State of the Property Market

[china]

Quite true.

The other thing that is becoming insidious in our Country is the " dead wood" syndrome.

This is where there are folk working within teams/organisations who everyone knows is/are useless, clock punching and simply doing as little as possible as often as possible.

And they basically can't be sacked.

Any highly Unionised industry will be rife with it.

But, they will get theirs eventually hopefully.

When I worked in the Health industry, I saw loads of dead wood, and they drag down the morale of the really good staff.

Some of the dead wood was in the higher ranks too...sponging off the taxpayer's gravy train.

I have no probs with folks earning lots of money - I want to earn lots of money too - but we should have to actually work and earn it if we are employed to do that.

Dead wood is very prevalent in the public sector, often protected by unions and important bureaucrats who encourage proliferation of dead wood, even if only to protect their own positions.

Anyone who tries to be innovative or encourage efficiency in the public sector be it in the public hospital or the local railway station is mown down or ostracised.

Public hospitals have long resisted any meaningful outside audits of efficiency in the name of so called patient safety. If the staff work continuously for any longer than 5 minutes, they will be fatigued and compromise patient care. And other similar rubbish which the public at large believes in.

Any meaningful improvement in public hospital systems will require an absolute change in culture led by private sector CEOs.

 

[devank]

And allow these silly Priests to get married and/or get a root so they might leave the kids alone.

Wholeheartedly agree

 

[TMNT]

going to go against trends but Ihave no problem with the brain surgeons, succesfful business owners earning gazillions,

but what I have seen over the past 5-10 years is that what I feel the majority of people are overpaid, youve got white collar workers, IT, some accountants pulling in $100k which I think is absolutely ludicrious, whilst their sense of entitlement has gone out of the roof when the actual work they do is no more then data entry or attend meetings to discuss stuff that they deem and is labelled as important but in reality isnt as


its also the attitude along with the lazyiness that goes with it, the average aussie is quite lazy (yes yes yes generalisation), a very oversensed sense of entitlement, I know friends who are in IT that they themselves have said they do no overtime, and they pretty much do data entry, some of these guys are crying poor and think their employer is ripping them off at $800 per day

think of those in hospitliaty, yes the skills required are far less, but full time hospitality its circa 45k

 

[devank]

TMNT... It all comes down to 'demand & supply'

I don't think IT people get paid as much as they used to.

 

[eggnog]

Love the generalisation on occupations. IT for example is extremely broad just like our health care professions. Yes you get people earning 100k's but also get those earning 40k depending on roles which can vary from non-skilled data entry types to computer help desks to highly skilled roles that are very specialised and in my view commands a very high salary to match. case in point, both my parents I would say work in IT as consultants and earn high incomes. I would say their salaries are justified considering their projects which include state of the art security systems for defence organisations like retinal scan, face scans, or programming the whole computer systems which a lot of universities in Australia rely on or the softwares and programs that run commercial airlines, spaceshuttles, satelites and missiles. To me I think such kind of IT jobs demand such high salaries.

 

[redwing]

Thirdly, I recently had a passing idea of building a deck on top of my free standing garage. I googled "decks + my suburb". I rang the top three search results. All three builders had answering machines with voicemail. I left messages on all three and none have responded. Must be a lot of employment going on if small business owners who have paid good money for their websites to rank highly on google search fail to respond to new business enquiries.

This type of thing?

 

[china]

Yes redwing. Except that my garage is located about 15m from the house and is an entirely detached/stand-alone structure. Have given up on this idea now as I have only managed to get one quote which roughly came in at 45k - all inclusive.

 

[chilliblue]

Good point BV. There is no point cutting wage incentive for medical personnel as it does not help the health system.

When the surgeon gets paid $2k for 20 mins work in fixing a cataract, you can be sure he wants to fix as many cataracts as he can. He will work as many hours as he possibly can. This is the best explanation as to why doctors work long hours. However, this leads to a productive health system which can only be good the community and patients.

What really wastes money in the health system is that other staff, often unionised, are on fixed wages and want to go as slow as possible leading to massive inefficiencies and non-productivity. This is what leads to massive public hospital waiting lists and a bottomless pit of wasted health dollars.

Health systems where both doctors and other staff are all on fixed wages are the most non-productive and inefficient of all. Fee per service for the doctor combined with user pays systems are the best health systems of all.

Being predominately focused in health, in NSW the money is wasted is the numerous levels of administration to run the system.

My private medical clients are able to negotiate their contracts for medical equipment and supplies and will often save 40-60% each and every time on what my public medical clients pay. We are talking contracts worth millions.

The public need to tender with fixed companies and those companies know that they do not need to negotiate their prices.

Then you look at their administration and management structure and the sheer number of people being paid over $300K for general administration and management is staggering.

Add to the fact that retail leases within the hospitals are paying pittances to the system and you can easily see where the money is being wasted.

 

[china]

Being predominately focused in health, in NSW the money is wasted is the numerous levels of administration to run the system.

My private medical clients are able to negotiate their contracts for medical equipment and supplies and will often save 40-60% each and every time on what my public medical clients pay. We are talking contracts worth millions.

The public need to tender with fixed companies and those companies know that they do not need to negotiate their prices.

Then you look at their administration and management structure and the sheer number of people being paid over $300K for general administration and management is staggering.

Add to the fact that retail leases within the hospitals are paying pittances to the system and you can easily see where the money is being wasted.

Very valid point. 20 years ago, the ratio of doctors to administrators in a hospital was 3 to 1. Now in 2014 the ratio has become 1 to 3.

Public health systems are a sad monument of wastage of taxpayer funds. They should be treated like Holden or Qantas. No more government bailouts. Bring on user pays and corporate governance.

 

[chausta]

I agree with TMNT, we will go into a slow phase where productivity need to be increased,income falling from ridiculous income.
Australia just needs to be more productive to be able to compete in the global economy.

 

[MTR]

Our Au$ needs to fall back further.

Who knows what will happen in 6 months time, certainly the last two years we have seen incredible growth in the property market in various capital cities around Australia. I still believe the market will continue to rise in particular Syd (NSW).

The slow down in the economy will perhaps provide some good buying opportunities, the main factor to consider when buying now is that you have a secure job, especially if the s..t hits the fan. I personally will just continue to source properties where I can add value/develop etc. and just manage the risk, buy and sell and hold and reduce debt along the way.

MTR

 

[Timkot]

The reason government agencies like hospital cost so much is the actual public. As they say, if they did not have to deal with the public everything would work well.

The issue is that people want far more accountability with government agencies and accountability means more levels of supervision etc, hence it means a lot more money etc. If people were willing to accept less accountability with a small increase in "corruption' that would occur then the money savings would be substantial, but unfortunately people don't want that.

Its like the old story of the local policeman in the old days kicking a child up the butt, everyone says it was a good thing, but of course most of those same people think its ok for the copper to kick some else's kid up the A**** but not theirs.