Opening Keynote for Sydney Morning Herald Sydney 2050 Summit

Video recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt7zARB_sxc

Sydney is the best city on the planet. We’ve got it all- the harbour, the people, the sweetness.

In 2000 Sydney was electric within the lead as much as the Olympics, emerging as a global city. Spectacularly well executed, Samaranch proclaimed them “The Best Games Ever”.

By 2007, Sydney was named the world’s best city within the City Brands Index for culture, people, international status, and to go to, work and live. Condé Nast ranked us the world’s #1.

In 2011, Condé Nast ranked us again #1, TripAdvisor second best. We won Cruise Destination of the 12 months. US Travel & Leisure ranked us fifth after which eighth in 2012.

In 2013, we ranked third within the City Brands Index, and the world’s hottest destination for international students.

From 2010 to 2016 Sydney was ranked the world’s best festival and event city by the International Festivals Association.

World’s best city for festivals and events seven years in a row.

Boy did we stuff it up.

Sydney today has a class motion by festival goers over strip-searches by police. Strip searches which have increased 20 times in ten years. At one point, police were strip-searching people on the train station on their way home from work. The Latest South Wales government argued that the searches, which sometimes involved removing tampons, were reasonable.

Truthfully, what are we doing?

Today it’s the one city on the planet where it’s normalised to be at a pub and have a parade of police with sniffer dogs march in. Or a mining conference.

Tyler Brûlé, the Editor of Monocle, which publishes an annual list of the world’s most liveable cities, lamented that resulting from the nanny state, “Australia was on the verge of becoming the world’s dumbest nation.”

Last 12 months, Sydney was ranked the third worst on the planet for making friends by Time Out, the second worst nightlife within the Global Liveability Rankings, the sixth worst airport for cancellations and ninth for delay and the second least reasonably priced city on the planet.

When it was first proposed to deliver this keynote I baulked at the concept. Sydney is a city of maximum frustration.

Leaving work at 9pm that Tuesday, I aimed for a meal on Victoria Street within the Cross, an important eat street of Sydney. ‘Sorry, kitchen’s closed!’ echoed from each venue.

Depressingly it looked like Betty’s Burgers. “Sorry, kitchen’s closed!”. At 9:11pm.

I tweeted “What does it take to seek out a restaurant open after 9pm in Sydney?”.

The responses got here in fast: “a taxi driver”, “kebab or maccas”, “an alarm clock so you may head out earlier”, “reasonably priced wages”, “delusion”, “a miracle”, “a sledgehammer”, “a plane ticket”, and what I assumed was probably the most correct answer, “a time machine back 15–20 years”.

I assumed, Jesus Christ, they’ve stuffed up this city! How bad will they stuff it in 20 more?

Perhaps I should do this keynote in any case.

I mean.. Why can’t you get a meal in Sydney after 9pm anymore?

Let’s have a look at rent, which for a restaurant in Sydney, is around $12,500 per square metre per 12 months. In Manhattan, the world’s hottest tourist destination, it’s under $10,000. In Los Angeles, it’s even cheaper.

Unbelievably, Australia also has the best casual wage on the planet at $21.38 per hour.

What to truly pay is baffling. We’ve 122 pay guides, and it’s demanding to work out which to make use of. The one missing is the one for the poor sod in Canberra that puts all of them together.

We’ve an “Asphalt Industry Award” for anyone in “road making and the manufacture or preparation, applying, laying or fixing of bitumen emulsion, asphalt emulsion, bitumen or asphalt preparations, hot pre-mixed asphalt, cold paved asphalt and mastic asphalt”.

There’s one for Premixed Concrete, different from the one for Concrete Products. There’s one for the Cemetery Industry different from the Funeral Industry. There’s one for the Sugar Industry different from the Salt Industry.

They call these ‘modern awards’, what’s modern about this?

For a restaurant you’d think perhaps the Hospitality Award applies. No, that’s for hotels, motels, saloons, bars, caterers, casinos, nightclubs.. and restaurants but only in hotels.

It’s also not the Fast Food Award.

The proper one is the Restaurant Award, which applies to catering by a restaurant but not catering as a business, cafes, tea rooms, roadhouses and nightclubs that usually are not in hotels.

91 pages of confusing tables for which you wish a ouija board: Level 1, 2, 3, grades 4, 5, 6.

What’s the difference between a Level 1 Food and Beverage Attendant Grade 2 and a Level 1 Grade 3? The primary serves food and beverages, handles money and provides customer support, while the second provides advanced food and beverage or specialist advice.

There’s tables depending on the time of day, form of day and whether it’s a vacation. There’s tables for adults, tables for 16 years or under. More for 17, 18, 19 and heaven forbid 20 12 months olds. Then all of the sundries like $1.93/day if you happen to bring your personal cheese grater.

