Large versus small Australia Australia - what you mean
whether Australia will continue to increase immigration or reduce the current level of immigration could have a big impact on your real estate investment strategies. So today I want to talk about how to go with the trend and not against the trend when developing your investment strategies together.
debate currently
over the past few years, there has been an ongoing debate between whether we should have, "Australia's small" or and "Big Australia". The supporters of Australia would like to see the big increase our population to 36 million by 2050. This means almost 400,000 new immigrants in the next medium to Australia each year. While the small camp of Australia would like to see kept our population to a lot less than that in.
There are a lot of pros and cons about being thrown from both sides of the debate: from any level of sustainable growth if we have to pay higher taxes, and even more extreme, such as cultural transformation and ethnic domination scenarios. I do not want to bore you with any of these, you can google them for yourself, and take any side you want, or simply pay no attention to any of them.
The problem with this debate is that people sometimes think that if one side logical attended more logical and better, then this side must win the argument. But in fact, progress of our society is not usually contest of logic or good thinking. You can sit in a classroom, winning the debate 10 times, but outside the classroom, it is factors like "effect" and "passion" that rule.
If you want a simple demonstration of this, just ask 10 of your friends, who are still in a marriage today, how many of them examine the pros and cons, and worked out the possibility of the survival of the marriage, before they reach it. If most people can not even apply logic and good thinking is one of the most important decisions in their lives that they can control it, how do you expect them to apply the logic and good reflection of the issue that they have little control over - such as whether we should become Australia's big or small Australia ?
This is one of the reasons that I've learned over the years to give more importance to the facts, and pay less attention to logic and good thinking. You will benefit the most in life by putting your attention on what happened in reality (ie the facts) and not what should happen.
facts
over the past few years, and immigration numbers have been hovering around 400,000 annually. Some years, slightly higher other years a little less. 40 years ago our population was 12.6 million people. Today, more than 22.7 million. If we are to continue to grow at the same rate, we will reach 400000 in 2050, which is the largest of the 36 million Australia Senior projection. So it seems, whether people like it or not, Australia is on track to become a "Big Australia" anyway.
now baby is the beginning for "mass retirement" starting in 2012. Those who retire before 2020 are more likely to rely on government retirement system because they will not have enough compulsory retirement. And all those retirees means that we will need more workers to pay enough taxes to support the government pension system. So I think it is almost a necessity for the government to maintain immigration at the current level, or even higher, at least until 2020.
secure
in Australia valued at more than $ 830 * billion of investment for years to come. We need to deliver goods in accordance with those contracts, but we do not seem to have enough people to produce all of them. Recently it had several major mining companies, heads of severe criticism of the government red tape that restricts them from bringing workers to Australia to work. Some are so we can solve this problem by allowing large numbers of temporary foreign workers into Australia to work. (Can be of most real estate investors understand the concern of the mining companies. It's similar to when the real estate development and prior to sale and development of 100 units to buyers, now realizes that there are available workers is not enough to build them!)
* June 2011 issue of Deloitte Access Economics Investment Monitor
real competition
may determine the outcome of the population of Australia? In my opinion, two major factors: the impact and emotion. Let's go through one at a time.
effect
We all know that it is the government that decides whether we will increase or decrease immigration on an annual basis. But what affects the decisions of the government?
There are two governments in the world: authoritarianism or democracy.
- in an authoritarian society, and political influence dominates the economic decisions. Any politicians (like a dictator) are more likely to dominate the business decisions.
- in a democratic society, the economic impact is dominated by political decisions. Any business community (like all lobbyists) are more likely to dominate the political decisions.
Australia democratic society. Here, after winning the office, politicians tend to be spokesmen for the political campaign of their masters (ie donor) or pressure groups, such as companies, particularly from major companies. Hence, you tend to see governments in saving a democratic society "is greater than that" businesses fail (such as what happened in the United States and Europe), and do not necessarily behave a little bit about the people who have less direct impact.
This is not a statement by the way what is good or bad, it is just the facts of the way the different systems work for different people.
So here is the key question: Do you think that the largest companies in Australia wants more immigrants or less immigrants?
Let's look at the needs of the largest companies and institutions in Australia:
- Do you think that the mining companies want more workers to provide their contracts?
- Do you think that the biggest airlines want more passengers?
- Do you think that the biggest retailers and shopping center owners want to have more people to shop?
- Do you think that the largest real estate developers and construction companies want to have more people to buy their property?
