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Worst year for new home builds in over 10 years marks need for action on labour shortages

Experts at Master Builders Australia have warned that low apprenticeship numbers will worsen the nation’s housing crisis if action is not taken immediately.

The warning comes after new Australian Bureau of Statistics data revealed that 2023-24 was the worst year for home building in more than a decade, dropping 8.8 per cent to 158,690 new starts.

“Detached house starts fell by 10.1 per cent, while higher density commencements were down by 6.0 per cent,” said Master Builders Chief Economist Shane Garrett.

“If building continues at this pace, we’ll be in for less than 800,000 new home starts over the next five years.”

“This would mean a shortfall of over 400,000 homes compared with the National Housing Accord target.”

The data release, revealing a drop to numbers not seen since 2011-12, coincided with fresh data from the National Centre for Vocational Education Research which showed declines in apprenticeship numbers.

Apprenticeship completions fell 8.6 per cent from 24,545 in the year to March 2023 to 22,420 to March 2024. In the same period, apprenticeship commencements dropped 11.8 per cent from 47,110 to 41,520, and the number of apprentices in training declined 2.2 per cent from 124,280 to 121,530.

Master Builders Australia CEO Denita Wawn said the new data painted a concerning picture for Australia’s housing crisis.

“Today’s data releases aren’t unrelated. To bring Australia out of the housing crisis we need to drastically increase the supply of housing,” said Ms Wawn, “and we can’t do that while we’re simultaneously suffering through a labour shortage.”

“Low apprentice numbers reflect a shortage of skilled workers across all trades, and until we’re able to address the challenges facing the future of the workforce, we won’t be able to increase building activity and reduce the impact of supply conditions in the residential building market on Australia’s inflation problem.

“It’s no longer appropriate to call for a return to pre-Covid levels, we need more tradies now than we’ve ever had.

“We urgently need governments to look at solutions to increase the number of tradies, increase the number of apprentices, and help Australian builders increase supply so we can come out the other side of this housing crisis,” Ms Wawn concluded.

Master Builders Australia’s “Future of the Workforce: Building and Construction Industry” report, which highlights the growing need for action to increase the workforce. To read the full report click here.

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29 comments

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  1. Clakka

    Yet another squawk after the horse has bolted.

    The housing & commercial building industry has been a mangle of discontinuity, and hapless interference and failures on many fronts, not least, insurance and builder’s licensing, and endless apprentice training schemes, and privatizations, seeking underneath it all to maintain a ‘closed shop at minimal cost’ mentality.

    Of course, that leads us to now, where it is an abject mess of vested interest in the midst of some of the best-in-world standards and quality systems that are mostly ignored or circumvented by profiteers engaging unskilled or semi-skilled labour scamming the immigration system, and corrupting the built system outcomes because of a shortage of qualified inspectors / enforcement personnel.

    The govt(s), bureaucrats and academics keep devising schemes, rules and regulations (paperwork), but the profiteers keep circumventing them, and even the dedicated and compliant builders can’t keep up, fundamentally because of a snowballing lack of proper education and R&D on top of supply chain issues in what is a cargo cult of ever-rising costs and risks contributed to by the Oz land barons, banks and financiers.

    Where has the MBA (Master Builders Australia nee Master Builders Association) been in all of this – asleep?

  2. Bert

    Niche living in WA are well behind on the completion of homes, appealing to god to help them.
    It seems about thhe only home being completed is for a director’s wife.

    God is good…. for his wife.

  3. Pete

    Renters are much easier to control than independent home owners, especially those who own their home outright. The Labor/LNP plan is working a treat. It is obvious that commodifying shelter was and is the agenda.

  4. Roswell

    Problem identified:

  5. Arnd

    Clakka, I started my carpentry apprenticeship in Germany in 1978, and have worked as carpenter (and sometimes-designer and builder), with interruptions, ever since. In Germany, France, Switzerland, South Australia and NSW.

