Housing Crisis and A Difference to a Difference of Opinion
Last night the ABC program ‘A Difference of Opinion’ looked at the issues of the housing affordability ciris. The panel provided some quality perspectives as to what was causing the challenge and what kind of actions might need to occur in order to address the issue with Ross Gittins’ early observation that the debate completely ignored one of the most significant affected groups, ‘the renters’ as worth the admission price to the debate. And I was left wondering if the assorted suggestions were failing to address a more basic question – ‘why exactly do Australian’s believe that owning their own home is so important?’ It is a question that Sohail Inayatullah’s Causal Layererd Analaysis might provide insight to as the ‘mythology of home ownership’ is placed under the spotlight. A recent Hudson Institute report showed that over the past 30 years in Australia, the capital growth of the average home worth $100,000 in 1970 was about 6.5% per annum. Not much above bank interest on a $100k cash investment. The issue of housing afforability requires more assessment by the futures community. If not, the economists, social advocates and builders might end up debating the wrong issue
For the past few years I’ve decided to declare each year to be something I think the world needs or is likely to see. It’s not so much about the prediction but more about the likely focus that will benefit the world. So I’m declaring this year to be the International Year of Battery Technology…
Read More >I keep reading posts that Uber is an example of the ‘sharing economy’, the one in which people freely share what they have with others. But it’s NOT – it is instead part of what I call the ‘Utilisation Economy’ which is about use of spare capacity. About 15 years ago I began writing about…
Read More >One of the reasons I founded The Australian Strategic Planning Institute was to ensure that high quality futures perspectives were included in the Strategic Planning process. Typically they were not which meant too many businesses and organisations were planning for futures that just would not exist as expected, meaning wasted resources and sometimes and marked…
Read More >As Victorian edges its way into a new drought phase and plays catch up to other parts of the country, I’ve been pushed to remember an article I wrote about our then State Government’s push to get people to reduce the length of their showers. The Four Minute Shower was an attempt to highlight just…
Read More >Sometimes when you look at enough assorted pieces of information a clear pattern emerges. In a previous role I was tasked with looking at the Future of Education, a topic I delved deeply into for almost 3 years. And in 2003 in a piece titled ‘The Future of Commercial Education’ I predicted that by 2015,…
Read More >Tomorrow I’ll be at the State Library of Victoria as part of the #V21 Digital Summit. In my futurist, pragmatist role I’ll be presenting few ideas about why ‘Your Future is NOT an App’, then later in the day facilitating an onstage debate about Disruption’s role in Innovation. And if it is anything to go…
Read More >I’ve been having a think lately about whether the use of Interest Rate movements by the Reserve Bank is actually too clumsy an instrument for effective economic management. The potential weakness has emerged only in recent times as the signs of a world-wide economic melt down have begun to expose one of the limitations of…
Read More >There’s a few problems with the successful leadership lists that bounce their way around the internet. In my opinion they lack context – the reality check that only comes by having a full appreciation of an individual organisation’s particular circumstances. Unfortunately many of these lists of ‘required leadership behaviours’ offer shallow quick fix advice that…
Read More >There’s no doubt that coal has a legitimacy problem with large swathes of the public around the world. Once a darling of energy and still in relative abundant supplies, Coal provides significant levels of energy per gram consumed. Yet the end outcome is now known to be incredibly harmful to localised communities needing to breathe…
Read More >At almost every stage in a shift in the way societies and organisations operate, there comes a period of extreme ‘unsettled-ness’. This period may show itself in the form of the doldrums (where things seem unusually calm but nothing seems to be happening) or in busyness (where there’s lots of activity but nothing seems to…
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