I’m calling bullshit on the popular story that criticising McMansions is equivalent to sneering at the working class, and denying them the good things in life. In this narrative, the people championing the McMansion are the true socialists and stand with the working man and woman in their quest for a truly equal society. This is in no way peculiar to Legal Eagle – I’ve seen it all over the media.

It’s one of the endless riffs on the “elites” narrative. According to this variation, the heroic workers are approaching, under neoliberal capitalism, the egalitarian nirvana which they always sought, and the only truly authentic expression of this is a mock-Tuscan mansion of 215 or so square metres, built to the boundary on a treeless (except for pencil pines) quarter-acre block on a nodule-shaped development far from public transport, shops and services, a hotbox in summer and freezing in winter, costing squillions to heat, cool and furnish. But wait! Who’s this, crouching behind one of the two Yucca plants out the front? Oh, no! It’s those horrible “elites” again, throwing cold water on this wonderful social apotheosis, claiming that McMansions are really a bit crap. It’s because they just don’t want the heroic working class to have nice things!

Here’s the article which provoked Eagle’s reaction. It’s written by someone who knows his stuff. But I see the counter-narrative everywhere. During the last election, I saw a letter by a concerned citizen in our local newspaper complaining that the Greens bad-mouthed mcMansions and by association, ordinary Australians. I recognised the name on the letter as a Labor apparatchik (not local), so I know it’s spin.

Unfortunately for this story, its main premise is a fiction – McMansion owners are more likely to be up and coming IT workers and professionals or semiprofessionals as classic battlers. But let’s put that aside for a minute and consider the idea on its internal consistency alone.

What it comes down to is: we’re criticising a mode of planning and building, and being told we’re not allowed to claim one way of building is objectively better than another, in case we offend the lower/middle class (that is, most of us). Imagine if progressives had been the source of this idea. Political correctness! the media would cry. Po-mo relativism! Emotional!! (In Australia, the most devastating criticism possible.) Yes, built environments have political and cultural significance, but I am willing to go out on a limb and say that people who are fighting for the godgiven right of the Aussie Battlers to buy McMansions are speaking more from financial or political self interest than any warm concern for the battlers themselves.

I’m womanning the barricades, Comrades, for the right to say that McMansions are badly built and badly sited on badly planned developments. I’m not ashamed to say that building houses which regularly feature his and hers walk-in robes, home theatres and “powder rooms” as standard, but describing wall and ceiling insulation and smoke detectors as “luxury inclusion(s)” is doing it wrong. Furthermore, I’ll say these houses are poorly sited with regard to sunlight, lack eaves for shade, have thin walls, have little or no garden space, are built quickly and cheaply, will deteriorate rapidly and need expensive repairs in a relatively short time. I won’t be bullied into praising these white elephants by creative use of the Roveian/Howardian discourse of “elites”.

Now I know you’re going to say: “Yes, Helen, you can state your preference for one kind of dwelling over another, but saying that people shouldn’t want McMansions is telling other people what they ought to want, so, still elitist.” Which would be absolutely true, but don’t forget that there is an entire industry – advertising and marketing – whose job it is to tell people what they ought to want. Buyers aren’t just Choosing their Choice in a vaccuum. The building and development corporations (and the big box retailers who serve them, and the credit companies behind it all) are going to a lot of effort to appeal to aspiration, to snob value, to illusions of community and stability. Buyers adjust their “dreams” to fit whatever display model takes their fancy, while in reality the cookie-cutter homogeneity and cheapness of construction suits the developers and builders first and foremost. In other words, I think people are being told what they ought to want by the developers and the rest of the building/retail food chain, and unlike the McMansion opponents, they aren’t being called on it.

It doesn’t end there. The Big Box retailers love the bigger houses because they need to be furnished, and the pressure is on to furnish them a certain way, not just bring all your stuff from the rental house. There are more rooms, and you can’t just put a squeaky little sound system in that home theatre. Then, of course, there are the credit providers raking in their interest after that 24-month-interest-free period.

I have no doubt that if they had the will, the corporations and their advertisers could use the same lush, descriptive advertising to convince the punters they’d be happier and more comfortable (and richer!) in a smaller but better constructed and environmentally intelligent house. Swap the home theatre and his’n'hers walk-in robes for thicker walls, insulation and better basic construction. Use the Australian vernacular instead of the European, with overhanging eaves and shady verandahs on the western side. Use the space gained on the block to orient the houses for the climate. Have solar hot water and other money-saving goodies as standard, instead of “European tiles”, marble benchtops and such. Those can always come later with the money saved on power and other bills.

