Amongst the dross on news websites of late, the one report that had me jittery was not from the Canberra cabal carping collective, but from the other side of the world.
‘Twas about housing, and it rang true for Australia.
It concerned “the insane unaffordability of London accommodation”, as The Guardian newspaper put it, in the Old Dart, the Mother Country to some unreconstructed monarchists, the place which once led the world and where today resides a nice old lady who has more power over this country than her own where the rich get richer while the poor get …
Whoops, I got started! Sorry. Damned republican sympathies, get thee behind me, get behind.
The report was about the UK’s increasing lack of rental housing and affordability – read, places to live.
This in one of the world’s richest countries – a bit like India really – stupendous wealth alongside mind-numbing poverty, or should that be mind-numbing wealth alongside … you get what I mean.
It gave me the jitters because it was a look at just-over-the-horizon Australia, a world-leading nation in social advances over the past century but which seems to be falling down the same UK path.
We have the same mindset as the Poms: riches count, more’van most anyfing guv’nor.
Thus we see pauperised Poms who have the bad luck to be living in a now-rich suburb, in London in particular, being effectively pushed to poorer districts due to some mad rule about “housing benefit caps”; “social cleansing” it’s being called.
Talk about a giant step backwards. Charles Dickens, where are you?!
Such a situation here is almost unthinkable. There is a lot of community housing in flash suburbs in Sydney – for example, Balmain, one of Sydney’s costliest waterfront suburbs (all hail previous Labor governments).
Strewth, the average Oz wage is now mid-$70Ks with railway police/transit officers – you know, the ones who are never there unless you misplaced your ticket – start at $78K, about $1500 a week before tax, therefore about $1K clear at minimum.
This of course reflects that big-city Australia is awash with dosh, which means that we’re more than likely to ride out economic tsunamis that might engulf other nations in the near future, so the dough’s coming from somewhere.
This is not a call to eat the rich – gosh, they’re so entertaining, and think of all the magazine staff who’d be out of a job – er, no complaints?
A moment ago I saw a wondrous sight, the International Space Station gliding illuminated overhead like a slo-mo shooting star (Frid May 11, 8pm-ish). I realised I was looking at a multi-billion ‘house’ for a few while back on Earth in this nation, and elsewhere, people face rents higher than what they earn.
Take a look at Sydney’s rental classies: thousands per week for near-city suburbs, while averages for so-so areas start around $600-plus.
To put it in perspective: an aged pensioner gets less than $400 a week, a person seeking work gets the dole (Newstart Allowance) of about $245 a week.
Like the UK and the USA, we’re developing a world-class, first-world class of working-poor, and we should beware.
Gimme shelter!
