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Education vs public housing

MattSAU2XR8

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I work in ED and see quite a few people who are homeless, and who despite the best efforts of hospital social workers remain that way indefinitely. And so have gotten to thinking about how we stack up against other countries in terms of major expenditure which includes health, education, housing, and welfare.

Healthcare is pretty well funded. While there are some people waiting for operations, eg. joint replacements, there are also a lot of people who are sick at least in part due to lifestyle disease, eg. smoking, overeating, not getting any exercise, or not taking their tablets. So probably as a whole the government is doing a pretty good job with this.

Education seems pretty well funded, probably excessively, i.e. I have two degrees now, but have forgotten large swathes of information as far back as year 10, and get by just fine, suggesting that at least some of what is taught is not essential to most jobs. I can't help wondering whether for many jobs an ' Associate Degree' that just took the most useful parts of a three year degree and compressed them into a one year 'all meat no fat' course could be just as useful...

Welfare is better than some countries, eg. USA, but at the end of the day it is difficult for many people to get by on newstart or the pension. With rental costs chewing up most of the money.

Public housing seems significantly underfunded. There are plenty of people who don't and won't have enough money to buy a house, and who can't afford private rental, and will end up waiting more or less forever for public rentals. And the cost of land, while good for people holding property, is other than this ridiculous. Hard to see a quarter acre block costing more than $100k to develop, or being worth more than $10k to the farmer or government department that originally owned it.

So I got to thinking, where free education was a great idea in Gough Whitlam's time, perhaps now would be a good time for the government to put an emphasis on housing instead. They should be able to buy the land cheaply, eg. just rezone some farm land adjacent to cities/towns and pay the farmers generously. Then train up some more tradies. And build housing that is good enough without being excessive, and designed to (a) last, and (b) be easy to refurbish when tenants move on, so eg. tiled floors rather than carpets, consider rendered brick internal walls rather than plaster so people can't destroy them, and so on.

On the whole it seems a bit silly being one of the most educated countries in the world but not having places for people to live...
 
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