A few days ago, my wife and I had lunch in a Fitzroy pub. She happened to comment that the problem with living in a place like that would be that you’d never get a park. In spite of the fact that we had – in fact – just got a park, I agreed. Then, in a strangely serendipitous moment, we walked past a two-storey terrace house with parking for two cars. Naturally I looked up the price and it was only a touch over two million…
“Let’s buy it,” I suggested.
“We haven’t got two million,” my wife pointed out, leading me to do some quick calculations and point out that, after selling our home, we’d only need to borrow a figure significantly less than a million dollars. And, while my wife was of the opinion that having recently paid off our mortgage, she didn’t want to go into to debt in order to buy a house which had more room than we needed.
Anyway, we did a list of pros and cons:
I suggested the following pros:
- It had off-street parking
- It was only a matter of metres from the pub.
She suggested the following cons:
- It added thirty minutes to her journey to work every day.
- It added thirty years to her working life in order to pay off the mortgage.
- It was only a matter of metres from the pub.
In any event, we’re not buying the house even though compared to Mr Albanese’s it was very cheap at less than half the price. I mean, what was he thinking? At $4.3 million his purchase may be more than Malcolm Turnbull paid for his house… although Malcolm purchase his some years ago. Anyway, it’s worth more than the apartment that Peter Dutton sold for $3.7 million last year, so while we can praise Mr Dutton for selling such an expensive property, Albanese stands condemned because…
Well, it’s not that he’d done anything corrupt. It’s just the optics, isn’t it? When people are suffering because of a cost of living crisis, then it doesn’t look good for the PM to be splashing money around and it’s all about how things look, isn’t it? Phil Coorey even went as far as to suggest that this was Albo’s “Hawaii moment”, comparing the house purchase to an attempt to hide the fact that Morrison was on holiday while Australia was burning… Ok, maybe just the east coast but that’s the important bit that contains the Canberra bubble, Sydney and Melbourne…
Take the recent budget surpluses. Labor have been using them to retire debt. This has attracted a certain amount of criticism because they shouldn’t have a surplus when so many people are struggling… Of course, if they were to spend the surplus helping with the cost of living, they’d attract criticism because the spending is putting pressure on inflation thanks to more people being actually able to afford things and the RBA has been raising interest rates in order to discourage people from buying things due to higher house repayments and not having a job any more.
While I do think that Labor could be using the money more effectively, I am aware of the conundrum that Labor always face. If they have a deficit, then it’s because they can’t manage money while any Coalition deficit is the result of the previous Labor government. On the other hand, if they have a surplus, the Coalition would have had a a bigger one because they wouldn’t have wasted money on unspecific things, and anyway, shouldn’t they be helping people by giving them tax cuts instead of having a surplus?
In a rather interesting development, the Queensland Labor government was accused of plagiarism by the Greens. A number of policies introduced by Steven Miles were policies that Labor had argued against when Anna Palaszczuk was Premier, leading Max Chandler-Mather to argue that this is why a Greens MP was needed, which is strange because surely Labor can steal their policies even if they’re not elected. Jarrod Bleijie, the LNP deputy agreed, telling us: “They have pinched a Greens policy that the Labor Party in parliament voted against not long ago!”
I guess this sums up the change in the Greens over the past few decades. When Hawke was elected and he saved the Franklin River, nobody complained that this was Greens’ policy. Now, even when Labor pinch their policies, instead of saying that Labor have done the right thing for once, they complain that this was their idea as though the thing shouldn’t be done unless they’ve been given credit and a release of copyright.
I mean when Labor approves coal or gas mines or when they fail to raise the rate of Jobseeker nobody in the Coalition complains, “Hey, this is what we do!”
Although they do complain when the Labor PM buys an expensive house without once using the phrases “class warfare” or “politics of envy”.
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