How come you’re so obsessed with the Olympics? It’s like 10 years away but every single post you write seems to be about them. Just move to another city if you hate them so much!

I’d be interested to know as well. I am looking for a steel pipe with a thread cut into one end to make a monitor stand a bit taller, but I have no idea who to even approach for something like that.

Yes but if it’s someone moving up from interstate or a young adult moving out of their parents’ home, then it’s still one less property available for rent than before, with the same number of renters looking for somewhere to live, which was my point.

There are thousands of people every week moving into QLD from interstate, and far fewer leaving. All those people have to live somewhere, and if they buy up all the rentals that are being sold so they can live in them themselves, where are those renters going to live?

Well at the moment most landlords I have spoken to (the ones with loans) are losing more money by renting out the property than they ever have before. You only leave money on the table if house prices increase, and despite what you see in the media, many house prices have not risen that much. My own have only recently returned to what they were worth back in 2008 before the GFC, but in that time I have spent many thousands on interest payments to the bank so if I sell today I won’t break even and will make an overall loss, as compared to leaving the money in a normal bank account the whole time. I am hoping that by next year when the leases expire the house prices will have gone up enough that I can at least break even and recover the extra money I paid to the bank. So I’m not sure what you mean by all the money left on the table, unless I am missing something?

The property sale is unlikely to be going to another investor given current market conditions, so it will be removed from the rental pool. Yes you’re right that it will go to another person, but this is likely to be someone moving out from their parents’ home, or someone coming in from interstate. It’s unlikely to be a renter purchasing the home because if a renter was going to buy a home they would have done so already, or they’re still saving for a deposit and the price increases have set them back so they have to keep saving for longer now.

It’s odd to say that landlords aren’t providing housing, when a new investor in the market will provide an additional rental that was not available before. Yes it might be an existing house instead of building a new one, but we’re talking about rentals not about buying. When we need more rentals available it doesn’t matter whether they are existing houses or new ones. We only need new houses when we’re talking about lowering the price of buying a house.

The fact is that landlords aren’t increasing rents faster than interest rates, it’s misleading the way it’s calculated. The interest rates have been increasing every month or two for a while now, but due to most leases being a fixed length, the rent can’t be changed. So of course once the lease gets renewed there is a correction and six months or even a year of interest rate increases suddenly get included in a single new lease, and so of course that looks like the rent is being increased at a much higher rate because of the sudden jump. But if you look at it percentage wise over the whole time period, you’ll find that the majority of rents (at least outside major cities) are increasing at or under the interest rate. In my own case I have increased my rents way under the interest rate which is why I’m now stuck for the next six months having to dig into my savings to make my loan repayments. But hey at least my tenants are keeping VERY quiet about maintenance issues as I think they realise they’re getting a pretty good deal, so at least they are helping me save some money there.

At any rate, time will tell which one of us is right. I am sure rents are going to continue to rise as the number of landlords decreases, but if that does not happen I am more than willing to admit I was wrong. We’ll see!

That’s the thing - as soon as the interest rates go down to the point where it becomes profitable to rent out a property again, it will open up competition as more landlords are drawn to the market and the additional rentals compete for tenants.

But fixing rents just makes landlords like me want to exit the market completely, which is what I am working towards now. Next year when my tenants’ leases are up they will unfortunately have to find somewhere else to live because I just cannot afford to keep subsidising their rent any longer - well over half my salary is going to the bank on top of 100% of the rent they pay me, which is not sustainable for me. I have to sell them on my own terms before I default on my loan repayments and the bank sells the rentals for me.

Most landlords I speak to are in the same boat. The more talk about rent freezes the more of them want to exit the market before they get trapped. And it has already started happening which is why rents continue to go up - the same number of tenants are competing for a smaller and smaller number of rentals, and it’s only going to get worse. I think I need to sell now before the next bright spark comes along and says hey let’s make it illegal for landlords to sell their rentals…

I think if you’re a tenant and you think a rent freeze is a good idea, you’re just shooting yourself in the foot. The real issue is the rise in interest rates, because some of that is what’s getting passed on to you in the rent increases. Lower the interest rates again and rents will drop. The problem is it’s so slow - it has taken this long for the rate increases to get passed on to tenants, so if they lower the rates again it will take just as long for rents to drop. I don’t envy anyone renting at the moment, but blaming and penalising landlords when the banks are giving them no choice is misguided at best and will only make the problem worse.

If you haven’t read the stuff coming out of the Reserve Bank it’s pretty sobering. They are aiming for a certain number of unemployed, homeless people because that’s how they plan to keep inflation low. So even the idea of a rent freeze is doing the opposite of what the Reserve Bank is trying to do, which is to get enough people to lose their jobs and homes so that they can’t spend as much money, thus lowering inflation. I find it amazing that they are doing that and yet people blame landlords, the ones who actually go to the effort of making a rental available and subsidise some of the rent out of their own income. Talk about aiming at the wrong target.

