Nabei avoid Oz. Most unaffordable in World.
http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf
The Australian dream is growing hazier
January 25, 2011
TOMORROW is Australia's national day, and if past practice is any guide most people will mark it in a low-key fashion, if at all. A distinctive feature of Australian life is that some other commemorations typically incite more flag-waving and patriotic ardour than the official national day. That is no bad thing. This year, however, the relaxed tone of the day may be marred for some because a cherished part of the national self-image has taken a buffeting.
As The Age reported yesterday, an international survey of housing affordability has placed Australia's housing markets near the bottom. Among the worst was Melbourne, ranked 321 out of 325 and only narrowly beating Sydney, which was number 324. Only Hong Kong was deemed to have less affordable housing stocks. For a country that has traditionally regarded a high level of home ownership as the material underpinning of its egalitarian ideals, this is sobering news. According to geographer Joel Kotkin, in an introductory essay to the survey, Australia was ''once the exemplar of modestly priced, high-quality, middle-class housing'' but has now become ''the most unaffordable housing market in the English-speaking world''.
The survey's findings should not be accepted without qualification. The US organisation that compiled the ranking, Demographia, campaigns against regulation of housing markets and especially against planning polices intended to contain urban sprawl. There is an agenda driving its statistical analyses. And the indicator it uses, the ratio of median house prices to median household incomes, is not universally accepted as the best measure of housing affordability. It does not directly reflect fluctuations in interest rates. The basic picture revealed by Demographia's annual surveys, however, is accurate enough: over several decades housing has become steadily less affordable in Australia.
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Those who argue that unchecked sprawl is the best way of keeping land prices, and therefore housing prices, down will draw predictable conclusions from this latest Demographia ranking. Late last year, when The Age reported that developers were leapfrogging Melbourne's urban growth boundary, stretching the metropolitan area 150 kilometres from east to west, Urban Development Institute of Australia chief Tony de Domenico remarked: ''If you try to limit the market, it never works; there is always a way around.'' It is no surprise that such attitudes find favour among developers. The notion that simply lifting regulation and releasing new land will suffice to reverse the trend of decades is, however, illusory. If Australia is ever again to become the home-owning paradise that earlier generations knew it to be, more will be required.
In part, the receding ideal of affordable housing reflects broader structural changes in the Australian economy since the deregulation of the 1980s. These changes may have made Australia more internationally competitive, at least in some markets, but they have also resulted in greater social stratification. Egalitarianism is still part of the Australian ethos, but it has less basis in reality than it used to do. Yet it continues to be the case that most Australians aspire to have a home of their own, which is one of the characteristics that makes Australia different from most other comparable societies. Given the widening divide between fact and aspiration, a long-term decrease in housing affordability should have been expected.
Calls for release of new land on the urban fringes do not address the fundamental problem of increasingly inequitable divisions of wealth. Indeed, when those calls are heeded they will only add to the cost of providing basic community services. If the Australian dream of home ownership is not to fade entirely, governments must resist the lure of quick fixes, and adhere to planning policies based on a mixture of housing densities and physical limits to the expansion of major cities.
State schools need a helping hand
VICTORIAN schools are not alone in facing skill shortages, but the impacts on students' opportunities have life-long consequences. Government schools, in particular, struggle to compete with the private sector since salaries have declined for decades relative to other professions. Teacher recruitment and retention have suffered accordingly. Governments have long failed to tackle this core problem of educational quality. Victoria's Coalition government, having wavered on its election promise to make the state's teachers the highest-paid in the country, is eyeing an alternative way to tackle skills shortages by involving business and industry in specialist high schools.
The government cites the model of Brisbane's Aviation High, where teaching and facilities are tailored to students who aspire to aviation and aerospace careers. The effect of industry involvement is apparent in the fact that, a year ago, Aviation High was the only participant in the federal Trade Training Centre in Schools program to be fully up and running on time. Nor is the motive necessarily ideological - for one thing, former Labor premier Peter Beattie drove the Aviation High project. For another, Victoria has specialist schools such as the John Monash Science School and the Victorian College of the Arts. Education Minister Martin Dixon says such schools can ''really engage some students'' and is also right in saying that the state school system must offer a broader mix of choices.
Many schools, however, are crippled by shortages of specialist teachers, particularly in maths, technology, science and languages (which affects Coalition plans to teach a second language in all primary schools.) Vacancies classed as difficult to fill exceed 50 per cent or more in secondary school maths, technology and languages other than English. Many schools simply can't offer some subjects. In the circumstances, it makes sense to create specialist schools to offer such subjects using the qualified teachers available, while taking care not to downgrade other schools in the state mix.
