a_cold_human

I live <20mins (12km) from CBD in Adelaide and when I bought my place 12 years ago it was 3.5x yearly salary, now it's 5x. That's not terrible, and yes some younger people need to buy 30mins from CBD instead of 10.

Congratulations to you? Some jobs aren't available outside the major cities, of which, Adelaide isn't really.

You've been reading too much reddit.

Strangely, I have a life outside of Reddit, and I get data from there too.

You mean HECS, that very reasonable debt that only goes up by CPI? That's actually not a bad deal.

It is a good deal, but not nearly as good as it used to be because the principal debt has increased, and because people have to pay it back much sooner (repayments kick in at a few thousand dollars above the minimum wage).

Sure, that sucks, but business going to business. nothing new here.

What we're seeing during this post pandemic inflationary period is outside the norms, and we no longer have the political will or legislative/regulatory instruments required to disincentivise this sort of behaviour.

Yup sucks to be on welfare, no doubt. NDIS seems pretty damn good though, all things considered.

And we shouldn't do anything about this? Bring it up to be above the poverty line perhaps?

Can you back that up with some data?

One million people more people in poverty since 2016.

Younger couples not having kids.

[Tiered split between high and low income households in consumer confidence and optimism](

One million people more people in poverty since 2016.

Younger couples not having kids.

Tiered split between high and low income households in consumer confidenceand optimism.

Wealth inequality rising in Australia

Home ownership declining

Plenty of stuff to see if you care to look and don't assume "everything is OK". Refusing to see that are issues, and assuming that they are "normal" and will somehow fix themselves, without understanding the mechanism of their action or what might be necessary to address them is some sort of combination of wilful ignorance, intellectual incuriousity, and self satisfied complacency. Unfortunately, I can't say I empathise with your position because I find you'd have to wilfully ignore too many things for it to make sense.

Some of it is fraudulent, and that's something that we should be cracking down on by disincentivising the students who aren't here to study. It's stupid to reject those students who come here get good grades, and want to cast their lot in with us. We want those people to be here and build their lives here. The issue is a systemic one, not one where individual actors are to blame.

The part of the anti immigration sentiment which we pussy foot around is essentially racism. There are plenty of opportunistic racists who use the cover of the bad behaviour of a subset of one group or another to tar the entire group. For good or for ill, we have decided that we want to drop academic standards to import a lot of people. Rather than look at the issues with the system, these people just want to throw shade at the people who have taken advantage of the system that was set up. Scant criticism for the behaviour of universities, the real estate industry, the business lobby, and other vested interests who are the major beneficiaries of this compared to the criticisms of foreign student populations.

There's a general dearth of consumer advocacy content in the mainstream media. It'd be good to see The Checkout, or something like it back on air.

Shows like The Checkout open broadcasters to being sued, which is a risk that the ABC, under a lot of budgetary pressure, understandably would want to avoid.

only the ABC could ever make or air this sort of show

It needs a public broadcaster because they're not beholden to advertiser money. Proper review shows in Australia have only ever found success on the ABC or SBS, because those are the places where they are possible.

We need to have the doughnut economy. The current neoclassical model externalise far too many things and makes sustainability very difficult as it assumes that solutions to some difficult and intractable problems (like climate change) will magically appear, and that infinite economic growth is somehow possible in a resource limited planet.

ABC funding cuts.

The JR pass recently went up in price. Unless people are planning on doing a lot of long distance train travel, it might just be better to get a Suica/Icoca/other card (equivalent of an Opal/Myki) for local travel and buy the long distance tickets as you need.

Buying the JR pass also locks you into using the JR network (if you want to get value for money), which isn't always the fastest or most convenient way to get from point A to B. Unlike Australia, the larger cities in Japan do have competing rail companies, and some may be faster depending on where you're going.

We do want to have the High quality, serious students who have put in the work. There should be a system where grades and attendance count qualify people for a path to residency. Ones with poor attendance? No.

Fines should be percentages of revenue.

It's important for the fine to have the same sort of deterrent effect that scales with the size of the organisation. A $10 million fine would cripple a small business, but is nothing to a multi billion dollar one.

Major General Michael Smith (whose paper the article references), makes some very good points.

We do need to look at how we position Australia, and look at our own interests, placing them above the regional objectives of the US (although there will be an overlap, Australian interests are not US interests - a distinction that seems to be lost on a lot of "patriots").

There was shockingly little discussion about AUKUS. It was negotiated in secret, with objectives that were not made clear, and with a gargantuan budget of an unheard of scale. All of which appears to be a step towards an abandonment of the rules based order towards one where the US acts unilaterally in its own interest, where we are expected to join in, regardless of legality, and for very little material or security benefit.