If you wish to negotiate a salary there’s An employer’s guide to annualised wage arrangements within the hospitality and restaurant industries from Fairwork, which says you truly can’t and still need to pay time beyond regulation and penalty rates.

The ‘penalty’ rates differ depending on time of day, phases of the moon, and are a multitude. Within the Hospitality Award, the evening is 7pm to midnight but within the Restaurant Award 10pm-12am.

In case you get any of this mistaken, you’re a wage thief!

I’ll inform you a ‘penalty’, and that’s not with the ability to get a meal since the restaurant’s shut.

They don’t open past 9pm in Sydney, because because the demand for a meal is dropping, wages go up and you wish an actuary and an eye fixed of newt to work out the pay. So last call’s at nine, in order that they can close at 10pm, when the complexity rockets up.

On the flip side, $21.38 an hour for 38 hours per week takes home $709.44. Compared with the average weekly rent of $783, leaves negative $74.

The restaurant is trapped between astronomically high rent, labour costs and bureaucracy. On the flipside, despite the best casual wages on the planet, its staff can’t afford to live.

How did we get here?

Peter Thiel says that “the complete modern political order is based on easy and relentless growth.. [but] most of our political leaders usually are not engineers or scientists and don’t hearken to engineers and scientists”.

One only has to have a look at the occupations of the Federal Ministry:

Policy Advisor
Solicitor
Solicitor
Policy Advisor
Community Employee
Union Organiser
Union Organiser
Political advisor
Healthcare Consultant
Aboriginal Affairs Administrator
Union Organiser

need I’m going on…

Australia’s quite the ‘lucky country’; our top 4 exports are raw materials that we extract out of the bottom and stick on a ship: iron ore, coal, gas and gold. You possibly can’t get easier than that. Raw materials for which we’re price takers not price makers. Lucky again because they keep going up, despite not engineering them into more complex, higher margin products.

Indeed, Harvard ranks us 91st on the planet for economic complexity, a measure of how unique and complex our industry is, behind Kazakhstan, Guatemala and Laos.

It’s fallen 40 places since 1995, a 12 months when Australia made things like cars, for which we’re still taxed $1.5 billion a 12 months, to guard an industry that now not exists.

Australia’ manufacturing’s share of GDP is 5.5%, on par with a tax haven like Luxembourg, but worse than Botswana, which sells diamonds and where you may see cheetahs.

Our high tech exports of US$6.3b are 1/a hundred and fiftieth of China’s, and 1/twenty sixth of South Korea’s, a rustic with GDP on par with our own.

Those 4 commodities: dirt, dead trees, gas from dead trees and gold, together with 34% of all the pieces we produce, we placed on a ship to China- a rustic we at the moment are totally dependent upon, and that we’ve got totally pissed off. In return we take 2% of theirs.

Our fifth biggest export is “educational related travel services”, or a visa factory at our local university, vocational, “business” or English college. The academic quality on the latter is worse than you’d get binge watching cat videos on Tiktok.

There are 620,000 “students” in Australia, akin to the populations of Canberra, Darwin and Alice Springs. 45% are studying higher education, 25% vocations and 17% English. Almost 40% are in NSW. By 2025 there’ll be 940,000 and Sydney will host a Canberra.

If that also sounds weird, in 2022, 573,000 student visas were issued by Australia. The USA issued 414,000.

The near record numbers are despite a 40% drop in Chinese students since 2019, the 12 months Australia took the lead within the origin of covid inquiry, an issue that continues to be to this present day, together with Where’s Waldo?, one in all the best unanswerable mysteries of the world.

The overwhelming majority are from emerging markets, India surging with 16% and Nepal at 9%. Colombia, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Brazil, Indonesia and Pakistan are next.

Now students from India are a number of the brightest on the planet. IIT has the world’s hardest entrance exam, where 1.2 million students compete for 10,000 places.

But there’s a couple of clues to what is definitely occurring.

Australia recently signed as much as the Mechanism for Mutual Recognition of Qualifications as a part of the Indian Free Trade Agreement. This agreement requires Australia to recognise all official Indian educational qualifications.

Like Australia, education in India is booming, at US$117 billion per 12 months. Education is the lubricant of upwards mobility, but like Australia, it’s turning right into a business that gives that by payment, quite than achievement.

A Bloomberg article Worthless Degrees Are Creating an Unemployable Generation in India quoted a former secretary for college education, that of the “16,000 colleges handing out bachelor’s qualifications for teachers, a big number existed only in name”.

“Calling such so-called degrees as being worthless could be by far an understatement,” said a former Dean at Delhi University.

