stop changing the Goddamn theme.

This goes for all of you.

Especially you, Justin.

Stop changing it you fucking postmodernist. We don’t have to be on edge with this kubrick-esque nonsense, I just want some good old fashioned gradients.

And it’s not like any of them have feeds obvious on the site anyway, so we’re losing traffic there.

This is a war, damn it. Stop this thematic nonsense.

EDIT: This is so much better, fuck, it’s readable, there are feeds at the bottom it makes us look all trendy.

BUY US BEER.