Philippines Buzz Daily (2024)

24/05/2023

So, you think you know why rents climbed.

You probably think was skyrocketing interest rates and a tsunami of migration.

It’s true that interest rates have jumped more over the past year than at any time on record, and it’s true that migration has roared back – in the six months to September 2022 (the latest month for which we’ve official figures) arrivals exceeded departures by 170,000.

But here’s the thing. Advertised rents began climbing sharply in late 2021 – six months before the Reserve Bank began pushing up interest rates, and at a time when it was forecast not to.

And “net migration” was negative back when rents were taking off – meaning the number of arrivals didn’t even match the number of departures.

It’s supply and demand

Something else made rents move.

As it happens, there’s no particular reason to think interest rates would have quickly affected rents even if they had been climbing. If higher rates force some landlords to sell, and they sell to other landlords, the number of properties for rent won’t change. If those landlords sell to owner occupiers who would otherwise rent, they cut both the number of rental properties and the number of renters.

What matters for rents, as for any price, is the demand for and the supply of the product being priced. More demand (more renters wanting properties) and the price climbs. More supply (more properties available for rent) and the price falls.

Read more: $1 billion per year (or less) could halve rental housing stress

On the face of it, neither demand nor supply was changing much during COVID as rents started climbing. Australia’s population was growing more slowly than at any time in modern history. And, as best as we can tell, the number of properties available for rent was climbing, albeit weakly.

What did change during COVID, according to the research department of the Reserve Bank, was the average number of people per household.

The change doesn’t sound big – the average fell from a bit above 2.6 residents per household to a bit below 2.55 – but applied to millions of households it meant about 140,000 more houses and apartments were needed than would have been.

Average household size (capital cities)

Average number of persons usually resident in an occupied private dwelling, trend and actual. RBA, ABS microdata

The sudden change was awfully for hard for the building industry to respond to, especially when it was laid low by COVID.

Why did we suddenly want to live with fewer people?

The head of the Bank’s economic division, Luci Ellis, thinks it was COVID itself, and lockdowns. We suddenly became more precious about sharing space.

‘Love the one you’re with’

Ellis says proportion of Australians living in group houses declined and stayed low. Faced with the choice of living with a large number of housemates and just one other person, perhaps a romantic partner, a lot of renters left group houses and shacked up with each other.

As she put it last year:

On the question of who you would rather be locked down with, at least some Australians have voted with their removalists’ van, by moving out of their share house and in with their partner.

There’s more to it of course, but where the supply and demand for anything are roughly in balance (rents had been increasing by less than 1% per year in the four years before COVID, and fell in the first year of COVID) any sudden change in either supply or demand can move prices quickly.

Advertised rents aren’t typical …

Having said that, for most renters prices are still moving slowly. Advertised capital city rents are up 13% over the past year, and advertised regional rates up 9%. But average rents (the average of what all renters pay) are up only 4.8%.

The rents charged to ongoing tenants climb much more slowly than the rents charged to new tenants, in part because landlords often like their tenants, and in part because for the first year renters are usually on fixed contracts.

But over time as renters move home, and landlords become less squeamish, more and more renters tend to pay the rents advertised. It makes the increase in advertised rents an unwelcome sign of what’s to come.

… but they’re a sign of rents ahead

And it might get worse. Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe says population growth is set to climb to 2%, – near the peak reached during the resources boom.

We won’t be able to build houses anything like that fast. Lowe says the last time Australia’s population surged it took about five years for housing supply to fully respond to housing demand.

We’ve ways of dealing with it of course. One is to re-embrace group homes, another is to delay moving out of our partents’ homes, or to move back in.

But even if this does happen, Lowe says, with typical understatement, that rent inflation – ultra-low before COVID – is likely to stay “quite high” for some time.

Read more: Rent crisis? Average rents are increasing less than you might think

What made rents soar? It might have been COVID, and pairing off

Source: Buzz Daily Updates

23/05/2023

Australia’s health system is under significant pressure. The Labor government has inherited a system with declining bulk-billing rates for GP visits. These fell from almost 90% of all GP attendances bulk billed in December 2021 to just over 80% a year later.