You don’t think they could sell this alternative vision? Of course they could. They’re the ones setting the agenda.

I dislike these houses because they are an embodiment of how individual buyers, society as a whole, and the environment on which we depend, are poorly served. I don’t dislike them because I don’t want ordinary people to have nice things. It’s because I would like them to have something so much better!

Update: The Melbourne Urbanist, Don Arthur on Club Troppo.

Update 2: Looks like a lot of people are changing their minds about house size.

One of the countless Aspirational Families in these tree-lined streets™, Tom and Sue O’Really work as a teacher and a construction estimator. They have two children, Lily and Bradley. Lily, 6, has started primary school and attends after-school care. Bradley, 3, is in daycare. Sue’s income is just over $150,000, making them rich in the eyes of Labor and Leftist types who choose to ignore the stark, brutal reality of their suburban struggle.

“Are you joking?” laughed Sue when we pointed the mike at her so she could tell us how the government, hellbent on redistributing wealth and closing the gap between the alleged haves and have-nots, has reduced their lifestyle to a nasty and brutish struggle for survival. Here is a transcript of the interview which followed:

Newsfax Ltd: Now that the rate at which the family tax benefit cuts out has been frozen at $150,000, will this spell the end of your middle class lifestyle?

Sue O’Really: Well, of course, a lump sum in your tax return is always nice. But really, isn’t government income distribution meant to be targeted at, you know, really struggling families, on $40,000 and less? I mean, of course your wants always expand when you get more money. (Laughs) but shouldn’t we be directing Family Tax Benefit to families who can’t afford to send their kids to the dentist? Or use the money to put dentistry on Medicare?

Newsfax Ltd: But food, clothing, gas electricity — it all adds up. Not to mention childcare and your private medical insurance, for which you now get only 20% rebate instead of 30%. With the cost of living increasing, shouldn’t eligibility for family benefits should have been lifted?

Sue O’Really: Look, of course the cost of living goes up. I’m not arguing with that, I just wonder whether “adrift in ocean of debt and despair” isn’t over-egging it a bit. Half of all workers earn less than $44,146 per year. Shouldn’t you be interviewing one of them? I mean, they’re taking money away from Leonie three doors down, for god’s sake, she’s on the single mother’s benefit and they’re going to put her on Newstart when her daughter turns 12! And… wasn’t it your paper and others like you who used to be against “middle-class welfare”, anyway?

Newsfax Ltd: Well, Wayne Swan said himself you weren’t that well-off!

Sue O’Really: Well, I can see how he would have been under pressure to say that. But it’s something thats easy enough to resolve through 10 minutes on the ABS website and some Year 8 maths. We’re not “battlers”. We’re not even “average”. According to the ABS, I’m in the top three percent of income earners individually and we’re in the top ten percent of households. So, yeah, sure, childcare is very expensive, and we did remodel our California Bungalow to twice its former size, and that means high repayments. And we try to eat healthily, and the cost of fruit is ridiculous. But to claim we’re doing it tough is just an insult to that half of the workforce that’s on less than $45,000 – not to mention disability pensioners, unemployed, single parents…I mean, they’re paying the same for fruit and vegetables as we are!…

[Newsfax Editor's note: You failed to get a proper response from this interviewee. Bin this story.]

Now, sure, I’m predisposed to like the guy. But let it be known I’m not particularly keen to fight Garrett’s corner as a minister in the Labor government. I’m the Voter who Cannot Love*, after all. He, like Julia, has broken my heart over environmental and Arts policies. No, I don’t think parachute-in celebrity politicians are necessarily a good thing, and I also think he’s overfaced. He was given too much responsibility, too quickly. The fact that every right wing hack was automatically programmed to hate him was just icing on the cake.

Should he move aside into a less demanding portfolio to gain more experience? Should he sit down and have a big think about whether the realpolitik of the Labor tent has negated his entire life’s work on environmental issues? Yes and yes. Should he stand aside because his position has become completely untenable and he’s electoral poison? Or because, in some quaint and symbolic way, in the Westminster system a Minister is required to fall on his or her sword for the actions of other people? Probably. But should he stand aside, or be sacked, because he bears some kind of moral responsibility for the four workplace deaths that have happened since the inception of the insulation scheme? That is such a pack of horse hockey I’m unable to contain my rage.