    What you say is exactly my decades-long experience.

    Except my recommendations are somewhat more radical: for a very long time now, I’ve held that we won’t get on top of any of the defining problems of our times (including the manifold problems in the building industry) unless we embark on a course of reform that leads towards (libertarian, small government) socialism and, eventually, communism.

    I am about to make another attempt at writing an outline of what I think we ought to be doing about all of this, and how we ought to go about doing it. The working title is “Between Robin Hood and P.W. Browne”.

    Robin Hood needs no explanation, I hope: it’s a conceptual reference to the importance of establishing and maintaining basic fairness. Obvious, I would have thought! Yet it is a subject that seems to have gotten totally lost in the thickets of public policy disputation over the last half century.

    P.W. Browne B App Sc, MAIB, FAICS, probably does need introduction. He is (was?) the author of “An Analytical Approach To Construction Estimating”, the textbook handed out by the Master Builders Association of SA when I attended their Estimators Course on first arriving in Australia in 1986.

    Browne is an obnoxious pedant. Possibly on the spectrum. Which might be why his book resonated so well with me. He pulled the whole construction process apart, and put it back together again with just as much obstinate logic, and insisted on methodically pricing every aspect.

    It was half a decade later that I finally put two and two together and arrived at four (or thereabouts). It occurred to me that Browne’s methodical cost analysis of the construction process overlays and traces almost perfectly with Karl Marx’s methodical cost analysis of capitalism (to which I had been introduced during my teenage years in the Socialist Youth).

    The problem is that no-one influential in construction and no-one influential in government would or indeed could possibly set out a course of remedial action that is at all informed by the Marxist critique of capitalism – which means that any course of remedial action must be formulated in ignorance and indeed contravention of the most basic construction costing principles as explained by PW Browne.

    Therefore, what we will get is further excited participation in endless committee conferences by high-ranking (and very well remunerated!) officials forever holding out promises that they will succeed where others have failed, and that they will finally square the economic circle, and solve the riddle of perpetual capitalist motion.

    Clakka, word of advice: don’t hold your breath!

  6. Canguro

    One example among thousands; more than two years ago the owner of the property adjacent to my home kicked her tenant out and had the house – a circa 1950s building consonant with the rest of the street’s architecture, in need of maintenance but not beyond being brought back to good nick – bulldozed and replaced with a pig-ugly McMansion styled duplex that occupies the whole of the front three-quarters of the block, with its walls ~1 metre from the boundary fences on either side. At the time of the laying of the foundation slab, I asked the builder how long he expected the construction would take. He guesstimated about twelve months, but noted that it was difficult to get labour.

    The house is now, after almost two years, nearly finished. At one point they had to relift the roofing tiles because they forgot to put the flashing down on the roofing frames prior to the tiling…. begging belief that the tilers didn’t twig to that at the initial point of tiling. So, along with labour shortages we also have gross incompetence as a feature of the building industry.

    Unlikely that these structural deficiencies will be fixed in the near term.

  7. Canguro

    Arnd, a six degrees of separation observation; my paternal grandfather was an architect and for a period of time the chief architect for the South Australian Housing Trust. He was commissioned to come up with plans for cheap and affordable housing for the establishment and development of Elizabeth, and on that basis designed a range of styles that were constructed for, if I recall correctly, around 750 quid. Thousands of these homes were subsequently built for that new city.

  8. Steve Davis

    Arnd, I know you used “perpetual capitalist motion” with tongue firmly in cheek, but it’s a notion should be exposed.

    There is a fallacy, a flawed assumption upon which capitalism is based.
    The fallacy is promoted to provide justification for the claim that capitalism is a superior economic model because it is self-correcting, that is, it avoids failure due to its internal workings.
    The evidence against this claim, the existence of the boom-bust cycle, is dismissed as inconsequential due to a self-correction process that works as follows.