One other clue is Morrison removing the 20 hour per week work cap. The result was a flood of Indian applications- so high, Home Affairs needed to reject 94% for vocational training. Nepalese applications needed to be cut from 85% to 7%. Employment is now limited to 24 hours per week.

In response to the Home Affairs Minister, we created ‘an underclass of low-paid and exploited staff, leaving international students in limbo and failing to fulfill the present and future economic challenges faced by the nation’. In the identical breath, O’Neil announced all these staff could be everlasting residents, an announcement that doesn’t logically follow.

That is the large, uncomfortable secret about Australia’s ‘easy, relentless’ growth.

The ‘easy, relentless growth’ politicians have chosen to take is to blow a property bubble on a scale like no other, one which has driven Australian houses up 8,570% (86x!) over 61 years.

Demographia publishes a worldwide housing affordability survey, the measure being the median price of a house to the median household income. If the median house price to the median household income is 3x or less, housing is reasonably priced, 3x to 4x moderately unaffordable, 4x to 5x seriously unaffordable, 5x or more severely unaffordable.

Sydney today is 13.3 times: the second most costly on the planet.

London is 7.0 times and Latest York is 7.1.

It’s not because Australia is making more people. Every woman will need to have 2.1 kids to take care of the population. Australia is 1.6 and dropping and hasn’t been above 2.1 since 1975.

House prices are also not driven by wage growth, which for the last decade has been below 2.5% each year, barely above inflation, not going anywhere. Now with inflation at 7% and wage growth at 3.3%, Australians are experiencing the most important decline in real wages ever. Our purchasing power within the last 12 months went back to December 2008. House prices didn’t.

The typical Sydney home is now $1.2m and the common wage is $94k, making it mathematically not possible for the common person to purchase the common house.

In case you borrowed it today from the Commonwealth Bank, at a 6.18%, your repayments could be $7,200 a month, every month, for 30 years. The monthly post tax income for $94k is $5,900, leaving you out of pocket $1,300 a month for 30 years, assuming you don’t eat.

In reality, on that wage, the Commonwealth Bank will only lend you $514k, and only if you happen to lie.

Immediately, 62% of household income (two people) is required to service a mortgage in Sydney. Back within the 80s, when rates were 17%, it only took 44%.

For a modest budget, you might rent a spot in Eagle Vale, 56 kilometres from Sydney, for $130 per week, $520 in bond and two weeks’ rent prematurely. Bring your personal ‘small shed or tent’ for his or her backyard, ‘open to discussing ‘power, water, Wi-Fi, toilets and showers’.

In January a student from China found a tent useful for privacy, because for $300 per week she needed to pitch one in a share-house lounge.

The City of Sydney is putting ads on bus stops for “find out how to grow your personal food if you happen to rent”.

To unravel this, the Federal Government announced a grand plan to construct a million homes by 2029. At the identical time it took in 400,000 people net. At this pace by 2029, we’ll be constructing 1 million homes for 3 million latest immigrants, 1,000,000 of which can come to Sydney.

Sobering when the Grattan Institute forecast that lifting by 40,000 would lift rents 5%.

We could construct more homes, but we’ve got the fourth highest construction rate within the OECD.

The Rider Levett Bucknall Crane Index tracks cranes worldwide, of which there are 868 in Australia: 365 in Sydney and 189 in Melbourne. There are 10 operating in Latest York, 17 in San Francisco and 14 in Chicago.

Construction is now the highest sector going bust. This financial 12 months 1700 construction firms have entered administration, up 83%, resulting from inflation.

“It’s the grimmest I’ve ever seen in 45-odd years,” said the Chairman of builder Tamawood. The Association of Skilled Builders says “it can worsen”. Bank loans for constructing are at a 15 12 months low, down 31%, now requiring a 17–32% return on investment.

Leaked documents found NSW will construct 36,000 homes a 12 months for the subsequent five years, when it needs 62,800, a shortfall the Planning Minister says is “greater than we thought”.

At the identical time RBA Governor Lowe gaslit the Australian public saying that you simply were the issue, “The worth of land is high… due to the decisions we made from a society where to live, find out how to tax housing and find out how to put money into transport”. The identical Bubble O’Phil that said rates would stay at 0.1% until 2024.

But after all it’s not true. It’s not your fault. This crisis is engineered. It’s by design.

A “deliberate design feature of our economic architecture”, quoting a former Finance Minister.

The US uses quantitative easing to drive ‘easy, relentless’ growth.

Australia uses quantitative peopling.

Within the 12 months to March, Australia grew by a record of 523,000, following which Albanese added 500 staff and $42m to clear a 600,000 visa backlog.

This shouldn’t be about ‘growth’ but inflating demand for housing. It’s not concerning the ‘economy’ but inflating GDP. But population growth doesn’t increase GDP per capita.

