The Institute of Public Affairs reposted this
Last week I was invited on to the Defence Connect Podcast by the great Steve Kuper, and it was an opportunity to put National Security and Defence into a broader social context, and to ask ourselves just what it will take to get some urgency into the political process and also the defence bureaucracy. (In the attached article I include the full AI generated transcript.) After we'd discussed the disturbing response to the survey about who would stay and fight in the event that Australia was threatened in the same manner as Ukraine, we had this exchange, which also enabled me to make the link between those results, what is taught in our schools and universities, but also the need for young Australians to have a stake in the country in the context of the housing crisis: "Steve: I want to pick you up or pick up on the point that you made around having young Australians having a stake in the country (which) is interesting because one of the things that I have frequently found is that, and it's something that's not necessarily picked up on in conversations around things like housing affordability, and that is that if young Australians can't buy a home here and they can't find consistent, stable work, now there's a whole host of other issues that go into that is as important as the education and the messages that they're getting through unis. Me: That is indeed the key point. I think we've seen enough hand-wringing from people saying, "Oh, yeah, we're very worried about young people not being able to afford a house." Well, it's a little bit like the defence conversation. How about we actually do something about it? How about we actually have a sense of urgency? And so that's, again, the perspective that the IPA brings to this partnership with Peter Jennings et al. is in our work on the pressures on both the supply side and the demand side for housing, the demand driver through a massive and out of control immigration program. And then on the supply side, it's a bit like defence. We haven't hit a target for the number of houses that we need to be building for over a decade. Land release is too slow. Local governments take too much cream off the top, and the cost of construction has been going through the roof. How about we actually start doing something about that? So yeah, that's exactly what I meant when I talked about the stake in the country, that people who can find their way onto the career ladders, housing ladders, the life ladder, if you like, marriage, stable family formation are people who have a stake in the nation and will work to defend it. Not everyone's going to be in uniform, obviously, but you want them to have a positive cast of mind to what we're trying to achieve here. #defence #housing #auspol Michael Shoebridge Marcus Hellyer The Institute of Public Affairs Rob Burgess https://lnkd.in/g2CRn7Dg