by PAUL COLLITS – AUSTRALIA’s economy has, as long as we can remember, relied upon mass immigration, including by, but not limited to, Asian students on a visa pathway, to keep the place afloat.
It is a Ponzi scheme.
Since we gave up making things – seduced by the false promise of globalization – and started shipping jobs to cheaper factories and since governments of both persuasions have all but outlawed mining and gas production, we are left with importing labour and consumers.
- NSW’s new Premier clearly understands the Ponzi scheme, and his pathetic role in perpetuating it.
- His colleagues in Canberra and their bureaucrats continue with the mass immigration scam.
- Which will only perpetuate our endless economic and social grief.
Then along came COVID, whose entirely unnecessary and profligate policy response has cost us a lazy trillion and which has all but killed the small business engine room, especially retail.
HANGOVER
Now we have the hangover. Labour shortages. The work-from-home scam. Massive interest rate hikes to tame galloping inflation and hidden unemployment and under-employment.
Time to call back the migrants! But the Ponzi migrant economy is collapsing. Literally.
Where do all the millions of new and not-so-new migrants live? Most – about 90 per cent – head for the virtually dysfunctional and, during more recently, dystopian cities of Sydney and Melbourne.
In these places, a common game is “spot the Aussie”. As well, many of them live in jerry-built apartments which are falling to the ground, along with the companies that built them.
The Canberra bureaucrats who devise these mass immigration “solutions” to our economic problems, which they mostly have created, outsource the implementation of their insane schemes to State governments to make work.
Then the State governments outsource their job to questionable developers. Who develop places like Toplace, which turns out not to be living up to its name, to say the very least.
Toplace is owned by the now infamous, non-resident property developer Jean Nassif, who has, perhaps wisely, fled the country.
Administrators have been appointed to the building arm of Nassif’s Toplace Group in a collapse that could hit hundreds of apartment buyers and contractors.
Antony Resnick and Suelen McCallum of DVT Group were appointed voluntary administrators of Toplace Pty Ltd on July 7 by lawyers acting for Mr Nassif, who remains overseas and is facing an arrest warrant over fraud allegations.
In June, the NSW Police Organised Crime Squad issued a warrant for the 55-year-old over allegations of fraud involving the Sydney apartment project developed by Toplace.
Mr Nassif’s daughter, Ashlyn, has already been charged with falsifying documents relating to the pre-sale of apartments at the development in Castle Hill, in Sydney’s north-west.
INSOLVENCY
The appointment of administrators comes as Mr Nassif offloads a prime portfolio of development sites that could reap as much as $250m, and follows insolvency firm KordaMentha being appointed receivers over a number of Toplace assets on behalf of secured creditors.
Sydney’s very own white shoe brigade. The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) weighs in (for once, the Left doing its job): “Administrators said on Wednesday that this could be the ‘biggest collapse in the Australian property market’s history’, with Toplace owing around $200m to more than 500 creditors. These include subcontractors who have not been paid for their work and buyers who have prepaid for units in uncompleted builds.
“Vicinity apartment owner Patrick Quintal told WSWS reporters that the collapse of Toplace means that owners of defective apartments may be liable for the full cost of complying with the rectification orders.”
But it isn’t just Toplace.
A 2021 report by the University of NSW City Futures Research Centre found that at least one in four Sydney apartment blocks constructed between 2008 and 2017 had some sort of building defect.
The figure was likely far higher, the report said, but comprehensive records were not available for all constructions.
Of those for which complete data was found, 51 per cent had at least one defect, 28 per cent had at least three and 12 per cent had more than 10 different types of fault.
Oops.
Here is the Liberal/Labor uniparty system at work: “In an attempt to hose down public concern over those disasters, the then Liberal-National NSW State government installed David Chandler in the new role of Building Commissioner within the Department of Fair Trading.
COMMISSION
“Now, the recently elected Labor government, led by Premier Chris Minns, has established the NSW Building Commission. It will also be headed by Chandler.
A recent opinion piece by Chandler, published in The Sydney Morning Herald, downplayed the systemic issues in the construction industry.
And who should have been Nassif’s point man in Macquarie Street? None other than Michael “everywhere” Photios.
The man of whom Graham Richardson once said, nothing happens in NSW without his consent.
Richo ended up working for him! The corrupt Gladys Berejiklian once said, unconvincingly, that she wasn’t “Photios’s girl”. After Photios had selected her first cabinet.