    Michael Hudson explains that the principle (fallacy) underlying the capitalist model is that the economy works in a sine curve; (see that? It’s scientific! Gotta be good!) it goes up and down, and there are automatic correction factors. Once it goes up, there are internal correction factors that move it down, but it’s always rescued, because when an economy moves down, labor becomes cheaper, there’s unemployment, it is hired again, and employers can make more profits, and there’s a recovery.

    They don’t even try to hide the fact that it’s the workers who pay the price for this miracle. That it’s the workers who do the hard yards. As an obscure analyst by the name of V.I. Lenin put it, “There is no crisis of capitalism that capitalists cannot overcome, as long as workers are prepared to pay the price.”

    So what’s the problem?
    Simply this. According to Hudson, as debt came to play an ever bigger role in the economic structure, i.e., as financialisation took over from production as the mainstay of the economy, every recovery from a recession has started from a higher and higher debt level.
    And because the global economy has been shrinking since 2008, the economy has reached the very peak of its debt-carrying capacity, and there is no way that it can recover. Every recovery has been weaker, and weaker, and weaker. The artificial gain in stock market prices and the financial sector since the 2008 crash has been accrued almost entirely to the top 5% or 1% of the population.
    The economy at large for the 90% has actually been shrinking.

    Much of the so-called growth in national income has been financial returns.
    Interest payments are counted as part of the GDP.
    Penalty fees are part of GDP.
    Rising housing prices are counted as part of the GDP.
    All of this is called a boom, and it’s not a boom at all. It’s impoverishing the real economy of production and consumption. But it has been making money for the financial economy, which is actually extractive. (That’s a polite way of saying parasitic.)
    And so, by including non-productive items in the GDP, the illusion of economic health is maintained.

    However, history tells us that such a process eventually comes to an end.
    Usually by war or revolution.

    With the West now fighting wars on three fronts, we could be witnessing the end.

  9. leefe

    (libertarian, small government) socialism

    Good luck on changing human nature sufficiently to achieve that.
    “Oh yeah, I totally agree that we need to pool our resources, to shhare and share alike and make sure that everyone has enough, and I am totally wiling to do that voluntarily” said no powerful, strong, wealthy person ever.

  10. Steve Davis

    leefe, your comment is exactly what every oligarch wants to hear.

  11. leefe

    OK then, tell me how “libertarian, small government socialism” is achieved. Not pie in the sky “people should” stuff, but actual, practical, effective methods that will overcome that little problem of human greed and selfishness, along with all the others.

  12. Arnd

    leefe: you could have googled this yourself.

    See, even (or should that be “especially”) the super-rich have a vested interest in maintaining the system that made them rich – and indeed, some of them managed to raise their eyes from their bursting balance sheets for long enough to tweak to the folly of slaughtering the goose that lays their golden eggs.

    Gina Rinehart is obviously not one of them. For example!

    At any rate, it is not the super-rich – the “1%” made (in)famous by the Occupy movement – who are the problem here.

    It is the next tier down. The middle class, of managers, accountants, lawyers, of overseers and superintendents, of enforcers and (academic) apologists … – all those, in short, whose jobs and careers, whose ability to feed, clothe and house their families is directly predicated on driving the systems that make their paymasters richer without they themselves really having to do anything. That’s where we really need to look for the inertia of the existing system.

    Steve Davis previously quoted Upton Sinclair on these pages: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’

  13. Arnd

    Steve,

    I know you used “perpetual capitalist motion” with tongue firmly in cheek, but it’s a notion should be exposed.

    I know!

    It was always my expectations that once we disabuse ourselves of this bullshit notion – to which, according to the leading “economic realists” of the last fifty years, including Thatcher, Reagan, Keating, Blair, Starmer, Albanese, Chalmers, “There is no alternative” – we’d begin actually looking for alternatives.

    And libertarian socialism may have a sporting chance (are you reading this, leefe?).