- Do you think that the largest banks want to have more people pay interest?
- Do you think that the largest universities want to have a larger number of students?
- Do you think that the biggest pharmaceutical companies want to have more people to buy their own medicines?
- Do you think that the biggest religions want to get more followers?
as you can clearly see, and politicians to be constantly under the influence of these groups are strong self-interest to continue to increase the number of the population. Now what do you think of Australia the chance absence of more immigrants?
Before coming to Australia, I lived in a country where politicians are often dictated by the companies what to do. Having lived in Australia for 23 years, and I'm fascinated to see the number of political outcomes are determined by bargaining between politicians and groups of self-interest, and how large an economic impact calls for snapshots in most government decisions. These groups tried to strong self-interest affect either directly or through the media indirectly politicians.
You may ask how all this affects the average person that worries about losing their jobs to immigrants or our environment becomes unsustainable? From my observation, the effect on the average person is limited unless it was coordinated through the larger groups, so even when their views are very logical and justified it unfortunately simply do not have the economic clout to pressure the government or have the financial resources to put in place their politicians.
I know that this may seem disappointing for those who believe in small Australia, but unfortunately this is just how it works democratic societies. If I go back again in time, just in Australia, and I am sure that if I had asked of the indigenous population a few hundred years, whether he would like to have 22 million people coming to their country, their answer might have been a resounding NO !, but they simply did not have enough influence to stop them.
obviously I am not discussing morality and ethics of these cases here. As I said earlier, I'm just discuss the facts of what happened. I think that everyone is entitled to what they believe in, there are always two sides of the same coin in any case we like or dislike any form. All I'm trying to do is to show what is the direction so that you can invest your money wisely.
It is important to remember that we do not have to love everything what is happening there as an investor, but we can benefit from this trend even if we do not like what's going on. This is similar to the position may not want dangerous when you want to fly, but the action against it is not smart.
passion
another major factor that affects the governments and politicians is a general feeling, any human feelings. Politics today is a popularity contest. If the policy observed over the last 50 years of any industrialized country, the good old days of the politicians who stood a chance to win by holding true to the values and beliefs, seems to have ended long ago. The best values to stick to win office these days seems to be more and more about "everything that the audience wants to hear."
Therefore it is important to know whether the vast majority of Australians are anti-immigration or pro-immigration and how this feeling may evolve over the next few decades.
There are quite a number of countries in the world where the majority of the population is opposed to immigration, and they make it clear in the legislation. In other words, these countries have a very special attitude toward other races. Australia did not have such a range of legislation.
some of the other facts of interest are:
- Apart from the indigenous people of this country, all of us are immigrants from one generation or another.
- Today, half of our population still speak a language other than English at home;
- Most Australians have blood lines that can track many different races and cultures;
I'm from the first generation of immigrants myself. During the past 23 years I have lived in Australia, and I can honestly say that I have never felt discriminated against. So overall Australia is a country completely open, accommodating and multicultural, and generally it is not uncommon to be racist here.
If you were not first-generation immigrant yourself, you may not be aware of how much he wants all immigrants from the first generation to help their friends and families to migrate to the same country and they are now in. They do this, because immigrants miss their families and friends but also because they want to help them have a better life.
think about how this applies to the average of 400,000 immigrants coming into the country each year. This flow of migration began five years ago. Give it another five years, and a huge four million new immigrants (and this figure equals the number of Melbourne) population, it added to the sentiment in favor of immigration. These four million potential new voters put a lot of pressure on any political parties who want to stop their friends and their families to come here.
Hence, I can see the direction of public sentiment is on the side of "Big Australia", and you know that politics will play out in accordance with this trend.
big Australia in exchange for a huge Australia
recently and I've been doing some numbers myself and I can sense a new debate soon - one called "big Australia Australia vs. huge. " (I hope I'm not the first to arrive at this name, and I really do not want to be the man who began the great Australia vs. Australia a huge debate in Australia knows.)
let's define what we mean by "huge Australia" first. If "Big Australia" means adding 14 million people to the current population to take it to 36 million, then you probably should be on a "huge Australia" to double the increase to add 28 million people to take the population to 50 million people!
, and if this number shocks you, let me give you a different perspective from outside Australia. If I had to explain to the Chinese for a friend of mine who lived in China around the idea of "Australia's huge," and I'm sure he thinks that I have lived in Australia for a very long time. He guaranteed me that it would at least a billion Chinese will not be able to understand why I would call a huge 50 million people on a piece of land the size of Australia, which is similar to China and the United States. He probably still calls us "little Australia" Even if we got a population of 50 million, because imagine the 22 million people we have today must be scattered all over the place for the occupation, such as the island is very large but mostly unused.