Minister O’Neil said ‘Our country faces real and significant challenges providing secure reasonably priced housing for Australians. These problems usually are not brought on by migrants’. I suppose she thinks the Canberra-sized armada every year are all nicely in tents in someone’s backyard.

So high is immigration that Migration Agent is listed on the Expert Occupation List and Brickworks, the most important brick manufacturer in Australia, is demanding that we herald more migrants as bricklayers.. to construct houses for migrants.

NSW bears the brunt, importing people on an industrial scale. Before covid, 730,000 a 12 months to switch 450,000 leaving to net 270,000. Latest South Wales’ population is barely 8 million. So you might have this huge stream coming in and an enormous stream fleeing for cheaper places to live.

30% of the country is now born overseas, the best amongst western nations. In NSW, it’s 35%. Here, 33% have each parents born in Australia and 43% have each born overseas.

The turnstyle of migration into Sydney last financial 12 months netted out to 55,000 going mainly into Parramatta and inner south west, displacing 52,000 Sydneysiders who leave, 40% to the country and 60% Queensland and other States. Births minus deaths add 35,000. This inbound is to skyrocket, with Sydney forecast to grow from 5.3 to six.1 million by 2033.

The answer is to construct a 3rd city called Bradfield in outer south west Sydney, next to the brand new Western Sydney International Airport and never removed from Eagle Vale where you may rent a backyard to place up a tent for $130 per week.

This third city shall be 60% the dimensions of the CBD. The situation does have its challenges, corresponding to being the most popular place on the planet. That’s what it was in 2020, when it reached 48.9C.

The Australia Institute found that “Western Sydney is amongst probably the most affected regions of Australia in relation to extreme heat. Its inland position on the foothills of the Blue Mountains prevents the cooling impact of a coastal breeze and works to trap heat”.

It’s “projected to have the best variety of days over 35C, a month/12 months by 2050. By 2090, this may double. [..] Human influence compounds this through the removal of heat-reducing green spaces, replacing them with materials corresponding to concrete and asphalt”.

2018 and 2019 each had over 44 days, outstripping the worst case. I’m also not an urban planner, but I’d guess that removing, say, 114 hectares of green space and replacing that with a concrete and asphalt city, might make things worse.

Since mortality increases by 20% over 30 degrees for twenty-four hours, and warmth causes 55% of all natural hazard deaths, a greater name for Bradfield is perhaps.. Hell.

I also presume Bradfield is where they expect all of the teachers, police, and hopefully- the firefighters and paramedics will live.

In case you’re going to construct a city and all these apartments, you wish roads and rail.

Material costs are at a 30-year high, and in some way, despite 730,000 coming into Latest South Wales every year, labourers have remained unchanged at 300,000 for a decade. It won’t be 300,000 for long with every tradie heading to Brisbane for the 2032 Olympics and higher pay.

Costs are blowing out. The 30km City and Southwest Metro was budgeted at $12 billion and is now $20.5b, the identical price as Trump’s 732 km wall. The Grattan Institute estimates 28% of billion dollar projects are blowing out, the median blowout being $627 million.

All up, NSW will spend $116 billion on infrastructure to accommodate these latest people. Given Premier Minns campaigned on a platform of ending privatisation, one might wonder how we’re going to pay for this if it’ll stay on the books.

Well the reply is debt, and NSW shall be in it deep, $187 billion deep by 2026. Naturally, the federal government says surprise, the rate of interest is higher than expected at 5.2% and climbing, costing taxpayers $6.8 billion a 12 months by 2026, more than was collected from land tax, pokies, casinos, medical insurance and parking levies combined last 12 months.

As they are saying in public policy, the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed.

With mass immigration driving uncontrolled inflation, property costs, infrastructure demands, construction collapses, business insolvencies, debt and the best erosion of Australian living standards on record, one would think that something might break.

You may also be considering, who exactly do these politicians think they’re working for? Government of the people, by the people, for the people. Which people, exactly?

That is with the backdrop of 5 banks with over US$2 trillion in assets failing in 50 days: Credit Suisse, Silvergate, Signature, First Republic and Silicon Valley Bank.

At Silicon Valley Bank business was good, deposits were up 4x in 4 years. The issue was borrowing short and lending long, investing $91b in t-bills and mortgage-backed securities at a crappy yield of 1.56%.

Just like the GFC, all of the Fed needed to do was hike to five.25% and all debt became untenable.

Startups burning money deeper for longer forced a $21b loss selling these bonds, resulting in a bank run at SVB, probably the most critically vital bank in technology.

One other critically vital bank that fell into this trap, losing $45b on $538b, leading to negative $12b of equity. The losses are on Australian government bonds, and the bank is the RBA. Going too hard during Covid they’re about 22% of GDP. For 50 years it’s been at 7%.

To stop inflation, you want to raise rates above it, otherwise there’s no incentive to save lots of as an alternative of spend. The Taylor Rule, taking a look at the Consumer Price Index, says rates ought to be at the least 7%. They’re currently 3.85%.

In case you don’t have a look at the Fantasy Football Index and have a look at the value of sirloin the pub index, last 12 months it was running at 8.5% ($38), this 12 months over 26% ($48). That may mean rates more like ’82 after they were 16.5%. Actually the debt and money printing today is far higher.

It’s clear rates of interest will keep rising, straining bank profits and liquidity as asset values decrease, with limited options for intervention. It shouldn’t be practical for the Fed nor RBA to ensure all deposits, as each are losing money, in negative equity, and lack liquidity. Banks will proceed to tighten lending. A recession is prone to emerge.

Now you is perhaps surprised to know that Commonwealth Bank has a bigger market cap than Goldman Sachs, and NAB is greater than UBS, even after buying Credit Suisse.

CBA’s latest results look good. But 70% of their book is home loans, a staggering $639b. Business loans are $150b and consumer $17b. Unlike the GFC, deposits cover 75%. But identical to at SVB, deposits can burn down in tough times, especially paying 0.00% interest.

Business deposits are falling. Taylor David says we’re in an “insolvency armageddon”, with 6000 going into administration 12 months to this point, 41% in NSW. Retail deposits have been rising, with no small contribution from 400,000 latest people a 12 months needing a checking account.

Quite the flywheel has been created. The Big 4 and Macquarie are 22% of the ASX200. Every month, 10.5% of Australian wages go into super, soon to cost 12%. 16% of super is invested into property and 23% into stocks, of which 22% of ASX200 stocks are banks. So relentlessly every month, 5% of wages buy up bank stocks, which helps them lend.. to mortgages.

Australian homeowners at the moment are in ‘mortgage hell’, negative money flow and unable to refinance resulting from serviceability requirements. NAB says 20% of their loan book is in hell now. In case you borrowed between August ’19 and July ’22, 40% are in hell. Many have dynamic loan-to-value ratios where values are forecast to drop 20%.

During 2020 and 2021, Australian banks lent $394 billion in fixed mortgages as little as 1.95% over three years. $350b of that resets this 12 months with the variable rate greater than triple.

The brunt is hitting now, with 17% of all fixed rate mortgages rolling off this quarter, 15% next.

If this sounds familiar, it should. There’s a movie where a financial ruin was created from excessive dangerous lending, particularly adjustable-rate mortgages with low teaser rates that “exploded” after 2–3 years. And explode, they did.

In that movie, Steve Carell talks to a stripper who has five houses and a condo who didn’t realise that her repayments could triple.. “Hey there’s a bubble, short [it]”. That movie was The Big Short, and that was Steve Eisman making US$7 billion.

Today’s stripper in a mortgage mine is a every day feature within the media: Garbage train driver reveals how he built up a 13-home property portfolio value $12 MILLION while earning lower than McDonald’s staff. Western Sydney ex-McDonald’s employee now owns 40 homes value $20 million, How Sydney dad owns 13 properties despite period of joblessness.

Reckless and dangerous financial advice pumped at you day and night. The tail wags the dog as Domain is about 34% of Nine’s market cap and Realestate.com.au 74% of News Corp’s.

Albanese will need to have recently been to a strip club, because he’s gone berko on immigration: increasing everlasting migration to 195,000, abolishing the abilities list, guaranteeing 2.1m temporary migrants a path to citizenship, halving withholding tax on foreigner developers, mulling rent caps, and allowing Latest Zealanders citizenship. What’s next, Tasmanians?

Julie Collins MP, the Minister for Housing who owns five homes and is, unironically, the Minister for Homelessness has announced that from July 1 the eligibility for the First Home Guarantee and two others shall be expanded those who haven’t owned in a decade, everlasting residents and “two individuals, siblings, a parent, cousins, a toddler.. and two friends”.

I suppose the guy who won’t stop talking about being brought up by a single mum in a housing commission flat wants the remainder of Australia to undergo the experience. None of that is about making housing affordable- it’s late stage ponzi moves getting the last suckers to maintain buying- at a stratospheric 13.3 times household income.

A ponzi because a continuing stream of latest fools are needed to maintain buying to make those who did buy feel wealthy. But like all ponzis, ultimately the variety of chumps you wish becomes untenable, and the entire thing is undone.

Australia’s household debt to GDP is the fifth highest within the OECD, 211% of net disposable income and rising, double the US, a rustic one associates with bank cards and debt.