Significant workforce shortages remain in rural and remote Australia, despite a raft of incentive programs to improve access to health care. In 2021–22, about 3.5% of adults did not see a GP because of cost, with higher rates of missed care outside metropolitan areas.

Policymakers may have relied on ineffectual financial incentives because they thought they were precluded from stronger actions, such as limiting doctors’ access to rebates in areas of oversupply. However, as we argue in the Federal Law Review, these constraints have been overstated.

This means it would be possible to radically alter the Medicare system. One option is to restrict Medicare access to GPs who agree to bulk bill all patients, while allowing those who don’t bulk bill to rely solely on out-of-pocket payments.

A new Medicare agenda should address the problems of fraud, geographical inequity, and bulk-billing decline. This can be done by conceptualising access to Medicare rebates by practitioners as a privilege, not a right.

Read more: GPs are abandoning bulk billing. What does this mean for affordable family medical care?

Why were policymakers constrained?

Health policy in Australia has been limited for decades by assumed constitutional constraints, which have been talked up by the medical profession to prevent policies they oppose.

After the second world war, the Chifley Labor government began a series of social security reforms. Legislation for one element of the reform – a pharmaceutical benefits scheme – was struck down by the High Court because there was no relevant head of power in the Constitution.

In response, the government proposed amending the Constitution to give it broad social welfare powers. This proposal had bipartisan support and was passed at a referendum in 1946. A new sub-section (xxiiiA) was consequently added to section 51 of the Constitution, giving the Commonwealth power to make laws about:

The provision of maternity allowances, widows’ pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorise any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances.

The parenthetical civil conscription constraint was included following an amendment from the Liberal Party. This was motivated by a desire to prevent the creation of a scheme like the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, which required all GPs to work under contract to government and hospital specialists to be salaried employees.

The presumed constitutional constraint seemed to shape the Labor Party’s thinking about what might be constitutionally possible when designing Medibank, the precursor to Medicare. Despite some members of caucus supporting a salaried hospital system, this was not pursued.

Current workforce incentives aren’t addressing the gaps. Shutterstock

But in 1980 and 2009, the High Court narrowed the meaning of civil conscription. This meant the subsection no longer constrained government power in the way it once had.

Medical practitioners now work in a diverse range of settings, not all of which rely fully on revenue from Medicare. So the nexus between access to Medicare rebates and the ability to work as a doctor has been broken. The government can now expand the constraints it puts on billing rights without it being considered civil conscription.

Read more: Labor has a huge health agenda ahead of it. What policies should we expect?

A bold way to restructure Medicare

It is time for a complete rethink of how Medicare payment arrangements are designed and regulated, free from the assumed constitutional constraints.

The recent Independent Review of Medicare Integrity and Compliance highlighted that:

the current state of Medicare, and some of the challenges […] are the result of previous attempts to apply discrete and band-aid solutions to single issues over time and a lack of system thinking and consideration.

The band-aid approach no longer works. A fundamental rethink of Medicare is required, moving away from practitioners’ relatively unconstrained and uncapped access to fee-for-service rebates.

Read more: 6 reasons why it’s so hard to see a GP

Presently, all specialists – including GPs – can apply for a Medicare provider number which enables rebate payments for their services, with few constraints.

Rather than an “all comers” approach, a new basis for Medicare could be one where practices sign up to Medicare and agree to meet Medicare’s contractual conditions such as agreement to bulk bill all patients, participation in training future health professionals and in quality improvement programs, and that practices are multidisciplinary. Again, fair remuneration needs to underpin all this.

Participating practices could be paid on a variety of bases, including number and type of patients enrolled, number of patient attendances (enrolled or not), and other payments.

Payment rates would need to be seen as fair by both government and practices.

Currently, all specialists can apply for a Medicare provider number. Pexels/Karolina Grabowska

A participation basis for Medicare, moving away from an unconstrained approach, coupled with adequate workforce planning, could also be used to encourage new graduates to work in locations and specialties in short supply by limiting access to rebates for specialties in locations of oversupply.

