The Collapse of Australia's Ponzi Economy
By Paul Collits
Australia’s economy has, as long as we can remember, relied upon mass immigration, including by, but not limited to, Asian students on a visa pathway, to keep the place afloat. It is a Ponzi scheme.
Since we gave up making things, seduced by the false promise of globalisation, and started shipping jobs to cheaper climes, equally seduced by the equally false promise of outsourcing, and since governments of both persuasions have all but outlawed mining and gas production, we are left with importing labour and consumers.
Then along came Covid, the plandemic we had to have, whose entirely unnecessary and profligate policy response has cost us a lazy trillion and which has all but killed the small business engine room, especially retail. Now we have the hangover. Labour shortages. The work-from-home scam. Massive interest rates hikes to tame galloping inflation, and hidden unemployment and under-employment.
Time to call back the migrants!
But the Ponzi migrant economic is collapsing. Literally. Where do all the millions of new and not-so-new migrants live? Most – about ninety per cent – head for the virtually dysfunctional and, during Covid, dystopian cities of Sydney and MelDanistan. n these places, the most common game is “spot the Australian”. As well, many of them live in jerry-built apartments which are falling to the ground, along with the companies that built them. The Canberra bureaucrats who devise these mass immigration “solutions” to our economic problems, which they mostly have created, outsource the implementation of their insane schemes to State governments to make work.
Then the State governments outsource their job to the likes of Nassif. Like Toplace, which turns out not to be living up to its name, to say the very least. Toplace is owned by a now infamous, non-resident called Jean Nassif, who has, perhaps wisely, fled the country.
Administrators have been appointed to the building arm of beleaguered Sydney developer Jean Nassif’s Toplace Group in a collapse that could hit hundreds of apartment buyers and contractors.
Antony Resnick and Suelen McCallum of DVT Group were appointed voluntary administrators of Toplace Pty Ltd on July 7 by lawyers acting for Mr Nassif, who remains overseas and is facing an arrest warrant over fraud allegations.
In June, NSW Police’s Organised Crime Squad issued an arrest warrant for 55-year-old Mr Nassif over allegations of fraud involving a Sydney apartment project developed by Toplace. Mr Nassif’s daughter Ashlyn has already been charged with falsifying documents relating to the pre-sale of apartments at the development in Castle Hill, in Sydney’s north-west.
The appointment of administrators comes as Mr Nassif offloads a prime portfolio of development sites that could reap as much as $250 million, and follows insolvency firm KordaMentha being appointed receivers over a number of Toplace assets on behalf of secured creditors.
Sydney’s very own white shoe brigade. The World Socialist web site (WSWS) weighs in (for once, the left doing its job):
Administrators said on Wednesday that this could be the “biggest collapse in the Australian property market’s history,” with Toplace owing around $200 million to more than 500 creditors. These include subcontractors who have not been paid for their work and buyers who have prepaid for units in uncompleted builds.
… Vicinity apartment owner Patrick Quintal told World Socialist Web Site reporters that the collapse of Toplace means that owners of defective apartments may be liable for the full cost of complying with the rectification orders.
Best in Breed
Best in breed, then. But it isn’t just Toplace.
A 2021 report by the University of New South Wales City Futures Research Centre found that at least one in four Sydney apartment blocks constructed between 2008 and 2017 had some sort of building defect. The figure was likely far higher, the report said, but comprehensive records were not available for all constructions. Of those for which complete data were found, 51 percent had at least one defect, 28 percent had at least three, and 12 percent had more than ten different types of fault.
Oops.
Here is the UniParty system at work:
In an attempt to hose down public concern over those disasters, the then Liberal-National NSW state government installed David Chandler in the new role of Building Commissioner within the Department of Fair Trading. Now, the recently elected Labor government, led by Premier Chris Minns, has established the NSW Building Commission. It will also be headed by Chandler.
An opinion piece by Chandler, published today in the Sydney Morning Herald, downplayed the systemic issues in the construction industry (Emphasis added).
And who should have been Nassif’s point man in Macquarie Street? None other than Michael “everywhere” Photios. The man of whom Graham Richardson once said, nothing happens in New South Wales without his consent. The Rum Corps State became Michael’s personal fiefdom. