View From The Couch - 21/Mar/2017

It's Not A Bubble If You Don't Call It That

Day after day, there's this concern about the Property Bubble. Looked through the hosing affordability prism, the bubble looks enormous, but looked through the prism of investments, housing-as- asset still looks safe to the majority of investors piling into the market. If you're hoping to get you quarter acre block and raise your kids in the manner that your parents did, in a neighbour that resembles the one in which you grew up, the likelihood has diminished to unlikely to zero chance doing it on your own.

If you're in the real estate racket, then it's in your interest to talk it down like it's not big deal.
This made me laugh:

Australia's banking regulator says the country's housing market is in an environment of "heightened risk", but he won't say there's a housing bubble. 

Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority chairman Wayne Byres told a Sydney conference that he wouldn't use "the B-word" to describe the housing market. 

"I don't use the B-word. I refuse to use the B-word. It implies a binary, that's too simplistic," Mr Byres said speaking at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission annual forum. 

"We are in an environment of heightened risk. House prices are high and particularly in this one (Sydney) they're rapidly rising," Mr Byres said.
"If everyone is not careful the risks are going to rise," Mr Byres said.

Mr Byres said APRA was watching the housing market, but he stopped short of saying the authority would bring in new curbs on investment lending.

I guess it's not a Bubble if you don't call it that. That's a bit like saying Tony Abbott isn't a dickhead because he's not called Dick Head, but Tony Abbott.

"What Bubble?" They Asked

Outside of Sydney and Melbourne, real estate pricing has not risen at the same dizzying rates. Of course, Australia's a very big place but GDP growth is concentrated in pockets. That is to say, there are only a few places in Australia worth being. You can go live in Tenterfield Queensland in a shack priced at 20k, which is the middle of nowhere, for instance, but it is days from amenities one expects of civilisation and if you didn't get your NBN connection out there, why, living conditions could approximate the 19th century more than the 21st.

Something like 8% worth of Australia's GDP's economic activity takes place in the precinct surrounding Wynyard and Town Hall stations. Think about that: 1/12.5ths of Australia's economy converges on 2 railway stations (I happen to know this because I talk to people at the UTS TRC). The whole point of Sydney is to service the 2 stations, and to that end, the public transport system has grown into radial spokes around the surrounding land all the way out to the hinterlands. It grew that way through a combination of factors, some of which included lack of vision by the NSW government; the small-ness of scope given to a precinct known as The City of Sydney which covers these two stations, but nowhere near far out enough to urban coordinate planning or transport planning; the fact that the Sydney basin as a whole had no urban planning for a good two decades in the middle of the 20th century; and general class sniping which has persisted from English Colonial times.

Unfortunately the physical need for participants in the economy to converge on the two stations is so immense it has absolutely warped the perception of value in Sydney. The CBDs of Melbourne and Brisbane also present similar problems. Combined, the central districts of the three cities would contribute to a quarter of Australia' GDP, perhaps a third -all of it sitting in a clutch of about 5-6 train stations. That's a lot of economic activity that needs to be serviced by public transport.

In a sense, it is like light. For every doubling of distance away from these hot cores of the Australian economy, the value of the land would lose by a square root. While this is common sense, the way the property prices have been growing is anything but. If Sydney's economic output as a whole is not growing by 18%, it's hard to justify 18% rises in the property - and that's just comparing like with like. If you compare the GDP output of Sydney with world cities, it is hardly worth the prices its property is fetching. I mean, Sydney's a nice-ish place to live, but it's not that nice. People are having themselves on if they're putting it up higher than NYC, London or even Santa Barbara, California.

Except perspective is very hard to come by when you've decided where you are so damn wonderful, and the market is full of these people. Do you wonder why some people think it's all going to end in tears?

Bad Ideas Still Get To Run

There's this argument going around that maybe first time home owners should be able to access their superannuation in order to put a deposit down for a house. Paul Keating thinks this is a terrible idea. Others are in favour.

The succinct summation of why it's a bad idea is here (take it away, Mr. Keating!):

The average superannuation balance of those aged between 25 and 40 hovers around $45,000. Were this to be taken from a saver's account to be employed as a housing deposit, it would effectively destroy that person's ability to compound any future sum into a meaningful retirement supplement. 

More than that, once the preservation rule has been breached, the whole investment system would be compromised as superannuation trustees were required to make provision for short-term withdrawals from an otherwise, fully preserved system. This would be completely disruptive to professional funds management.

If you look at it from a longer time frame, you'd have to say property prices will not keep going up, or even stay above their historic trend forever. it's doubtful it would stay that way over a working life. The insane price rises we're seeing are based on the delusion that these markets never go down. People are forgetting what an economic contraction looks like, what a recession looks like, and how it impacts prices of things.

