Immigrants make you richer.

[mistermack]

Dumb post?

Most of Australia is not habitable, and land there is cheap. The few bits that are habitable are fucking expensive. Those are rather obvious facts. What is not at all obvious is why you alluded to those facts.

Saying that only desirable corners are expensive is a load of crap anyway. Less desirable corners of habitable areas are disgustingly expensive as well. On average, Australia's housing affordability is worse than that of the UK, Japan and the US (among other countries) precisely because so little of the continent is habitable. Linkypoo

You obviously don't understand the word desirable.
The suburbs of Sydney are desirable, because people desire to live there. It's pretty simple, if you make an effort.
It's nothing to do with intrinsic quality. It's because it's near Sydney.

[Hermit]

You obviously don't understand the word desirable.
The suburbs of Sydney are desirable, because people desire to live there. It's pretty simple, if you make an effort.
It's nothing to do with intrinsic quality. It's because it's near Sydney.

You said "the most desirable corners." I would hardly regard the Blacktown area of Sydney as one of the most desirable areas, nor would most of its residents. Most of Australia's habitable areas are simply less desirable than the others.

At any rate, Australia's habitable areas are fairly densely populated, and this is reflected by the fact that housing affordability among the worst in the world. It is worse than that of the UK, Japan, the US and some other countries.

Stop digging. Your hole is plenty deep enough already.

[mistermack]

And your posts are getting more and more idiotic.
You state that your little terrace would sell for a million dollars, and then try to claim that it's not desirable. Can you not see the stupidity of that argument?

And I posted about the cost of a plot of land, and you bang on about the cost of housing.
Did it not occur to you that they are not the same thing at all?

[Hermit]

You state that your little terrace would sell for a million dollars, and then try to claim that it's not desirable. Can you not see the stupidity of that argument?

I claimed that not just the most desirable corners are expensive. If you try to buy something in the most desirable corners, my terrace looks cheap. In Vaucluse you get nothing for under eight million now. In the most desirable corners of the Eastern Suburbs houses under 2.5 million are as rare as hen's teeth. And forget about the most desirable corners of Bondi Beach or Tamarama Beach unless you are happy to shell out half a million for a studio so small you have to step outside if you want to do as much as change your mind about something. Then there are the desirable corners around Sydney Harbour. Sheesh, the number of houses that change hands with numbers that reach well into telephone territory. Phone numbers for landlines in Australia consist of eight digits.

And I posted about the cost of a plot of land, and you bang on about the cost of housing.
Did it not occur to you that they are not the same thing at all?

The cost of housing is overwhelminly due to the cost of land. The terrace I sold was valued at $120,000. The rest of what I got for the property was the land value. I had a look at real estate ads a few months ago. It turned out that the house I sold was up for sale again. Going by the photos nothing much had changed with the terrace, but the asking price was $1,260,000. That would mean around a million bucks for 90 square metres of land. Two weeks later I looked again, and it was marked as under contract. About six weeks ago the ad had disappeared altogether. I presume the property was sold.

Whatever. Your initial comments are irrelevant at best and just plain wrong at worst. Australia is neither underpopulated, nor is land cheap as far as immigration issues are concerned.

[mistermack]

Hermit, you are talking complete bollocks.
I mentioned the most desirable corners of Australia, and you convert that into the most desirable corners of Sydney and argue against that.

Anywhere around Sydney is a most desirable corner of Australia. You know that, but you can't admit that you just shot your mouth off without thinking.

[Hermit]

I mentioned the most desirable corners of Australia, and you convert that into the most desirable corners of Sydney

And you converted "the most desirable corners of Australia" to "the desirable corners of Australia", which becomes pretty fucking useless as a definition for the purposes of our discussion because "desirable corner" now means "any area that is not uninhabitable", and anywhere in Australia that is not inhabitable is still pretty bloody expensive.

Take the little town I've lived in for the past ten years. It's motto is "Where the outback meets the sea". That's a quaint way of saying "If you take a step to the south, the sharks will get you. A step to the north, there be dragons." The nearest big city is 400 kilometres away by road. Today my town is one third the size in population that it was when the shipyards closed down around 1974, so you wouldn't expect much of a housing shortage.

The cheapest houses are tiny, semi-detached 1950s or 1960s vintage facebrick constructions. The front door will open straight into the lounge room, which will be no more than 3.5 x 3.5 metres in area. Then you get two or three bedrooms that are significantly smaller than that. Good luck trying to fit a queen-sized bed, a two-door wardrobe, a couple of bedside chests and a dressing table in those and have more than a couple of feet wide floor space between any of them. The kitchen/dining area is galley sized and there is no corridor to speak of connecting any of them. You get from one room to any other through cleverly positioned doors connecting the lot. Did I say cheap? You'll be lucky to find one for under 200k, and that will be unrenovated. Not exactly cheap for a desirable corner on the edge of habitable Australia, both geographically and qualitatively.