    No guarantees, but! Just a chance. And not necessarily a very good chance, either. Holding out the possibility of libertarian socialism will not make the Trumps, Orbans and Duttons of this world magically vanish in a puff of irrelevance. Making them irrelevant will require hard work.

  14. leefe

    Arnd:

    None of that gives the actual things that have to be done to change the system. What do we do – kill the middlemen, eat the rich, send everyone to re-education camps? What, exactly?

    Don’t tell me what needs to be done, tell me how we do it.

  15. Steve Davis

    Arnd — “Making them irrelevant will require hard work.”

    Yes indeed, but a great first step is to get people to stop believing in them.
    At that point the rest of the process will grow organically.

    Which answers leefe’s question.
    But will it be seen as such? 🙂

  16. Arnd

    leefe, you sound almost exactly like my wife – and fair enough. And you are closer to the truth than you realise:

    Don’t tell me what needs to be done, tell me how we do it.

    There’s your key, right there. We’d all do pretty much exactly whatever it is we’re doing right now.

    But we’d do it ever so slightly differently. It’s not about doing one thing totally differently all at once. And it is definitely not about doing everything totally differently all at once. Nobody could handle this sort of thing.

    It is about slight and incremental change. An insistence on a 2% increase in personal responsibility and agency, year on year. An altered awareness of political possibilities, and a commensurate change in evaluating the promises and intents of our political representatives.

    What we have at the moment is a bad case of voluntary submission to the precepts of neo-liberal “economic rationalism”, with a clearly discernible obsequious vorrauseilender Gehorsam quality to it.

    If we did everything we do now, but without accepting the implied duty to make up for managerial incompetence with greater and greater personal effort and exertion, capitalism as we know it would very soon cease to function at all.

    Which is the point when we really do need to reference a viable alternative. In other words, we need to do better than Judith Butler addressing the Occupy movement:

    If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible. If the right to shelter, food, and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistibute (sic) their wealth and cease their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible.

  17. leefe

    But what do we change and how do we change it? You’re still blathering on with what is little more than complex general wordage rather than the actual practical actions.

    If we did everything we do now, but without accepting the implied duty to make up for managerial incompetence with greater and greater personal effort and exertion, capitalism as we know it would very soon cease to function at all.
    And how do we refuse to accept that? Exactly what do we have to do? Storm the corporate citadels? Remove ourselves from the capitalist system by … what? that is actualy achievable by the vast majority of people?

    Yes indeed, but a great first step is to get people to stop believing in them.
    At that point the rest of the process will grow organically.

    It will? You think the billions of people worldwide who are locked into the system will just cast off their chains and somehow become (a different kind of) woke* and “organically” change the system? Why? Human nature doesn’t change that easily. There will always be the stronger, the greedier, the more ruthless, and they will always be looking for a way to impose their will on others. That’s how even biological systems work – survival of the ‘fittest’ which often just means the strongest (in one way or another). That’s what has happened with every major change in our history; every succesful revolution leads to the the revolutionaries becoming the thing they supplanted.
    You can’t escape that reality without changing human nature.

    This all reminds me of my problems with meditation. “Just empty your mind”, they say. And here’s me with my ADHD brain that lacks an off-switch, asking “how?”, and they just keep skirting around it and saying the same thing in different words.

    *Which reminds me, Arnd; you still haven’t responded to my request for a definition of “woke” and “wokism” on the Hatred article. You throw the words around so lightly, you must know their meaning and the history of their popular usage. Please explain just what they mean to you and, again, specifics without the weasel words.

  18. Steve Davis

    leefe, you are demanding to be spoon-fed.
    At the moment you are like the child that keeps asking “Why?” after a question is answered.

    Don’t hide behind an ADHD diagnosis.
    We all have brains that keep feeding a constant flow of thoughts into our consciousness.
    Most of it being irrelevant trash.
    You are not alone in that, you are not exceptional, you’re just one of us.
    As they say in the East, we are all Seekers on the Path. Even those of us who don’t know it yet.