It's kind of crazy to pull your money out of diversified funds and stick it into one asset. Not one asset class, but one asset. And then you assume that one asset will keep going up enough that you could liquidate it at the time of your retirement to fund your retirement. If you believe that, I have a bridge I want to sell you. 

News That's Fit To Punt - 29/Sep/2015

Circular Quay Revamp

The Baird Government wants to drop some money on Circular Quay and its wharves. Naturally it wants to sell off some assets and privatise stuff. It also wants to breakup Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority and hive off  the various functions to various departments. Of course Mike Baird won't care if some jobs will be lost - because of course that's why a government privatises stuff - to carve off the barnacle state employees who could not be gotten rid of in any other way. 

Be that as it may, here's the article from the Shake-My-Head journal.  

"We're not going to make a decision that is not in the best economic interests of the state of NSW," Mr Perrottet said. 

The move is the latest push to privatise government assets perceived to be serving little public use and follows the announcement of a plan to convert historic government offices into a five-star hotel. 

As well as the properties owned by the government in Circular Quay are buildings currently operated by the Mercure and Four Seasons hotels at Darling Harbour and office space at Darling Park. 

Mr Perrottet said the plan would not the diminish heritage values of the area.
The plan coincides with the abolition of the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, following a review of the agency. 

The organisation's functions and more than 100 of its staff will be transferred to other departments. 

The Premier said he expected most staff to be retained but would not categorically rule out job losses among bureaucrats. 

"The expectation is the vast majority of the roles will go to Government Property NSW," the Premier said. "We're trying to take away duplication and inefficiency in government."

Damn the SMH and its one sentence paragraphs. The picture that's emerging is that the NSW Government wants to sell off some prime real estate before the bubble pops. 

Property Bubble Isn't Ready To Pop.

I know we've been told there isn't a Property Bubble, but if there happened to be a Bubble, it's not yet ready to pop. You can go to the link and read through it but it won't tell you anything they haven't told you before. I'm sure it's all fine as long as China is sort of doing somewhere in the vicinity of "Business-As-Usual". 

Of course, China might not be doing such a thing nor doing well as hoped. Try this article for size:

On Friday, in a move that would make even Hewlett-Packard's Meg Whitman blush, Harbin-based Heilongjiang Longmay Mining Holding Group, or Longmay Group, the biggest met coal miner in northeast China which has been struggling to reduce massive losses in recent months as a result of the commodity collapse, just confirmed China's "hard-landing" has arrived when it announced on its website it would cut 100,000 jobs or 40% of its entire 240,000-strong labor force. 

Impacted by the slump in coal prices, the group saw its loss over January-August surged more than 1.1 billion yuan ($17.2 million) from the year before. In the first half of 2015, the group closed eight coking coal mines most of which had approached the end of their mining lives, due to poor production margins amid bleak sales. 

Chaiman of the group Wang Zhikui said the job losses were a way of helping the company "stop bleeding." The heavily-indebted company also plans to sell its non-coal related businesses to help pay off its debts, said Wang. The State-owned mining group has subsidiaries in Jixi, Hegang, Shuangyashan and Qitaihe in Heilongjiang province, which account for about half the region's coal production.

That's a lot of people to go lose their jobs in one hit. 

Just to give you a feel for what 100,000 in one fell swoop means, Australia's unemployment figure is something like 600,000. All the people losing their jobs in the collective withdrawal of car manufacturing from Australia is estimated to be about 20,000-30,000.

Maybe more eye-opening is the fact that the coal miners of the world are still profitable, even more so than the Chinese coal mining industry that hangs on cheap labour, despite the total devastation of commodity prices this year.

Of course, the good Tylers at Zero Hedge might be right: China might be heading straight into a hard landing. In which case there will be ramifications for Australia, and amongst the things it might hit would be that Property Bubble that everybody is pretending it's not a bubble. Let's face it, when the money stops flowing in China, it's going to stop flowing all the way out here and into the property market.

Oh, and look, here comes October, Month of Crashes!

Phoenix-ing Companies Under Scrutiny, Again

It took a long while but the Federal Government is finally on to the scourge of phoenix-ing companies.

At least $3 billion of debts are being shirked in the construction industry due to the insidious and illegal practice of phoenix activity, a Senate inquiry has heard. 

So-called phoenix companies are businesses that collapse one day with a pile of debts then rise from the ashes with the same assets and customers to avoid their bills.
They rip people off, go broke and emerge debt-free. It is a practice that has become the scourge of the construction industry. 

In the words of the Australian Taxation Office in a submission to the Senate: "Where such insolvencies result from intentional or systematic planning to become insolvent, we see this as a serious threat to the integrity of our financial, employment, regulatory, taxation and superannuation systems – harming both these creditors and all Australians."