Gosh, it’s touching that the Liberal party has suddenly discovered workplace deaths in the building industry. When they were in power, those despised Unions were constantly trying to tell them. About forty people a year, more or less, die in Australia every year. Are the other thirty-six people who died in Australia in the last year chopped liver, just because they don’t come with a Ministerial scalp? I don’t hear any outrage in doorstop interviews about them.

The four people (some of them boys) died for the usual reason: because their employers ignored occupational health and safety practice (as well as ordinary common sense). The employer of the worker who died in October could possibly claim ignorance about the metal fasteners used with metal foil insulation close to wiring. The others couldn’t, because Garrett didn’t do nothing: he moved to ban the fasteners in November. Two more workers died as a direct result of the employer ignoring a new regulation which Garrett himself had put in place, as well as one from heat stroke, again the employer’s responsibility. To quote one commenter, the responsibility to run a safe workplace lies with the employers.

Now we have the Liberals shouting that Peter Garrett should have micromanaged the scheme to the point of overseeing every employer, perhaps, I don’t know, climbing into every roof space himself. This is the same Liberal party mainly composed of people who see every government regulation as a slippery slope to socialism. This is the Liberal party whose constituency is business groups which oppose industry regulation as “anti-business”.

These are the people who claim to espouse a doctrine of individual responsibility, but because it suits them at the moment, they’re willing to abandon that. “If you don’t like my principles, I have others”, I guess? See Also, the invisible hand of the Market sorting things out? When push comes to shove, this incident has shown that they really know it’s a crock.

So, Libs, if you want to claim your prize Ministerial Scalp at the prize desk, I think you should have to fess up that the despised unions were right all along and that government oversight of private industry is totes necessary (and that at the moment you’re calling for government micromanagement on a scale hardly known except in command economies). Also, that conservatives are for Individual Responsibility, except where you can blame something on someone you don’t like.

Also, that your arses are on fire.
 
 
 
 
*Just like Chilly, the Elf who Cannot Love.

He hasn’t been a casualty of the financial crisis. He no longer has a job because things are going so well. Mr Bucket sales are through the roof and he can’t keep up.

You’ll remember that Mr Bucket started Going Off back in March. I forgot to blog about the Rose Street Market fashion-show-with-models for L’Oreal Fashion Week. Which was a whole lot of fun – see the ultra-professional Bucket segment here. Ahem.

He’s started running the stall on St Kilda Esplanade on Sundays and has been included in this book.

Wolf at the Door, a new place in Hepburn Springs, bought a fuckton of T shirts and were sold out by the weekend after that. He also had a writeup in Men’s Style mag – no link for that.

Week after next Mr Bucket moves into his new studio in an old factory in Brooklyn, next to an artisan associated with the Wolf at the Door, who runs a bronze casting foundry.

Oh, and he has bought this thing, which is really cute, but the exciting part for me is that our family mitsu-bashi isn’t the Bucket car any more and I get to do things on weekends like a normal person!

So, life is set to change. It seems all go for the Buckets and unusual and exciting things are happening all the time. SO has his books all in order and is doing his own super and insurance and everything properly. I’ll be looking at the Dow and the Futsi and the All Ordinaries with more than usual anxiety in the next twelve months and hoping we don’t have this W-shaped recession that some party poopers are talking about.

Excuse me while I just go and hyperventilate into this brown paper bag.

I saw it as I was coming out of the turnstiles at Parliament station. The poster for the Herald Sun: TAX SLUG BEER CIGS. Oh. Budget time.

This ghastly gastropod has terrorised the Australian scene for decades. My extensive research (i.e. Wikipedia) has eliminated the common slug, banana slug or even the Red Triangle slug (found in Melbourne snooker halls?) No, this is more of your gigantic mutant movie monster, like the Slugs that Ate Canberra.

The Hun obviously doesn’t approve of the Tax Slug and seems to be urging the citizens of Australia, as in any good B-movie, to band together to fight this mucous menace. Here is how a Hun journo and Aghast of Mt Martha see the Tax Slug:



However! We of the social democratic persuasion see the Tax Slug in a more glass-half-full way:



Something I forgot to add when I photoshopped this Tax Slug… We can haz Paid Parental leave? I hear a weak cry of “yes”. But not until 2011, apparently. Bummer.