Oh, and did I say desirable? Yes we have services. We have schools, but the teachers are bottom of the barrel. All the good ones either manage to avoid coming here in the first place or wangle their way back to civilisation quick time. We have doctors too. Same as teachers. We have a hospital. If there's a complication with a daughter's tonsillectomy, it is quick to organise a flight to Adelaide. The flying doctor service is very busy here, and luckily very good at what it does. Our biggest shopping centre proudly advertised the fact that it houses 48 shops when I moved here. When the current massive expansion is completed there might be 70. There are three or four other shopping centres. With the exception of "Uptown" none of them has more than about a dozen, and a third of uptown is for lease. All in all a desirable spot if you are into a Spartan style of living, but I guess this is a desirable corner of Australia to live in by your definition.

[cronus]

Yeah, Australia is unsustainable. Gonna be the first major country to hit both peak oil and climate change head on at the same and together. Why I'm glad I never moved there. Very glossy campaign to attract more and more suckers into the kill-box Australia got going.

[mistermack]

Hermit, I honestly don't see what you are trying to prove.
My post, that you took exception to for some strange reason, was this :

You don't have astronomical prices for a small plot of land over there, except in the most desirable corners.

Why the fuck you are banging on about the price of houses, only you can know. But it's totally irrelevant to the post you were criticising. Why don't you debunk my post, instead of the imaginary ones in your head?

[laklak]

Damn, if I had anything worth a million I'd sell that motherfucker in a heartbeat and buy a big fuck off sailboat. You wouldn't have laklak to kick around any more, except when I was in port and managed to piggyback somebody's wifi.

[Hermit]

Hermit, I honestly don't see what you are trying to prove.
My post, that you took exception to for some strange reason, was this :

You don't have astronomical prices for a small plot of land over there, except in the most desirable corners.

Why the fuck you are banging on about the price of houses, only you can know. But it's totally irrelevant to the post you were criticising. Why don't you debunk my post, instead of the imaginary ones in your head?

Nice decoupling of the immigration issue. Seems you forgot why you made that comment in the first place. I'm not going to go over it with you again. You bore me now. Just shit on the chessboard and declare yourself the winner of all internets debates. You know you want to.

[klr]

Property prices in Ireland and the UK have (IMHO) got very, very little to do with those dastardly immigrants, many of whom are quite happy living in high-density rented accommodation. No, it's because of an Irish/British obsession with owning your own house.

[Seth]

Hermit, all your post means is that immigration has been good for the immigrants.

Read the post again with this in mind: The current opposition to migrants and asylum seekers is a case of descendants of earlier migrants putting up the "no vacancy" sign to later ones. That is the intended meaning of it.

Yeah? So what? What logic do you use to assume that foreigners should or do have the same rights of occupancy as "descendants of earlier migrants" in any particular place? By what reasoning do you imply that people born in another country have some inherent right to migrate to another country, particularly if that country is already overpopulated?

There's nothing wrong or immoral about saying "Sorry, we've reached our comfortable capacity and you're not welcome to come here, go fix your own nation's economy if you don't like it."

I also quite intentionally began that topic with "As for Australia". The mileage in other countries may vary, though the same dynamic is somewhat obscured due to the longer time span of their migration history and the fact that some previous cultures have become totally extinct.

"Migration" is not a human right I'm afraid. The people of the nation the intruders wish to occupy, who are the ones who labored to make it a good place to live, which is what attracts migrants, have every right to tell immigrants that they can't simply walk in and start enjoying the fruits of other people's labor just because they want to. People should labor to make their own nations fruitful, not attempt to steal from those who have already done so.

[Blind groper]

Seth

My original message had nothing to do with any "right" to migrate. Just that a University of Oxford (UK) researcher discovered that migrants contribute positively to the economic well being of the country they migrate to.

How that translates into national policy regarding immigration is up to the nations concerned, and their government.

I think, though, that your country has benefited immensely from immigration, and the energy and enterprise those people brought to the United States.

[pErvinalia]

Unless, of course, they ship billions of dollars out of the country to relatives in their homeland...

While many immigrants do that, the host country still experiences a net benefit. What's the problem?

Does it? I didn't see that factored in. Perhaps I missed it.

Did they steal that $$?

The market spends money to make money, or to meet its other needs.
For every dollar they earn, they make someone else >$1, or have filled some other market need that the market has determined is worth at least $1(usually both).


Natural citizens buy billions of dollars worth of retail "loss leaders" every year. This has a similar effect: money is lost.
I have a feeling you're somehow less bitter about that.

Yeah, it's amazing how Seth forgets his alleged libertarian and free market principles when there's others getting something that he and his rich buddies/peers could be getting.

[pErvinalia]

If you are poor and unskilled, what you need is some guy from wherever (overseas in this case) who is so ambitious that he creates his own business and hires you.

I did say don't talk stupid, but you just ignored me.

The overseas guy will just ship in his unskilled brothers, sisters and cousins, and hire them. Failing that, he will hire someone who speaks his own language, and pay them less than the minimum wage.
And you will have less chance than ever.
Because he will put the local entrepreneurs out of business, people who might have hired you.

Don't forget that they are all likely terrorists too...