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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • International student intake as a ratio of housing supply is the main issue. If dwellings were being built at the same rate of international student intake, then affordability or vacancy would not be a problem.

    Look up your local universities (they’re all non-profit organisations with financials reported in the ACNC) and realise just how much their business model has become funded by international students. Here’s a few examples:
    University of Melbourne: 69% of tuition fee revenues comes from intl students
    University of Queensland: 70% of tuition fee revenues comes from intl students

    The universities also receive government funding, pay no income tax (because they are “nonprofit”), and don’t need to contribute anything to the housing problem that they are feeding. It’s time for them to help carry the burden - they should either provide housing or help pay for it.



  • When Russia has repeatedly denied requests from other journalists in the past, I don’t think that you can really associate Carlson with being “free press”. This is a business deal, not journalism. How should we treat people who engage in business deals with sanctioned individuals?

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tucker-carlson-vladimir-putin-interview-b2492192.html

    “Does Tucker really think we journalists haven’t been trying to interview President Putin every day since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine? It’s absurd – we’ll continue to ask for an interview, just as we have for years now,” said CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

    The BBC’s Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg, wrote on X: “Interesting to hear @TuckerCarlson claim that ‘no western journalist has bothered to interview’ Putin since the invasion of Ukraine. We’ve lodged several requests with the Kremlin in the last 18 months. Always a ‘no’ for us.”

    Yevgenia Albats, a Russian journalist and author of a book about the KGB, described Mr Carlson’s claim as “unbelievable”.

    “I am like hundreds of Russian journalists who have had to go into exile to keep reporting about the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. The alternative was to go to jail. And now this SoB is teaching us about good journalism, shooting from the $1,000 Ritz suite in Moscow,” she wrote on X.



  • I wouldn’t call it propaganda or even news - it’s just theories at this stage.
    What we can speculate about is motive to deceive. Russia has been incurring some notable losses from Ukrainian anti-air defences recently, so there would be a motive from the Russian side to portray those anti-air defences as either ineffective or untrustworthy so as to try and sway public opinion about its use.

    Claiming that POWs were onboard the plane aligns with that motive but it also raises questions such as:

    1. The plane was reportedly shot down after taking off from Belgorod, so if it was carrying POWs away from Belgorod, what was the intended destination? It doesn’t seem logical that Russia would fly from Belgorod into Ukraine (unless they were stupid or taking the risk).
    2. Why not transport POWs to Ukraine by road or rail, given that Kharkiv is only a 90 min drive away?




  • I’ve been thinking about this perspective for a while now, so it’s good to see the topic raised in the mainstream media. If you compare a business investment or buying shares in Australian companies with investing in property, there is much greater value to society and positive flow-on effects from business investing.
    A business can use the investment to hire staff, produce more goods / services for export, and growing revenues mean more tax revenue for the government.
    With investment properties, the owner buys a property by outbidding someone who may have just wanted a home and they then proceed to charge that same group with a rent burden. No additional jobs are created from the investment property and a cost burden is placed on the renter, reducing their disposable income.

    As a society, we need to start thinking about investment properties in the way that we would think about fossil fuels. We know it is easy and it makes money, but it’s bad for future generations and we need to transition to alternatives.