There seems to be a lot of issues in the media at the moment that are really closely linked but few seem to be drawing on those links.

I was thinking about a post regarding rates and property tax. In some senses, the recent increases in the cost of owning a home has turned into a peculiar class issue. Essentially, working class people are being pushed out of the areas that they have lived in for generations in some cases. This is because their suburb is being ‘gentrified’ and ‘new money’ is moving in. So rates go up sighting an increase in property value and therefore relative prosperity of the residents. Of course we all know that this is not necessarily the case.

In a relatively prosperous country like Australia home ownership has traditionally been an achievable goal. So we are fortunate in Australia that the propertied class is not necessarily the bourgeois. Generally speaking I’m in favour of higher tax rates to people who are better off and on the surface property ownership seems like an appropriate thing to tax (or charge fees as the case may be). But in this particular case it would seem that it is actually damaging the working class – the group that these sorts of fund traditionally help.

In the long term this will create ghettos.

This is linked to issues of interest rates, housing prices, education and training, refugees and migration, taxation, investment in research and development, trade agreements, unemployment, under-employment, industrial relations reforms, child care, paid maternity leave, women’s rights, minimum wage, ‘the aspirationals’, reconciliation, tax free thresholds and much more. I wish I had time to draw them all together but essentially it is about class and increasingly it would seem that a class war is emerging. I can’t help but feel that the recent riots in Sydney, where ghettoisation was a major factor, are at the coal face of this clash.