'Housing Affordability Crisis' Hits Home

On the whole, 2008 has been a pretty good year for me. I enrolled in a post-graduate course at Melbourne Uni - if I keep it up I'll be a licensed Master of Publishing and Communications. Hell, I might even go do the mortarboard and gown thing for the first time when I finish this one. By dint of not so persistent practice and application my drawing steadily improved to the point where I felt up to hanging a few of the better ones on the study wall. Things were looking good, as long as I ignored the 'housing affordability crisis' - in plain English, Australia's chronic housing shortage.

Then in late October, when I was out in the outer leafies, dog-sitting again, the usual happened: that cantankerous old bastard in the sky, the one in whom I refuse to believe, dropped a big, fat jobbie into my life. I came home for an overnight stay, after a class, and Zeppo Bakunin showed me the notice to quit that we'd received from the agents. Our landlord and landlady were splitting up and the landlord and his daughter needed a place to live. Moving us out, so that they could move in, was cheaper than moving into a rented house, in a tight rental market, and keeping up the mortgage payments on this place, regardless of the rental income and negative gearing. I used to like our landlords but, sooner or later, this country's housing market forces everyone involved in it to act like a bastard.

So now Zeppo Bakunin and I are looking for the opportunity to perform our own little act of bastardry - we're looking for a house we can move to. Whatever we look at, there's bound to be at least one young family looking at the same place. People who'll use the extra bedrooms for sleeping in, rather than accomodating desks, computers, books and assorted stuff.

Since the market is very tight at the moment, it's wise to have back-up plans. My plan B is to get really active on internet dating sites, and try to find someone with really low expectations with a bungalow in the backyard. Plan C is to pack up all or most of the stuff, put it into self-storage and use my pensioner Christmas bonus to do a bit of travelling: the way the economy is heading, I reckon the first edition of The Rough Sleeper's Guide to Australia will find a ready market.

At times like these, I envy the Swedes. Back in 2002, I read a World Bank report which gave the Swedish government a slap on the wrist for allowing a surplus of public housing to develop. This was, of course, a waste of economic resources and therefore economically irrational, if not irresponsible. Given the choice between economically responsible government and a roof over my head, I know which one I'd take right now.

Enter at Your Own Risk

A couple of my real-life friends decided to go ex-pat last year; they're now in London, doing what ex-pats do. In this case, getting sucked into a Movieum of London short film contest, where entrants had 48 hours to produce a slasher horror film for screening on Halloween. You can read a bit about the making of here, or you can just take a look at the finished entry. An extended version with more slashing is in the works.

300 Journalists

I noticed a couple of new posters advertising The National Rupert at a couple of tram stops the other day. I didn't have a camera handy, so when I got home I drew a copy from memory, for anybody out there who hasn't seen them yet.

Almost, But Not Quite, A Retraction

On September 10, reluctant culture warrior Kevin Donnelly declared, in the National Rupert, that his worst fears for the future of education had been realised:

LEADING up to the federal election, I welcomed the ALP's policy calling for a national curriculum based, as it was, on a conservative agenda very much like the Howard government's approach to reshaping the teaching of history and English.

The fear was that the devil would be in the detail and, given the cultural-Left's control over the curriculum, that the agenda would be captured by those opposed to the more academic and balanced approach.

...

The second appointment proving that the national curriculum has been captured by the usual suspects is that of Professor Peter Freebody, from the University of Sydney, who will oversee English as a subject.

Today, Kev's pleased to announce that:

THE release of the national English curriculum initial advice paper will lead to Australia's education progressives suffering apoplexy.

There's no prize for guessing who wrote the initial advice paper, and the new curriculum that has Donnelly so chuffed. If you can't guess, this report from The National Rupert has the answer.

'Age of Bastardry Over' - Bastard

HERE is the latest, shocking fashion news: nasty is out and nice is in.

Bastardry is suddenly so last season - just like Big Brother - that all the best stars must now switch their sneers to smiles.

The sooner this trend spreads from TV and radio to those newspapers, the better.

Word of the Day: Thingo

With nothing significant to report from Canberra, the front page of today's Hun is devoted to the dastardly 'West Gate Bomb Plot' of recently convicted terrorist wannabe Abdul Benbrika. According to The Hun's Keith Moor:

One of the most chilling conversations taped by police was between Benbrika terror network member Fadi Sayadi and an associate as they discussed destroying the West Gate Bridge...

Sayadi suggested it would be possible to snorkel or scuba dive under the bridge and plant "thingos underneath".

Obviously Sayadi wasn't talking about water-lilies; nonetheless he sounds completely clueless. Anyone wanting to plant thingos under the Westgate Bridge need only take a walk through Westgate Park in South Melbourne. Once you had your thingos in place at the base of the Eastern pier you could hop on the ferry to Science Works, where a short walk will take you to the Western pier with its memorial to the workers who died when the bridge collapsed during construction.

If Sayadi had ever made that little trip he might have seen how difficult it would be to bring down the West Gate Bridge with thingos, however well placed. Still, it's a good excuse for THe Hun to milk the story for another day while they wait for the man who would be Prime Minister eventually to make his move on Malcolm Turnbull. Since that's going to take at least six years we can all look forward to a lot more well beaten-up crap on The Hun's front page.