It's not a practice limited to the construction industry. I've seeing a few times in the events business and film business. It's too easy to do and there's really no viable recourse if you are a creditor. Most small businesses can't go to court over debts of five figures. But swallowing losses of five figures to such 'enterprises' is debilitating. If it's six figures, it's still prohibitive to down tools and go to court and hope to win - if you lose, it's a double whammy. And so the practice continues with impunity.

The latest attempt to tackle the problem was back in 2012 when directors were made personally liable for the debts of the phoenix company in relation to non-payment of amounts withheld from employees' wages and super. 

To date, the various inquiries and changes to the law and ATO and ASIC crackdowns have had little impact. 

What is most concerning is it is getting worse.

That's not exactly pleasing to our eye to be reading that last line.

Somebody Leaned On This Guy

Back in late April, Tim Williams, the Chief Executive of Committee for Sydney came out swinging against the toll-road-centric road-buildit agenda that is becoming the norm for transportation  planning in NSW.

Dr Williams, whose organisation's members include major construction, finance and engineering firms, also called on the government to release the business cases for the new mega projects being proposed for Sydney which, to its detriment, remained in the thrall of road builders.

"There is no strategic or structural planner of Sydney at this point of time outside of RMS [Roads and Maritime Services]," Dr Williams told the Halloran Trust event at the university. 

"RMS is the structural planner for Sydney," Dr Williams said, before quoting George Orwell to the effect that Sydney was "a family with the wrong members in control".

"I'm sorry to have to say it but I think it is, I think we've got problems," he said. "I think in its current form, RMS needs to be reconstructed."

Dr Williams' presentation largely reflected familiar themes advanced by transport academics and urban planners. As cities became denser, governments needed to fit them with better public transport, cycling and walking facilities, rather than focusing on new motorways that encourage sprawl and car use. 

But the intervention is significant because it is rare for a big business group to press these points. Members of the Committee for Sydney include major engineering firms like Arup​ and AECOM, as well as finance companies like Macquarie Group, Westpac and ANZ. 

"We are in the presence of another road transport upheaval in this city," Dr Williams said, while showing a slide of the $15 billion WestConnex motorway and its proposed extensions to the north and south. 

"Which, by the way, we are not seeing in any other cities in the world," he said. "And that's the issue – many other cities in the world are taking their highway capacity out and I'm just wondering, what is so different about the Australian city experience that means that they're wrong and we are right? 

"We think this is a congestion-busting proposition and nowhere in Christendom does that appear to be the case – so what's going on?"

He kind of spelled out the common sense problems of just bunging in more toll-roads as the answer Sydney's transportation problem.

Of course, today we read this:

The chief executive of business lobby group the Committee for Sydney has apologised for his candid criticism of Sydney's toll-road agenda. 

Tim Williams used a recent presentation at Sydney University to argue the city needed a "public transport revolution" and that "all sides" of politics had got it wrong on transport planning. 

The criticism was powerful and unusual because of Mr Williams' position as head of an organisation that represents firms that might expect to benefit from the construction of new motorways, and particularly the $15 billion WestConnex project. 

But in a note to members this week, as well as in a letter to the Herald, Dr Williams backed away from the criticism, saying it reflected only his personal views.

"Some members will be aware that during an unscripted speech I recently gave at Sydney University I uncharacteristically commented from a personal perspective and went beyond the formal position of the Committee without clarifying I was doing so," Dr Williams wrote in a note. 

"I have apologised to all partners and to my board who have been very magnanimous although concerned for 'normal service to be resumed'," he wrote.
"I also apologise to members for this untypical event." 

Dr Williams' swift backdown on the presentation - which he supported with 95 slides - underlines the sensitivities around the WestConnex project, which at 33 kilometres is the largest motorway proposal in the country.

And in case you couldn't tell, that's what a guy who got leaned on to shut-the-fuck-up-and-get-with-the-program, says. You speak the truth, they threaten to take your livelihood away and so you recant.
That's how Room 101 works in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' :"Under the spreading Chestnut Tree, I sold you and you sold me". It's kind of crazy that the powers-that-be think this makes the original speech not stand.

Oh by the way, if you click on the 95 slides link in the quoted bit above, it goes to a 404 Error page. Yes, they've taken down the 95 slides that show how fucked WestConnex was, so you won't see it. it has been made a non-article, because it never happened. Dr Tim Williams is lucky he wasn't made into a non-person and erased from history. These bastards are working hard to ram WestConnex through. They're not taking any prisoners and they don't care who they destroy along the way. It's a disgusting collusion between the state and private enterprise.

More Rail Please

How Bad Are We At Rail?

