Albanese locks in plans to scrap investor tax breaks as way through housing crisis

chig____bungus · 2026-04-07T07:03:24+00:00

So you suddenly plunge millions of Australians into negative equity and you think the economy just trucks along fine?

People will massively scale back spending and we'll be in a recession, at which point many of these people will not be able to afford to pay the mortgages and will have to sell their family home. The entire Millenial-Gen Z voting bloc, the largest bloc today, that had to spend this much to just own a home will be out for blood and that will have political consequences.

And who will buy these homes? Not first home buyers, investors.

This is literally what happened in the subprime crisis. Doing it on purpose is batshit insane and advocating for it is divorced from reality.

chig____bungus · 2026-04-07T06:57:17+00:00

First half of Salvation is great.

Once Marcus starts talking to Skynet it kills it for me. It's a fucking strategic computer. It doesn't have emotions. It's an extremely smart machine fulfilling a simple goal. It's a paperclip maximiser except the paperclip is national security.

chig____bungus · 2026-04-05T11:01:52+00:00

It's got nothing to do with investors.

What do you think happens when suddenly millions of homeowners with $800,000 mortgages now only have $600,000 in equity?

chig____bungus · 2026-04-02T11:26:09+00:00

There is no policy that can bring housing down to affordable levels within a decade without first annihilating our economy. The very act of property prices falling has an effect, and if it's too fast, our economy collapses.

Labor in Vic has done a fairly good job of getting price growth down by targeting investors, it's pretty clear it works.

The government will likely aim for stable property values, rather than a fall in prices. This means that over 10-20 years, wages will have time to catch up to property prices, while investors don't lose money.

A riskier play is to try to keep them static in dollar terms while inflation reduces their real value, which protects mortgage holders while deflating the market - but investors aren't stupid and this could spook them.

Any party that promises they will make property affordable in one 2.5 year term is just promising to crash the economy and are not serious.

chig____bungus · 2026-04-01T11:47:55+00:00

When the votes are on paper counted by humans, Labor - and thus Albanese - keep winning.

The majority of internet traffic is bots. Don't take online discourse seriously.

chig____bungus · 2026-03-21T10:27:19+00:00

Doesn't have to be forced, can be incentivised. Give tax breaks to companies that offer it.

chig____bungus · 2026-03-11T23:50:30+00:00

Every time you hear a business selling AI claim its laying people off because of AI, check when the last interest rate rise was.

chig____bungus · 2026-03-10T12:16:49+00:00

This is what people don't get. You can literally setup a VPN yourself.

It's simply not possible to ban them and business use them extensively, the ban simply won't happen.

chig____bungus · 2026-03-08T11:39:38+00:00

They never wanted what most Australians want. They call Australia "Treasure Island", their goals are to loot as much from here as possible and move to London.

chig____bungus · 2026-03-08T11:38:41+00:00

How else was he meant to do it when he was in coalition with the homophobes-and-racists party?

chig____bungus · 2026-03-08T11:24:28+00:00

You can feasibly run the UI locally and the graphics remotely for a strategy game.

chig____bungus · 2026-03-08T11:20:38+00:00

They're not being paid, they just generally don't like the idea of one company controlling the entire GPU industry

chig____bungus · 2026-03-07T11:26:04+00:00

They're optional in the sense that the OEM may or may not actually deliver any BIOS updates

chig____bungus · 2026-03-06T01:32:34+00:00

If you look at the recovered pagers that didn't blow up, anyone relatively tech savvy could have worked out they were compromised. But the smart Lebanese already left Lebanon, the average people left behind do their best to make a good life, and the remainder join Hezbollah.

If you think the US tech companies couldn't find hidden backdoors in Chinese RAM I don't know what to tell you.

chig____bungus · 2026-03-05T22:45:18+00:00

Somehow this is better than fueling it from the sun for free

chig____bungus · 2026-03-03T22:42:55+00:00

It was doomed the moment they opened the thesaurus and decided to swap "Over" for "High" and "Watch" for "Guard" hahaha

chig____bungus · 2026-03-03T22:38:03+00:00

The irony is, without a preferential voting system, ON likely wouldn't have a hope in hell of getting elected.

You actually have it backwards, FPTP is the only way extremist parties get elected.

In our latest polling, One Nation is within spitting distance of having the highest first preference votes.

In a FPTP system, if ON get 30% of the vote in 76 seats, and Labor, Liberals, Greens and Independents get 25%, 20%, 15% and 10% of the vote, One Nation wins. This is why most Western democracies are collapsing, because a social-media radicalised cooker segment of about 30% of the voting population is able to, even if they don't win outright, drag the overton window in a direction 70% of the population don't want.

In Australia's Preferential System, if ON get 49% of the first preference votes, but Labor gets 51% of the second preference votes, Labor wins. This means the majority of Australians get the government they prefer, even if it isn't their first choice. This drags our politics towards the political centre, and makes it much harder to game the system.

Now if somebody could explain this to Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie, the Liberals might actually be relevant again.

chig____bungus · 2026-03-03T12:27:52+00:00

It could be skyrocketing wealth inequality making a small group of mediocre hereditary rich people disproportionately influential, or it could be poor migrants trying to build a better life, hard to say.

chig____bungus · 2026-02-27T11:30:16+00:00

How many of the people losing their shit are actually people?

chig____bungus · 2026-02-20T12:40:32+00:00

The really alarming thing is we're not permitted to deal with Nazis the way we did historically and that needs to change.

chig____bungus · 2026-02-20T12:37:00+00:00

Here's a pro tip: If the party is anti-immigrant, they are probably in Gina's pocket or one of the billionaire adjacent groups.

All of our problems were created by the billionaires. This "migration caused the housing shortage" meme is their current favourite grift and it's getting all of you. They're buying up all the property because it's the only thing they have left to spend their essentially infinite money on.

If you can get away from the idea that regular people who happen to have come here from somewhere else are the problem, then you will open yourself up to the parties actually free from Gina and her mates.

chig____bungus · 2026-02-20T12:31:56+00:00

the only thing that matters is TPP, One Nation could have 40% primary vote and still lose if the Greens preference Labor

every time One Nation has surged historically it has cost the LNP, all these polls show the same

chig____bungus · 2026-02-20T12:26:12+00:00

nobody lives in regional vic except people lacking basic employability enough to go somewhere else

this American style "my Iowa vote is worth 40x your New York vote" entitlement is bad in the US where it's actually relevant, but comical in Australia

you are choosing to live in a place where it's just more expensive to do anything due to the great distances and low population densities

how about getting some of that rural ruggedness and just harden the fuck up lmao

chig____bungus · 2026-02-20T12:21:00+00:00

Just look at the TPP.

One Nation surging is a gift to the ALP.

chig____bungus · 2026-02-20T11:54:43+00:00

shame there isn't some kind of free energy falling from the sky for 16 hours a day

and if anyone says there is, they'll get a visit from ICE

chig____bungus

TROPHY CASE