Ideally, every school would offer a broad range of subjects taught by specialists. It seems unlikely that any government will lift funding, and tax levels, to a point that enables this. The private sector is concerned about the skills of school leavers and has the incentive, resources and expertise to support specialist schools offering opportunities that would otherwise not be available. Issues of governance and statewide equity should not be glossed over, but something must be done about an underesourced and disgracefully uneven system of government schooling.
http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf
The Australian dream is growing hazier
January 25, 2011
TOMORROW is Australia's national day, and if past practice is any guide most people will mark it in a low-key fashion, if at all. A distinctive feature of Australian life is that some other commemorations typically incite more flag-waving and patriotic ardour than the official national day. That is no bad thing. This year, however, the relaxed tone of the day may be marred for some because a cherished part of the national self-image has taken a buffeting.
As The Age reported yesterday, an international survey of housing affordability has placed Australia's housing markets near the bottom. Among the worst was Melbourne, ranked 321 out of 325 and only narrowly beating Sydney, which was number 324. Only Hong Kong was deemed to have less affordable housing stocks. For a country that has traditionally regarded a high level of home ownership as the material underpinning of its egalitarian ideals, this is sobering news. According to geographer Joel Kotkin, in an introductory essay to the survey, Australia was ''once the exemplar of modestly priced, high-quality, middle-class housing'' but has now become ''the most unaffordable housing market in the English-speaking world''.
The survey's findings should not be accepted without qualification. The US organisation that compiled the ranking, Demographia, campaigns against regulation of housing markets and especially against planning polices intended to contain urban sprawl. There is an agenda driving its statistical analyses. And the indicator it uses, the ratio of median house prices to median household incomes, is not universally accepted as the best measure of housing affordability. It does not directly reflect fluctuations in interest rates. The basic picture revealed by Demographia's annual surveys, however, is accurate enough: over several decades housing has become steadily less affordable in Australia.
Advertisement: Story continues below
Those who argue that unchecked sprawl is the best way of keeping land prices, and therefore housing prices, down will draw predictable conclusions from this latest Demographia ranking. Late last year, when The Age reported that developers were leapfrogging Melbourne's urban growth boundary, stretching the metropolitan area 150 kilometres from east to west, Urban Development Institute of Australia chief Tony de Domenico remarked: ''If you try to limit the market, it never works; there is always a way around.'' It is no surprise that such attitudes find favour among developers. The notion that simply lifting regulation and releasing new land will suffice to reverse the trend of decades is, however, illusory. If Australia is ever again to become the home-owning paradise that earlier generations knew it to be, more will be required.
In part, the receding ideal of affordable housing reflects broader structural changes in the Australian economy since the deregulation of the 1980s. These changes may have made Australia more internationally competitive, at least in some markets, but they have also resulted in greater social stratification. Egalitarianism is still part of the Australian ethos, but it has less basis in reality than it used to do. Yet it continues to be the case that most Australians aspire to have a home of their own, which is one of the characteristics that makes Australia different from most other comparable societies. Given the widening divide between fact and aspiration, a long-term decrease in housing affordability should have been expected.
Calls for release of new land on the urban fringes do not address the fundamental problem of increasingly inequitable divisions of wealth. Indeed, when those calls are heeded they will only add to the cost of providing basic community services. If the Australian dream of home ownership is not to fade entirely, governments must resist the lure of quick fixes, and adhere to planning policies based on a mixture of housing densities and physical limits to the expansion of major cities.
State schools need a helping hand
VICTORIAN schools are not alone in facing skill shortages, but the impacts on students' opportunities have life-long consequences. Government schools, in particular, struggle to compete with the private sector since salaries have declined for decades relative to other professions. Teacher recruitment and retention have suffered accordingly. Governments have long failed to tackle this core problem of educational quality. Victoria's Coalition government, having wavered on its election promise to make the state's teachers the highest-paid in the country, is eyeing an alternative way to tackle skills shortages by involving business and industry in specialist high schools.
The government cites the model of Brisbane's Aviation High, where teaching and facilities are tailored to students who aspire to aviation and aerospace careers. The effect of industry involvement is apparent in the fact that, a year ago, Aviation High was the only participant in the federal Trade Training Centre in Schools program to be fully up and running on time. Nor is the motive necessarily ideological - for one thing, former Labor premier Peter Beattie drove the Aviation High project. For another, Victoria has specialist schools such as the John Monash Science School and the Victorian College of the Arts. Education Minister Martin Dixon says such schools can ''really engage some students'' and is also right in saying that the state school system must offer a broader mix of choices.
Many schools, however, are crippled by shortages of specialist teachers, particularly in maths, technology, science and languages (which affects Coalition plans to teach a second language in all primary schools.) Vacancies classed as difficult to fill exceed 50 per cent or more in secondary school maths, technology and languages other than English. Many schools simply can't offer some subjects. In the circumstances, it makes sense to create specialist schools to offer such subjects using the qualified teachers available, while taking care not to downgrade other schools in the state mix.
Ideally, every school would offer a broad range of subjects taught by specialists. It seems unlikely that any government will lift funding, and tax levels, to a point that enables this. The private sector is concerned about the skills of school leavers and has the incentive, resources and expertise to support specialist schools offering opportunities that would otherwise not be available. Issues of governance and statewide equity should not be glossed over, but something must be done about an underesourced and disgracefully uneven system of government schooling.
