The Chinese buyers can often outbid local Australians for properties:
Real estate agents report that Chinese buyers often buy several apartments in a new development as a family group. Joseph Ngo, an agent for LJ Hooker in Glen Waverly, that paying $100,000 to $200,000 over the market price “is not a problem for these buyers”. The same is happening in Melbourne, if not quite at Sydney’s intensity.
That's good for those with investment houses to sell, but terrible for those Australians looking to buy a family home.
The writer of the piece, Clive Hamilton, is someone who is definitely on the progressive left in Australia. However, he has opted in this case to sympathise with the local Australians forced out of their own communities:
Couples planning families can no longer afford to buy in the suburbs where they grew up, where they have built friendship networks or where they work. Forced further and further west and south, they are progressively cut off from their old neighbourhoods.
There was an era (roughly 1880s to 1920s) when the progressive left mostly did opt to support local populations against the negative effects of an unconstrained market. However, eventually the logic of the commitment to "equal freedom" led the progressive left to move toward an internationalist position (if what matters is my freedom to self-determine, then there needs to be a system in which we guarantee individuals the right to self-determine, which means not discriminating on criteria that the individual cannot self-determine such as race, ethny, sexuality, gender etc - that's the logic by which a liberal egalitarianism pushes toward non-discrimination and cosmopolitanism).
As you might expect, Hamilton's post received a mixed response at the leftist Guardian site. Some were sympathetic in his criticism of an unconstrained market, but others thought that showing fidelity to locals over international buyers was racist and discriminatory. The paper itself inserted a long, hand-wringing editor's note trying to wade through the conundrum.
The comments section is particularly interesting as you can see the Guardian readers battling it out. The internationalists seem to have the numbers, but there are a fair few who speak up for the conditions of locals.
It's possible that if a serious traditionalist movement were to continue to develop and to become an influence on politics that it might encourage one wing of the progressives to take more of a stand in favour of local communities, as occurred a century ago. We already have examples of progressives who seem willing to do this, such as Paul Kingsnorth.
The internationalists are doing with economics and money what the Soviets tried to do by force and policy.
ReplyDeleteAustralia signed the TPPA (Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement) and magically overnight the car industry has collapsed while those same cars will be manufactured by cosignees in Malaysia and Korea. Not to mention China and India which will be future members, interesting that the manufacturers were aware of this even before the government ratified the agreements.
This is not about "equal freedom". This is about the progressive Left HATING the white race and all white (especially English-speaking) nations with a passion.
ReplyDeleteThese days, there are those on the left who have moved to such a position (though it is connected to beliefs about equal freedom - they see whites as having contravened rules of equal freedom in assuming a position of privilege). However, in the era 1880 to 1920 there were two wings of the progressive movement in the U.S. (I've been reading historian Eric Kaufmann on this). One was an emerging "left progressive" movement that would later dominate the left. It didn't so much hate Anglo-Saxons as believe that it was a higher morality for Anglo-Saxon Americans to give up their ethnic existence in order to merge into a fused, melting-pot people that would lead the way toward a universal brotherhood of man. However, before the 1920s, the dominant part of the progressive movement was a more nationally particular one, that opposed open borders because of the effect on American workers and which sought to maintain American institutions.
DeleteYep, agreed. I think the "brotherhood of man" is more of an ideal (and which is biblical). Anti-white hatred, open borders, miscegenation are just the latest means the Left is using to achieve that end, using some standard that does not
DeleteHow many of these Chinese buyers are corrupt government officials that stole the money?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.smh.com.au/world/corrupt-chinese-officials-flee-overseas-some-bound-for-australia-20140225-hvdse.html
I just wish Chinese buyers would look a little farther afield, to places that are already not unbelievably popular with Chinese buyers. Instead of paying over $1,000,000 for a small place in Vancouver, look at the Outer Banks of North Carolina. You can get an oceanfront house in Kitty Hawk for the same price. Small oceanfront cottage for less than a milllion, bigger and nicer for perhaps 1.3 to 2 million.
ReplyDeleteYes, there may not be the Asian grocery stores yet, but why not start one while you and your friends buy a hundred houses or so. The schools are good, I hear. They are well-funded, as you can imagine. A resort area where most of the houses are not year-round dwellings, but many valuable houses generate lots of tax money to educate a relatively small number of students.
North Carolina has many great Universities, public and private.