The AU housing market. Unattainable for the young.

 "A median income household in Australia with a 20% deposit could afford a home of $513,000, while the national median dwelling value is $815,000, she said."

Well, it's all there in a single sentence. House prices are lapping wage growth, like Usian Bolt racing... me. A corollary to this is that a high income can now only purchase a sub-average home. What a world. Is this the Australian dream? Where a person needs to work like a Trojan for decades to get to a high income, so they can finally afford a dilapidated home.

This is where economic growth leads us; to a land of haves/have-nots. Economic growth will always lead to inequality, for a number of factors, one of which is the Cantillon Effect, which was outlined 300 years ago, which states that the closer you are to the King (government), the more of the public money you will receive.

The Baby Boomers have been in power for a couple of decades, and of course, they have morphed the economy to represent and nurture their own financial circumstances, which is the ability to purchase property back in the 60s/70s/80s, when it was dirt cheap and plentiful, and ride the wave of increasing values, until now where it is scarce.

So, for example, how would a recent migrant to Australia ever hope to purchase property?

Young people, like my kids, will only be able to own property by inheritance. My friend, his son is early 30s, with a family and 2 young kids, good paying job, and they are unable to save for a necessary down payment because they are paying $800/wk rent.

So when the Prime Minister's tout economic growth as the single measure of a functioning society, the young people are very confused, because none of that applies to them. They see property values out of touch, as they go to Woolies and spend $1.20 per potato. And then they wake up on Monday morning, to work in their causal jobs without any benefits like annual/sick/parental leave, job security, redundancy pay, career development, workplace rights, fair work benefits such as Long Service Leave, financial stability where banks see them as less secure, etc etc.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jan/08/australia-housing-market-widening-gap-income-home-values

The alarmingly trend of doctors reducing their working time

 Yes. And this trend will accelerate in the coming years. In the last decade, there are more female doctors graduating each year than males.

Look at the study linked in the article... 61% of doctors are considering reducing their time working. Unfortunately the data was not broken down by sex so we don't get the complete picture, but this is consistent with the overall societal trend of women reducing hours to have families whereas men will work until retirement. And paradoxically, the greatest threat of this shortage will be in the gyno/ob sectors where the % of female doctors is the highest. In fact, in the US, there is an anticipated shortage of 100,000 gyno/ob doctors in the coming years.

Nothing wrong with this. This is just how it is all working now, and we have to understand the effects and how to maintain proper societal healthcare under these circumstances. 

And like anything in society, the key is to get the proper data so we can make the proper decisions.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jan/01/almost-10-percent-of-gps-in-australia-aged-over-70-shortage

SSRIs vs Psychedelics - not even close

 "But experts have warned that using them recreationally risks doing more harm than good."

What the...? Where did the author conjure this up from the data? Did they read the study they used for this article? I did. The study states that 78.6% of participants were glad to take psychedelics, 91.1% had only at most a day of discomfort, and only 2.6% of participants sought any assistance for their 'impaired' experience where the vast majority of symptoms of this 'impairment' were feeling anxious or some disassociation.

And this study was meant to highlight the adverse effects of these psychedelics. And if 15.7% of participants have a negative mindset before the study, then of course, you will get some people who have negative experiences.

This is what is so infuriating about the war on drugs. Right now as I speak, 7% of all Aussies are suffering withdrawal symptoms from SSRIs and the like... from a pool of 17% of Australian women, and 10% of men being prescribed SSRIs like candies. 10% of which are also experiencing sexual dysfunction issues. So SSRIs are a real problem in society, and yet prescribed by the tens of thousands every day.

I mean look at the difference in symptoms:

1) SSRIs: in this study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666915324000519), the symptoms were: There were 1148 respondents, who were mostly white, female and educated. For 40 % of respondents, withdrawal symptoms had lasted more than 2 years and 80 % were moderately or severely impacted by them. One in four were unable to stop their antidepressant. Reported consequences of withdrawal included impaired work function (56 %), losing jobs (20 %), taking sick leave (27 %), and relationship breakdown (25 %).

2) Psychedelics: In the study I linked here, symptoms were: 

Feeling anxious 36.1% 

Difficulty sleeping 27.9% 

Difficulty thinking or making decisions 24.0%

Feeling disconnected from everything 23.7%

Feeling distant or cut off from other people 20.1%

Bothered by little things 18.4%

Headaches and/or body pain 16.3%

Re-experience of stressful event in the past 15.7%

Trouble enjoying things 14.4%

Sensitive hearing 14.4%

In other words, the symptoms for psychedelics were quite benign compared to the SSRIs. It's not even close. The current system is an unconstitutional mental health nightmare.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/25/experts-warn-of-mental-health-risks-after-rise-in-magic-mushroom-use

Could Australia Elect a Trump? Of course.

 We all smugly laugh at the US electing this clown for a 2nd time, yet this begs the question: if Trump was here in AU, would we elect him? Now we probably have a hearty guffaw pondering this, but are you sure? We elect sports heroes (Sam Groth, David Pocock), crazy Pauline Hansen, even a rock/roller Peter Garrett. Even Ukraine elected a comedian (which ultimately was not a bad decision).

