DUCKPOND

I had occasion to have a small celebration in recent days , when I discovered that we had paid off out housing loan. There are a number of ways of looking at this development and not all of them good. For example, we have lost access to an economic way of raising money. I am somewhat surprised that the Bank did not want to contact us before this happened.

There are two related issues, which do not seem to me to get much attention. Firstly, let us surmise that owning a house is a desirable outcome, and represents one of the ways that ordinary people have of acquiring a wealth creating asset, other than superannuation. Furthermore, that presupposes people have secure employment to take out a mortgage. Some, who are interested and savvy, unlike me, will trade and have a number of houses over time with the accompanying capital gains.

Senator Bartlett, at least, is concerned about the raising bar of the threshold of entry to house ownership, and in a large urban conglomerate such as this one, travelling time and cost to work for people who must live on the expanding urban periphery. The Treasurer apparently successfully parried this question so that it was not put on the political agenda. There are those people who over commit, whose anxieties were real as I had direct experience of, and who became the targets of government propaganda during the last election campaign.

And then there was the news item, for a fleeting moment, that reported on the rising number of homelessness, and earlier reports that homelessness was more prevalent among Aboriginal people. Homelessness would, it seems to me, make permanent employment difficult, as it would the provision of any form of social services.

It is no great insight to suppose that secure employment, one supposes with reasonable terms and conditions, is an underlying causal factor. And the critical issue, that the IR legislation does not address, should employment be other than a form of economic slavery, or commodification?

I get the impression that this Federal Government is wrapped in an ideology and does not care. The law of the human jungle, or social darwinism, should apply. A blind person could predict that homelessness and social distress will increase. They will seek to discipline the population with mindlessness and martial law. And as for housing, that only creates labour inflexibility, so in truth they are not interested in benefits for the population at large.