    Take a deep dive into advaita.
    The whole purpose of that line of Indian philosophy is to show the way out of the clutches of the ego, the ego being the source of our endless mental activity.

    Now that the sermon’s over, to answer your objection to the organic growth that will change the system.
    If you think about it quietly for a while, there is only one reason that the powerful currently have power.
    They have power because the masses believe in them.
    Believe in their wisdom.
    Believe their fairy-tales about defending universal values and rights.

    That belief leads the masses to think that only by committing fully to the system that the powerful control, can their personal aspirations be attained.
    As soon as the masses realize that it’s all a con, and the cause of most of the chaos in the world, they will turn back to community for fulfillment.
    At that point the system will collapse because contrary to what the powerful say, the system is not stable.

    When the people make community the focus of their energy, their stronghold, that’s socialism.

  19. Arnd

    leefe, your incredulous “It will?” in response to Steve’s assertion that stripping people of their misplaced faith in the Trumps, Putins and Orbans of this world, and of their still largely unquestioning acceptance of, and submission to the systems they stand for is telling. You yourself have not seen through this “cult of success” (George Soros in The Capitalist Threat), or “Commodity Fetishism” (Karl Marx). Once you do, the world will look a whole lot differently. It’ll still be the same world you’re looking at – but you will see it through different eyes, and it will therefore look differently.

    Earlier, you asked:

    What do we do – kill the middlemen, eat the rich, send everyone to re-education camps? What, exactly?

    None of the above. It is, in the first instance, a matter of removing the ever so thin and threadbare veneer of legitimacy from those who presume to run our affairs and govern our lives – and charge us dearly for doing so.

    Unashamedly hagiographic venerations like Bill Shorten: a lion of the Australian labour movement should have no room on The AIMN, for example. And if they do appear, they should attract comments expressing contempt rather than admiration.

    It is such minute acts of dissent and insubordination, small and insignificant in themselves, but irresistible by sheer number and frequency, that could prepare the ground for implementing the changes that we want.

    As for replying to your “woke” comment, I will return to that article. I didn’t even know you had posted another comment.

  20. leefe

    Steve,

    Could you at least try to be a little less patronising?
    I’m not hiding behind anything; I was making an allusion to the fact that in certain circumstances, no matter how much you ask for specific information, people don’t/won’t give it. The ADHD is relevant to the meditation situation, it isn’t to this discussion.

    We all have brains that keep feeding a constant flow of thoughts into our consciousness
    No, we don’t. If you don’t live with this form of ADHD, you have no idea what I’m talking about. What you’ve said there is just like the “we’re all a little bit autistic” line; it’s inaccurate, condescending and ableist. Try to do better.

    I agree that belief of the masses is what (initially at least) gives autocrats power, and even that that is the first (and possibly biggest) thing that needs to change; I still question whether changes to the system will automatically flow from that. Inertia is real and it applies to human society as much as physical objects. And I still don’t see how that change is supposed to be brought about, especially given that the autocrats (and their wannabe counterparts and enablers) have both a vested interest in maintaining the current situation, and the power to do so.

    ps: You know why children keep asking “why”? Because they don’t get satisfactory answers. The basic rule of getting people to do something different is to tell them why something different is needed, and then give them clear, simple actions to take. The average Joe Blow in the street is not going to be interested in your hi-falutin’ philosophical verbiage; they want it simple and obvious. Children, lacking both knowledge and mental maturity, are usually much the same.

    Arnd,

    I didn’t realise Steve’s comment about the organic flow refered to the Putins, Trumps, Orbans, etc of the world. That’s on me, I was rushing through too fast instead of taking a bit more time to make sure I read yours again to check. I related it to the middle-manager line. My bad.
    Not that agree, but I should have said it differently.

