I'd be interested to know as well. I am looking for a steel pipe with a thread cut into one end to make a monitor stand a bit taller, but I have no idea who to even approach for something like that.

Yes but if it's someone moving up from interstate or a young adult moving out of their parents' home, then it's still one less property available for rent than before, with the same number of renters looking for somewhere to live, which was my point.

There are thousands of people every week moving into QLD from interstate, and far fewer leaving. All those people have to live somewhere, and if they buy up all the rentals that are being sold so they can live in them themselves, where are those renters going to live?

That's the thing - as soon as the interest rates go down to the point where it becomes profitable to rent out a property again, it will open up competition as more landlords are drawn to the market and the additional rentals compete for tenants.

But fixing rents just makes landlords like me want to exit the market completely, which is what I am working towards now. Next year when my tenants' leases are up they will unfortunately have to find somewhere else to live because I just cannot afford to keep subsidising their rent any longer - well over half my salary is going to the bank on top of 100% of the rent they pay me, which is not sustainable for me. I have to sell them on my own terms before I default on my loan repayments and the bank sells the rentals for me.

Most landlords I speak to are in the same boat. The more talk about rent freezes the more of them want to exit the market before they get trapped. And it has already started happening which is why rents continue to go up - the same number of tenants are competing for a smaller and smaller number of rentals, and it's only going to get worse. I think I need to sell now before the next bright spark comes along and says hey let's make it illegal for landlords to sell their rentals...

I think if you're a tenant and you think a rent freeze is a good idea, you're just shooting yourself in the foot. The real issue is the rise in interest rates, because some of that is what's getting passed on to you in the rent increases. Lower the interest rates again and rents will drop. The problem is it's so slow - it has taken this long for the rate increases to get passed on to tenants, so if they lower the rates again it will take just as long for rents to drop. I don't envy anyone renting at the moment, but blaming and penalising landlords when the banks are giving them no choice is misguided at best and will only make the problem worse.

If you haven't read the stuff coming out of the Reserve Bank it's pretty sobering. They are aiming for a certain number of unemployed, homeless people because that's how they plan to keep inflation low. So even the idea of a rent freeze is doing the opposite of what the Reserve Bank is trying to do, which is to get enough people to lose their jobs and homes so that they can't spend as much money, thus lowering inflation. I find it amazing that they are doing that and yet people blame landlords, the ones who actually go to the effort of making a rental available and subsidise some of the rent out of their own income. Talk about aiming at the wrong target.

Not sure but I recently found there are satellites monitoring for hotspots you can look at to see if there are fires nearby: https://firenorth.org.au/nafi3/

Click on "South QLD" in the sidebar then zoom in on the map. It's quite eye opening how many fires are burning across the state at any one time.

It's true that in some Chinese cultures cheating the system is how things are done, but this doesn't apply to other Asian cultures. Japanese people for example are very respectful of others and culturally are much less likely to bend the rules when compared to natural born Australians, so you can't really lump them all into one bucket as there are huge differences between them.

Very few Asians are refugees. A refugee is someone who escapes their homeland because their life is in danger, and is allowed to settle in a new country without meeting the normal requirements for citizenship. International students paying for a plane ticket and going back home a few years later when they're finished studying don't even come close to the definition of refugee. Have you gone through a university campus carpark recently? There are so many Asian students driving BMWs and other expensive cars because their families are rich, and that's why they are able to study abroad. Why would they want to live here when back home their family is powerful and politically connected?

While they are here they pay GST and other taxes just like everyone else. Again, just look at COVID when the annual influx of international students stopped - companies went bust and white Australians lost their jobs because there weren't enough people coming into the country and buying their stuff.

True refugees may well be a drain on society while they get back on their feet, but Asians sure don't count in that. I'd be interested to know where you got the stats showing how many refugees are Asian? I can't find any stats on refugees, only on which countries migrants come from and that says this year the most came from India, followed by China, New Zealand and the UK.

What other cultures would you prefer on our streets instead of Asians? I guess you'd rather we change the law to allow burqas and mandate all food be halal as per Islamic law, so we can get more Muslims in to replace all the Asians? No thanks, I like the fact that whatever country Asian people are from, they are happy to follow the laws we have and not try to change them.

Sydney has many more Asians than Brisbane if that's what you're asking? I don't think many are refugees though, most seem to be international students here to study. That's why you see a lot of younger people but far fewer older people.

As far as people moving here permanently, if you follow what China has done in Hong Kong, it's awful. Those people are welcome here as far as I'm concerned. Most of them would return home in an instant if the Chinese government left and things went back the way they were, so you can't blame them for escaping a bad situation.

There are plenty worse cultures that could be filling up our streets. At least most Asian cultures are generally courteous and encourage you to get a job, work hard, and ultimately pay taxes that benefit us all. They also don't try to change our laws or force us to accept their religious ideas either as some other cultures do. It could be much worse than having Asians here believe me.

It's the ones who don't work and just leech off society that bother me, and most of the ones who do that were born here. (Like the guy that carjacked the taxi the other day, we certainly don't need people like that in our society.)

It certainly is for tenants, you're way better off financially to buy if you can. But that can be difficult for a lot of people, either because they just don't earn enough or because they do earn enough but they don't want to sacrifice their lifestyle today for financial security tomorrow.