This would also facilitate management of fraud and over servicing through contractual controls, rather than cumbersome administrative law processes.

A “participating provider” approach would transform the patient experience. Most importantly, the bulk-billing lottery would end: practices displaying a Medicare sign would bulk bill all patients, not just some.

There would need to be a new deal for doctors too, with remuneration set fairly – not at the whim of government – ending the political fee freezes suffered under the previous government.

Australia’s Medicare fabric has many holes

Although Medicare has served Australia well, it’s beginning to fray at the edges with reductions in bulk billing and provider satisfaction, and geographical shortages.

The old incentive structures have not addressed these problems and now new approaches, which may previously have been thought impossible in part because of the perceived constitutional constraints, must be considered.

What we have is shown is that the policy agenda is more open than might have hitherto been considered. The time is right for these options to be considered.

Read more: How do you fix general practice? More GPs won’t be enough. Here’s what to do

This article was co-authored by Emma Campbell, former Grattan Institute intern and current LLB/BPPE student at The Australian National University.

What if Medicare was restricted to GPs who bulk billed? This kind of reform is possible

Source: Buzz Daily Updates

23/05/2023

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong joined 50,000 people to march in support of q***r rights across the Sydney Harbour Bridge for World Pride in early March. A week earlier, Albanese became the first sitting prime minister to march in Sydney’s Mardi Gras, something he’s done over several decades.

And yet at the same time, in another part of the world, Uganda’s parliament passed a string of draconian measures against homos*xuality, including possible death sentences for “aggravated homos*xuality”. Any “promotion” of homos*xuality is also outlawed.

Read more: Uganda’s new anti-LGBTQ+ law could lead to death penalty for same-s*x ‘offences’

Seven years ago, I co-wrote a book with Jonathan Symons called Q***r Wars. Back then, we suggested there was a growing gap between countries in which s*xual and gender diversity was becoming more acceptable, and those where repression was increasing.

Sadly, that analysis seems even more relevant today.

A growing gap

Some countries have been unwinding criminal sanctions around homos*xuality, which are often the legacy of colonialism. This includes, in recent years, former British colonies Singapore and India.

But others have been imposing new and more vicious penalties for any deviation from stereotypical assumptions of heteros*xual masculine superiority (what Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell terms “hegemonic masculinity”).

Anti-gay legislation is currently pending in Ghana, which led US Vice President Kamala Harris to express concerns on a recent visit.

These moves echo the deep homophobia of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has bizarrely linked intervention in Ukraine to protecting traditional values against LGBTQ+ infiltration.

Meanwhile, reports from Afghanistan suggest that anyone identified as “LGBT” is in danger of being killed.

Indonesia recently passed legislation penalising all s*x outside marriage. This follows years of anti-q***r rhetoric from Indonesian leaders and crackdowns in regional areas.

And while the Biden administration is supportive of q***r rights globally, the extraordinary hysteria around trans issues in the Republican Party reminds us the West has no inherent claim to moral superiority.

Read more: What’s going on with the wave of GOP bills about trans teens? Utah provides clues

Where to next?

Speaking at the World Pride Human Rights Conference, both Wong and Attorney General Mark Dreyfus made it clear Australia would press for recognition of s*xuality and gender identity as deserving protection, as part of our commitment to human rights.

Wong also announced a new Inclusion and Equality Fund to support q***r community organisations within our region.

Australian governments have usually been wary of loud assertions of support for q***r rights. This is partly due to a reasonable fear this merely reinforces the perception that such language reflects a sense of Western superiority, unwilling to acknowledge other societies may have very different attitudes towards gender and s*xuality.

Australia is part of the Equal Rights Coalition, an intergovernmental body of 42 countries dedicated to the protection of the rights of LGBTQ+ people, and has supported s*xual and gender rights in the country reviews undertaken by the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

Australia has a minimal presence in Uganda, and direct representations are unlikely to have much effect. Uganda is a member of the Commonwealth, as are Ghana, Kenya and Zambia, where official homophobia appears to be increasing. But there’s little evidence the Australian government sees this as a significant foreign policy forum, or is prepared to push for s*xual rights through its institutions.