  21. Steve Davis

    “Could you at least try to be a little less patronising?”
    leefe, go back, take a look at the tone of your questions and objections.
    If you want discussions to be conducted in a certain manner, it’s best to participate in a certain manner.

    In regard to the flow of thoughts matter, you appear to be saying that only those with ADHD experience this.
    That is not correct. An entire school of philosophy has developed on the basis of this as a universal trait.

    You say that children keep asking “why” because they don’t get satisfactory answers.
    No doubt that’s sometimes the case, but it’s also the case that the child can be at a stage where it is unready to absorb certain concepts. As you conceded with “Children, lacking both knowledge and mental maturity, are usually much the same.”
    If you did not get satisfactory answers from Arnd, perhaps you need to take more care with your questions.

    As for Joe Blow wanting, and being entitled to something simple and obvious, as you put it, the world doesn’t work that way. You’ve been sucked in to the individualistic mind-set of instant gratification.
    A change in awareness, a change in consciousness, is not a simple thing. It can be a slow and painful process.

    Do you not think about the information that’s available in comments here?
    Do you just come here to have your bias confirmed?
    Arnd has more than once outlined the years of study and reflection that got him to his present position where he’s happy that he has a realistic take on things. Yet you demand the simple and obvious.

    Sorry. It ain’t that simple. You’re going to have to work at it.

  22. leefe

    Jo/e Blow needs things done the way I said, because s/he is too busy trying to survive to do the deep-dive into sociopolitical philosophy. It’s arrogant to insist that people must do certain things or do things in a certain way and then sneer at them for not doing it because they’ve no idea how to. This isn’t for me, I have my own ways of resisting the status quo.
    If you want people to do what’s necessary you need to tell them how to do it. They aren’t going to suddenly wake up and think “oh, that’s right, this sucks and we need to fix it and the way to fix it is blahdeblahdeblahblah“. People need tools to do certain things, and that includes instruction. You want it to happen? Then make it more likely to happen by helping people to find the way.

    Yes, I thought you might take the “children” comment like that. ‘Nuff said.

    I don’t know what you’re reading into what I wrote, but the only emotion driving those questions was a growing touch of exasperation because I wasn’t getting proper answers. When someone asks for specific actions, give them specific actions or tell them to bugger off and not bother you; repeatedly delivering vague generalisations is inevitably going to cause frustration in the questioner.

    I don’t give a rat’s about philosophy in this respect. There is a difference between general internal voices (which, by the way, are not a universal human phenomenon) and the sort of thing that happens with certain forms of ADHD and OCD. Learn a bit more about the conditions before you write off the effect. The brain doesn’t switch off. Ever. It’s going – often in multiple directions at once – 24/7. This is an area where you lack both knowledge and understanding. Try for a little humility and admit that.

    I don’t want the simple and obvious for my own sake. I’m asking to try to clarify what Arnd meant and how he thinks the changes he wants can be effected and for that I don’t need to know the path he took. I’m currently looking at this whole question from a purely pragmatic viewpoint: can it be done and, if so, how?

  23. Steve Davis

    “It’s arrogant to insist that people must do certain things or do things in a certain way and then sneer at them for not doing it because they’ve no idea how to.”
    Who’s been sneering?
    The only one using sarcasm here, is you. Repeatedly. Then when things get a bit hot, you play the victim.

    You are projecting your own faults. Which means that you recognize them as faults.
    Do something about it.

    “I’m asking to try to clarify what Arnd meant…” No you’re not. Your sarcasm shows that you are not.
    But you are giving a very good impression of someone who’s just in the mood for an argument.

    “for that I don’t need to know the path he took.”
    I never said you must follow it.
    I gave it as an example of the complexity of matters for which you, with your expectation of instant gratification, demand answers that are simple and obvious.

    Simple and obvious. Those are your words.
    If answers were simple and obvious the problems would have been fixed already. You come here expecting simple answers to problems that have beset the finest minds for centuries.

