Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

The Age reports that the Government is prepared to reduce the performance requirements for the rail network operators, on the grounds that increased patronage makes it harder to achieve on-time requirements.

There’s some truth to that, but the real game is almost certainly rigging things so that the performance statistics look better prior to the next State election, at which point we can expect the ALP to be making a lot of noise about how things are “better”, when in reality they are probably worse.

Public transport in Melbourne is a mess and it’s only going to get worse. I don’t know — or particularly care — what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not another $8 billion on freeways. Not unless it’s a special bus-only freeway…

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Some people I know are into rock climbing, and today they were expressing some distress over a recent tribal claim to one of the most difficult climbs in the Grampians — sorry, I can’t find anything about this online. It was suggested that as the people making the claim hadn’t been seen anywhere nearby for 50 years, perhaps their connection with this particular bit of land wasn’t as deep as they claim…

Which reminded me of another group who claim a deep connection with a particular bit of land which they had, in large part, vacated some hundreds of years previously. They then swanned back in, supported by the military might of a waning superpower, and kicked those who’d moved in since back out again.

The “they haven’t been here for ages” line is pretty common when a native title claim affects our lifestyles, but somehow it’s not an argument which typically holds much water when the Israel situation comes up.

Is that because the Israelis are more like us than the local natives? Is it OK to boot people out of their homes if the people doing the booting have had a rough time of it, or if they have (better) weapons, or if they’re white Europeans, or they have a pretty effective set of lobby groups that aren’t constantly suffering from corruption and mismanagement?

But if they’re black or — more importantly I suspect, as these blokes aren’t particularly racist — it’s us they’re evicting? Even when the “eviction” is pretty tame by comparison with what they copped a few hundred years back when our ancestors showed up with guns, booze, and disease?

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Today the ALP announced a big push on IT in schools, but is there any sign of this on their websites? Nope.

(That they have several is also confusingly stupid.)

Yesterday the Liberal Party announced 9 frigging billion dollars of pork. They do have the PM’s speech transcript online, but no further detail than that.

Ludicrous. Anyone’d think they don’t want the general public to have more than the soundbites.

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Dymocks have announced today that they will start selling ebooks. Purchases are online for now, but they’ll start selling in-store as a “dump to memory card” deal fairly soon and they’re also talking up on-demand print.

Formats are Mobipocket, Adobe Reader, and Microsoft Reader. It looks like the Adobe versions are DRM-free.

Prices are ~30% lower than physical books.

They’ve also announced they’re now selling audiobooks online, but this is basically just a rebranding of Audible. Presumably the value-add here is the in-store marketing, something Audible can’t really do itself.

(Note for the non-Australians: Dymocks is one of the big book-store chains here. Unlike some I’ll refrain from naming they also have a pretty decent reputation.)

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I really should. But I read this Age article on housing affordability anyway.

And, predictably, I am now feeling moderately depressed.

I simply cannot imagine being able to pay $2600 per month for housing alone, and our household income is somewhat above the stated average. None of the proposed “fixes” so far have been anything more than band-aids: increasing the supply of land on the fringes won’t help, there’s already plenty of land locked up by the developers, the extra Rudd proposes to release will go the same way and be sold off in a trickle to keep prices up.

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One of the lines the ALP is running at the moment is “a vote for Howard is a vote for Costello”. As if that’s supposed to dissuade people from voting Liberal.

A better line would be “a vote for Howard is a vote for Howard, because you can’t trust the guy to keep his word on this”.

If I thought I could actually trust John Howard to stand down in eighteen months I’d be voting Liberal, because frankly Peter Costello’s social policy agenda is much more in line with traditional social-liberal/left views than Kevin Rudd’s.

But Howard can’t be trusted to keep his word on anything. If the Liberals win, in eighteen months it’ll be “the party still wants me”, “it was a non-core promise”, “I’ve got a lot to contribute”, and so on. The only way John Howard is leaving the Lodge is in a pine box, electorally or literally.

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There’s been a fair bit in The Age recently about the Lockerbie proposal, revised population growth estimates (now estimating 5 million people in Melbourne by 2030), and what effect this should have on the Government’s Melbourne 2030 plans.

There seems to be an unquestioned assumption that urban sprawl is by definition Bad(TM), but I’d like to suggest that it isn’t urban sprawl itself that is the enemy, it’s urban sprawl without a matching investment in infrastructure, be that schools, hospitals, or public transport. What matters more than distance is travel time and comfort.

