I had the great pleasure of seeing Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles at the National Gallery of Australian in Canberra on the weekend.

It’s a piece of art that I’ve always loved. Aesthetically, I find it really striking. How can such chaos be so well balanced? The acquisition of Blue Poles also symbolises a sort of coming of age for Australian. To top it all off, it is incredible that such an abstract artwork of such renown could be painted in an era that is known for its conservatism, the 1950s.

It got me thinking, are we getting more conservative? I have a feeling we are.

There seems to be a resurgence in traditional gender roles. People are getting married more readily, we’re having a mini baby boom and Melbourne continues to ballon as people seek their quarter acre block in increasingly distant suburbs.

Are growing divorce rates simply a reflection of a growing number of people feeling the need to get married and therefore rushing into it?

I also get the feeling that the moral minority (the christian right) have a stronger hold on government than they have had for a while. The ALP has always had a strong catholic contingent (the SDA, among others, is a staunchly catholic and powerful Labor affiliated union). It feels like this influence is the strongest it’s been for a while. The Prime Minister and senior cabinet minister, Stephen Conroy, both strongly identifying with christianity. That’s not to mention the strong influence that conservative christianity has on many opposition members, not least of which is their leader, Tony Abbot. Then there is Steve Fielding was elected thanks primarily to ALP preferences – a scary thought – and the DLP has it’s first seats in the Victorian Government for god knows how long.

Then there’s the ANZAC phenomenon, where young people are flocking to dawn services around the country. I’ve very mixed feelings about ANZAC day. I do think those who gave their lives in these wars should be remembered and honoured, particularly considering the role Australia’s working class has played. However, I’m deeply uncomfortable with the associated glorification of war and the damage that war continues to have on so many with the loss of live, injury and the psychological damage that reeks havoc on soldier’s families – the silent victims in all of this.

My mixed feelings also come from the fact that I just don’t have any tangible connection to anything military. My Grandfather fought in in Papua New Guinea during WWII but never spoke of it, never marched and never really had an interest in doing either.

Finally, there’s the growth in Australian Nationalism. People used to bemoan the lack of nationalism in Australia, now it seems to be everywhere, complete with southern cross tattoos. Nationalism terrifies me. Not only is it inherently conservative, it necessarily creates an ‘other’; which for an immigrant nation is a dangerous thing. But to start that discussion these days elicits a highly emotive response. What could possibly be wrong with flying the Australian flag? This is the greatest country in the world.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that we aren’t getting more conservative – the daily bombardment of highly sexualised images is a case in point. But I suspect that things are getting more conservative around here.

I guess the other thing that worries me about urban sprawl and the over reliance on cars is the social isolation that is associated with it.

When you have to get in the car to get anywhere, it leaves you less connected with others and your immediate surrounds.

It’s just too atomising. Humans are social beings. Families and couples always work better when they have strong social networks around. Of course you will develop relationships with your neighbours but they are unlikely to have the same depth that you would have with those you have built the close and more intimate relationships that comes with shared experience.

I’m really not one to romanticise localisation and community the way a lot of hippies people do. I’ve no desire to go back to the days of the village or anything like that. I’m quite excited by the dynamic and changing nature of the modern world which is far more connected in so many ways. But I wonder if anyone has ever mapped the relationship between urban sprawl and divorce?

Life is also a lot cheaper (excluding housing costs) when everything is in walking distance. In too many of these outer suburbs, the local corner store is a service station that is a 5 min drive away, not a 5 min walk. That means that your transport costs alone go through the roof. Not to mention the heating and cooling costs attached to such a big house.

And what will happen with the advent of Peak Oil? Oil production has already peaked and in the next few years demand will outstrip production. Petrol prices are already through the roof and will not come back down in any meaningful sense anytime soon. So what is going to happen to our housing supply issues when petrol is at $7 or $8 a liter and there are thousands of acres of urban sprawl without a train station in sight.

But my Peak Oil rant will have to be saved for another post.

I could write here about why I hardly ever blog anymore, but I won’t. I’m trying to figure out what to do with this blog and have decided to stop thinking and just do a little more (no promises on how long that will last).

So, housing. In Melbourne Specifically.

I turned 30 this year. That means that a lot more of my conversations around the dinner table revolve around housing prices (thankfully they haven’t descended in to mortgage rate comparisons just yet). Moreover, I’m increasingly interested in buying a little place of my own.

Housing is unaffordable. At the moment, one bedroom flats in Coburg are going for over $500,000. There are no real signs of the housing market cooling off. Melbourne has a housing shortage and Australia’s economy is quite buoyant due to the country being one giant quarry and China having an insatiable appetite for energy (ie coal). Both these things mean that the housing bubble isn’t likely to pop anytime soon. But if history teaches us anything, it is that bubbles pop.

For example, I understand that in Tokyo the median price for an apartment dropped to one third of it’s price at the height of Japan’s economic bubble.

So don’t buy a house right now. Interest rates continue to go up, but they are still at incredibly low levels. As they continue to climb more an more people will be defaulting on their loans and those people are going to be in real trouble when the bubble has pops. They will no longer be able to afford their mortgage and their house will be worth less than their loan – particularly if they have cashed in on any equity in the mean time.

The situation is just untenable.

I believe that it should be affordable to own a home and that this should be a solid investment for most people as it is probably the most expensive thing you will ever buy. But to keep housing prices down, investment properties should be discourages. The property boom is partly due to the huge growth in people investing in property. A key culperate in this whole thing is negative gearing. It has to go because of the way it encourages investment properties and artificially inflates the market.

Incentives like this mean that property is the investment of choice for middle Australia. But even negative gearing will become a major problem when the property bubble pops:

The ATO says people earning between $30,000 and $75,000 represented the largest group of taxpayers who held property investments and they claimed $3.6 billion in losses.

So the answer is not in releasing more land on Melbourne’s burgeoning fringes, but to address a system that encourages people to buy investment properties and driving prices up. But that doesn’t address the supply side of the issue.

Which brings me to my final point: housing is an environmental issue as well and an economic one.

By area, Melbourne is one of the biggest cities in the world (last I checked it was second only to Mexcio City and LA but that may have changed since). This means that we are a very car-dependent city which is an ecological disaster. There is also no public transport infrastructure to address this car dependancy on these urban fringes.

To make matters worse, Australia now has the largest houses in the world which is an ecological disaster no matter how you look at it (land use, energy use etc). Not to mention that housing density is surely a major cause of the lack of housing supply.

So this is what gets me. The Greens are increasingly dominated by a group of upper middle class inner-city dwellers who don’t want new housing developments. But high density living is a must in a country where our population will increase by about 50% over the next 40 years (and it must do that – but we can save that argument for another post).

Now, I’m no friend of developers. The whole industry is ripe with corruption (witness the growing number of Local Councils in strife over developments) and they have an active interest in keeping housing prices up. They are certainly not beyond using tactics such as withholding the release of land as quickly as they might like to reduce supply levels.

Moreover, I think the attitude towards local residents taken by the Victorian Government is undemocratic and an utter disgrace. There must be consultations with the community, and compromise. Developments need to be ‘appropriate’. But the government isn’t interested in having the discussion.

But we MUST have an increase in housing density in Melbourne’s inner city. It already has public transport infrastructure and everything is just closer anyway which reduces our dependance on carbon fueled modes of transport.

So I am deeply frustrated by all the NIMBY groups, often aligned with the Greens, opposing development after development.

We need more housing and the inner city must be able to accommodate more people so that less people are reliant on cars to get everywhere.

So there you go, an incoherent rant on housing in Melbourne.