As of March, 61% of Australian households renting were in rental stress and 48% of households with mortgages were in mortgage stress, where stress is monthly outgoings greater than income. Twenty years ago, each were under 15%. In Latest South Wales, 70% of renters are in rental stress. This cannot go on for for much longer.

What’s crazy concerning the ponzi is 69% of immigrants are in rental stress, with outgoings greater than income, the second worst group after the elderly. That’s why they are saying migrants are net contributors to the economy, because they’re drawing down their savings to live.

The $53,900 expert migrant threshold leads to $863 per week after tax, barely enough to eat and rent a tent. Raising it to $70k might allow an upgrade to a shed. We’re at that time within the ponzi where we’re potentially importing future welfare recipients to maintain the sport going.

Anglicare’s annual rent report surveyed 46k listings: 345 were reasonably priced on a full-time minimum wage, 162 on the Aged Pension, 66 on Disability Support, 4 on JobSeeker, and 0 on the Youth Allowance, “That is the primary time we’ve got ever seen the variety of reasonably priced listings for a full-time minimum wage earner crash to below 1%”. The Property Club predicts with 190,000 latest migrants “the variety of homeless [in Sydney] will explode”.

The yield curve has inverted and the Latest York Fed predicts a 58% probability of recession. That is where the economy contracts, spending crimps, defaults on loans go up and jobs are lost.

It’s not an issue of if the property bubble pops, but when. The US, UK, Spain, Portugal and Ireland all blew bubbles throughout the GFC, but all of them allow them to pop. Australia kept blowing. Despite what the politicians say, there has never been a soft landing for an asset bubble.

And keep blowing, they do, citing chronic ‘skills shortages’. We want some technical skills because despite kids’ dreams of working for firms like Tesla or Canva, they’ll’t link school learning to those careers. Once I left highschool, I assumed engineering was something to do with driving trains. Sadly, last careers day, I saw nothing has modified.

Programmers and analysts are indeed the highest skills brought into the country, but the standard coming in is awful. Of 228 applicants I had for a software role last week, 220 were unsuitable.

Next usually are not engineers, nurses or entrepreneurs, but chefs and cooks for accommodation and food, which has probably the most migrants at 40% of staff and the best rate of insolvency.

That is the actual skills crisis that politicians primarily bleat about, a crisis created by themselves. Cafes can’t find staff because despite paying the best casual wages on the planet, locals can’t make it work with the fee of living. So we import people and trick them for some time to work in a restaurant, before they realise they’ll’t afford it either.

Unless the robots do it, these poor sods will find yourself wiping bums as 85s and over are going to 1 million and 65+ are doubling to six.5 million by 2042. Over 86% of young, growing families with mortgages are in mortgage stress, no surprise the locals aren’t having kids.

The unlucky thing is that this is all happening at the identical time AI is being unleashed upon the world. In case you think the Web was transformative, Generative AI shall be greater.

The breakthrough was the Transformer, allowing large language models to devour large amounts of knowledge: now 10% of the Web, soon to be all of it. What now comes out is dark juju magic. It might probably answer any query, speak any language, draw illustrations indistinguishable from photographs, and is now learning to write software.

Any job that you may do, the AI can do higher. No less than, jobs using a pc, for now.

ChatGPT hit 100 million users in two months, the fastest in history. It currently scores in the highest 1% in verbal within the GRE, for US grad school, the highest 7% within the SAT for undergrad, top 10% within the Uniform Bar Exam, top 12% within the LSAT, and top 15% in advanced placement statistics, art history, psychology and biology.

Daily, the AIs sucks down more data, and daily they’re getting smarter.

Where it fails, for now, is in what we perceive as creativity. It’s hard to get ChatGPT to crack a joke that isn’t a dad joke. But as we give it more data, we’re seeing intelligent behaviours that we don’t understand and didn’t predict. Scientists are wondering if we’re beginning to see sparks of artificial general intelligence. Creativity, heart and soul might just emerge.

The subsequent biggest job for migrants is being a GP, not that we’ll need as many soon resulting from ChatGPT. The 8% of the population attempting to wangle valium or oxycodone shall be glad about that. A study comparing ChatGPT to GPs saw patients preferring the AI 79% of the time with responses 4 times longer, 4 times higher quality and 10 times more empathetic.

Motor mechanics follow, which electric vehicles need less of, then accountants. I feel sorry for accountants because with OnlyFans models, AI goes to wipe them out.

Half of white collar admin jobs will go. Accounting is rule-based. There’s no room for creativity, or if you happen to’re being creative, the federal government doesn’t prefer it.

Half of lawyers are next as, except deal making or Charles Waterstreet theatricals, most is drafting and ChatGPT can do it higher. As a substitute of paying a lawyer $1200 an hour in 6 minute increments, ChatGPT can write an agreement, letter, patent, research, explain a case, file a suit or fight your parking ticket in seconds, without cost.

