What's going on at Seaford Rd intersection? Letter to Ministers and Councillors

Ok, thanks Sonya. I really appreciate your reply.

Yes, it is good to help people by removing negative gearing for non-genuine investments, but this problem is already out of hand. So many young people are going to be extraordinarily stressed by their high mortgages, and when they have children, even more stressed - and I worry for the raising of these children - with absent (due to work) and stressed parents. If interest rates rise these people will lose their houses, probably never get another one, and yet will still be paying of the banks for the rest of their lives.

But perhaps a bigger problem is that the growth of housing, and ever more and wider roads is moving over prime farmland, land that not only Australians' depend on for food, but also much of the rest of world to whom we export to. Europe has not been able to feed its population for decades now and relies on food coming from former colonies to survive. The production methods used in these plantations and in the USA and Australia, are not sustainable. It is not helping us, or anyone globally, to be permanently destroying our own land. If the houses were on stumps, they could at least be removed in an emergency, but they are on concrete slabs - and production of concrete is also a major contributor to global warming. In fact, all our activities of road building, high density houses (which usually require air-conditioning as there is no tree cover) are contributing to global warming, not to mention the production of plastics which are now choking our oceans, and whose mass will soon exceed that of the fish in the oceans, as I am sure you are aware.

Look, really what our government should be doing is moving onto an emergency footing - equivalent to the efforts put into the two world wars - to restructure our society away from failing industrialism and global fossil-fuel economies as quickly as possible - much as Cuba did during its crisis at the end of USSR. We need to move to localised systems with much smaller land holdings for food production. Research by the UN shows such farms are more productive per-acre than large ones (but large ones require less man-power to run when you use fossil fuels, thus their predominance).
(see Small is Bountiful by George Monbiot)
I am sure you will find plenty of people young and old who are up to the challenge, if they are given opportunities, including access to resources.

It is clear that time is running out to address this fundamental fact: the system has already failed, both environmentally and financially - governments are just living in denial.

Best Wishes,

Matt

(PS: for readers who are interested in what happening in Cuba, and how they responded with a market system based around democratised ownership of land please see: The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.. The interesting thing about this was that communist Cuba had a mass of small privately run farms and local markets whilst 'Capitalist' America has 6 companies which - for example - control all its meat production. Cuba also had free health care and education, and people during this period were healthier than Americans.