I think yes, because firstly what is the maid going
to apply for skilled occupation visa? there is no "Maid" job title
in the skilled occupation list. 2ndly in AUS, they are called PCA,
personal care assistant and that needs an Australian certificate in
PCA to gain employment. . Almost every job here needs a some
kind formal training or course to
gain employment. seriously uneduated maids from 3rd world
countries dont stand a chance
There is an immense precoccupation about workplace safety, laws
, education and training here in AUS.
M, what do you think of the article below? cause for concern? i
don't mean to open a pandora box for lionnoisy to start his
nonsense again, but it is an interesting perspective.
i actually find this interesting and to my favor, becos i am
gonna likely do something OoO detest, i.e. time the market to make
my purchase when i am down there.
what say you?
Kenneth
Davidson
July 31,
2008
A recession is the biggest
threat to Australia 's real estate market.
ARE house prices going to
crash in Australia as has occurred in the US ? Based on West Sydney
University economics professor Steve Keen's regular Debtwatch
newsletter, the answer is probably yes.
The Housing Industry
Association explains how a projected 10% fall in the nation's
property prices will affect you.
The doubling in real terms
in house prices in the past decade is a bubble waiting to burst.
According to Keen, the bubble is based on speculation financed by
debt. Keen claims it is effectively a "Ponzi scheme" where
dividends are paid out of new rounds of capital injected into the
scheme instead of the non-existent profits. The scheme collapses
when there are no new investors to pay the
dividends.
In the case of real estate
speculation, according to Keen, "the only way the individual
speculator profits from real estate speculation (and sharemarket
speculation) is either by selling to somebody with a higher income
or by selling to another individual with a similar income, who
takes on sufficient debt to buy the property at a price that
exceeds the speculator's price plus accumulated net losses from
debt serving".
The banks and the Government
are the witting, or unwitting, financiers for this massive Ponzi
scheme. The banks are directly or indirectly responsible for most
of the lending for housing. The Government offers an inflation
multiplier through the tax system through negative gearing, which
allows investors to write off the interest expense against all
income instead of just rental income, and pay only half the capital
gains tax when the house is sold for a profit. These concessions
cost tax revenue some $2 billion a year. It is a notorious form of
middle-class welfare that is never on block in discussions about
the need to curb Government spending. And yet, by directly adding
to the inflation in house prices, the tax concessions reduce the
supply of affordable housing and shuts an increasing proportion of
the middle-class out of home ownership.
The banks have contributed
to the Ponzi by lowering lending standards. It is an iron law of
financing: apart from meaningless advertising, the only way banks
can compete for customers is by lowering lending standards. It was
the reason why, after financial deregulation in 1983, the banks
quickly ran up some $20 billion in "non-performing" loans — they
were able to borrow unlimited amounts from overseas to onlend to
customers. This led to the closure of two state banks, rising debt,
massive asset price inflation and then treasurer Paul Keating's
"recession Australia had to have".
Within two decades, the
lesson was forgotten. Driven by the "carriage trade", where
Australian banks could borrow cheap on the capital markets of Asia
and the US to lend dear to their customers in Australia, foreign
debt nows exceeds $600 billion, or more than half annual GDP, and
domestic debt is about $1.7 trillion or 65% of
GDP.
As Keen has noted, while an
individual can escape from an excessive debt by selling property
for a profit, the nation as a whole can't.
It is possible to imagine
the Australian housing market going into meltdown, but probably not
in the magnitude of the US , more because of the different culture
within which the two financial systems operate rather than superior
risk management within the Australian system.
The "subprime" meltdown in
the US was a consequence, rather than a cause, of the collapse in
house prices.
The US is a far more
stratified society than Australia and this is reflected in a lack
of standards and planning in outer suburban developments, apart
from stratified and gated communities for the middle-class and the
rich.
About 11 to 12 million
houses throughout the US are empty and about 20% of people live in
streets where houses are simply boarded up.
The loans that financed
these homes were allocated by agents who didn't care that their
clients were NINJAs (no income, no job, no assets), or the housing
was in jobless ghettos without public transport, because the loans
were bundled and on-sold.
Fortunately, we have no
single-industry cities like Detroit , no urban ghettos on the scale
of many US cities and a more egalitarian distribution of income and
social infrastructure. But we are following the US down. House
prices are falling in the outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne
because of substandard public transport.
Thankfully, we have resisted
the recommendations of right-wing think tanks such as the IPA to
deregulate urban planning and cut development taxes to boost the
supply of affordable housing.
The biggest immediate threat
to Australian house prices is recession leading to rising
unemployment and a slump in immigration.