Not sure but I recently found there are satellites monitoring for hotspots you can look at to see if there are fires nearby: https://firenorth.org.au/nafi3/

Click on “South QLD” in the sidebar then zoom in on the map. It’s quite eye opening how many fires are burning across the state at any one time.

What you ask for and what you present to the people are two very different things though. The Uluru Statement may well be what is requested, but when you put it to the people to vote, you need to remove as much ambiguity as possible and flesh out the practicalities in much more detail. That doesn’t mean diverging from the Uluru Statement, it just means providing more detail on how those requests are actually going to be met.

For me, it’s the difference between describing your dream home to a friend vs getting the blueprints back from a qualified engineer. If you build off the high-level description you’re probably going to be disappointed, but if you sign off on the blueprints before construction starts you’ll know exactly what you’re going to get - no surprises.

All the government had to do was flesh out the processes and procedures in more detail and instead of us now arguing Yes vs No, we’d instead be assuming Yes and arguing about the various implementation details instead. Such a lost opportunity.

It really boils down to will Australia recognise them and listen to them?

I would suggest avoiding statements like this, because it makes people in the No group more certain they should vote No. It’s because the majority of No voters want to recognise First Nations people but they disagree with the way the current proposal has been put forward. It’s exactly the same as the referendum on Australian’s independence - even people who wanted independence had to vote against it because they weren’t happy with the way it was going to be implemented.

Telling No voters they don’t want to recognise First Nations people when they actually do, makes them feel like the Yes crowd doesn’t understand their concerns, and doesn’t see the problems that might arise. So it makes No voters even more certain that they need to vote No, in order to save everyone from problems they think the Yes crowd hasn’t seen. Maybe that’s untrue, but I feel it necessary to point out that in order to convince people to alter their opinion, you need to understand where they’re coming from so you can provide reassurance about whatever it is that worries them. If you don’t understand what your opponent’s concerns are, you will end up putting forward arguments that are not persuasive and you will have no hope of changing their minds.

To answer your final question, yes I want to recognise First Nations individuals, yes I want to listen to them, but no I don’t want it made permanent in the constitution until I have seen it making a difference in the real world first. I don’t care what changes anyone wants to make to the constitution - it could be free money for all white males like me - it should not be changed until we have tried it first and are 100% sure that it is going to work and isn’t going to introduce any unforeseen problems.

Show me the Voice working for two years and all the positive differences it’s making in everyday people’s lives and I will gladly vote Yes to make it part of the constitution. Until then I’m afraid it’s a No - nothing to do with First Nations people, and everything to do with being given an incomplete picture of what’s going to happen.

I can’t argue with your reasoning there. But I would like to think that if it actually worked, at least a future government could hold the referendum to make it permanent and everyone would know exactly what they’re getting, because they’d already seen how it was going to work. There’s too much uncertainty around at the moment to convince most No people to change their mind, so I think the Yes crowd are facing an uphill battle.

One of the problems I see with the Yes arguments are that they often claim some part of the Voice will work in a certain way, so there’s no need for alarm, but the problem is the No crowd can see it going wrong ten different ways and there aren’t any reassurances coming from the Yes side showing how none of those problems could happen. The Yes side seems too focused on the one way things might work if everyone plays by the rules and nobody does anything bad, but it means they aren’t addressing the No concerns about people taking advantage of the system, as politicians typically do. So without actually addressing those issues they’re going to have a hard time changing the minds of the No people I think. It might be possible but they’d have to change tactics.

I do find it interesting and somewhat ironic how between the two of us, the same things are causing us to vote differently - specifically the permanent nature of the legislation, and that we are both hearing convincing points from people we respect.

Well I plan on voting no, because I disagree with the idea of making something permanent before you’ve demonstrated that it works. There are countless programmes and departments and taskforces that have been set up over the years that were supposed to help Aboriginals and apparently none of those seem to have worked, so it makes me very sceptical that the Voice is going to be any different. Many in the Yes crowd keep insisting that this will solve problems of the programmes in the past, but I haven’t yet seen anything that listed out specific points of why each of those programmes failed, and what the Voice does differently to avoid falling into the same traps.

I just don’t understand why it wasn’t introduced in a temporary capacity so we could all see how it was going to work first, putting everyone’s concerns to rest, and then if it proves successful I wouldn’t have any issue voting yes to make it permanent. It’s the whole fear of the unknown thing for me - what if it just makes things worse? One of the Yes arguments is that if they made the Voice legislatively instead of via a referendum, a future government might undo it, but that’s the whole idea - if it turns out to be another failed attempt added to the pile then we can undo it and try something else. But if it is shown to work THEN we have the referendum to make it stick, I think at that time most Australians would be happy to vote yes as they would know exactly what they are voting for. I think it was incredibly silly of the government to hold the referendum so prematurely, and I think they have probably shot themselves in the foot by doing so.