    You need to rethink your attitude.

  24. Arnd

    leefe:

    Jo/e Blow needs things done the way I said, because s/he is too busy trying to survive to do the deep-dive into sociopolitical philosophy.

    That’s true enough, and I have been around enough fellow truck drivers and construction workers to see the relevance of your observation. (Then again, it’s not fair or useful to dismiss all of them as hopelessly beholden to nothing other than the daily grind, either.)

    But you seem completely to dismiss that there’s whole demographics whose daily lives are precisely not dominated by the immediate need to make ends meet, and who (claim to) have taken it upon themselves to safeguard and advance the common weal: lawyers, economists, virtually all humanities scholars and (professional) philosophers of many different stripes and flavours, public intellectuals … – and above all, politicians! People, in other words, who publicly claim (if not in exactly so many words) that “I, of all people in this electorate, am so wise, and possessed of such deep understanding of all aspects of the human condition that I want you, the voter, to endorse my becoming part of that small elect group of people (226 at federal level in Australia) who get to discuss, make, review, amend and enact the rules by which all the rest of you must organise your lives!”

    Is it really too much to expect these people to do what they are appointed and paid to do, namely to reflect, to think twice, and indeed occasionally to “deep-dive into socio-political philosophy.”

    And if indeed that is too much to expect – as experience of the last half century clearly suggests – then what alternative is there, but to take matters into our own hands, anarchist-style.

    Hence the proliferation of discontent and whole-of-system dissent, of “sovereign citizens” and indigenous “sovereignty never ceded”. However, directing this grassroots discontent towards constructive rather than destructive ends does require a fairly solid grasp of anarchist principles – and since it is unrealistic to expect either the untrained hoi polloi victims or the upper 10,000 beneficiaries of the current scheme of things to develop a critical understanding of all matters socio-political, it seems to fall to us – interested lay people without vested interests – to take up the slack.

    I mean, if not us, then who?

  25. leefe

    Arnd,

    Yes, those people exist and I agree that they should be doing as you say, but they aren’t the only ones you need to carry with you if you’re going to make wholesale changes. The people at the bottom are the largest group and those most affected; they are the most in need of those changes and they need to be invested in them or you’re just another authoritarian imposing a new system on the masses “for their own good”.
    Teach them, give them a path easily trod within the context of the lives they live. Give them a reason to trust and believe and a way to help.

    Steve:

    I shouldn’t have asked the question. It seems you can’t even try to be less patronising.
    You are, once again, telling me what I think and mean and feel, despite my repeatedly telling you that you are wrong. Despite my having repeatedly told others – in exchanges which you have read – not to do so because they are almost always wrong in their assumptions. Again: you aren’t me, you don’t know my life or how my mind works and you’ve done a very poor job so far of interpreting my motivations and what else might lie behind them, so it might be a good idea to stop doing that.

    I haven’t been sarcastic here apart from my comment about the “organic flow”. You do know sarcasm is something that comes from the writer, don’t you? Your deciding that’s what I was doing doesn’t make it so.
    I really truly have been trying to reach some level of understanding here; of what changes people think are necessary, of why they are necessary, and how how – at a base, practical level – to effect those changes. If this is ever going to be anything more than a theoretical diuscussion, that understanding is essential.

    I never claimed you said I had to follow Arnd’s path; I said that, given why I was aking questions here, that I didn’t need to know that path.

    expectation of instant gratification
    Nope, that’s definitely not arrogant, not condescending, not sneering … ooops, damn it, I’ve slipped up and resorted to sarcasm; naughty me.
    Again, trying for mutual understanding, not for others to fix things for me. I could tread that same path Arnd did but I still won’t know exactly what he means and thinks because – different life, different mind, different way of looking at things. So the only way to gain understanding is to go into the questions and answers at an appropriate level.

