Migrants taking our jobs

[pmccarthy]

Today's paper tells me that the shortage of labour in Oz, or the near-full employment, can be entirely accounted for by the lack of immigration over the Covid period. So the opposite must also be true. When we have unemployment, as is often the case, the cause must be excessive immigration. They really were stealing our jobs!

[facthunter]

Today's Paper Tells me........ Is Views, not news.   Nev

[Yenn]

Surely if we have more immigrants we will have greater need for more immigrants to build the houses we don't have enough of now.

We seem to have plenty of people pushing paper from one side of the desk to the other, or similar things with computers. The real shortage is of people who produce something and we have not been training theming,

[facthunter]

We have a duty to train our own and not pinch people from other countries to  make up for our deficit. It's used to drive wages DOWN. Nev

[spacesailor]

If it takes four immigrants to build a house.

Were do they live afterwards? .

In the 50s & 60s poms were put into ' concentration type ' accomandation. 

Yet a lot of my Indian neabours have got mortages , that most Aussie,s can,t get.

Makes you wonder how they get their benefits .

spacesailor

 

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

5 hours ago, facthunter said:

We have a duty to train our own and not pinch people from other countries to  make up for our deficit. It's used to drive wages DOWN. Nev

I think those unskilled visas (405s??) are designed to keep unksilled wages down, but importing professionals is more about having other contriues pay for the cost of training. In the 80s, 90s, and biughties, by the way, there was a huge brain drain of professional Aussies in software, engineering, finance, and the like to Europe and the USA - so Australia for a long time was paying for the training of other countries' gain, but it did not have an effect of reducing the salaries for those professions in those countries. Certainly, in the capital cities of many countries, Aussie accents in offices were as prevalent as they were in pubs.

 

3 hours ago, spacesailor said:

Makes you wonder how they get their benefits .

I can't speak for your neighbours, but my expereince has been that "handouts" don't get them mortgages. There have been myths propagated about what migrants get. Migrants get nothing! Refugees get assistance if they finaly get to the shores, but nothing near enough to go an buy a house. Every new immigrant/Aussie I have known have been able to afford houses using the same methods as Aussies do...  There have been instances of immigrant groups abusing the system - such as the Turks who used to set up fake car accidents and claim compensation for Whiplash, etc. but these "strategies" were I guess innovation used in a bad way, and not because they were some sort of "benefit" exclsuively available to immigrants.

[Yenn]

Those poms who were put into concentration type accomodation were thankful for that accomodation and it was in some cases better than they had come from. I know because I was one of them. It allowed us to get  a job, save and get out into the real Australia. That accomodation was not like the cold and bleak homes of pommie land.

[pmccarthy]

I went to school with New Australians from Bonegilla. Those kids seemed pretty happy.

[old man emu]

8 hours ago, Yenn said:

concentration type accommodation

A lot of those places were former army camps. But don't forget that in the post-war years, the Poms were living in pre-fabs which were not any better than the Nissan huts of the migrant hostels in Australia. At the same time, Aussies of the same age as the migrants were also living in shared boarding house type accommodation because they could not get the materials to build a house. My parents didn't get into their 2-bedroom fibro house until 1950, after saving up to buy the block of land during the late 40's.

 

What was common amongst non-English migrants was a cooperative spirit. Two or three families would buy one house and all would live in it, pay it off then buy the second. Do the same and then do it a third time. That didn't exist with Aussies, or British.

 

Everyone then was happy to have an 8 to 10 square house. There were no MacMansions that fill the streets of new subdivision. And the reason people were happy was that they were reasonably free or debt worry.

[pmccarthy]

My parents married in 1951 and I came along next year. We lived in a 'temporary dwelling' until my dad built a house. Then the 'temporary dwelling' became the one- car garage.

[red750]

My dad bought an unfinished house (internal plaster not completed on some rooms), and moved in with 6 kids. 1956 in Deniliquin. Wouldn't be permitted today. Later, 1970's, bought a house in Melbourne and had it moved to a farm block out of Benalla. Kids had all flown the nest by then.

[onetrack]

My Dad built a house entirely by himself, between 1948 and 1951, on farmland he'd owned since 1934, constructing it out of concrete bricks that he made with a small (1-brick) hand-operated brick mold. You struggled to get bricks in the late 1940's.

We moved in (Dad, Mum and 3 boys) in 1951, and despite the fact we were only 11 miles out of the centre of Perth, we had no electricity or mains water. Fortunately we had a superb underground water supply with oodles of beautiful water at 16 feet.