Sure there are plenty of bigots out there who will vote no because of race, but the majority of people I talk to about it are voting no because they’re concerned that it’s going to create new problems without solving the existing ones first, and that it won’t make one bit of difference to those who need it most. Concerns that could’ve been easily addressed with a trial run first.

So while I have no ill feelings towards anyone who intends to vote yes, and I think they are well-intentioned and are making the noble choice, I think the government has handled the whole thing poorly and they need to come back with a better plan instead of the half-arsed proposal they put forward this time. It really is straight out of Utopia - make the big announcement first and let someone else worry about whether it will actually work or not.

The charge controllers are likely fine (I am going to put some into practice soon, but full disclosure I haven’t yet) however as with most products from Chinese sellers their stats are a little too optimistic. Most Western countries will build a safety buffer in to their products (so a 10 amp controller will work all day at 10 amps, and maybe up to 11 or 12 amps) whereas a Chinese 10 amp controller can probably only peak at 10 amps for a few seconds with additional cooling, and may die prematurely if it sits over 6-7 amps for too long. You see the same thing with inverters - western ones are sold by their continuous rating, like “500 W (1 kW peak)” whereas Chinese ones sell by the peak rating it can only reach for a second or two at a time, like “1 kW inverter” and then in the fine print buried in the listing “500 W continuous rating”. Occasionally there are exceptions but these seem to be mistakes, as the majority of stuff is advertised with the biggest and best numbers even if they aren’t really reachable.

So as long as you’re aware of this and you over-spec everything by a good safety margin then you should be ok. This is assuming you choose a product that is genuine, and not a fake such as a 10 amp controller with a 30 amp sticker on it, of course.

If you’re relatively new to solar and don’t know exactly what you want and how to figure out whether your Isc is within limits, the Voc has a good safety margin to not blow up the controller, etc. then you may find it cheaper to buy from a local company, because although you will pay more you should only have to buy once. If you go with Aliexpress you may have to buy three or four different models until you find one that works the way you want, and then quickly go back and buy more of them before they change the internals. Fine if you’re building a bunch of larger systems with dozens of controllers, but it will probably work out more expensive for a small system with only one charge controller total.

I was going to suggest something disposable, like a garbage bag, newspaper, or an old teatowel or length of fabric held together with a peg or tied in a knot. Might not look great but you can throw it away once you arrive. But then I guess the problem is you can’t use it for the trip home again? I wonder whether you could stash normal clothing somewhere out of the way, e.g. at a train station or hidden in a garden somewhere. Maybe it’ll still be there later when you return? Not sure what time you would be heading home again or if you would use public transport for that, but I’d be surprised if those sorts of indecency laws were enforced late at night, it seems more like a daylight hours thing.

Does anyone know what was happening on Hermanns Rd last night off the Warrego Highway around 6:30pm? (Between Hatton Vale and Minden.) Approaching from the west there was the smell of smoke in the air and there were a lot of emergency vehicles parked on Hermanns Rd including ambulances and fire engines.

That headline confused me, I thought the Salvation Army had been given the job of managing the housing strategy and they were being fired for corruption!

No argument there, BUT it’s not just as simple as building more houses. It’s no use building a bunch of affordable houses out at Toowoomba if all the jobs are still in Brisbane, as people still need to live near where they work. There are already plenty of affordable places to live, they are just too far for most people to commute. And nobody really likes the idea of knocking down houses close to Brisbane and replacing them with towering apartment blocks - the traffic is already bad enough as-is.

With more companies pushing for employees to come back to the office, I do wonder whether some sort of tax incentive to encourage remote work would be better. If a company received a financial incentive for each employee who lived more than 100 km from their base of operations, not only would that make it easier for people who cannot work remotely (e.g. peak hour traffic wouldn’t be so bad) but it might help revitalise some of these country towns that are suffering from dwindling populations.

The AirBnB is already “taxed” when it’s empty because the owner still has to pay rates, loan interest, body corp, etc. so they are already losing money if nobody is there. They would appear to be popular enough that that ‘tax’ is still a better deal than putting the place up for long term rent.

With the recent rule changes limiting rent increases but interest rates still so high, a short term rental is now probably more attractive to a property owner than a long term rental as far as covering the costs of owning the property.

If you want fewer AirBnBs and more rentals available, make it more attractive for property owners to provide long term rents, don’t put them all off like they are doing now by making it such a hassle to make a place available for rent.

It’s true that in some Chinese cultures cheating the system is how things are done, but this doesn’t apply to other Asian cultures. Japanese people for example are very respectful of others and culturally are much less likely to bend the rules when compared to natural born Australians, so you can’t really lump them all into one bucket as there are huge differences between them.