Some people of a needlessly literal and nitpicking type might drop in at this point to inform me that Slug is used here in the sense of a Tax Hit, as in taking a hit, possibly from the German schlage? Well, I refuse to believe that, that’s all. Not only have I forked out all that money for a mucus-proof suit and slug gun, but that would require me to believe that all these journos all over Australia, people who are paid to write, just keep recycling and recycling a piece of slang that was out of date when my mum was a girl. Say it isn’t so!

Unfortunately, Fox News and the right-wing astroturf organisations which promoted the Tea Parties have decided to try to be all colloquial an’ appeal to the younger generation an’ stuff, so they have referred to themselves as “Teabaggers” and the protests as “Teabagging”.

Much hilarity has ensued.

P.S. Just for comparison, now that you’ve probably seen these entitled babies on the news making fools of themselves, you might be interested in a real (non-astroturf) protest, at real risk to themselves, by genuinely courageous people who deserve our support.

Where did those home equity loans and lines of credit go? Irvine Renter points out that the situation went really toxic when people realised that they could take out money, not just for renovations – which would then increase the house’s value – but for consumer spending. Boats, cars, holidays, that kind of thing. But I can see that many people who would balk at spending on these kinds of things might consider using their home equity for something they consider more important, more reasonable, more of an investment.

Back in the Australian context, I’m wondering how many households have been mining their home equity for education.

Under the previous government, a culture was built up whereby private education has been valorised at the expense of public, and (because of poorly designed funding systems) rewarded disproportionately. At the same time, the public school system has been starved of resources to the point where even parents who would rather choose a properly constituted public system feel compelled to go over to the private system simply because the local high school is too run down.

The peak body of the “independent” (private) schools has relentlessly pushed the line that private schools aren’t just for the super-rich, and that many parents of modest means are “making huge sacrifices” to send their children to private schools. We used to have the apocryphal taxi driver trotted out: “We have taxi drivers’ children at our school!” It’s difficult to prove or disprove the industry’s claims that our elite schools are filled with the happy offspring of taxi drivers and process workers, whose parents are forgoing the second and third car and the annual holiday to Tuscany in order to fund their childrens’ education.

I think you can see the holes in this argument. I have been looking around in vain for the second and third Mercedes which I can hock, and the Tuscan holidays, and the beach house which I can sell, but sadly, they are not there.

The marketing spin skirts around the unspoken ideas “if you really love your children, you’d go private” and “education is a competition, and private education will give your kids an edge”. And of course there was the idea, enthusiastically kicked along by the last Federal government, that private schools espouse values whereas public schools don’t. It puts a great deal of psychological pressure on parents. I’m thinking that many parents – and this is conjecture only, mind you, and this is a blog, not the Fin Review, so… many parents may have been doing the equity mining thing to put their kids through private school.

Recently articles like this and this have begun to appear about school fee defaults and home reposessions. Note that the second article describes a mother who contemplated suicide when she was forced to consider taking her kid out of private school. Moral panic can be a dangerous thing. Note also that the Christian Values of the private system, the superiority of which has been rammed home to us by marketers and the Howard government, seems quite a flimsy facade when they start behaving like the businesses they are.

The articles cite job loss, loss of bonuses and the effects of declining interest rates on grandparents as the reason for the defaults. The writers don’t mention the effects of the credit crunch and the end of the home ATM bonanza. They are talking about people losing houses. It’s just my guess that housing credit is contributing to the situation.

The outcome, of course, is rising enrolments in the previously despised public system. You’d think I’d be pleased, because surely it’s possible that a genuine crisis in the private system might lead the Labor government and State governments to re-think the current neglect of the public school system and decide to fund a system which will educate all comers, whether they’re headed for the boardroom or the coolroom. Well, it’s possible. But it’s very probable that before any such desirable policy change takes hold, I’ll see the same effects on the public system as I saw on the public transport system after the rise in petrol prices: severe overcrowding and overstrain on the system without any commensurate action by State governments to respond to the increased demand. All just as Exploding Boy is beginning his secondary school career. Lucky us.

(Although I have zero sympathy for any of the protagonists in this story, to most of us, “£1.17 million” =/= “broke”.)

I don’t think Rudd’s “fiscal stimulus” is going to do much to save us all from a recession. Why? Because although we’ve had the resources boom, I think a lot of our economic “growth” has been due to demand created by people spending more than they earn, and doing it for a long, long time. I think it’s unsustainable and will inevitably have to stop, and I’m no Robinson Crusoe there. We’ve heard a lot about people who have credit cards stacked on top of other credit cards and who end up declaring bankruptcy. I think that from now on we’ll hear a lot more about the other story, people pulling money out of their houses for consumption spending.