We all lived there until 1962, when Dad sold the farm, which he'd run a dairy on, between 1951 and 1957. However, milk quotas ruined any chance of making money from dairying, so Dad chucked it in 1957, and went back to house painting.

We still didn't have electricity on the farm when we moved out in 1962 - and moving into an Eastern Perth suburb with mains water and power and regular buses and trains to the city, was heaven for Mum.

[old man emu]

In the late '40s you went from this   to this

 

Then you got this That looks like reclaimed timber and bricks.  On to this 

 

Until you finally got this  and finally it all came together by about 1953 to be this 

[onetrack]

And all clad in the greatest advance and the finest product in building materials for the day - asbestos sheeting!  

[facthunter]

Fibro-cement. Easily cracked by a cricket ball. Wooden weatherboards were common usually of milled hardwood. Some baltic pine was used just after the war to fill a shortage.  Masonite for interior walls.  Nev

[Old Koreelah]

Like many of our parents’ generation, we built our own (if we hadn’t, we’d still be paying off a poor compromise of a house.)

Is that option even available to today’s young couples?

[old man emu]

On 24/09/2022 at 10:33 AM, onetrack said:

And all clad in the greatest advance and the finest product in building materials for the day - asbestos sheeting!  

It got its name "fibro" by not mentioning what the "fibre" in "fibre-cement" actually was.

 

1 hour ago, Old Koreelah said:

Like many of our parents’ generation, we built our own (if we hadn’t, we’d still be paying off a poor compromise of a house.)

Is that option even available to today’s young couples?

Yes ....But

First you have to complete and owner/builder's course https://www.fairtrading.nsw.gov.au/housing-and-property/building-and-renovating/becoming-an-owner-builder

Then you have to have the money to pay for application fees, various insurances etc, etc

After that, you need to money to pay for site preparation and materials

All the while, you need the money to house and feed yourself.

 

If you look into getting a house built in one of our metropolitan areas, you will find that the cost of erecting a typical house on a block of land is about $250,000. It's the price of the land that is the killer. That's what takes a new house over the $1 million mark.

[Bruce Tuncks]

It was a great pity that it became known as "Asbestos" because fibro is not dangerous. For many years, I thought that if you heated fibro, as in a fire, you would liberate the raw fibers. This turned out to be untrue. It's a safe material, given a bad name by the semi-educated. The raw fibers are so well bound to the cement that it's a different substance.

Asbestos is a natural mineral and dust contains some. That is, the real stuff.  So don't breathe during a dust storm.

[old man emu]

Put old style fibre-cement into a fire and it can explode. Perhaps that is caused by water on the old stuff turning into steam and building up enough pressure to blow out.

[onetrack]

I can remember as a schoolkid in 1957, after having moved into a newly-built school (all built out of that fabulous asbestos sheeting!), we'd light a fire to burn rubbish (ahhh, the joys of no restrictive rules and regulations), and then throw scraps of asbestos left over from the school build onto the fire, and get our jollies watching them explode with a huge "BANG!"

 

I would hazard a guess it was caused by residual pockets of moisture in the cement in the sheeting that caused the stuff to explode.

 

That school was totally demolished around 2010, because it was deemed an exceptionally dangerous building to work in, thanks to the major levels of asbestos!

 

Edited September 25, 2022 by onetrack

[facthunter]

Big Truck Brake servicing was probably the most intensive exposure I had to asbestos. Used it plenty in housebuilding. Use a special cutter and blunt point nails..  Nev

[Yenn]

We used asbestos for insulation material when I was building chimneys, before the dangers were made known. I used to go home after work, looking like father christmas with an asbestos coated beard. That was up to the seventies, so 50 years later and mu lungs are just about perfect. I also used to cut asbestos pipe in the eighties. I still have fragments of asbestos cloth knocking around. The danger is not necessarily from coming in contact with asbestos, but depends upon your susceptability to it.

I reckon a lot more fuss about it goes on than is logical and in my opinion fibreglass insulation is dangerous, it is definitely more uncomfortable on the skin.

[red750]

The premises where our Men's Shed used to be had signs all over the place warning "Danger! Asbestos in floors and walls."

 

We had to move out as the owners wanted to renovate and use the rooms. They planned to cover the asbestos tiles - floating floor.

[old man emu]

3 hours ago, Yenn said:

in my opinion fibreglass insulation is dangerous,

And after that, carbon fibre.

[octave]

On 22/09/2022 at 5:35 AM, pmccarthy said:

They really were stealing our jobs!

Stealing or out competing?