Anti-PC Beat Up of the Week

Culture Warriors Demand an End to Culture Wars

Two new appointments to the National Curriculum Board have angered the journos and pundits at The National Rupert Daily. According to Justine Ferrari, 'Education writer' at the National Rupert, the appointments of Stuart MacIntyre and Peter Freebody to prepare draft curriculum outlines for history and literacy have re-opened the history wars and the reading wars.

Former Howard hack and literary canoneer Kevin Donnelly declares that his worst fears have been realised, and an anonymous editorialist wonders if MacIntyre and Freebody were really the best available.

Next they'll be demanding that the jobs to go to Keith Windschuttle and Kevin Donnelly.

Another Day, Another Furphy

Dr Jennifer Marohasy, whose work at the IPA involves examining and critiquing the scientific claims of others, produced an amusing piece on glaciers yesterday. She claimed that:

A study of sea level rise from ice melt in Greenland and western Antarctica has just been published in Science and concludes that a rise of 0.8 metres is possible by 2100, but even 2 metres “physically untenable”.

If, like Dr Marohasy, you strive to be inquiring in your blogging, you might click through that link and read the abstract of the study report 'Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-Century Sea-Level Rise'. Here's what it actually has to say:

We consider glaciological conditions required for large sea-level rise to occur by 2100 and conclude that increases in excess of 2 meters are physically untenable. We find that a total sea-level rise of about 2 meters by 2100 could occur under physically possible glaciological conditions but only if all variables are quickly accelerated to extremely high limits. More plausible but still accelerated conditions lead to total sea-level rise by 2100 of about 0.8 meter. These roughly constrained scenarios provide a "most likely" starting point for refinements in sea-level forecasts that include ice flow dynamics.

It looks very much like Dr Marohasy has misread the abstract - a sea level rise greater than two metres is rise by 2100 is physically untenable, a rise of two metres is tenable but unlikely, a rise of 0.8 metres is plausible. Despite a comment pointing out this error, the post remains uncorrected.

The abstract page for the Science article has links to the full report (pay per view and to a podcast of September 5. If you're inquisitive enough to download the transcript of the podcast you can read what Tad Pfeffer, the report's lead author, had to say about the study:

Interviewer - Robert Frederick
What do you mean by dynamics?

Interviewee – Tad Pfeffer
Dynamics is the part of discharge of ice, from glaciers into the ocean, which is accomplished not by melting the ice and letting it run off as water, but by pushing ice as icebergs, right out into the ocean. So it’s accomplished by the flow of the glacier, and what we call the dynamics, rather than melting of glacier ice on the surface. When the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment was published, they left out dynamics, and they were very up front about it – they said, “This is an important process, but we don’t understand it well enough to make the kind of consensus statement about dynamics that is, you know, up to the standard of the IPCC.” So they said, “Since we can’t really deal with this in anything resembling a confident fashion, we’re going to leave it out.” And so, as a consequence, the sea-level estimates, they were known to be low because that process wasn’t taken into account, and since that time there have been a number of different groups and individuals who’ve tried to get a handle on what that dynamic contribution might be – how rapidly outlet glaciers might be able to move ice into the ocean, by having these outlet glaciers speed up.

Interviewer - Robert Frederick
How high do those estimates get in the published literature?

Interviewee – Tad Pfeffer
In the published literature, you can find estimates as high as 4 to 6 meters of sea level rise at rates occurring at something like 2 to 5 centimeters per year. Now that's very high sea level rise. It's based on analogies with past conditions, particularly at the last interglacial, when sea levels were at least 4 meters higher, and possibly a great deal higher. And those were conditions that were very analogous to what we're coming into today. And, in fact, in the next century, we may be in climate conditions that are more or less identical to the last interglacial, 125,000 years ago. But the timing of that sea level rise back then is very uncertain. And that was what our analysis is really about, is the question of, 'OK, sea level rise may be big, but how fast is it going to occur?

...we publish a range, we present a range of total sea-level rise, ranging from about eighty centimeters up to two meters. And there’s a great deal of uncertainty in there, again because we still don’t know the processes, but there are some very simple concepts that you can use to place brackets or bounds, if you like, on what outlet glaciers might do, how rapidly outlet glaciers might deliver ice to the ocean in the future. And, the reasonable values fall within about 80 centimeters to 2 meters – that’s not to say that it’s physically impossible that we could have a total sea level rise of greater than 2 meters in the next century. But to do so would require processes to come into play and things to happen in glacier systems that we’ve never seen before – it’s not impossible, but it’s not something that I would recommend that we adopt as a working hypothesis. If we’re going to try to make predictions based on our best understanding of glacier physics, it should be based on the range of values and processes that we know best.

If, after reading that, you remained in any doubt about the findings of Pfeffer and his colleagues, you might get inquiring enough to e-mail him (his e-mail address is on the abstract page too); that way you might avoid the embarrassment of mis-stating Pfeffer et al's findings in a public internet forum and having the error picked up and reproduced by Andrew Bolt. That sort of thing is no good for anyone's credibility.