Cassandra Wilkinson will be voting Liberal in the Sydney mayoral election.
The Left criticises those who would lock the door against refugees but appears happy to drive the needy out of their own neighbourhoods with development controls that preserve the three-bedroom terraces of the inner-city elites against the two-bedroom flats of the first-home buyer.
…
Progress to me is the building of homes, the creation of jobs, the raising of living standards and creation of opportunity for all citizens, not only those lucky enough to live in this country’s most privileged postcodes in Sydney City.
I suspect she might be disappointed.
Many politicians suffer from the problem that Cass identifies:
… policies that are as vague as they are naive and that offer no practical measures to increase supply, ease congestion or support jobs growth. … appears not to grasp the relationship between supply and price, and continues to talk about affordability in the same breath as proposing controls on density and design that can only drive up prices.
If I recall, the election is for the seat Moore held in the NSW state parliament.
She chose to stay on as Sydney Lord Mayor.
Has Ms Wilkinson launched her leadership challenge for Mr Robertson’s job?
Can she rely on fawning support from her cheer squad here at the Cat’?
Garbage.
Most first home buyers in Sydney would not even be able to afford a two bedroom flat in an inner city postcode – they are ridiculously overpriced.
BTW, Sydney has been ruined by the proliferation of ugly, shoddily constructed (dodgy laybore bruvvers ‘r us and sons), noisy, overpriced neo-brutalist rat boxes dumped near railway stations, highways, etc. The person responsible for this dodgy laybore developers picnic, was of course, one boob carr.
He referred to it at the time as:
Oh and cass – living in one of those awful, cramped, soul destroying rat boxes is not an example of an increased standard of living, it is an example of the very opposite. It is also the way hypocritical middle class leftist dirtbags want other people to live.
It’s also why ‘bogans’ want to live in McMansions (regardless of the other disadvantages) and why I, for example, will never live in an attached dwelling ever again.
No.
Aaah the council elections this weekend!
Excuse me if I’m not delirious with excitement working out who to put last here in the City of Yarra, the most left wing local government in the most left wing city in the country.
I did some Googling on my local ward candidates. It’s so bad that I’m going to have to put the laybore guy second. There is one reasonably sensible-sounding independent pub owner, then the laybore guy. The rest are all Greens and something called the Yarra Socialists.
The latter have been letter bombing me all week – their slogan is ‘more Labor than Labor. More Green than the Greens’. I kid you not. Their how to vote card is pretty useful to follow in reverse, though.
Gee, they sound like winners!
Rabz it’s almost worth scanning the campaign leaflet and putting it up. There’s one woman who is kind of hipster looking, but the guys seriously look like hobos.
They get a lot of their votes from the housing commission estates by promising all kids of free stuff, so maybe they’re deliberately dressing like their target market? They also carry on about how capitalistic the Greens are.
A bit harsh. Canberra is retains this damnation, despite Melbournians electing the failed Liberal leader Robert Doyle as Lord Mayor.
No matter how bad Red Ted is, Victorians can still look at Lord Mayor Doyle to realise it could have been worse if Doyle had managed to win an earlier State election. Thank goodness he is only stuffing up the City of Melbourne, not the whole State of Victoria.
Nah…City of Yarra comes in third behind Moreland City Council and City of Port Phillip. Moreland has long been top of the heap when it comes to rank stupidity. Recall how a decade ago they proposed charging Australia Post rent because postboxes took up space in the city. And how they tried (but fortunately failed) to ban pay-TV cabling.
Rabz
I love your work. But I can’t share your disdain of apartment living. It depends where the apartment is.
Sorry Walter, I beg to differ. City of Yarra are undisputed world champions on leftwing looniness. Consider:
The area takes in Carlton, Abbotsford and Fitzroy and North Fitzroy (aka Greens / Hard Left heartland). It has the dubious honour of having not one but two elected members of the Socialist Party of Australia as councillors, and another three in the running – as far as I know the only elected ones in the whole country.
As far as stupid ideas goes, these are the buffoons who voted in a proposal to tax restaurant owners for outdoor heaters, and use the money to hand out hippy blankets to outdoor diners instead. I kid you not.
In Fitzroy they’re so anti car they decided to up the second parking permit from $30 to something like $600.
