The charitable organisation, Rosies, has volunteers bringing together the disadvantaged, the lonely and those living on the streets. Rosies provides comfort, meals and a cuppa.

Our front cover photo shows the small group near the Caboolture Railway Station on a Friday night at James St and Mathew St (Map 427 G4). The van is specially equipped for tea and coffee, along with snacks. Conversation and a chat are designed to bring a quiet social climate; perhaps this van is making advance community use of this proposed community site.

This group is convened by Peter and Robyn Ryan, the parents of Mark Ryan, the local Labor member of State Parliament for Morayfield. Peter and Robyn started this local Rosies group ten years ago, making this a special anniversary year.
Even with his official duties as Assistant Minister of State, assisting the Premier, Mark often attends these groups, helping people with considered chat and staying in tune.

Peter has been a senior executive in the Queensland State Government and Robyn has been an assistant planner in the planning department of the Moreton Shire and former Caboolture Shire. While 33 year old Mark is known for his parliamentary work, his 30 year old brother, Gerard, is a social worker with a varied career of ‘helping’ in Queensland and Melbourne, with eight months in Nauru and twelve months in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Peter, Robyn, Mark and the owner of Pocket Books, Gerry Clarke, are in the group photo. (Yes, another Gerard.) Gerry is also the chair of the Glasshouse-Beerwah LNP branch. The work of Rosies and the plight of the homeless is of concern to all.

The Rosies organisation has many local bands of volunteers with vans and willing hands, through many parts of the nation and in other lands. The Queensland division is run from Iona College at Wynnum by Andrew Obrien, phone 3396 4267 & 0437 005 200 and PO Box 908 Wynnum Q 4178.

The Oblates 200 years

Rosies was established by the Catholic religious order of priests called the “Missionary Oblates Mary Immaculate”. This order, started by St Eugene de Mazenod in 1816, celebrates the 200th year anniversary of its founding in the south of France. The Oblates have 40,000 priests worldwide. Locally, they run the Iona College at Wynnum and St Eugene School and Parish at Burpengary (Map 464 C4).

Rosies mission is to help the 20,000 Queenslanders who are homeless tonight. Almost half are women and over forty per cent are aged 25 and under. Women are particularly impacted and are often the ‘hidden’ homeless. There are also many teens, some are lucky enough to ‘couch surf’ a few nights a week.

Men, who can be equally as confused, sometimes with destructive patterns, are more likely to sleep without shelter.
Rosies is here to help with friendship, support and connection. A simple cuppa, a bite to eat and a chat can bring an amazing change within people. Much of the work done comes from donations.

Being a Christian group, this prayer brings focus to the task:
‘O Jesus, make our hearts so human, that others may feel at home with us; so like yours, that others may feel at home with you; so forgetful of self, that we might simply become the place where you and they meet; in the power of your love and the joy of your friendship. Amen’

What Causes Homelessness

A few years ago, our Pocket Books office employed a lady in her mid twenties. She had been to India for a year or so and had seen the poverty and starvation. She recounted sharing a bread roll with a girl who had not eaten that day. She said to me that to be on the streets in Australia, you really had to be subject to a whole series of unfortunate mistakes, but she said this could still easily happen.

The ‘series of mistakes’ are often built into our Australian system. Many could be avoided and many adjustments could be made to law and policy. Jesus says ‘the poor will always be with us’. That is why he emphasised that policy and law must work at least equally for the poor, and not against the poor.

The hitch-hiker

For instance, hitch-hiking for a lift is still illegal in Queensland. So a poor destitute person asking for a lift from passing vehicles on a Queensland road, can be hauled off to court and fined hundreds of dollars.

Early in 2015, at three in the morning, my wife and I had set out driving from Peachester to just past Goondiwindi. At Cedarton my wife noticed a chap sitting in distress, beside the road. He had walked from Caboolture to Beerwah, where he could not get the help he thought would be there. Then from Beerwah to Cedarton, with aim of walking to Yarraman to his father’s house. He did not hitch-hike because that is illegal (he had obviously had trouble with this law before).