A decade ago they did a survey of urban rail systems around the world. Predictably CityRail in Sydney cam last in a list of about 40 cities and Geneva came first. So they sent the best and brightest from the ranks of CityRail to Geneva to study how they made it so good. Upon his arrival the Swiss showed him around and explained to him how they did things. Alarmingly, he countered by telling them how they did things better in Sydney, as if the Swiss would be interested in how the worst rail system in the world did things...

Things actually haven't improved all that much in Sydney since. Yes, they've introduced the Opal card and a few extensions have been added on to the network but neither the immensely complacent ALP government that presided over the mess for over a decade (that would be you, Bob Carr!) and the Coalition government - which is even more beholden to general construction companies and their lobbyists - has barely scratched surface of needs. Of course the latter have come up with the fiasco we will come to know as Wasteconnex, and is pouring billions into it, but that is almost like the potassium benzoate icing on the Frogurt.

You could almost forgive the enthusiasm for more tollways if it was matched with an enthusiasm for building a metro network that actually worked. You could understand the utter disinterest in building a metro network if it was matched with an equally similar, utter disinterest in building tollways. As things stand, successive NSW governments of both parties have happy committed to what amounts to worst of both worlds. Worse still, they always couch the expenditure as an either/or proposition and somehow the bidding always goes the way of building more tollways (and tunnels!).

Now our State and Federal governments are so fixed in their ways and set on their contracts that we are committed to even more roads instead of much in the way of rail. You do wonder when things will begin to improve. That leads me to this article here today:

In numerous studies, international academics have demonstrated that there is a certain amount of time people are willing to spend travelling each day. That is their travel-time budget.

People may exceed their budget in the short-term.

But over a longer period, if they have to spend more than about 80 minutes travelling, they will make changes to their lives to fall back within their travel-time budget.

And if people start going under their travel-time budget – Seventy Minutes Plus or Minus Ten is the name of a recent review of the literature in this area by Asif Ahmed and Peter Stopher of the University of Sydney – they will probably find other trips on which to spend their travel time.

This seems to pass the commonsense test.

If, suddenly, your work commute drops to 10 minutes because you start living near your office, you might then be more likely to drive, cycle or walk to a better set of shops in the evening.

Now when you combine this concept of a travel time budget – we all have a limited number of minutes we are prepared to spend travelling – with the demonstrably worse congestion on our roads, an explanation for the drop in driving kilometres emerges.

"If the budget of travel time is the same and your travel time is mainly going up because of congestion, you are not able to cover longer distances because you don't want to spend much more time in your car," says Michiel Bliemer, Professor in Transport at the University of Sydney.

"That maybe explains this trend: if your vehicle is not getting faster on the road, you cannot cover longer distances," he says.

So what are the implications of this?

One response would be to build more roads.

Yes, that's right, more roads. Except there's a mathematical problem with more roads: Roads are inherently in support of a city expanding 2 dimensionally. As the city sprawls across a plane, roads go with it. Occasionally lifting up a level or going underground but essentially supporting a two dimensional schema.

The problem is as urban density grows, it tends to be three dimensional. Not only do people start living in closer quarts, they do this in high-rise blocks going upwards. The demand then becomes moving more people for shorter distances instead of moving fewer people across greater distances. i.e. the demands of an increasingly dense population centre is cubing (^3). Roads can only ever service it in squares (^2). No wonder roads with cars get congested.  

The congestion is so bad that there's a garden suburb on the edge of the sprawl where people can't get out of their driveways in the morning. The road is congested on the garden suburb local roads, all the way to the entry on to the M5. The M5 is now a lot wider going both directions but it still has the problem that the heavier traffic comes to a crawl, the closer it gets to Sydney. Again, it's just the maths of it - but the people who make the decision that roads should be built and expanded don't address the fact that all it does is it moves the congestion further out and closer in. 

Similarly, the government is under fire for not having built greater pubic transport infrastructure for all the high density dwellings going upon the inner city. It's all very nice to put the high density dwellings closer to the city centre but if it takes them 45minutes to get to work in the city, you haven't exactly helped things at all. 

The fact of the matter - and I keep bringing this up - is that the people who make these decisions are in the pockets of the general construction company lobby. So the general construction companies are happy to build the high density apartments, AND the roads that go out with the sprawl, but because they don't stand to make a dime on the railways, those crucial transport infrastructures don't get built. 

Worse still, the vast majority of these people live in suburbs where they can commute by car easily, so they don't see the problem as it really stands. And I won't name names because these people are trigger-happy with their defamation suits, but some of these people are people who ought to know better; but I guess business is what it is, and the public good doesn't come into it at all.  That's why they're giving us Wasteconnex without giving us a loser look as to what is in it. Some people are going to get very rich out of Wasteconnex, at the expense of the public purse, and nobody's exactly stopping them.

That's how we always end up with more tollways and not enough rail.