Society is nothing but cults of personalities. We idolise the rich, the sports heroes, the movie stars (not scientists though... far too geeky).

What these personalities understand, which the common person doesn't, is that there are no rules in society, and that the only currency in society is notoriety. What's the saying: any PR is good as long as they spell your name right.

And, to me, this fealty to personalities will only get worse, because now that we have access to all the world's information in our hands, someone needs to be even more radical in order to gain that notoriety. A personality who wants to be elected and is just a good solid human being will be left in the dust... how boring of them.

Each society believes that 'our' society has a underlying structure which somehow stops the bad apples, and it is simply not true. The only thing that saves us is that society is a bell-curve, and most people have similar needs to each other. But the bell-curve is fragile and can easily be swayed depending on the personality. Australia is no different.

The Lies of Monetary Policies

I would say monetary policy is one of the most misunderstood aspects of our society. I don't claim to understand it all, but I (think I) know enough to understand the low-hanging fruits of it all.

The 1st lie the politicians tell us is that the government budget is like a household budget. In our own lives, we have jobs which bring us income, and we use that money to buy things, and we can't maintain a deficit balance in our budget for very long or we get into trouble. A government with it's own currency as we have in AU or US does not operate the same way. A government with its own currency can never run out of funds. It's not like household budgets. It always has the funds since the govt is the entity that creates the money.

The 2nd lie they tell us is that our taxes pay for the government programs. Taxes don't. The govt creates money for a program say like NDIS and spends it, before taxes come in, by crediting the bank accounts of citizens, disability organisations, etc. What taxes do is they destroy the created money... by the citizens, disability organisations, etc giving the money back to the govt (in the form of taxes) thus debiting their accounts, and destroying the money. Nowhere in this process are the taxes funding the programs.

The 3rd lie they tell us is that deficits are bad. They are only bad if they result in undue inflation. In fact, the opposite is true; surpluses are bad. Let's look at a surplus. The government spends $90, and the people pay $100 back to the govt in the form of taxes. So the govt has a $10 surplus. But the people have $10 less money to do things. That's bad. If the people have less money to provide services/products/etc, then the economy can become recessive. Conversely, if the govt spends $100 and gets back $90 in taxes, thus operating in a deficit, then the people have a surplus of $10 so they can invest, start new businesses, etc. The only problem, as I stated, is inflation.

So the politicians tell us that deficits rob the future generations by forcing them, in the form of increased taxes, to pay back all this currency debt. They don't. They tell us they can't afford certain expenditures, etc based on current tax revenue. They always can. They may decide expenditures would be unduly inflationary so they don't do them, but they can always create the funds.

It's all lies, convenient lies, but still lies nonetheless.

UBI works. Here's proof.

This extensive study of UBI in Kenya is so chockful of good news that it's difficult to summarise it.

The money was paid-out either as a lump sum, or per-month, and of course there was a control group of people who were not paid at all.

The result is the people who were paid in a lump sum, substantially outperformed the other groups. And this makes sense, since they had the capital to start substantive businesses. And what was so amazing was the people who were paid per month, banded together to form savings clubs which allowed them to take turns in getting larger lump sums to create bigger businesses.

And inflation didn't rear it's ugly head because people were buying across a wide range of products.

It clearly showcases the inherent cooperative, connective, and intelligent nature of our communities.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/12/07/1217478771/its-one-of-the-biggest-experiments-in-fighting-global-poverty-now-the-results-ar

Work, you proles, work.

This is on us. Not the politicians, not the billionaires. Us. The consumers of the developed nations. We have raped Mother Earth dry in the pursuit of our trinkets which we use as placebos in our artificial quest for self-worth.

We have allowed ourselves to be transfixed by the self-interests of the corporations, who sit there in their ivory towers, smoking their fat cigars and drinking their Hennessy, laughing at us as the psychology of their childish marketing tricks works it's magic on the mindless proles. I always return to the lipstick ad showing a beautiful woman with bright-red sensual lips with the tagline: "Say goodbye to boring lips". Must. Buy. That. Lipstick. The mind screams.

We have allowed ourselves to be transfixed by the promised Valhalla of 'economic growth' as both parents need to spend their best hours working to survive now with their mortgages and car loans taking the bulk of their salaries, all the while destroying the family and promoting individualism to create jaw-dropping statistics like, by 2030, 40% of women between 22-45 will be single and childless. Work, you proles, work. Don't save, you proles, spend spend spend.

And look what we have done. We have traded our freedoms for trinkets. And for what? Here's a question for you: Our real wages in 2023 are equivalent to what year in the past? How does 2008 sound? And our wage growth has been considerably less than the labour productivity gains for each of the last 22 years. We've been spinning our wheels for over 20 years. And it's purely our fault.

We have lost ourselves, and in doing so have allowed others to determine our own fates.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/world-facing-hellish-3c-of-climate-heating-un-warns-before-cop28