We chose, as our own decision, to pick him up and drop him at Yarraman. Allow hitching; it is the driver’s choice to stop. Remove this law which hurts the homeless.

Homeless after a wage drop

Rosies had in their autumn newsletter, a story of a family made homeless when the father lost his job and obtained one at about half the previous wage. Of course, the home payments started to suffer, until the bank took over and evicted the family, selling for what they could to cover the mortgage.

The question is: Should homes have to be so expensive that the family budget is nearly always under stress to meet the mortgage?

In the 1970’s, I used to sell real estate with my father’s family firm of C C Clarke & Sons in Kew, Melbourne. Many working class homes in Kew would sell for about $10,000 in 1970; these are the single fronted homes on 6 or 7m frontages. These same homes fetch $1.5 million on the 2016 market. That is 150 times the price, in just half a lifetime. In 1970, a factory wage might be $50 per week. If dad worked fulltime, and mum part-time, bank payments of $30 a week could be met, with the aim of paying off the mortgage.

Today’s factory wage, so long as the work is here and not in China, is about $900 a week – only 18 times that of 1970. Not 150 times like the increase in home prices.

Of course, today, the minimum salary people in our society cannot really hope to buy in prestige inner suburbs and hence settle for the outer suburbs. In property economics, there is a theory called the Ricardo Principle, which says inner city real estate rises in line with the cost of transport reaching from the far-flung suburbs to get to the central city. This principle, when applied to Australia, should lead to about a half-a-per-cent rise annually for inner city homes, plus whatever the government-promoted inflation is, so long as the outer areas are still expanding.

The rises have been at an average of 11.25 per cent per year, compound, over the 47 years. (This is about 4 times the rate of inflation, year in and year out.)

So, there must be other forces playing on the property market. The main other force is the banks aim of ensuring rising prices so that mortgages can be bigger. The word mortgage comes from two Latin words – Mort for death, and Gage for chained. Some pre-Christ religious groups believed that those ‘shown favour on Earth are the chosen for favour in heaven’.

Of course, Jesus, whom the Oblates follow, opened the door of heaven to everyone of good character, regardless of wealth; even for the poor on the street. While the Roman influenced Gospels, with the Pivo family editing, talk about a non-existent midnight meeting of Rabbi hierarchy calling for the death of Christ, the more likely reason for the Roman crucifixion was that Jesus upset ‘the money changers’ by expelling them from the Temple!

Some Puritan groups were virtually expelled from England in the early 1500’s for re-installing the ‘favoured in heaven’ theory. These exiles went to the new land, America, and set up the Banks, charging interest 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Keeping people in debt has been their stock-in-trade ever since. These days, the main way people are released from debt is to sell the family home on to somebody else who takes an even bigger debt.

Unfortunately local councils try to cash-in on these massively higher ‘values’ which they realise the banks will finance with even bigger mortgages. Councils introduce regulations about lot sizes, about having to have separate work districts instead of easy to run home businesses, about paying infrastructure taxes to pay for what should be ordinary council duties. So land prices must jump an extra $50,000 per lot.

So land is about $160,000 a block on the outskirts of Caboolture, instead of around $70,000, if the basic Ricardo principle, with government inflation, had been followed. The Federal Government also has an inflation ‘target rate’ of 2 to 3% annually. So they are directly responsible for about a quarter of our 11.25% annual rise.

We then have land developers, claiming to ensure continuing high values introduce covenants on land; such things as you must build with 26° pitch roof, you must build at least a 200 sq metres brick-veneer home with 40 sq m of garage, must not have a front fence (stopping you from growing vegies in the front garden). Suddenly, the house is $250,000. So house and land is $410,000 almost, as a minimum.

Mind, the Queensland building code says a 60 sq m timber home with a single garage at 2.8m x 5.5m is adequate!! Yes, about $80,000 of building, or only around $50,000 if you build the timber sections yourself, with a home hammer and saw and then erect it on the weekends using a trailer – on about a $70,000 lot of land. But you wouldn’t have a huge mortgage then, would you? That would not suit the banks.