As persecution on the basis of s*xuality and gender identity increases, more people will seek to flee their countries. Q***r refugees face double jeopardy: they’re not safe at home, but they’re often equally unsafe in their diasporic communities, which have inherited the deep prejudices of their homelands.

The UN’s refugee agency reports that most people seeking asylum because of their s*xuality are unwilling to disclose this, because of discrimination within their own ethnic communities. This makes it impossible to have accurate numbers. But a clear signal from Australia would be a powerful statement of support – that it understands the situation and welcomes people who need flee because of their s*xuality or gender expression.

An official Canadian government document states:

Canada has a proud history of providing protection to and helping to resettle the world’s most vulnerable groups. That includes those in the Two-Spirit, le***an, gay, bis*xual, transgender, q***r, inters*x, and additional s*xually and gender diverse community.

Theirs is a model worth following.

There’s a growing gap between countries advancing LGBTQ+ rights, and those going backwards

Source: Buzz Daily Updates

23/05/2023

We are facing a mental health crisis. Teenagers and young adults are more depressed, suicidal, anxious and lonely than ever before.

Depression rates among teens have been increasing since the early 2000s. A 2018 national survey found that 13.3 per cent of U.S. adolescents experienced a major depressive episode in the last year.

But it’s not just teens — young adults are suffering too. A 2016 international survey of university counselling centres revealed 50 per cent of university students sought help for feelings of anxiety and 41 per cent for depression. Su***de rates are also increasing. The number of teenage girls in the U.S. who died by su***de nearly doubled between 2000 and 2015.

The mental health statistics for Canadian youth are similarly grim. In 2003, 24 per cent of Canadians aged 15-30 self-reported that their mental health was either fair or poor (compared to very good or excellent). By 2019, that number had risen to 40 per cent.

The COVID-19 pandemic worsened the mental health of Canadian youths. In 2020, 58 per cent of Canadians aged 15-24 reported fair or poor mental health and nearly one in four hospitalizations for children and youth aged 5-24 were due to mental health conditions.

What has changed in the last decade to explain this rise in poor mental health among youth? Some psychologists point to the recent cultural emphasis on safety as a contributor.

Parental overprotection has been shown to foster unhealthy coping mechanisms in children. (Shutterstock)

Shift in children’s safety

In previous decades, American and Canadian children enjoyed more freedom, even though there were rising crime rates. The crime wave in Canada rose steeply from the 60s through the 80s until it peaked in the early 1990s. Cable TV became widespread during the same period, meaning that news of crimes spread farther and quicker than ever before.

This surge spurred safety initiatives like sharing pictures of missing children on milk cartons and crime shows like America’s Most Wanted. It’s no wonder parents became increasingly fearful and protective.

Crime rates began to come down in the 1990s, but fear among parents remained. This is where the problem of being over cautious begins. The concept of safety started to extend beyond children’s physical safety to emotional and psychological comfort. This denied children experiences they needed to learn and grow.

Parental overprotection has been shown to foster unhealthy coping mechanisms in children. Overprotected children are more likely to both internalize problems (as in anxiety and depression) and externalize them (as in delinquency, defiance or substance abuse).

Some psychologists propose that overprotection can morph into what they call “safetyism,” which teaches kids negative thought patterns similar to those experienced by the anxious and depressed. Safetyism can over-prioritize a young person’s safety to the exclusion of other practical and moral concerns.

It is natural to want to avoid problems, but avoiding things that bring us discomfort can reinforce a belief that we cannot handle certain issues and, over time, make us less capable.

Unhelpful thought patterns

Here are three unhealthy thought patterns to monitor in yourself and your children:

Identify negative filtering. Do not underestimate the positives of experiences like unsupervised play (joy, independence, problem-solving, risk-assessment, resilience) when considering the potential negative consequences.