    Seriously, why would I keep trying to talk about things with you if it wasn’t to try to reach some degree of understanding? Fighting for the sake of it is not my idea of entertainment.

  26. Steve Davis

    leefe, I said earlier that you need to rethink your attitude.
    That was a genuine and sincere piece of advice.

    You are smitten by the idea that you are special because you are different. You are not.
    That’s a flawed assumption that you’ve picked up from the dominant ideology of the day. An ideology that is political, with all the negatives that this entails.
    Your focus on difference comes through loud and clear in your discussion with Arnd at the Hatred article. That focus will not serve you well. It too easily merges into negativity.

    The great irony here is that you actually are special. Very special. But not because of difference.
    You need to find the real reason that you are special. Not at the intellectual level — you need to live it.

    There’s a paradox here.
    Special-ness is not found in difference. It’s found in unity. In One-ness.

    Keep in mind that a paradox is not a dilemma.
    Paradoxes arise through insufficiency or deficiency of language and/or culture.
    Think of this one as a Zen koan — a device to free the mind.

    That’s why I suggested you do a deep dive into advaita. The answer to all your problems, all our problems, lies there.
    It’s not a five minute fix. I’ve been a student of Eastern philosophy for over fifty years, and I’m still learning.

    And although you claim to not “give a rat’s about philosophy” I’m pretty sure you do or you wouldn’t be here.

    So here’s the bottom line.
    A philosophical enquiry into unity leads to an appreciation of unity that will provide life-long calm, security, deeper and deeper appreciation and, just to add to the paradox, a continually developing sense of Self.

    Give it a go.

  27. leefe

    I said earlier that you need to rethink your attitude.

    Pot/kettle, mirror, etc etc
    Seriously, do you really think you’re the first person to say that to me because you don’t like or don’t agree with what I say? This is a tactic that has been used to silence people – particularly minorities – that’s as old as human society.
    I don’t care what you think I should do or feel or say. You live your life and I’ll live mine and (hopefully) never the twain shall meet. People have to find the path that works for them, and it isn’t going to be the same path for everyone, because we are all different.
    So, here’s my advice to you on this matter: keep your [expletive deleted] advice to yourself.

    You are smitten by the idea that you are special because you are different.
    Again, telling me how I feel and what I think and, once again, being wrong. I’m no more special than any other person. Mentions of certain differences are (once again) attempts to partially explain where divergences in opinions and ways of expressing them arise.

    The answer to all your problems, all our problems, lies there.
    There is no one answer to life, the universe and everything, that works for everyone. (Especially as we don’t even know what the question really is.)

    You say that I think I’m special but, from where I’m standing, if there’s anyone here who thinks that about themsevles, it’s you. And you either don’t see it or won’t question it.

    although you claim to not “give a rat’s about philosophy”
    Keep it in context. I said ” … in this respect” ie, with regard to this particular discussion. You might have noticed the clues the support that, like me constantly asking for practical steps to achieve ends.

    an appreciation of unity
    I’ll appreciate unity when I’m dead because then, with no more individual consciousness and my bodily substance slowly decomposing, I really will be one with the universe. Until then, I prefer solitude.

    Have the life you deserve.

  28. Steve Davis

    Ahh leefe, at least I tried.

  29. Lyndal

    The construction industry generally has problems stemming from its very nature. When a house or whatever is to be built, there are waves of workers required but none get a full-time secure job. My son-in-law some years ago left the industry: as a carpenter, he was mainly erecting the trusses and frames, often little more that two weeks’ work, sometimes interrupted by unpaid days when it rained, or another tradesman such as an electrician had to complete work first, or some supplies were late being delivered, or they were awaiting the arrival of the porta-loo. The work is not well- paid for the tradesmen and labourers, who are usually nowadays expected to have their own ABN, workers’ compensation, and cover them selves for sick and holiday pay, and superannuation.
    My son-law said that one of the reasons to leave was that he would never be able to buy one of the homes he contributed to building.

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