I think there is some merit to this view, is not it? Imagine if the United States had only 22 million people living in that day (which is not much more than the number of residents of Greater Los Angeles area)? It feels like the island very empty after Australia's bigger than the United States in the size of the Earth!
now why I think that the idea of "Australia's huge" not completely crazy? Although anyone at the moment I have not seen proposing such a projection of the community government or business, here are some of the main reasons why I think it is possible:
1) Australia has the means to become enormous.
Currently we are accepting 400,000 immigrants on average each year. This converts to an increase of 1.8% from the current population. All you have to do is add to the 0.2% again to take it to 2%, or about an additional 50,000 people a year, whether guests or any other form of visa workers, it will take Australia to 50 million people by 2050.
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even if Australia wants to become a huge (ie 50 million people by 2050), we have the means to do so without the majority of the public even noticed the difference.
The real question is not whether Australia wants to become huge. In my opinion, the question is more realistic and perhaps should be whether Australia has the option was not to become huge!
2) Australia may be forced to become huge.
not one of us that calls into question the arrival of four seasons and one after another, year after year. There is a kind of law behind this rotation can be observed even if we can not fully explain.
and change chapters similar to the way that nations rise to become economic powers, and then drops again. If you are looking for the past 500 years, there were 9 countries, which rose to a level of power that enabled them to dominate the global economy in their own times. Namely Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, England, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and America. As the old saying goes, what goes up must come down. None of these countries survived the decline and all lends itself to another country to take on a leading role in the world.
We are now well in the "Asian Century" the position of our prime minister recently put it. I would probably call it "Australian century", as there was no time in history where Australia was pushed to the center of the world stage, both in terms of economic and political power.
is put
Australia a unique bridge between Asia and the rest of the world. Is the only country (apart from New Zealand) with Western civilization and lifestyle Asia in the same time zone.
Today, the distance barrier is removed by technologies such as the Internet, video conferencing, etc., only one barrier to effective communication is still - a barrier zone!
you can communicate with most Asian countries during the hours of work by living in Australia. Instead, you'll need to work evening or night shifts if they are based in Europe or America. This is one of the main reasons why such a large number of multinational companies set up headquarters and a strategic design ability Asia and the Pacific in Australia.
The biggest problem in Australia for a long time it was always considered "isolated" because of its distance from the other continents. But now its location means it is ideally placed as a gateway to Western Asia. With the booming Asia you can see why Australia has been getting this attention is unprecedented in recent times. Have you noticed lately that there is a struggle for attention in Australia's two biggest economies in the world, which represents the East and the West?
as "laid back", as was the Australian culture in the past, and I think that increasingly be forced Australia to assume some sort of leadership role quickly and the West desperately needs to find growth opportunities from the east. At the same time, the Middle desperate attempts to improve their standard of living, and finds herself in Australia is ideally placed as a conduit for those goals. In the end, which means we have no alternative but to get the biggest and the richest. The
After all, those nine other countries, some significantly smaller than Australia, for their role during the past 500 years. With the decline in America and Europe and it must be someone else's turn this time. If not Australia, you can choose another country in the West, which is positioned more completely and ready to thrive now more of us? I can not.
3) may be in interest in Australia to become huge.
Have you noticed that Australia has been busily all our resources shipped 22 million people currently do not need overseas? In other words, we sell our most valuable resources for the construction of other countries instead of our own.
If you think this makes sense, put on a hat thinking as an investor property. Imagine that you are the farmer sitting on a large piece of land. It is more intelligent: just sell your land now to get the price today or to allow more people to work for you on earth forever? This is one of the reasons most often see land development projects, the largest being a joint venture between the farmer and land developer, so the farmer gets a much better return on their land.
The Australian government is just like a farmer who happens to be sitting on a large piece of land that has a lot of potential. Why do not you allow more people to come and work on your land, rather than sell out to overseas buyers just because you do not have enough domestic demand?
This is one of the reasons I think it is in Australia's interests to attract the best talent from all over the world to develop more industries internationally competitive while we are selling down our resources. Selling the bottom of our resources is not only a temporary cash flow strategy; it is not investing to survive long-term strategy.
a great opportunity for investors property
simply, there has never been a better time to be a real estate investor in this country.