Australian amathia and useless houses

I’ve written about the gross inadequacy of Australian housing before - often (e.g., see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), and now there is an opinion piece in the mainstream media which attempts to identify the cause. 

The article blames “winter stoicism” as “partly” the cause, and I wish to write about the other causes. 

My experience suggests that the problem is caused by: 

• Australians not questioning or challenging “the norm”, and being focused on glitzy superficial trappings and external appearances rather than function - which I summarise as Australian amathia; 

• Australians being GREEDY, selfish, uncaring of others (including victim blaming the homeless), wanting the evil of social status, easily led (duped by conservative politicians over decades!), and duck shoving responsibility on to others (i.e., letting builders do whatever they want, without question); 

• the vested interests of the building industry, which is focused on profit (see previous point, as “money is all” is a particular fault of Australian settler culture - not only in politics, but in everyday life) including avoiding having to retrain/re-equip its workforce to build things better as that involves the expenditure money (and/or inconvenience?).
  

What we NEED is: 

• education that teaches people to think - including making sure that students are taught that techniques can and should be applied to things like social status, the norm of “doing it the same as it always has just because”, and monitoring to make sure this is working by being applied in everyday life (see this and this as examples of what needs to be overcome); 

• a mechanism to ensure that citizen’s interests are ALWAYS considered ahead of vested interests (bigotted delusions such as “trickle down economics” have long been disproved - as has, in my opinion, the tool of the ultra-wealthy for deluding the weak minded that is known as neoliberalism, and profits of corporations are, in recent years, excessive and counter to the interests of society and its citizens [and are probably best illustrated by power prices - Robert  Reich is an excellent source of commentary on this] ); and 

• encouragement and enabling of those - especially those IN the building industry - who want to do better by allowing non-standard house constructions, rather than having an approval system based the evil of preserving social status in the form of housing (they’re NOT homes!!!) price.
  

We are getting improvements to housing in SOME parts of the nation - especially in my home state, and the best of Australia is now probably three to four decades behind normal practice in places like Europe, and half a century or a bit more behind best practice there.  

The article which triggered today’s tirade is: 

 “Why are Australians in denial about how cold our homes really are? ‘Winter stoicism’ is partly to blame | Reena Gupta | The Guardian”   https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/02/why-are-australians-in-denial-about-how-cold-our-homes-really-are-winter-stoicism-is-partly-to-blame     

 

 

Assumptions / basis 

In writing this, I have assumed / started from the following: 

• this blog states quite clearly that it is about political and human rights matters, including lived experience of problems, and thus I will assume readers are reasonable people who have noted the content warning in the post header;

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”; 
  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

If they are of any use of interest, the activism information links from my former news posts are available in this post. 

 

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Remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing, and all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering”.

Copyright © Kayleen White 2016-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike basis   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/