I can certainly see both sides of the argument. If you're an introvert and you aren't going to go out drinking all weekend anyway then it makes sense to save that money for your own house, but if you're an extrovert and you'd be depressed if you never went out on weekends, well what's the point of spending years in misery saving for a house that you're never going to spend much time in anyway once you have it?

Yes I'm getting subsidised assets partly funded by other people's labour, and in return I'm providing them with a place to stay they couldn't otherwise afford. I'm not forcing them to rent from me, they are free to live somewhere else if they don't like what I'm offering.

I wouldn't have offered the place to rent if there was no chance of making money off it, why else would I sacrifice my time and money if I wasn't going to get anything in return? That would make no sense. Maybe some people put up a spare room for rent out of the goodness of their hearts, but for the vast majority it's a business. You put in some time and money and you hope to get a payoff at the end of it. Why is that so controversial?

There's no weaselling about it - you rent out a property to get a tenant to help pay off your debt, that's how it works. Are you paying $200+/week from your salary to random people to help them out with their rent? No? What makes you think a landlord would want to do the same?

I don't think you understand how the whole idea of rentals work. It's not some magic supply of free housing, it's ordinary everyday people like you and me who scrimp and save in the hope of getting a long term payoff that makes up for all the sacrifice.

I don't think it sucks to be me, I think it sucks to be a tenant renting at the moment as the supply start to dry up and rents increase beyond what they can afford, thanks to poor government policy inadvertently making renting more expensive than it should be.

I definitely want them, as I'm hoping it will make house prices go up!

I have four rental properties I want to sell because I'm sick of the government interfering even though I try to do the right thing by my tenants (in the 15 years I've had rentals I've never kicked anyone out or taken any bond money, all my tenants left because their job moved or they got married and needed a bigger place). It really annoys me that one arm of the government puts up interest rates to take money out of people's pockets, yet the other arm says no no you can't pass those increases on to tenants, you can't take money out of their pockets! Like make up your mind, either take the money fairly from everyone or take it from nobody! I'm just waiting for the house prices to go up enough that I can break even when I sell (so I can pay the loans off in full) - if I sold today I'd still have a debt of around $100k to pay off - no thanks.

Apparently I'm not alone, a lot of other landlords are also planning to sell in the coming year so it looks like rents are only going to go up as fewer properties are available for rent. So ironic that a policy was hastily brought in to try to limit rising rents but it will end up making the problem worse, but I guess that's normal for government.

It will be nice not to have to subsidise people's rent any more though. At the moment I'm paying around 30% of the rent out of my pocket on top of the rent paid by the tenants in order to meet the bank loan repayments, and that's on top of the loan repayments for my own place (a tiny one-bedroom unit) so the majority of my salary (and rental income) just goes to the bank. That was the deal going into it though so it comes as no surprise, and I wouldn't mind so much except most of my tenants seem to have way more money than I do, driving cars that are less than five years old and all I can afford is a 13 year old ex-taxi. One of my tenants is in the same unit complex as me so we're almost neighbours, and they love getting Uber Eats delivered all the time while I'm instead frequenting Coco's at Annerley to buy all the cheap stuff with expired best-before dates just to save a few bucks.

Maybe once I've sold I should start renting instead, tenants seem to have way more disposable cash than landlords do!

The video is showing as private now. I guess if you could use a YouTube video downloader while it's (I presume) streaming you might be able to keep it and perhaps re-upload it to another channel so it can remain public?

I lived in Yeronga without a car for 10 years. I hardly ever used public transport either (mostly because it was so inconvenient it was a whole day trip if you ever wanted to go anywhere). But I could do it because I was comfortable walking a lot. It was a 10 minute walk each way to get groceries, a 45 minute walk (4 km) to where I worked (so no gym membership needed), and being an introvert I didn't enjoy going out on weekends so that made it easy. The walk home from work was past the shops so I'd just buy a little (at least as much as I could carry) every 2-3 days on the way home from work, so I rarely had to make a specific trip to the shops.

If you're an extrovert and you have to be out in public all the time, the other advice here about living near good public transport connections is wise, but if you're an introvert it's probably beneficial to live within walking distance (or at least a short public transport trip) from where you work, and not too far from some grocery shops. That way food and work is taken care of.

I will admit though, after finally getting a car it's much nicer to be able to pop down to Bunnings to get something and be home again 30 minutes later, instead of having to set aside a whole day for the journey, or order it online and have to wait a week or two for it to arrive. I guess if you can afford it then a taxi or Uber could be another option, but if you do that too much then it won't take long before it's cheaper to own a car.

I ended up buying a cheap ~8 year old ex-taxi hybrid, which only gets driven once or twice a week so uses hardly any fuel (around $200/year) so the overall cost ended up being much less than I expected. It has made me a lot lazier though as I will drive the two minutes to the shops instead of walking for 10, so with WFH also reducing the amount of walking I'm doing I have put on quite a bit of weight (20 kg) so going without a car and having to do so much walking was certainly much better for my physical health.

I think for many people it's fear of the unknown. Once you understand how electricity behaves, you start to instinctively know what's dangerous and what's not. You can clearly see this in YouTube videos on solar, where people explain how their solar systems work. It's pretty clear which presenters know what they're talking about and which ones are just repeating things they've read without truly understanding what's going on. I think once you gain that fundamental insight into what's actually happening, everything else starts to fall into place and it makes a lot more sense, it's a lot less mysterious, and much less intimidating.