Very few Asians are refugees. A refugee is someone who escapes their homeland because their life is in danger, and is allowed to settle in a new country without meeting the normal requirements for citizenship. International students paying for a plane ticket and going back home a few years later when they’re finished studying don’t even come close to the definition of refugee. Have you gone through a university campus carpark recently? There are so many Asian students driving BMWs and other expensive cars because their families are rich, and that’s why they are able to study abroad. Why would they want to live here when back home their family is powerful and politically connected?

While they are here they pay GST and other taxes just like everyone else. Again, just look at COVID when the annual influx of international students stopped - companies went bust and white Australians lost their jobs because there weren’t enough people coming into the country and buying their stuff.

True refugees may well be a drain on society while they get back on their feet, but Asians sure don’t count in that. I’d be interested to know where you got the stats showing how many refugees are Asian? I can’t find any stats on refugees, only on which countries migrants come from and that says this year the most came from India, followed by China, New Zealand and the UK.

What other cultures would you prefer on our streets instead of Asians? I guess you’d rather we change the law to allow burqas and mandate all food be halal as per Islamic law, so we can get more Muslims in to replace all the Asians? No thanks, I like the fact that whatever country Asian people are from, they are happy to follow the laws we have and not try to change them.

Sydney has many more Asians than Brisbane if that’s what you’re asking? I don’t think many are refugees though, most seem to be international students here to study. That’s why you see a lot of younger people but far fewer older people.

As far as people moving here permanently, if you follow what China has done in Hong Kong, it’s awful. Those people are welcome here as far as I’m concerned. Most of them would return home in an instant if the Chinese government left and things went back the way they were, so you can’t blame them for escaping a bad situation.

There are plenty worse cultures that could be filling up our streets. At least most Asian cultures are generally courteous and encourage you to get a job, work hard, and ultimately pay taxes that benefit us all. They also don’t try to change our laws or force us to accept their religious ideas either as some other cultures do. It could be much worse than having Asians here believe me.

It’s the ones who don’t work and just leech off society that bother me, and most of the ones who do that were born here. (Like the guy that carjacked the taxi the other day, we certainly don’t need people like that in our society.)

Traditionally the prices are supposed to double every seven years but thanks to the GFC in 2008 there was a huge reset and prices in many Brisbane areas have only recently started moving again after COVID. But that means there’s a lot of “catching up” to do, so everyone is expecting a sudden jump where the prices go up much quicker than normal. Couple that with the upcoming Olympics and it’s easy to see why some people are predicting a massive increase in house prices.

It’s just a shame so many employers want employees back in the office for jobs where remote work is easily doable. Imagine if all those office workers could live and work remotely out in country towns where they are desperate for more people to keep the town running, freeing up inner city housing and making it much more affordable for those people whose jobs cannot be done remotely. Not to mention cutting down on peak hour traffic. It seems like a win/win but no, managers have begun to realise how unnecessary they are so we can’t have that, everyone has to fill up the roads commuting and live close to the city to keep house prices high, even when it’s completely unnecessary.

It certainly is for tenants, you’re way better off financially to buy if you can. But that can be difficult for a lot of people, either because they just don’t earn enough or because they do earn enough but they don’t want to sacrifice their lifestyle today for financial security tomorrow.

I can certainly see both sides of the argument. If you’re an introvert and you aren’t going to go out drinking all weekend anyway then it makes sense to save that money for your own house, but if you’re an extrovert and you’d be depressed if you never went out on weekends, well what’s the point of spending years in misery saving for a house that you’re never going to spend much time in anyway once you have it?

Yes I’m getting subsidised assets partly funded by other people’s labour, and in return I’m providing them with a place to stay they couldn’t otherwise afford. I’m not forcing them to rent from me, they are free to live somewhere else if they don’t like what I’m offering.

I wouldn’t have offered the place to rent if there was no chance of making money off it, why else would I sacrifice my time and money if I wasn’t going to get anything in return? That would make no sense. Maybe some people put up a spare room for rent out of the goodness of their hearts, but for the vast majority it’s a business. You put in some time and money and you hope to get a payoff at the end of it. Why is that so controversial?

There’s no weaselling about it - you rent out a property to get a tenant to help pay off your debt, that’s how it works. Are you paying $200+/week from your salary to random people to help them out with their rent? No? What makes you think a landlord would want to do the same?

I don’t think you understand how the whole idea of rentals work. It’s not some magic supply of free housing, it’s ordinary everyday people like you and me who scrimp and save in the hope of getting a long term payoff that makes up for all the sacrifice.

I don’t think it sucks to be me, I think it sucks to be a tenant renting at the moment as the supply start to dry up and rents increase beyond what they can afford, thanks to poor government policy inadvertently making renting more expensive than it should be.