Minter Ellison, Australia’s largest law firm, panicked first, “Lots of our clients have really been grappling with the query of whether the billable hour is the very best solution to measure our worth as skilled advisers.” Les jeux sont faits, the sport is up. Wads of legal bills annotated with “read email”, pull out template, edit, edit, pretend I did something, “teleconference with partner”, “reply to email” are over.

Frankly, software shall be next and much more amenable to LLMs. I told my engineers there’s a probability in 12 months they won’t be writing code, at the least not like now. They’ll move ‘up the stack’ more like a product manager, a director or producer.

Mass layoffs are coming. We’re going to see the identical social displacement and upheaval that the mechanisation of agriculture caused within the 18th and nineteenth centuries, and mechanisation of producing caused within the twentieth century. Only this time it’s with the mental classes. The primary contributed to the Long Depression of the 1870s, and the latter led to the Great Depression of the Twenties. The upper paying the job, the more vulnerable it’s.

IBM just announced it’s stopped hiring and that 8,000 jobs in the subsequent five years shall be replaced by AI, including 30% of all non-customer-facing roles.

Education, our fifth biggest export, shall be heavily impacted. Researchers have found that 19 of 30 jobs almost definitely to be worn out are postsecondary teaching. AI can already develop a curriculum higher, personalised to a student’s strengths, weaknesses, and learning style. You possibly can now chat to your textbook, as if it were a professor. Chegg, the textbook company, saw their stock fall 48% after they admitted ChatGPT was affecting their business.

This might cause an issue maintaining Australia’s scientific edge given teaching cross funds research. But the majority of immigration shouldn’t be for that or entrepreneurs that create jobs quite than take jobs. It’s designed for serving us coffees and to maintain the bubble alive.

Yet it’s still almost not possible to get a meal in Sydney after 9pm. So rare, that it became a campaign talking point for Dave Sharma and Allegra Spender last federal election after Woollahra Council tried stopping an Indian diner from serving kebabs after midnight.

This is similar Woollahra Council that launched a Night Time Economy & Footway Dining plan, the results of which was the tip of late night dining in Woollahra Council. One is perhaps cynical concerning the motive provided that Double Bay is now an apartment construction site.

Sydney was fun, until developers, politicians, casinos, wowsers, media and councils, shut down 176 venues, by gaslighting the general public that violence had “spiralled uncontrolled” when Sydney had just won an award for being the ‘safest and friendliest city on the planet’.

These geniuses knocked down the venues for, surprise, more apartments, planning to maneuver the nightlife to Barangaroo zoned 24×7, conveniently near the casinos. There, a row of restaurants were built.. which close at 9pm, because they built apartments there too.

Like Captain Renault in Casablanca they were “Shocked! Shocked to seek out that cash laundering was occurring here!”, and that the business model of Australian casinos was to launder money out of China, a rustic whose residents are prohibited from sending greater than US$50k a 12 months overseas and where despite it being illegal to own foreign property outside of China, appear to own a good variety of places in Vancouver, Auckland and Sydney.

Like moving the Powerhouse Museum to a floodplain, every decision is driven by apartments. Just have a look at an old gig poster to see the way it’s modified. You used to have the ability to exit on a Wednesday to see bands like INX, Midnight Oil or the Hoodoo Gurus from Cremorne to Cammaray, perhaps dollar drinks, perhaps until 4. You possibly can’t buy anything for a dollar, anymore.

Which gets us onto the purpose of corruption.

Transparency International rates Australia the world’s worst money laundering property market, only one in all three countries where accountants, lawyers and real-estate agents usually are not required to report suspicious transactions or do due diligence on customers. Latest South Wales is the worst state in Australia, where the common price of a home is ‘contact agent’ and the quantity paid and useful ownership usually are not required to be public.

Latest South Wales has 1200 councillors. They’re the very best money should buy. Other than stuffing up fun, the one real power they’ve is influence over development.

Councillors are paid nothing, $9.5k/12 months for a small metro, $19k for a regional city. Mayors are paid $10–40k more, unless you’re Clover Moore by which case you’re paid substantially more.

One is asking for corruption when councillors have influence over billions but paid a pittance.

Thus, ICAC is busy: Operation Hector within the Inner West, Operation Galley in Hurstville and Georges River, Operation Dasha in Canterbury and after all, Operational Keppel in Wagga Wagga. Now Ray Williams is claiming senior members of his party were paid “significant funds” to put in latest councillors within the Hills Shire for a developer.

My parents, able to retire, own a warehouse in Rhodes, a suburb being bulldozed for yet more apartments. They were content with a well exhibited plan, until one morning, the plan with no explanation suddenly modified for the few who had yet to sell to the most important developer.