Be aware of dichotomous thinking. Do not fall into the good or bad trap. There’s a world of possibility between one or the other. Considering people, ideas, places or situations as either good or evil (but never both or somewhere in between) fosters a polarizing “us vs. them” attitude and eliminates nuance.

Recognize emotional reasoning. Feeling “unsafe” (uncomfortable or anxious), does not mean you are actually physically unsafe. If you avoid all stress, you will never learn to overcome stressors or understand your full potential. Avoiding hurdles can make us think we are more weak or fragile than we are.

Avoiding things that bring us discomfort can reinforce a belief that we cannot handle certain issues and, over time, make us less capable. (Shutterstock)

Painting the world as a place with dangers at every turn has created anxious youths who avoid activities they previously would have experimented with. Rising rates of loneliness and anxiety mean some youth are delaying getting a job, driving a car, having s*x, drinking alcohol and dating. Research supports that overprotective parenting (such as “helicopter parenting”) decreases adolescents’ well-being, motivation, independence and ability to deal with problems in a healthy way.

Generational trends show that across all social and economic demographics, American teens are putting off activities they deem “adult” and don’t crave adult freedom as previous generations did.

They spend less time unsupervised by parents because they’re worried about what’s out in the world, and they think they can’t handle it. They don’t date or have s*x because they’re worried about broken hearts, pregnancy and s*xually transmitted infections. They don’t drink alcohol because they’re worried about drunkenly making mistakes and what people will think of them afterwards. They don’t drive because they are happy to rely on their parents for transportation.

While some of these are rational consequences to avoid, they shouldn’t feel so overwhelming as to keep youths from transitioning into adulthood. Broken hearts teach you about what you want in a romantic partner, young people can be taught about safe s*x, alcohol can be drunk in moderate amounts and mistakes are healthy, human and normal. Teens shouldn’t be so afraid of life that they no longer feel excited to live it.

Without opportunities to explore and learn their limits, youths risk internalizing a false sense of helplessness and becoming depressed and anxious.

Helpful thought patterns

Positive thought patterns must be developed within ourselves. That means giving ourselves, our teens and our children the opportunities needed to become independent, resilient and autonomous. And that means embracing negative experiences like frustration, conflict and boredom.

Here are some words of advice:

Mind your mind. Your thoughts are powerful. They dictate how you see the world, others and yourself, so foster positive, rational thought patterns.

Raise your voice. Encourage curiosity and productive disagreement. We will never learn to be open-minded or become well-rounded people if we do not challenge our own beliefs, listen to others’ perspectives and recognize our potential to be wrong. Every aspect of our lives, including our relationships and jobs, depends on our ability to argue in an effective, respectful and productive way without becoming overemotional.

Open your heart. Try to give others the benefit of the doubt because most people do not intend to do harm. Do not let fear dictate your thoughts and actions.

Trust yourself. Life will always throw curve balls and there will not always be an authority to defer to. Life is not safe or risk-free. The best protection is the knowledge that you can handle life’s challenges.

Over-emphasis on safety means kids are becoming more anxious and less resilient

Source: Buzz Daily Updates

23/05/2023

I first realized the usefulness of literary theory to the issue of hiring discrimination when I came across an article about a permanent resident struggling to find employment in architecture, her field of expertise, in Canada.

Employment counsellors from a government-funded newcomer program suggested the resident should shave foreign experience off her resume so she wouldn’t appear overqualified to recruiters.

Despite policy and labour law changes, Canadian-specific work experience is still a barrier for many newcomers struggling to find employment in Canada. Beyond finding a job in the first place, there is also an increasing wage gap between Canadians and immigrants with the same level of education and work experience.

While many regard these issues as a matter of social policy, we are also dealing with a cultural, aesthetic problem. As a researcher in comparative literature, I believe literary theory can offer unique insight into the hiring process.

In particular, literary theory can help us understand how managers actually read resumes and why they prioritize certain types of experience over others. Understanding forms of unconscious bias can help us understand current hiring prejudices and, ideally, help us move past and overcome them.

