Outrage: Minister says Aussies too decadent

Labor Federal Housing Minister Tanya Plibersek, has told Sky News that she thinks average Australians are too decadent and don't actually need the large houses they enjoy buying and living in.

The following exchange took place between Plibersek and journalist, Jennifer Hewett:

Tanya Plibersek:  ... the propensity to build larger homes, three, four, five bedroom homes, is disproportionate to the proportion of our population that needs those three, four, five bedroom homes.

Jennifer Hewett:  Who’s buying them?  Why are they being built?

Tanya Plibersek:  They’re being built because it actually doesn’t cost a builder or developer much extra to put an extra bedroom onto a house.  That’s one of the things that we need to work with local government and state and territory governments on.  Some of the ways that levies for blocks of land are levied just don’t make sense. (i.e they need to be higher)

So Plibersek is essentially saying that she needs to work with State governments to make sure people can't afford the extra bedroom that they want.

What is the problem with an average Australian family having more space in their house? Isn't that a good thing? Isn't that called progress? Over time, products get cheaper because there are market innovations and technologies that make housing cheaper. The type of houses people want will be satisfied by the businesses that are involved and competing in the housing industry. That is the way a market works, it responds to the consumers needs and does so automatically. There is no need for government intervention.

The reality though, is that over many years, there has been a leftist social engineering project by governments to manipulate and choke land development on the outskirts of suburbia, under zoning laws, forcibly cramming Australians into the existing land areas. This, and other government interventions in the marketplace, have lead to the housing affordability crisis we see today. Therefore, the housing crisis is no accident. It is a deliberate policy of your "loving" government.

Throughout the interview, Plibersek acted as if it was her job, as opposed to buyers and sellers, to decide where Australians should live and in what style of house. She said:

"We need to have a range of housing options, including things like row housing, town housing, medium density, side by side with larger family homes."

She also proclaimed to know what Australians will want in the future:

"... the type of housing that people want in the future and the type of communities they want to live in aren’t necessarily large houses on large blocks of land."

The reality here is that this isn't the type of housing people will want, it's the type of housing that the government hopes it can force you to want. Government policy is deliberately attempting to socially engineer the Australian population into accepting a high-density, family-unfriendly situation in the hope that such an inner-city society is more leftist in political orientation and accepting of massive central-planning and socialism. High density living is, of course, more conducive to governmental control and planning because you can control a larger number of people with fewer bureaucrats.

Plibersek also endorses the pseudo-scientific and discredited Malthusian theory of "carrying-capacity". Since the population hysteria of the 1970s, "carrying-capacity" has been debunked time and time again, with Malthusian ideologues continually claiming that if the population reached x then there would be a 'Malthusian catastrophe' of resource scarcity, disease and famine. A noted debunker of these ridiculous theories was the late Professor Julian Simon who won a famous bet on the subject, with arch-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich.