Those State Libs & their land deals. Is this corruption?

[watt price tully]

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politi ... 20am6.html

A one seat majority in State parliamant, a history that was rife in the State Liberal party in the '70's of "Land Deals" & corruption has come back to haunt us.

Pay a few dollars & get policy outcomes to match your expectations. NSW of course have banned developers from donating to their party.

If you live in the Outer subsurbs your roads have just become more congested.

Ted is out Jeffing Jeff by a long margin. What a swell Guy our Mathew is (State Planning Minister).

[Tannin]

Massive, blatant corruption. Absolute dog acts. I hope this scum rot in Hell where they belong.

I voted for Ted 'cause I was sick of the bad management and land deal corruption the Labor mob were getting into.

Well, that was nothing by comparison with the massive, utterly shameless rorting going on with this mob.

[3.14159]

Ted borrowed my mower back in 1981 (when we were neigbours on Hotham St East-Melbourne) and He broke it. He filled it up with Super and lent it one of merhant banker cronnies. (the same one that thunked it was Sub-Zero cool to rock up to the Stock Exchange in his banker threads but driving an hotted-up EH ute airbrushed all over with a palm tree and surfer motiff.)
His wife sid she'd pay me repairs if he didn't, but i still haven't seen a red cent from either of them.
Oh well, I used to get angry about it but in the end, it's just another broken promise from a politition and a Banker.

true story.

[stui magpie]

maybe, maybe not.

I'm sure the developers who won tattslotto in the last Labor opening of land a few years back would have also lobbied hard and made donations.

I'm much more interested in the planning involved here. Unless the Libs are way ahead of labor, the standard rules will apply that the suburbs will be built and full of people best part of a decade before they get their arse into gear with building the infrastructure. Case in point Sth Morang Train Station. The extension of the epping line should have started years before it did and should have been further extended to Wallan straight away.

Some of these new suburbs are around Wallan. There's a v line train station there which is a start but not a shit pile else. Plenty Road is the link out that way and it's already a nightmare. They've veen building between Sth Morang and Wallan for years. Mernda and Dooreen are growing rapidly and the options to head south toward the city are slim and bloody busy.

For those who know Bundoora there's a proposal to use the old Smorgy's site on Plenty Road to build 8 storey (from memory) apartment s all over the site. They will be great for all the Indian and Chinese students going to Latrobe or RMIT by tram but will create more strain in the area. The old Larundel site is also being developed.

%$^, I'm moving closer to the inner suburbs without moving house.

Just build the frigging infrastructure to support the opening of land. Have a bloody plan. For once.

[pietillidie]

Ted borrowed my mower back in 1981 (when we were neigbours on Hotham St East-Melbourne) and He broke it. He filled it up with Super and lent it one of merhant banker cronnies. (the same one that thunked it was Sub-Zero cool to rock up to the Stock Exchange in his banker threads but driving an hotted-up EH ute airbrushed all over with a palm tree and surfer motiff.)
His wife sid she'd pay me repairs if he didn't, but i still haven't seen a red cent from either of them.
Oh well, I used to get angry about it but in the end, it's just another broken promise from a politition and a Banker.

true story.

That's a classic story

I wondered how you were mate as I hadn't seen you post for while. Worth the wait!

[pietillidie]

[Black_White]

Absolute dog acts.

Paging Donny, paging Donny.
Come directly to the thread, do not pass GO.

[Tannin]

^ All of this is true (apart from the willed blindness to the stupidity of growth at all costs in the first sentence, of course) but it entirely misses the main point here - the gross corruption that saw sudden, unexplained land rezonings which have provided major Liberal Party donors, associates and members with massive windfall fortunes.

Labour, Stui, was discreet, and softly softy with their corrupt dealings. It wasn't until the last term of a long-lived government that they went right over the top. The Liberals jumped straight in with some big dishonest favours for their mates and donors and members almost immediately after the election (out Cranbourne way, I think it was, other side of the state from me so I'm hazy on the exact location) but now they have given up on retail corruption and gone in for stunningly massive wholesale graft.

I voted this mob in. That was quite possibly the most stupid thing I have ever done.

[stui magpie]

^

I actually don't remember who I voted for in the last state election.

[pietillidie]

[Of course, Tannin, I'd say you have a blindness to the economic realities of scale (Smith et al.) and spillover effects (Krugman et al.) ].

[Nick - Pie Man]

Oh goody, room for more bogans out Pakenham way

[Tannin]

1: Look up the standard of living in various countries.
2: Select the three or four or five with the highest standard of living, best lifestyles, and most pleasant environments.
3: Notice that they ALL have modest, sensibly controlled populations, very low crime rates, very good education systems, superb public amenities and infrastructure.
4: Throw your absurd, 19th Century dogma about endless population growth without limit into the dunny where it belongs, 'cause the facts prove conclusively that it just ain't so.