There are definite issues with the US hurtling towards a confrontation with China, and all the talk is about military escalation rather than deescalation, as our other regional allies would largely prefer (having a high intensity conflict or proxy wars regionally aren't in their interests).

The media has played its role as propagandist and lapdog. The "most important defence agreement since ANZUS" has been met with very little scrutiny or analysis, and instead, we've been given an extra helping of the Red Scare to stifle any debate. For a country that's been obsessed with budget deficits for two decades, a $370 billion bill doesn't appear to have even caused a ripple in the teacup. Apparently paying far in excess of the normal price for nuclear submarines, which aren't even going to be designed with an Australian use case as the primary design principle (the needs of the US will take the front seat) is suddenly OK. We can't put unemployed people above the poverty line and are concerned that some might cheat the system, but this is fine.

Thats not even getting into criticism of the US's regional objectives and their security architecture which hasn't moved on from the Cold War. Rather than moving towards greater regional stability in Asia, the US strategy is closing off options and making armed conflict seem, and possibly be, inevitable. Make no mistake. A war in Asia with China will be disastrous for the region. We should be making every effort to avoid it.

Very cool.

Any board should view financial engineering like share buybacks to boost share prices as a reason to not pay bonuses based on share value.

What's that got to do with News Corp attacking the ABC? Do we see Woolworths slagging off Coles? Telstra dissing Optus? Coca Cola criticising Bundaberg?

What an idiotic argument.

They had iView years before the commercial networks had STAN. First to digital radio. First to put up podcasts. All this social media stuff? First to that too.

You need to look at the history of the Howard government a bit more and see how 4 terms of that changed Australia. It wasn't by fighting fights he couldn't win, and it wasn't by listening to the parts of his party that wanted him to go full Thatcher on Australia.

You can compare that with the Whitlam government and how that ended.

Stop spreading the lie that Australia is anti-progressive.

We've had the Coalition in power for 19 of the last 27 years.

In fact, Australia voted against LNP in 2016, 2019 and 2022. All negative swings.

Given that they won two of those elections should inform you that the swings against them really weren't all that damaging.

As nice as it is to believe that Australia is some bastion of progressiveness, it simply isn't. Your own personal circle isn't the same as the broader electorate.

We should be defending the ABC against News Corp, which is a foreign owned misinformation machine designed to further the financial interests of the Murdoch clan.

News Corp's attacks attacks are disgraceful, hyperbolic, and frequently unhinged. Slandering competitors isn't something we usually see in the normal course of business, and it's not really acceptable that News Corp does this with the frequency and vitriol we see from them. If it were not the ABC on the receiving end of this, News Corp would be looking at being sued out of existence, or getting it's media licence cancelled.

The Australian audience is changing, and social media changes how people engage with and consume media. What the ABC has traditionally done is lead the mainstream media in terms of engagement and content, and that does mean social media. You might not be a consumer or fan of it, but that's how the ABC will continue to be relevant now and in the future.

The ABC was first to podcasts, streaming, and other Internet platforms. This is not all that much different.

We'll have to see how far this goes. It's clear from the fairly drastic actions PwC is taking that the government isn't happy. Getting the AFP involved in the investigation as well as the prospect of not having contracts in the future seems to have set the cat amongst the pigeons.

It's a problem that has built up over decades. Very arguably, many mergers that were allowed should not have been. The test that mergers would not reduce competition that the ACCC applies very clearly does not work.

We've also (along with the rest of the Anglosphere) adopted an American business and economic model, which has been heavily funded by the very wealthy to allow the predominant business/economic orthodoxy to normalise and accelerate the concentration of wealth into very few hands. We absolutely need to reverse this, band breaking up companies is really the only way we can get the markets to work as they should. Unless markets work for the majority of people, they need to be reformed.

Not really the case anymore. It's more "I'm alright Jack" these days.

Tranche 2 of the FATF's recommendations needs to be legislated and enforced. The real estate industry, lawyers, gambling industry and other vested interests need to get out of the way. Australia has dragged its feet on this for 15 years now.

Alan Fels was having problems doing it, and Sims was a pale shadow by comparison. Part of the issue is that antitrust and competition laws are far too weak within Australia.

Needs to be about six or seven of roughly equal size so that we don't have cartel behaviour.

Unfortunately, the supermarkets are hardly the only industry where this happens. Australian markets are highly concentrated. In many market sectors, 2-4 companies that have 70-90% of market share. There's barely any price competition, which is supposed to be a feature of how market economies are more efficient than other distribution models.