However, if you lost your well-paying job and had to settle for a lesser-paying job, you would not be losing your home.
Don’t think the banks and government can keep prices artificially high. Roma had stable land, then a gas boom taking prices to $300,000 a home, now to a slump where the same homes are around $100,000.

What to do if prices fall and income falls.

If you are in a home that drops in value below your big mortgage, and have a drop of income, take all measures to try to stay in the home. Believe it or not, if you walk away from the home by mailing the keys to the bank as happens in the USA, in Australia you still owe the mortgage!!

Remember, that living in part of the home is better than living in no home and on the street. Carefully look around the home, and let out half the rooms. See if the garage can be re-jigged a bit to let as a bungalow. This might be slightly illegal under council law and possibly tax law, but we are talking about being on the street or being in part of your home. Make sure the payments are made and resolve to eventually pay out the mortgage.

Stop smoking, stop drinking alcohol, take coffee in a thermos-flask. Continue spending say just $2 on lotto - after all, your chances of winning are marginally increased from nil, to just above nil, if you have a ticket!

In five years, government-conspired inflation (governments make inflation, not individuals) will take your wage and income up sufficiently so that you will not need the room renters. But, at least, you will have your home. If a government were serious about housing pricing, it would abolish infrastructure taxes, which simply make private mortgages bigger, making councils rely on annual rates and keeping budgets within this revenue.

Government would also say that interest is just the service price of debt, thus including interest within the goods & services tax (GST) on new loans. (This should have led to a reduction in other taxes.) Then home prices would rise in line with inflation for replacement value and a small Ricardo principle; this would be about one quarter of the current rate of rise. People would be much more inclined to pay the mortgage over a number of years, rather than saying the next buyer will take a bigger mortgage just to pay the existing mortgage out. Our children could then afford a home.

Starting Out

If you are in your late teens or early twenties starting out on a home quest, simply buy a cheap block without covenants, past Wamuran or even past Kilcoy, build a 60 sq m home and run a tradie business from the garage. Have solar power with batteries and do not hook up to the grid; use 12 volt for lights and many items like your TV, fridge and kettle, with a small inverter for things that really need it. Have tank water with raised squat tanks just below the gutter and yet above the home’s water use points. Have a septic system, not sewerage and not a sewerage-plant. Your council rates will be much cheaper than a ‘serviced’ block. I bought my first house when I was 18, in 1969. I wish I had never sold it, but when one moves one does sell; so long as keeping in the market is achieved, one keeps a roof.

Transport

You may need one car. But the second transport could be a solar powered electric bicycle or tricycle for transport. When the LNP was in in opposition, I managed to get a motion through the LNP State Convention, with about 400 of the 600 delegates voting yes, saying that we should be able to have up to 2,000-watt electric motors on bicycles or tricycles. I showed them 500-watt bicycles from Canada with solar cells shaped into the wheels.

Labor’s Anna Bligh’s response, was to make a law saying skateboarders are not permitted to go over 15 km/hr – a stupid law unnecessarily controlling teens (after all they are subject to normal 60km, and less, road law anyway). Not to be outdone, the later LNP transport minister, refused to allow 2,000 or even 1,000-watt electric motors and made a law that 250-watt motors could only operate in a ‘power-assist’ mode. So both parties worked against environmentally-friendly personal transport. Motors at half the power of your kitchen mix-master, at 200 and 250-watts, are so slow that almost no-one uses these bikes.

Probably – just a dream

Just maybe, both political parties will work together, and with groups like Rosies, to change laws, to reduce the costs of owning a home, especially in new ‘green fields’ subdivisions. Then we will reduce the numbers of homeless on the streets.
Kind regards,

Gerry Clarke, B.PED

Owner Pocket Books

By the way that B.PED thingo is my university degree called Bachelor of Property Economics and Development; although, of course, ‘nothing can be relied upon, etc.’