Safe to say if Nassif does ever return home, he’ll need all the help he can get – so it’s handy that Toplace has been registered since 2020 as a client of Premier State, the firm run by the Liberal moderate powerbroker and lobbying supremo.
Unfortunately, that relationship seems to have aged, and Nassif may have to look elsewhere, with Photios telling CBD he had not worked for Toplace for many years.
Be that as it may.
The fact is that many of Sydney’s developers had a symbiotic relationship with the NSW Liberal Government that Photios controlled. Until recently.
Here is how the deal works. Australian governments tick the multi-cultural box by importing massive numbers of migrants. Big business loves migrants. The Liberal Party loves big business.
GHETTOS
Where do we put them? Well, we build endless apartment blocks, the ghettos of the 21st century. We reward developers with extra floors. They pay their bounty. Then the lobbyists step in and claim their share of the cream off the top.
An exquisite scheme. Everyone’s a winner. It is how the modern Australian economy “works”.
The developers get even more floors if they throw in some social housing. Everyone loves social housing.
Except, perhaps, the people who get to share the vertical ghettos with the clients of the social housing industrial complex.
And guess what? The apartments, especially when built next to railway stations, also tick the climate change/sustainability box.
This is called “new urbanism”, a trendy Leftie urban planning philosophy that hopes one day to make cars extinct. And which suits the big Liberal and Labor backers who build these modern towers of Babel. And who destroy the fabric of our once great cities.
Terry McCrann has opined on the Melbourne scene: “Melbourne transformed into ‘construction site’ under Premier Andrews.”
Not just the Premier State, then. Andrews has form, of course, on every last front.
All goes well until the apartments and the companies that build them start falling over.
The new government in NSW has no intention of addressing the systemic corruption of the Ponzi economy.
According to The Australian Financial Review: On June 15, Minns offered property developers – who are generally treated in NSW politics like Middle Eastern bikie gangs – an extra 30 per cent height on apartment buildings worth more than $75m, if they subsidise 15 per cent of the homes.
“A few days later, the planning department qualified the promise, which it said would apply to buildings within 800m of train stations and other transport “hubs” in Sydney.
“The property industry was pleasantly stunned. One apartment developer spent $260m on land in Sydney the day of Minns’ announcement. The lot was suddenly worth more; he was worried the seller would realise. He didn’t.
RICHER
“Mirvac’s shares rose seven per cent in one week. Billionaire Harry Triguboff, owner of Meriton, became even richer. Architects began, mentally, redrawing plans upwards.
Just make them higher!
NSW’s new Premier clearly understands the Ponzi scheme, and his pathetic role in perpetuating it. Just give it a soupcon of social democracy and all will be well.
The 1980s accommodation of socialism with capitalism is a hybrid that is now destroying us all. Our cities. Our authentic Australian culture. Our productive economy.
Meanwhile, Chris Minns’ colleagues in Canberra and their bureaucrats continue with the mass immigration scam.
Which will only perpetuate our endless economic and social grief. As the buildings fall down. And their builders go broke, and, in some cases, flee the country.
The lobbyists do okay, though. What a sick place it is.PC
What is Australian culture but a continuous evolving process in response to a changing environment. What is ruining Australian culture more than anything is adherence to globalist treaties that are entered into by successive governments, in secret and behind the backs of ordinary Australians, and which help to remove Australian sovereignty and turn our country into part of the global conglomerate governed over by un-elected bureaucrats. We don’t know what is going on and why our governments continuously don’t respond to our needs but bow to dictates of global institutions, and I’m thinking primarily about the UN and WHO.
Bob Hawke allowed the masses of Chinese into Australia and they brought with them all their bad habits and wealth and plan to breed us out. Then Keating with his Lebanese/Muslim mates next to replace us . The ALP have been importing voters and crippling our manufacturing and economy for once they supported. LNP are not much better now. WE can no longer import the great unwashed of the world at the risk of losing our own nation and heritage and culture WE need to sustain our nation not drain it. One Nation. One Flag. One Language .
The problem is the birth-rate, or more precisely the lack of birth-rate. Current figure is around 1.6, and that includes some very fecund minorities. It seems John Williamson had it right when he asked ‘are you just another dying race’ in his song True Blue. Let’s face it, if the birth-rate had remained at post-war highs, we wouldn’t be following the rest of the first-world into a merger with the third world.