Like me, you might be watching the price collapses and home defaults in the US and thinking “is it going to be just as bad here?” Many well-informed people think it won’t. It’s scary, though, to see so many people lose their homes there.

Of course, the flip side is that houses might become more affordable. If, that is, people still have jobs and credit to buy them with.

In the last few months I’ve been following this blog, which tracks house sales in the Irvine district of Orange County (yes, that’s “the OC”), California. Unlike the stratospherically rich suburb in the TV series, this is a place roughly similar to – I’d say – Malvern or Brighton in Melbourne. So, much more upmarket than where I live. It may not sound like fascinating reading, but in California, it’s somehow possible to obtain and publish details of the house’s financial history as well as the number of granite counter tops. The lessons to be learned are salutary.

I like the Irvine Renter’s blog concept, in which he ties each post to a song with a Youtube link, although I don’t always agree with his song picks!

One of the central themes of the Irvine Housing blog is HELOC abuse. A HELOC is a Housing equity Line of Credit. Long story short, it is borrowing money against the equity in your house, supposedly for improvements to that house which then increase the value. But in the last few years homebuyers, thinking house prices would rise forever, have been taking out one HELOC after another to support their consumer spending – cars, holidays, boats, that sort of thing. Some people are even using it as income. IR calls it the “Home ATM”, because they’re treating their house like an ATM that gives out free money.

We do this too here in Australia, we just call it a home equity loan or refinancing, and there’s a scary looking thing called a Viridian Line of Credit, which seems very much like a HELOC to me. Sometimes, financial advisers encourage people to roll their credit card debt into their house loan, because of the lower rate of interest. It seems to me that that’s not an easy way out, because unless you cut up your card after that (or become the perfectly responsible pay-off-every-month customer, which probably wasn’t happening before) you’ll just keep on increasing your mortgage faster than you pay it.

As Irvine Renter points out, this was all fine when everyone thought house prices would never fall. But now that they are, some people end up owing more than the house is worth. “Negative equity”, they call it here. Irvine Renter calls it being “underwater”. He calls the desire to spend your house “the Kool-Aid”, because it seems so simple and tempting.

We were tempted to sip from the Kool-Aid in 2001, when the presence of a second child (one more than available bedrooms), plus wiring and plumbing that had reached its use-by date, coupled with a loan that was laughably titchy in today’s terms (55,000) made us decide to get the place in order. I don’t regret that, because if I do the maths I can tell we’re unlikely to end up underwater. And I really don’t want to live with wiring that’s going to kill us.

But we’ve survived that because we’ve paid it down since then. The people featured in the IR blog have been increasing their house debt year by year. Back when we borrowed to renovate, everyone was madly sanguine about what a massive price we’d get for the house if we ever sold, but we like living here. We didn’t renovate it to flip it – we did it to live in ourselves. Thank the FSM we didn’t get a taste for the Kool-aid and start using the home equity to pay for a big shiny SUV, holidays, furniture and consumer gadgets.

An important difference between Australia and the US is that over there the homebuyers can choose to walk away from the whole mess and the bad debt is taken over by the bank. The homebuyers’ credit rating is up the creek, but they don’t get chased for the balance of the loan. In Australia, we do.

It’s going to take more than the injection of a couple of thousand per selected household to kickstart an economy if that economy is dependent on people spending more than they earn. Once the homeowners have to stop using the home ATM, the music really will stop for some. That’s going to mean a lot of pain for people who make stuff and sell stuff and provide services. More thoughts on that later.

H/T Belle (this is becoming a habit, isn’t it?)

Frankable Optionally Redeemable Equity Settleable Transferable Securities, that is.

No, this is not a joke. Surely a box of Monte Christo cigars will have been bestowed upon the banker who dreamt up this acronym.
Anyway, Gunns is looking to wrap up its $430 million capital raising by early October, before the interest rate on its Forests resets on October 14 to an expensive 12.5%…

October 14, eh? Tick, tick tick…

Of course, it’s more fun to imagine Treebeard storming into the Gunns Ltd boardroom, bearing two tonnes of old growth woodchips, all of which he forces John Gay to eat. With milk but no sugar.