Relying on rhetorical devices

The act of evaluating resumes is a reading exercise, and as such, it is bound to the conventions of literary genres. Literary theory can help us understand, for example, why hiring managers often succumb to a form of unconscious bias known as affinity bias by seeking out familiarity in resumes.

Two types of rhetorical devices — logos and mythos — are especially useful for understanding the resume reviewing process.

Mythos relies on external authority figures to provide knowledge, while logos requires the reader to process the information by themselves. The act of name-dropping is an example of mythos, while academic jargon is an example of logos.

A headline reading “Canada’s Trump” about a Conservative Party candidate (mythos) is much easier to grasp than an academic paper explaining how Conservative politicians have implemented “brand repositioning” strategies (logos) in a way similar to Donald Trump.

Mythos serves as a shortcut: what we already know helps us understand what we don’t know. Evaluating a resume is meant to be an exercise in thinking about a candidate and yet resumes listing well-known companies — Apple, BMW, Colgate — are meant to be read quickly, without much thought.

Forbes recommends placing company names first in a resume, revealing that mythos, or familiarity, is valued by hiring managers.

This Google advertisement chronicles a newcomer’s difficulty in finding a job with their prior experience.

Google’s recent advertisement promoting its work certifications similarly show that immigrants need recognizable, familiar experience — not necessarily local.

Yet global disparities in technological resources mean not all companies can be verified as trustworthy names. In cases like this, what happens to resumes that don’t have experience that can be pulled up online? The short answer is they may be deemed unverifiable or untrustworthy.

Hiring prejudice is nothing new

The barriers that certain groups of people — including women, people of colour, q***r and trans folks, and economically disadvantaged groups — face at work has historical precedents.

A photo of George Sand taken by French photographer Gaspard-Félix Tournachon in 1864. (Galerie Contemporaine)

In the early 1840s, a young Marx was reading French writer George Sand, a rare female voice in the literary profession and an easy target of s*xism.

Her 1841 socialist novel, Le Compagnon du tour de France, parodied employers who rejected bohemian young men with fragmented work experience.

The novel told the story about a clash between traditional employers and their values, and a new class of nomadic young workers that emerged during that decade’s rural exodus.

One employer, Mr. Huguenin, is only interested in hiring familiar young men. In one scene, he asks a headhunter: “You must have companions of the Tour of France, children of the Temple, sorcerers, libertines, the off-scourings of the highways?”

Like newcomers to Canada, Sand’s nomadic workers faced prejudice because they lacked social history, not employment history. At a time when technological progress had not yet fostered a cohesive national identity in France, prejudice against workers in the 1840s had to do with their unfamiliar origins within, not outside, France.

Do we share Mr. Huguenin’s fears when we expect Canadian experience from newcomers? Could the same type of prejudice be threatening Canadians?

Trust is the solution

The fact that work experience must be recognized or certified is symptomatic of a larger crisis in trust — a crisis that has been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. We have not come a long way from Sand’s time: her contemporaries may have sometimes believed in “sorcerers, libertines, the off-scourings of the highways,” but we still believe people can trick us.

By using literary theory to understand how rhetorical strategies like mythos and logos can shape the hiring process, we can gain insight into why some types of discrimination still persist — and how we can overcome them.

The solution to the trust crisis and hiring discrimination is slowing down and taking the time to truly understand an applicant’s resume. Practically speaking, employers should use unfamiliar work experiences as an invitation to poke further and discover a new culture or perspective. It is only superficially that work experiences from other countries may be seen as nontransferable to Canada.

Recently, we have been boasting about how the Canadian dream is overtaking its American counterpart. But we should not imitate our neighbour to the south: the construction of any national myth is bound to be exclusionary.

Instead, what we need is a new myth, according to which all work experiences are relevant and valid experiences. No one should have to toil and labour for years before meriting trust. If employers considered resumes a few minutes longer and did their research thoroughly, we could genuinely break experience-related barriers into the workforce.

The power of language: How rhetoric awareness can combat hiring bias and discrimination

Source: Buzz Daily Updates

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