Is this not a perfect image of how times are changing in Australia?
After 42 years, Holden will stop producing its iconic Commodore model from 2020. It's gone from holding the title of Australia's best-selling car for 15 consecutive years, to the scrapheap of automotive history - with Holden instead focusing on what the kids of today want, SUVs and utes.
It's a sign that nostalgia and cries of "un-Australian!" can't stand in the way of market forces. The Reserve Bank and the Morrison government learned that when the latest productivity numbers showed we're going backwards, largely because businesses haven't been investing as much in innovation and development. They want wages to rise, but are critical of the caution being shown by the business community's response to a languishing economy.
The latest update is an urging from the RBA's Philip Lowe to business and government to lower their expectations on investment returns and start spending, dammit. And we're back to the tug-of-war between RBA and government on who should be doing what to stimulate the economy.
For his side, Dr Lowe went on-record yesterday saying that consumer spending will increase soon, despite very weak household consumption figures for the September quarter. Let's hope he's right, especially with UBS predicting we've a snowball-in-hell's chance of the Morrison government engaging in any meaningful stimulus activity this side of Spring 2020.
Just as Scott Morrison is fully in support of volunteers making up the front lines of Australia's response to the current bush fire crisis, so too is the government apparently keen for Australian workers and consumers to help themselves.
More land released in Sydney as prices hit the nos
Landcom has released 160 hectares of brownfield land in Glenfield, in Sydney's south-west this week. That's 3500 new home lots being added to the city's western growth corridor. It'll be rezoned by 2021, after which Landcom will lodge a development application.
Back to the Commodore analogy, and more evidence of the supercharging of house prices in our major cities. ABS numbers show Australian property prices posted the biggest gain since 2016 in the September quarter, led by Sydney and Melbourne which both rose 3.6 per cent over the period.
This has sparked talk that the incoming First Home Buyers Deposit Scheme, due to start January 1 2020, won't be enough to improve affordability in Sydney and Melbourne. Even on a 5 per cent deposit, hundreds of dollars are being added every week to the minimum amount a Deposit Scheme applicant will need to have saved in order to be eligible.
The advice from this bloke is, expect prices of existing homes to go nuts in 2020. He says while prices are likely to wallow or even drop in high-rise, the cost of detached houses in these markets will continue to escalate rapidly.