Lol. Matt Barrie is about to discover what invisibility feels like.
Like John Pilger, MB and others, throwing truth bombs at the Australian bourgeoisie is like jumping down a coal shaft at midnight.
At the Daily Mail:
“Well I think every Australian would realise that when you go to the pub and your schooner of beer costs 12, 13 14 dollars, sometimes $15; your landlord is jacking up your rent by ten or 15 per cent; the banks are jacking up your mortgage 100, 200 or 300 per cent; your energy bills are up 20 to 25 per cent: something is terribly wrong in this country”.
“We are a very primitive country in terms of what we export”.
“We dig out of the ground basically dirt, which is iron ore, stick it on a boat and ship it to China. We dig out dead trees, which is basically coal, and ship it overseas to Japan and China”.
“In between that, let’s just keep pushing house prices up. House prices have gone up over the last 60 years, 86 times”.
“Government policy, absent of hoping and praying that commodity prices go up – commodities that we don’t elaborately transform into higher end goods, such as petrochemicals and so forth – have led to a situation where a country has manufacturing as a percentage of GDP on par with a financial haven like Luxembourg”.
“‘The only reason why house prices are going up is because we’re bringing more people into the country”.
“In Australia now, our household debts are about 211% to GDP, which is double the US – a country that you’d normally associate with credit cards and debt”.
“Households are basically at breaking point and mortgages are skyrocketing. We’re currently at 3.85% in terms of the interest rate, which is lagging the US, UK and Canada which are 4.5 to five-and-a-bit”.
“And we’re at the point now where it is a complete replay of the movie The Big Short”.
“All these mortgages during covid were written about 1.95%. And this quarter, 17% of all fixed rate mortgages will come off those lower rates and will go up to a much higher rate”.
“By the latest data I saw mortgages are now 7-8% and if rates go up next week it will be 9%”.
‘”It’s exactly the global financial crisis which we saw in America, happening here in Australia today”.
I could not agree more with Matt’s spectacular assessment, which is perhaps not surprising given he clearly reads MB.
I also agree that Australia is a big short in the near term as the RBA overcooks rate hikes. Corporate profits are going to get smashed.
But, I disagree with his prognosis that we are on the verge of a GFC episode in Australia.
We are caught in something much worse.
Our torment is not a sudden and painful reset to shock us out of a bubble.
Ours is a gradual and endless fall in living standards as mass immigration is used to plug every hole, bog every gap, inflate every leak, and bulwark every tilting wall.
As it does so, the devolution of Australia from an advanced economy to an emerging market will transpire over twenty years.
We will wake up one day a decade or two hence and discover that we live somewhere between Mumbai and Ho Chi Minh City replete with:
- a heavily bifurcated class structure based entirely on property;
- a huge slave labour underclass;
- utterly dysfunctional cities choked with ruined infrastructure and ghettoes;
- destroyed public services;
- an environment bordering on desertification, and
- a white elite ruling over a post-colonial imported colony plagued by civil strife as we keep warring with mother countries.
But we will still have high property prices unless or until the population demands immigration cuts.
