kewpid.net

On Census night 2006 there were approx­im­ately 105,000 people classed as home­less in Aus­tralia. The ABS arrived at this fig­ure based on the data col­lec­ted from the 2006 Census in con­junc­tion with other key data­sets. That the ABS had to rely on external data reflects the dif­fi­culties in count­ing the num­ber of people exper­i­en­cing homelessness.

This is due in part to the dif­fi­culties asso­ci­ated with defin­ing home­less­ness. The ABS uses the “cul­tural” defin­i­tion, where home­less­ness is divided into three cat­egor­ies: primary, sec­ond­ary and tertiary.

• Primary home­less­ness cov­ers the tra­di­tional ste­reo­type of rough sleep­ers and those in make­shift accom­mod­a­tion. They account for about 16% of home­less­ness in Australia.
• Sec­ond­ary home­less­ness includes people who fre­quently move from one tem­por­ary form of accom­mod­a­tion to another, and those in transitional/emergency accom­mod­a­tion provided under the Government’s Sup­por­ted Accom­mod­a­tion Assist­ance Pro­gram. This is the biggest cohort, and accounts for 64% of homelessness.
• Ter­tiary home­less­ness includes people who live in board­ing houses on a medium/long-term basis but do not have the secur­ity of ten­ure con­sidered neces­sary to meet the com­munity stand­ard of a self-contained flat. This includes “couch surfers” and accounts for about 20% of home­less­ness in Australia.

The Government’s 2008 Home­less­ness White Paper, The Road Home, set an ambi­tious tar­get of halv­ing home­less­ness by 2020, with an interim tar­get of a 20% reduc­tion by 2013. Between the 2001 and 2006 Censuses, the num­ber of people exper­i­en­cing home­less­ness increased from about 100,000 to 105,000. How­ever, the over­all stead­i­ness of this fig­ure masks the big changes that occurred among age groups. Although there was a 16% decrease in the num­ber of 12 – 18 year olds exper­i­en­cing home­less­ness, there were large increases in the num­ber of under 12s and over 55s. This kind of data – dis­ag­greg­ated and rig­or­ous – is essen­tial in any kind of home­less­ness policy devel­op­ment, and assess­ing the effect­ive­ness of that policy.

Although the most recent Census was held on 9 August this year, most of its res­ults will not become avail­able until late 2012. This lag in data col­lec­tion will be prob­lem­atic when it comes time to track the pro­gress of interim goals in the Home­less­ness White Paper.

Long-term, it might be use­ful to provide basic stat­ist­ics train­ing for NGOs and com­munity groups. If the stand­ard of their data col­lec­tion rises to a level accept­able to the ABS, the job could be effect­ively out­sourced, provid­ing wide­spread geo­graph­ical cov­er­age and a rolling stock of raw data so we don’t get sur­prises every 5 years.

In day-to-day life any kind of price rise is blamed as infla­tion (or price gou­ging!). But this is tech­nic­ally incor­rect. A price rise on any one thing is just a price rise, it is not infla­tion. Strictly, the text­book defin­i­tion of infla­tion is “a sus­tained increase in the gen­eral level of prices”.

There is no easy way to meas­ure infla­tion, and the best tools we have are prox­ies in the form of vari­ous price indexes. The most well-known is the con­sumer price index (CPI) which tracks a ‘bas­ket’ of goods and ser­vices rep­res­ent­ing com­monly bought things.

Infla­tion can be an insi­di­ous thing, erod­ing the value of people’s cash sav­ings, and redu­cing their pur­chas­ing power. It also has a tend­ency to accel­er­ate out of con­trol if it is not con­tained. The most fam­ous example is the hyper­in­fla­tion in Ger­many in the 1920s, which got so bad people had to push around wheel­bar­rows of cash to buy loaves of bread.

Australia’s Reserve Bank (RBA) has an expli­cit policy of “infla­tion tar­get­ing”, where it tries to keep the annual rate of infla­tion (CPI) between 2 and 3 per­cent over the course of the busi­ness cycle. The RBA achieves this through changes in the ‘cash rate’, which is the mar­ket interest rate on overnight funds lent to banks and fin­an­cial insti­tu­tions. The cash rate is used as a baseline that affects most other interest rates, includ­ing mort­gages and busi­ness loans. Increases in the cash rate have a tend­ency to reduce levels of busi­ness invest­ment and con­sumer spend­ing and vice-versa. Changes in the cash rate there­fore have rever­ber­a­tions across the entire eco­nomy, affect­ing over­all spend­ing and borrowing.

