Katy's InTray

Using super for housing would make homes more expensive, hinder the home ownership aspirations of young Australians, reduce retirement incomes, and lead to a significant long-term cost to the Budget, a Corinna Economic Advisory report authored by Saul Eslake has found.  

In an independent report, commissioned by the Super Members Council, Mr Eslake charts how a long list of demand-side Australian housing policies over several decades have simply made homes more expensive.  

He warns super for a house would be the worst of all.  

“We have 60 years of history, which unambiguously tells us, anything that allows Australians to pay more for housing than they otherwise could leads to more expensive housing and not more homeowners,” he said.

“Of all the demand-fuelling housing policies, the Coalition’s super for housing policy would be the biggest – it can only lead to higher prices.”  

“If super for house was introduced, it would be one of the worst public policy decisions in the last six decades.”

Mr Eslake said the decline in home ownership rates could undermine a key assumption in Australia’s retirement system – that most retirees will own their own home – and noted the need to expand housing supply.  

However, the Coalition’s ‘Super Home Buyer Scheme’ under which people would be allowed to withdraw up to 40% of their superannuation savings up to a maximum of $50,000, would likely hinder home ownership aspirations for younger Australians.

Full report here.

Using a nationwide online survey (N = 534), we investigate how individual-level characteristics and past actions are related to support of affordable housing at the neighborhood level. Several demographic characteristics, past actions, federal government trust, personal exposure, racism (symbolic racism scale), and affect (emotional connotation) are found to be significant predictors of support. We provide evidence for racism and affect being mediating factors acting in series to shape support of affordable housing. In addition to racism, individuals’ affect can potentially help explain the shift from support of hypothetical scenarios to opposition of real affordable housing development proposals and warrants continued study.

The use of cars in cities has many negative impacts, including pollution, noise and the use of space. Yet, detecting factors that reduce the use of cars is a serious challenge, particularly across different regions. Here, we model the use of various modes of transport in a city by aggregating Active mobility (A), Public Transport (B) and Cars (C), expressing the modal share of a city by its ABC triplet. Data for nearly 800 cities across 61 countries is used to model car use and its relationship with city size and income. Our findings suggest that with longer distances and the congestion experienced in large cities, Active mobility and journeys by Car are less frequent, but Public Transport is more prominent. Further, income is strongly related to the use of cars. Results show that a city with twice the income has 37% more journeys by Car. Yet, there are significant differences across regions. For cities in Asia, Public Transport contributes to a substantial share of their journeys. For cities in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, most of their mobility depends on Cars, regardless of city size. In Europe, there are vast heterogeneities in their modal share, from cities with mostly Active mobility (like Utrecht) to cities where Public Transport is crucial (like Paris or London) and cities where more than two out of three of their journeys are by Car (like Rome and Manchester).

There is an increasing demand for trans and gender diverse (TGD) health services worldwide. Given the unique and diverse healthcare needs of the TGD community, best practice TGD health services should be community-led. We aimed to understand the healthcare needs of a broad group of TGD Australians, how health professionals could better support TGD people, and gain an understanding of TGD-related research priorities. An anonymous online survey received 928 eligible responses from TGD Australian adults. This paper focuses on three questions out of that survey that allowed for free-text responses. The data were qualitatively coded, and overarching themes were identified for each question. Better training for healthcare professionals and more accessible transgender healthcare were the most commonly reported healthcare needs of participants. Findings highlight a pressing need for better training for healthcare professionals in transgender healthcare. In order to meet the demand for TGD health services, more gender services are needed, and in time, mainstreaming health services in primary care will likely improve accessibility. Evaluation of training strategies and further research into optimal models of TGD care are needed; however, until further data is available, views of the TGD community should guide research priorities and the TGD health service delivery.

The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can and should be built, researchers are working to create “safe AGI” that is “beneficial for all of humanity.” We argue that, unlike systems with specific applications which can be evaluated following standard engineering principles, undefined systems like “AGI” cannot be appropriately tested for safety. Why, then, is building AGI often framed as an unquestioned goal in the field of AI? In this paper, we argue that the normative framework that motivates much of this goal is rooted in the Anglo-American eugenics tradition of the twentieth century. As a result, many of the very same discriminatory attitudes that animated eugenicists in the past (e.g., racism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and sexism) remain widespread within the movement to build AGI, resulting in systems that harm marginalized groups and centralize power, while using the language of “safety” and “benefiting humanity” to evade accountability. We conclude by urging researchers to work on defined tasks for which we can develop safety protocols, rather than attempting to build a presumably all-knowing system such as AGI.

The Special Rapporteur recommends that:

• New initiatives be developed in order to bridge the worlds of corporate and government finance, housing, planning and human rights;
• Strategies be developed to achieve target 11.1 of the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda include a full range of taxation, regulatory and planning measures;
• Trade and investment treaties recognize the paramountcy of human rights, including the right to housing;
• Business and human rights guidelines, on a priority basis, be developed specifically for financial actors operating in the housing system;
• States review all laws and policies related to foreclosure, indebtedness and housing, to ensure consistency with the right to adequate housing;
• States ensure that courts, tribunals and human rights institutions recognize and apply the paramountcy of human rights; and
• International, regional and national human rights bodies devote more attention to the issue of financialization, and clarify it for States.
   

 If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)? 

The Internet, itself in constant innovation since its inception, has historically supported unprecedented innovation across the globe, driving considerable growth in technology and commerce.This paper reviews a set of properties set out by Internet experts in 2012, which aimed to capture the unvarying properties that defined the Internet (“the Invariants”).

[…] 

An early realization was that that the Invariants not only capture an ideal form of the Internet, they describe a generative platform — a platform capable of continuous growth and fostering the expansive development of new things upon itself.

[…]

Notably, several technologies being developed and deployed in today’s Internet don’t conform to those Invariants, and thus are not laying the foundation for similar innovations in the future. With the Invariants in hand, however, we have a tool to evaluate the state of the Internet and any proposed changes that would impact it, and support discussion between and among technologists and policy makers to help ensure that future choices foster a better Internet, aligned with the ideal expressed in the Internet Invariants.

This is “climate change” of the Internet ecosystem: absent concrete action to address the departure of the application infrastructure of the Internet from the ideal outlined in the Invariants, the experience of the Internet going forward will not feature such a rich diversity of solutions to the needs of the world’s population.

Despite the widespread harm caused by cars and automobility, governments, corporations, and individuals continue to facilitate it by expanding roads, manufacturing larger vehicles, and subsidising parking, electric cars, and resource extraction. This literature review synthesises the negative consequences of automobility, or car harm, which we have grouped into four categories: violence, ill health, social injustice, and environmental damage. We find that, since their invention, cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people and injured at least 2 billion. Currently, 1 in 34 deaths are caused by automobility. Cars have exacerbated social inequities and damaged ecosystems in every global region, including in remote car-free places. While some people benefit from automobility, nearly everyone—whether or not they drive—is harmed by it. Slowing automobility's violence and pollution will be impracticable without the replacement of policies that encourage car harm with policies that reduce it. To that end, the paper briefly summarises interventions that are ready for implementation.

This year’s State of HATE report focuses heavily on the Radical Right, a political phenomenon we define as right-wing populist in outlook, with strongly anti-immigration and anti-elite rhetoric, but differs from the traditional far right in that it advocates an illiberal democracy rather than overthrow of the system itself.