[pietillidie]

1: Look up the standard of living in various countries.
2: Select the three or four or five with the highest standard of living, best lifestyles, and most pleasant environments.
3: Notice that they ALL have modest, sensibly controlled populations, very low crime rates, very good education systems, superb public amenities and infrastructure.
4: Throw your absurd, 19th Century dogma about endless population growth without limit into the dunny where it belongs, 'cause the facts prove conclusively that it just ain't so.

There a number of major economic considerations which need to be factored into this issue.

If you're thinking of say Scandinavia, if I recall the geography correctly it benefits from much greater urban and regional density and market interconnectedness than Australia, not to mention the EU integration process started decades ago. Just look at the population density of say Stockholm and Copenhagen and how close they are to other significant markets, and then compare them to say Melbourne and Sydney. And take a look at where cities like Vancouver and Toronto lie in Canada (80% of Canada's exports don't go over that border for nothing), or Japan and Singapore's density and interconnectedness.

So you don't have a real calculation until you add or subtract the returns to scale and spillover. You can offset a lack of scale and spillover with specialisation and clustering (e.g., Nokia in Finland), which of course I wholly support as much as feasible, though that has obvious limits (no matter how much you specialise, at 20xM people your industry will still be smaller than that in many economies), and at a certain point specialisation reduces robustness (too many eggs in one basket, etc.).

Moreover, if you forgo scale and spillover you have to have the knowledge culture to make up for the automatic losses you take for not having them. Now, I don't know if you've traveled the world much, but Australia is an intellectual backwater. As you know I'm forever cursing this and I fully support all policies to help overcome it, but the chance of Australia pumping out as many engineering graduates as say Europe or Japan, well, good luck with that. We have to keep pushing and hoping, but the Anglosphere is becoming more anti-intellectual by the minute, not to mention this is a circular problem because the lack of density itself works against developing a knowledge culture.

Also, many of the countries you're thinking of are lucky they reached such a high level of development prior to the new wave of competition coming on line, and prior to massive population growth, so a static snapshot is extremely misleading. Europe was lucky it got a foothold before the US, the US before Japan, Japan before the Asian NICs, the Asian NICs before China, China before India, etc. Direct competition really matters because labor advantage attracts capital, and obviously you attract more capital if you're developing at a time when there's less competition for capital. Bearing that in mind, there's no guarantee that we will be "advanced" in the future; just look at how productivity fell under Howard in the blink of an eye. That is, the competition environment matters, and that competition environment is now very different for all countries including those currently at the top of the pile. Remember, the future predictions of GDP growth and human development you see around the place are very simple extrapolations with absolutely no adjustment for competition (which is unknowable, of course). For instance, such predictions have nothing to say about the current European crisis or Japan's outrageous debt; these things can be game changers. You simply can't stop capital flowing to better returns wherever that may be.

Bearing in mind the full range of economic factors, I'm not really confident Australia can retain competitiveness at current rates of population. I mean, we can't even put together a word-class research university let alone a world-class tech company, and show no signs of doing so (not denying some good elements and potential here and there, and our mining and agriculture specialisations). Our productivity isn't falling for nothing in my view (this was rightly noted by Glenn Stevens in a speech the other day), and to my mind the easiest way to fix the density-spillover-knowledge deficit is through population growth. We'll be pushing shite up hill trying to do it any other way, I reckon.

[Tannin]

Oh do get real.

1: The population density of Scandinavia is low. Sweden, for example has a lower population density than Victoria.

2: Physical distance to markets hasn't mattered much for years, decades, even centuries (depending on the particular product). Even things like fresh vegetables are routinely transported intercontinental distances these days. It's just a non-issue.

3: Pretending that there is a positive relationship between quality engineering graduates and population growth is ridiculous. The dearth of quality graduates in Australia is a consequence (among other factors) of our dreadful education system, and the main reason our education system is so bad is that we keep on pissing tax dollars up against the wall endlessly trying to catch up with the population growth treadmill and we don't spend anything like enough on educating the kids we have. Of course they grow up into dummies when they learn bugger all from their ill-educated parents and even less in school because the class sizes are so bad the teachers barely know their names. Have you worked in education?

4: In fact, those countries reached their present wealthy, comfortable and pleasant state out of tremendous hardship. Most (not all) of them rose out of the ashes of World War II, with wrecked economies and shattered dreams.

5: I can't be bothered with the rest of it. Start a new thread for it if you wish, but the topic here in this thread is the Baileau Government's corrupt real estate deals.

[pietillidie]

^Just grabbing the chance to articulate something on the topic; incorporate it into your thinking as you will.