The irony of the Vietnam War versus the Australian Property Bubble

The Vietnam War led by the US spanned most of the 1960s through to 1975. The famous motto “All the way with LBJ” developed as a result of Australian PM Harold Holt’s commitment to military support of the US led War in collaboration with Lyndon Baines Johnson, the US President.

The conventional political wisdom at the time was that the North Vietnamese “Commos” were simply part of a larger Communist “Empire” led by Mao Tse Tung; the Chinese Communist revolutionary and founding father of the People's Republic of China, which he governed as Chairman of the Communist Party of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976.

The War was controversial and based partly on something called the “Domino Theory”, which meant that Australia was exposed to the threat of invasion by the Communist Chinese. Once the Commos took South Vietnam we were done for.

Today Australia faces the irony of an “invasion” by the Capitalist Chinese. Their money is invading Australia.

They are buying houses and farms in order to exploit opportunities for profit, including removal of food from Australia. We have empty houses throughout the suburbs of capital cities that may have been purchased to diversify some foreigner's asset portfolio.

Australia’s politicians, supported by the ABC, provide the Australian people with no reasonable option by way of public policy debate. The ABC just reports what is happening instead of challenging the logic.

It’s all about the wealthiest lobbying for “growth”. People like Paul Keating were praised for “deregulating” the Australian economy in the early 90s and cutting down tariff barriers. The Liberals fully supported these theories.

In 2000, with the Australian Dollar at around 50 US cents, the import duty on foreign cars was around 5%. By 2008 the Australian dollar had risen to around 95 US cents. Similar rises had also occurred against all major currencies. In order to maintain the competitiveness of the Australian car industry at a level comparable to year 2000, the tariff would have needed to rise to 78%, because US Dollar priced cars had become so much more competitive.

This was free trade (?) combined with a rigid tariff structure that ignored the integral part that the exchange rate played in defining competitiveness. What drove the Australian dollar so high? Surely this was a combination of factors driven by Government policies including:

• Extreme population growth driven by mass migration
• The population policy driving demand for everything, including housing
• The population policy creating a dilemma for the Reserve Bank’s interest rate policy. There is a conflict between the need to use high interest rates to resist house price inflation and the need to reduce Australia’s exchange rate using low interest rates. The Government and Reserve Bank have failed miserably in achieving a coherent outcome. Some of the blame must surely be attributable to the extreme population growth policy
• The FIRB’s failure to manage the impact of foreign investment on the long term "interests" of the Australian people by supporting foreign investment in all its forms
• The delusionary thinking that convinces both economists and politicians that GDP growth must be driven by population growth despite all the KPI’s that suggest that this may not be true. These include adverse trends in unemployment, homelessness, productivity, infrastructure funding, Federal budget growth, GDP growth per capita, and environmental impact. In fact there is arguably not a single KPI that clearly supports extreme population growth

So what is driving extreme population growth? It’s really quite simple. Politicians are addicted to dumb GDP growth and fail to perform the due diligence analysis of the facts that might lead to a better understanding of the extreme population growth problem in Australia.

The ABC fully supports this failure by claiming the issue is “not newsworthy”.

Big business loves it because it drives short term profits. No other criterion is substantially or actively used to drive the decision-making of big business.

If the Government can neither evaluate nor comprehend what is in the national interest; what hope is there for Australia's future?