However. Assuming we don’t want Melbourne itself to simply keep on growing and eating up all the surrounding farmland, how about investing in high-speed train services to places like Geelong and Bendigo? If you could travel from Bendigo to the Melbourne CBD in 30 minutes, wouldn’t that make Bendigo at least as attractive a place to live as Glen Waverley?

The risk for a city like Geelong is that it becomes a ghost town during business hours, with half the population commuting to Melbourne for work. But we’ve seen what has happened over the longer term in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne: business has started locating facilities there because it’s cheaper and that’s where the staff live. If a bank is looking to build a big datacentre in 2015, many of their employees are commuting from Bendigo, and there’s plenty of telecomms capacity, then Bendigo becomes a viable location.

The downfall to this sort of thing is that public transport still isn’t a very high priority and train services have a very high up-front capital cost. All that land, the tracks, the stations, the rolling stock. And if you want it to be very very fast, you’re probably looking at significant upgrades to the existing lines, which means a fair bit of inconvenience in the meantime. But if you pick a few good locations that are already reasonably attractive places to live, put in the money — borrow if you have to, borrowing for long-term investment is good — and encourage people and business to decentralise, well, there goes that whole “urban sprawl” problem you were so worried about.

And everyone comes out a winner.

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Andre feels inclined to heckle a bit over my previous post.

He suggests that the real problem is that we won’t look at places that aren’t “cool”, that we want to get it all on a platter right away.

Not quite true.

It’s funny he should mention Boronia, as it’s one of the areas we’ve been looking at. It’s on the fringe of “acceptable commute time”, barely. It’s also on the fringe of “too expensive”.

He points out a house he’s found online. You’ll note that the price is $260k+, but it’s highly unlikely to sell for $260k, it’ll be more like $300k.

But let’s assume it does sell for the advertised price. That works out to be a bit over $2000/month on the loan repayment over 25 years. About 50% of my after-tax income, which is doable so long as my partner is also working.

But, y’know, like much of the country we’re planning to have kids. Which are expensive, not just in outgoings but also in terms of opportunity cost — my partner won’t be working for at least a few years.

$2000/month with only one income and the cost of kids? This is verging on “crushing” territory. The slightest hitch and we’re screwed. This includes any significant upward movement in the interest rate.

And all this assuming it does actually sell for the advertised price. Which is not terribly common in Melbourne right now.

So all this and 80 minutes each way commute. Hell of a lifestyle option, eh? Just because 90% of the population is in the same boat doesn’t make it any less fucked up.

This really isn’t about “cool” places to live. We’re just about at the point where we’re ready to give up on the inner-city as a place to rent let alone buy. I’m sure things are easier if one is militantly anti-child and making well over $100k/pa. Most of the country does not fit this description.

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Housing affordability has become a bit of an issue around here of late. Both sides of politics are talking about it quite a bit, as are commentators of all stripes.

The proposals so far have not been particularly relevant to us as we’re in an “interesting” position. Specifically, neither of us can drive so we absolutely must be near good public transport, and our income is such that we don’t qualify as “low income”. Most proposals are either geared toward making rentals less expensive for low-income earners or for those buying newly-constructed houses, and the latter are almost entirely on the very fringes of our cities where public transport barely exists.

What would make us happy? Well, the ideal would be for the housing market to calm down and prices to drop so we could reasonably afford to buy a two or three bedroom house with a yard within a 45 minute commute by train to the CBD. And when I write “afford” I don’t mean “will a bank lend us an insane amount of money that’ll cripple us?”, I mean “for an amount of money we can repay over 25 years without having to eat cardboard”.

But leaving aside that fantasy-land, what’d be nice would be to make renting less horrible. Leases of five years or more, the right to make cosmetic changes to the place, a cap on just how much rent can be increased each year (indexed, perhaps?), and lease terms that allow pets. If an entire generation is to be locked out of the property market then we ought to at least be able to settle down in a rented house, make it our home, and have some moderate level of security.

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This week’s 4 Corners story on torture was fairly thought-provoking. The one question it didn’t ask of the pro-torture interviewees that feels lacking is this: if it’s necessary and even OK to torture people, why do you need to hide it?

The two obvious answers to that are either (a) they don’t think they’d be able to retain public support for their behaviour if it were widely acknowledged and on the record; or (b) they are themselves ashamed of it and would rather people didn’t know.

If it’s OK to torture then it should be a matter of public record. Who was tortured, how, where, by whom, and what was the outcome? They should be required to operate within a strict set of legal rules, justifying the desire to torture to a judge in order to receive a warrant, and reporting back to that judge at regular intervals and at the conclusion of the process.

If it’s going to happen, better that it happen in the light of day. Maybe that’d prompt a few cockroaches to go running for cover.

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