The Sydney Housing Crisis

vivianimbriotis | Dec. 20, 2023, 5:44 p.m.

Wikipedia lies to you.

For instance, it will tell you, if you ask, that the Sydney Harbor Bridge was built after World War One, but everyone who lives here knows the truth. The bridge has always been there. It was there before Sydney was settled. Probably it was there before the First Nations people migrated across the sea ice, though of course it is hard to be sure. It is possible they made it, in fact, though impossible to know.

How it was made is also a mystery. Get close enough and you’ll realize that the nuts and bolts – each as big as your head! – are not in fact separate pieces. The whole structure is one fused chunk of metal. Maybe it was cold welded together in the vacuum of space. Maybe it came out of the magma in this shape. Wikipedia is silent on this topic.

What we do know is that unless it is sated, the bridge will extract a toll from us. Many tourists think the tolls are the government’s idea, but the state treasury doesn’t see a cent of them. No one knows where the money goes. The bridge used to have toll booths, and whenever no one was looking the $2 coins would vanish. Now the tolls are electronic, but if you go now and look at your bank account, you’ll see the bank details of the transfer are strange. If you reload the webpage, the number will be different every time. It will always be a prime. If you try to write it down, when you're done you'll never have written down digits, always some strange markings that you don't recognize. Do you?

Those aren’t the only tolls the bridge demands, of course. Collisions. Leaps from high places. Pedestrians struck. Why do we put up with this? Because of what happens when the tolls are not paid. First the drinking water changes taste. And then the housing prices go up.

Many people attribute the rising housing prices in Sydney to Liberal-National policies, because things started getting bad after the Labour Keneally government was ousted by the O’Farrell coalition in 2011. But that’s not true. That’s another lie. The infection point happened a year earlier, in 2010. So what did Kristina Keneally do?

Well, lets examine who she is to start. American-born, life long democrat. Married to the ex-Mayor of Botany Bay. Moved here with him, joined the labor party. Her blood runs red (or, confusingly, blue, if she’s in America). But they key thing to note is that she was not from here, and probably looked the Harbour Bridge up on Wikipedia. She probably though it was build soon after World War One. And she probably instituted careful traffic controls.

The mid-level civil servants know better than to compute statistics on the frequency of crashes on the Bridge, but my money is that they have been going down steadily since 2010. Since an American interfered in the ecosystem. And every year, the bridge is getting angrier. It charges us more in tolls. I can feel it when I walk over it. You can see it on realestate dot com.

Keneally walked away from Omelas. God help us all.