Infla­tion tar­get­ing was intro­duced in 1993 and has been sin­gu­larly suc­cess­ful in anchor­ing infla­tion expect­a­tions, keep­ing CPI increases stable, and under­pin­ning Australia’s eco­nomic growth. You can see in the graph below that CPI increases oscil­lated wildly before 1993, but have since mostly stayed in the RBA’s 2 – 3 per­cent tar­get band.

The CPI starts to wobble again towards the end of the graph as the income surge from Australia’s min­ing boom starts cre­at­ing price pres­sures across the eco­nomy. The uptick at the very end is attrib­ut­able to the hangover caused by the RBA dra­mat­ic­ally cut­ting the cash rate from 7.25 to 3.25 per­cent over the course of 2008-09 in the face of the global fin­an­cial crisis.

The most recent stat­ist­ics have the CPI run­ning at 3.6 per­cent, fuelled by increases in the cost of fruit (up 26.9% in the three months to June), pet­rol (+4.0%) and health ser­vices (+3.4%). This was off­set by decreases in the cost of veget­ables ( – 10.3%), com­puter equip­ment ( – 6.3%) and elec­tri­city ( – 1.5%). Although some of this is attrib­ut­able to nat­ural dis­asters and external events, the CPI is still at the upper bounds of the RBA’s target.

Through agree­ment between the RBA Gov­ernor and the Treas­urer, and the State­ment on the Con­duct of Mon­et­ary Policy, the RBA’s man­date is to address this breach of its infla­tion tar­get. If the RBA were a purely infla­tion tar­get­ting cent­ral bank, it would have raised rates on Tues­day. The RBA’s staff eco­nom­ists pushed for an increase. Read­ing between the lines of its state­ment, ele­ments of the RBA Board would also have pre­ferred to raise rates. The ten­sion lies squarely on the Board itself, which is pop­u­lated by industry fig­ures whose busi­ness interests, par­tic­u­larly in retail, are cry­ing out for rate cuts.

Against the back­grop of ongo­ing debt and eco­nomic troubles in the US and Europe, the next 12 months will be fascinating.

While I thought Sydney University’s new logo was a good effort, another aspect of their rebrand­ing leaves much to be desired.

I shall simple repost my com­ment on Enoch’s blog, who also does not think very highly of the ret­ro­grade changes.

It is god damned atro­cious. It’s increas­ingly appar­ent we went to a third-??rate insti­tu­tion, and it shows up in everything they do: the qual­ity of edu­ca­tion, the qual­ity of facil­it­ies, the rela­tion­ship between the gov­ern­ing bod­ies of the uni and the stu­dents, and now the barely-??tepid effort they put into their web­site.
Who the hell thought it was a good idea to have the logo jut ting out to the left? What is this meant to rep­res­ent? That if you want to achieve some thing, Sydney Uni will jump out of left field to block you?
Why is there is logical grid or spa­cing to effect­ively man age the masses of informa­tion? Why is it so boxy? Why is the typo­graphy so bad? All-??in-??all it looks like some “designer” spent a couple of hours trawl­ing the 1990s inter net for some “cool scripts” and hacked together a Frankstein’s monster.

And this is after a very prom­ising brand ing pitch book that actu­ally looked like it was going to unify the hitherto haphaz­ard brand ing strategies. I’m really dis­gus­ted. I fully expect Sydney Uni to have slipped down the rank­ings in the next dec­ade, all the while fun­nel ling massive amounts of cor­por­ate money into its coffers.

Mmm… virile.

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dear­ness only that gives everything its value.“
 — Thomas Paine

Hugs are spe­cial. They provide com­fort in times of need, and express joy fol­low­ing tri­umph. And it is their rel­at­ive rar­ity that gives them that value. That works out well, because our pas­sions and emo­tions are rarely at those highs for very long.

For my gen­er­a­tion how­ever, those hugs are doled out without a second thought – they are lit­er­ally free.

I find this a little troub­ling, because these actions provide a ven­eer of rap­port and camaraderie over what are really very shal­low rela­tion­ships. If a hug is just a way of say­ing “hello”, how do we express real intim­acy? Not with kisses, because guys are end­ing their text mes­sages with them. Is it symp­to­matic of an instant-gratification cul­ture where we try to fast-track bonds of affin­ity, and in the pro­cess des­troy the worth of those relationships?

Call me a cold bitch if you want, but I find the excess­ive touchy-feelyness of other young people quite icky. Harden the fuck up people, and save hugs and kisses for when they are actu­ally warranted!

XOXO