Their newsletter is so PC and muti-culti it’s hilarious – not only to they fall over themselves to acknowledge the Wurundejeri as traditional owners, they have a blanket statement, grovelling to anyone else who may have some distant link to another Aboriginal tribe but who has graced the area with their presence and thus made an ‘enormous contribution to it’s cultural heritage’
The only real competition they have is Marrickville that wanted to ban anything Jewish made.
Oh and Yarra succeeded in banning Pay TV cabling…
The Libs should reject Wilkinson’s vote. It’s tainted, having been in some dreadful places.
Cass was referring to the by-election for the seat of Sydney, vacated by Clover Moore’s resignation.
Labor is not contesting the seat. The alternatives are the Liberals, Greens, Christian Democrats and two independents, one of whom is endorsed by Moore.
Not that the Liberals are all that great, but I think it would have been an easy choice for a libertarian like Cass.
I think she’s quite hot. She has an alluring iron-fist-in-velvet-glove delivery.
Is this the same Cass that was on the Bolt report on Sunday?
Rabz, rubbish, you might not like apartments, but if you get rid of planning controls and allow developers to meet the market you will find out what potential buyers actually want.
I predict that the sweet spot for the inner-city first home buyer will be low rise medium density.
Papa: yes.
There’s apartments and then there’s apartments. Those towers like you find in Singapore, or even the Gold Coast, they can offer decent sized living with playgrounds and outdoor parks at the ground, BBQs, tennis courts etc. A bit different to the shit you find around Brunswick say where they don’t get above 3 stories and the letterbox is considered an amenity.
As opposed to the neo brutalist monstrosities I described as unacceptable.
You’ve proved my point.
Wilkinson is a snake. She’s there to put a friendly face on a profoundly sick machine.
By the looks of it, yes.
David, what’s the odds on Michael Costa and Cass defecting?
We could swap them for Malcolm.
then I agree with your assessment, OCO
Bolt seems to have a knack for finding disgruntled Labor types to come on his show and unload on their colleagues in government.
Latham, Della Bosca, Belinda O’neal, Cass Wilkinson, Michael Costa to name but a few.
Rabz, the only difference between my and your visions is that I thing buildings will be just low enough to avoid lifts, or at least very many lifts. They’ll still be ticky tacky because that is what you get for any sort of affordable construction price. So I didn’t prove your point, you just didn’t understand mine.
Harold, you’ll find that relative construction costs explain a lot of that. Ours are shocking.
Shame there wasn’t an “outdoor recreation party” candidate…
Rabz, do you live in one of those flats? Probably not, so why do you care so much that other people do?
It’s not your job to supervise the free market, we have enough people blundering at that already. Leave other people to get on with their own lives.
Don’t you fucking patronise me, you fucking ignoramus.
There is absolutely no reason why low rise medium density developments can’t be affordable, well designed and constructed. Some of the shoddiness and poor design I’ve witnessed in developments in Sydney defied description.
However, I object to the assumption that these or all new developments can’t offer detached (or mainly semi-detached) dwellings. That assumption is greenfilth/UN inspired agenda 21 bullshit. You’re not being offered a choice.
And don’t give me the “not enough space” argument. This country is a continent inhabited by 23 million people, FFS. The cost and standard of housing in this country is an obscenity.
BTW, commies want people to live in ugly, unpleasant, shoddily constructed boxes.
That’s why the fucking morons keep building them whenever and wherever they get the opportunity. It’s one of their central beliefs.
See my comment above, you dick head.
I have lived in apartments before and quite frankly, never again. However, if people want to put themselves through that – then yes, they’re free to make that ‘choice’.
What I care about is that people are being conned into thinking they don’t deserve a choice in housing.
That’s what pisses me off about this topic.
Fuck me you’re angry! Don’t shoot the messengers, guards, scribes, horses or nobles…
I see why.
Christ those buildings are ugly. A sweet kiss from a BGM 109 is the only way out for those poor wretched things, as soon as they are evacuated.
Dot – the destruction wreaked by commies on the ‘housing market’ does make me furious and with good reason.
DD has made some sage observations on this topic previously.
