Yea.
We been living off principal over virtually non existent interest for a few yrs now.
Investing in banks was good till a few yrs ago.

I remember 18.2% coming in at one time, around 24/26% going out if you that dumb..

2,942 English Pounds cash for my first NEW, new house in UK in mid '60's.

This one $245k AUD around 16 yrs ago. Around $850 ish now to buy.

It's the same house????.

You tell me.
That much in that period of time is ludicrous....
What chance have the young ones got.

The solution is for the governments to release Crown land ... and lots of it ... to stabilise real estate prices, just as the Wheat and Wool Boards used to stabilise commodity prices by buying and selling into the market. But that will never happen, since many, if not most, of the pollies are self-serving real estate profiteers.

Does anyone remember the old days when the measure of a robust economy was its international balance of trade? That is, an economy was deemed to be doing well if it exported more than it imported. It's no good just moving money around internally -- that's a phony economy. A country is no wealthier if its housing prices are higher today than yesterday. Today our economy is deemed to be robust because we can service our debts when they fall due. Imagine if we all lived our lives in the same way, perpetually in debt.

The secret to a genuinely robust economy is manufacturing. Australia needs to make stuff that other countries want to buy. We have nearly all the world's major resources, yet all we do is dig them out of the ground and send them to China. The Chinese turn $1 of value into $100, then we buy their junk, use it for 3 months, and bury it in another hole in the ground.

It's no use manufacturing more arts/law graduates or bioethicists, philosophers, etc. We need the STEM professions. They are what underpinned the coveted "Made in USA" labels of yesteryear. Then it was "Made in Japan" and "Made in Korea". Now the Chinese have rewritten the economic text books with "Made in China", proving that you can build a world dominating economy by producing junk, provided that you sell it at a low enough price.

If you go to DFAT's web site, you will see that, in the list of Australia's top 10 exports, there are no manufactured products. However, if you examine the UK's list, nearly all are manufactured goods, with the number one export being motors and pumps, yet Australia's economy is deemed to better than theirs. The world really is screwed up.

The fact is that Australia never really manufactured anything, even when China was behind the Bamboo Curtain. Even in those days, Australian industry was too weak to stand on its own merits, and had to be protected by massive tariffs. Sure, China is competing unfairly with slave wages and a fixed currency, but the German economy can still flourish under these conditions. Maybe Germans are just smarter and more industrious than Australians.

AISI, the emergence of China as a world economic power has simply exposed Australia's phony prosperity. Look around you -- I can see plenty of people in my immediate circle of friends who live a Mercedes lifestyle on a Volkswagen income, propped up by a long line of credit. That's the same picture I have of the Australian economy.

I think your right to a certain extent , but Australia used to manufacture quite a lot if you go back in time ,I can remember when I was a young guy we even had our own clothing manufacturers, we made cars here until recently,our steel manufacturing was huge,our mining industry was a doing well a few years ago,it's not only China, but modern tec ,auto teller machines ect.

And let's call a spade a spade bringing huge amounts of immigrants in uneducated from third world countries sounds like a brilliant idea eh.

we were the the lucky country let's hope it stays that way, because to my old brain it seems to me we could easily end up being in a lot worse shape....

Ron-D wrote:

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The chineese government is an evil creature with a huge peasant population that work for no wages.

how can our nation with high wages and a big spending government ,huge debts (thanks Kevin ) expect to compete in manufacturing things against a country that has slave labour,in my opinion the government wastes a lot of money on silly hand outs to people that should not be entitled to them,but once there in place you can't remove them an expect to be re elected..

Iam an old man that's lived the good life in our great country I feel sorry for the young ones....

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Gday...

Points well made Ron-D ... however, whilst we have priced ourselves out of almost every market ... China has grown in every way in the past decade. They are no longer the "slave-labour" economy - high average wages, high disposable income, high consumer demand for home-grown and imported products.

Cheers - John