A road was put through one guy’s land. For my parents and neighbours, controls were gerrymandered with heights, setbacks and FSR such that only a minaret may very well be built- or sold to the developer at a hearth sale price. The kicker? Freedom of knowledge revealed council openly pondering relocating zoning to “deliver these developers a return on their investment”.

Who do you complain to when the Mayor of Canada Bay, General Manager, town planner, major & minor developers and go-betweens are being investigated by ICAC in Operation Tolosa, our local MP found to be engaged in serious corrupt conduct in improperly influencing council decisions an unrelated matter in Operation Witney, and the Premier and her boyfriend are being investigated by Operation Keppel? You possibly can’t make these things up.

Tolosa was higher than the Sopranos. ICAC, is at the highest of their game: surveillance photos of envelopes of money, a shoebox of money and rubber bands, and a phone tap of the Mayor’s partner, a councillor from yet one more council, gleefully asking if he got his ‘cashy-cashy’.

The entire system of development on this state stinks. I’d struggle to imagine that there was any council where corrupt influence from developers helping councillors construct rubber band collections in shoe boxes isn’t the on a regular basis way of doing business.

Thus the challenges for Sydney 2050 are many and complicated.

The foundation of all evil is the fee of property, that squeezes the life and soul out of all the pieces. There isn’t a justification for Sydney being the second most costly on the planet.

With the best inflation in a long time, sharply declining real wage growth, the worst rental crisis on record, overloaded infrastructure, construction blowouts, bureaucracy, mass insolvencies, extreme cost of living and the most important destruction in purchasing power in 50 years- the answer is, as all the time, more people, despite this being the foundation cause.

It’s sending the Australian middle and dealing classes into poverty. It’s politically untenable.

Also frankly, I feel, morally mistaken and a national disgrace.

At this point, either wages have to go up 50% or house prices have to halve. Businesses can only afford to extend wages in the event that they cut half their staff, and the AI might indeed sack them.

Expert migration programs could be very useful, but they’re purported to strike a balance between meeting labour market needs and ensuring the well-being of each local and immigrant populations. We’ve a skills shortage in some areas because we neglected skilling up our own residents, overhauling education and let a brain drain persist for a long time.

Australia used to have an economy that made things, but has as an alternative became a ponzi depending on mass migration to be able to buy houses, devour things and make us coffee.

The ponzi is in its late and final stage and like all ponzis, unsustainable. The one query is the collateral damage. Many coming here will find that they’ll’t afford to live, many seeking jobs that we never needed or may now not exist.

Goldman Sachs predicts AI will take 300m jobs and 25% of all jobs within the US and Australia. Latest jobs shall be created, but will we skill up fast enough before the AI takes them too? If the job uses a pc it will probably be done higher, faster, cheaper by an AI-powered freelancer.

In brief, the country is bankrupt: from the federal government’s $1 trillion of debt through to the Reserve Bank, State, the household and consumer. The piper eventually has to receives a commission, and only so long can we kick the can down the road. Many debts can’t be paid off, and even serviced for for much longer. The choices are to default, or inflate them away.

Within the 1850s, the invention of gold near Bathurst sparked the best gold rush in history. Half 1,000,000 got here here looking for their luck, igniting a property boom. From 1880–84 Sydney land went up 80% and doubled in Melbourne in ’87. Sound familiar?

Commodities prices eventually soured and banks pulled back lending causing house prices to halve, GDP to collapse and a run on the banks, which depositors needed to recapitalise. The crisis of the Eighteen Nineties was deeper and more prolonged than the Great Depression. In case you bought at the highest of the market, it took seventy years to interrupt even.

Crisis does result in opportunity, but real issues have to be solved. The die has been forged for economic, social and political instability within the years to come back.

Government must find its way back to being of the people, by the people and for the people, quite than a government of bringing in too many individuals, squeezing the people, and gaslighting & controlling the people.

House prices and the fee of living must be urgently addressed, which implies immigration must decelerate. The targeting and quality of such needs substantial improvement. The education, skills, and training of our existing population must be lifted, particularly in manufacturing, health, technology and the trades, and to organize for AI. It must be easier to run a business and it’s imperative that we improve the economic diversification, complexity and value-add of our services and products, to drive an actual rise in real wages and GDP per capita. There must be a major rethink of how education and healthcare are delivered, and serious regulatory reform in real estate and native government.

Peering through the Overton window, we regularly discover a sideshow setting the agenda, distracting from the actual issues: What’s really happening on the planet? How is the country really being run? For whose profit? How is the world evolving, and where are we headed?

More importantly, why can’t you get a meal after 9 anymore?