Qatar’s ghost flights – an open secret within the aviation sector – are “taking the piss” out of Australia’s strict aviation laws, industry sources say, and are occurring despite the Albanese government rejecting the airline’s formal request to increase flights out of concern the extra capacity would go against Australia’s “national interest”.
Honestly, I don’t blame Qatar Airways. Good on them for getting around this protectionist nonsense policy.
Air travel is already quite expense and carbon heavy. Actively blocking routes makes the system less efficient, expensive, and will emit more carbon. Isn’t that also against Australia’s “national interest”?
I’m very glad Hussein is out but I don’t know if Sean Fraser will do a good job. His previous role as immigration minister let the country consistently exceed its immigration targets, which only made the housing crisis worse. He’ll be looking into the consequences of his own actions on housing.
He already refrained from building more houses directly and “subsidizing”, not investing, “below-market” housing instead, so that’s not a good sign already.
From a structural standpoint, merging housing and infrastructure into a single ministry makes sense. These two issues go hand in hand.
- Maintain a central registry of who owns what housing and who lives there (necessary for the policies below). This can be used to audit abuses
- Raise property taxes on vacant housing
- Introduce a new yearly anti-speculation tax that depends on the owner of the unit:
- Canadian citizens: 0%.
- Permanent residents and people with work permits: 0%.
- Companies established in Canada:
- Single-family dwelling: 5%.
- Dwelling between two and 6 units: 2%
- Housing with more units: 0%
- All other assumptions: 10% <-- this includes foreign investors
Why all this bureaucracy? We can simply just shift property taxes to land value taxes. Much more equitable and it would disincentivize speculation and incentivize density. You only need to know who owns which parcel of land so its much less bureaucratic.
Partially correct. You can self host peertube instances. What differentiates it from YouTube is:
I hope so. Subscribe to !georgism@kbin.social if you haven’t already.