I was talking with a client who owns a large 5 Bedroom house with land on the Upper North Shore. It’s worth less than our apartment in the Eastern Suburbs. Not only do we have have extensive views of the Harbour and the Ocean, we also have a dentist, post office, a butcher, coffee shops, chemist, dry cleaners and a news agent within a few minutes walk. Where do all these people in those horrible house only suburbs, like poor old Rabz go to buy a coffee or a paper?
WTF?
Like that’s a reason to put up with all the intolerable noise, traffic, lack of privacy and innumerable inconsiderate egomaniacal arseholes?
The beastern bloody shruburbs, FFS?
Overpriced, overcrowded, overdeveloped, overrated hellhole.
Mind you, I could have happily lived in the Rabbi’s house on OSH – the old converted fire station. One of the premier properties in the country in it’s day.
I look down on my social betters.
I have seen the Rose Bay golf club and it smacks of an easy course for the privileged who have never been challenged and cannot cope with loss.
The poor dears.
My Butler gets it for me.
Rabz, you’re criticizing the planners for being just like you, only having different opinions. Remove planning and heritage laws and you will see both more medium density boxes in the inner city and more suburbs. I predict there would be less housing in cheap high-rise, but expensive high-rise would still be constructed.
But those are only my predictions of market demand. Which is quite different from your foam-flecked ravings about how housing should be.
They’re hardly foam flecked ravings.
What part of “The cost and standard of housing in this country is an obscenity” are you too stupid to understand?
Sydney has been utterly ravaged by the plague of ugly, shoddy overpriced ‘housing’ constructed there over the past few decades.
If I’m angry about that indisputable fact, I have every right to be.
Wrong.
Everyone does.
The only people who benefit from such rules are those who bought in just before they are imposed. They only benefit if selling the property is their exit strategy from investing and wish to retire. Their potential return on investments made in Australia has now diminished and their cost of living rises as well.
Rabz,your comment about Carr’s responsibility is spot on but the fool went even further than allowing dodgy developers,better known for their generous “donations” than for quality workmanship,to fulfill his “medium density dream”. Under his direction Planning NSW produced guidelines for what they considered to be “desirable architectural design” and imposed this rubbish on Councils to enforce.Examples of these resulting brand new slums can be seen all over Sydney with an outstanding model located on the Princes Hwy. at Wolli Creek.
Tell me rabz, what do you think would be different about inner-city housing if bob carr hadn’t stuffed it up for you? The big problem is construction costs and you can’t blame planning laws for those.
“There is absolutely no reason why low rise medium density developments can’t be affordable, well designed and constructed. Some of the shoddiness and poor design I’ve witnessed in developments in Sydney defied description.”
Then the market must say otherwise. But what would it know. Planning lawys don’t specify ugly design and shoddy construction, quite the opposite in fact and there is a plethora of Australian standards about noise and such.
I’d say that these contribute to the problem. The rules are too complex, sometimes only a nonsense solution can be given barring consulting an engineer.
Pedro the guidelines laid down by NSW Planning during Carr’s reign do specify,by any reasonable architectural standard,ugly design and even non-dodgy non-Labor connected developers were forced to submit Development Applications which reflected those ugly designs.failure to do so simply meant having the Application either delayed or refused repeatedly until they buckled.It was a case of produce ugly designs that complied with SEPP 65 and the Residential Flat Design Code or just piss off and go broke.
Pedro,
Do you have any first hand experience of the types of developments/properties in Sydney I’m talking about?
See also Lew’s comment above about “desirable architectural design”. As for:
The lived experience of myself and a shedload of other Sydney residents including friends, family and fellow strata residents clearly suggests otherwise.
*Here’s a hint – look up “Meriton Apartments”…
Thanks, Lew.
Hi everyone
I grew up in what someone has described above as ‘a rat box’ although it was in Bondi not sydney city. The issue is not whether the two bedroom flat is worse than a house in the suburbs – the issue is choice. People who want to live in the city are being hit by planning controls just like those in the suburbs. I have never supported the Carr era planning controls because i think they drive up price and diminish choice. In fact as I understand it Frank Sartor dubbed me ‘hurricane Katrina’ for my efforts on behalf of my then boss Michael Costa to battle the statist controls being applied to housing development and land release.
Best regards
Cass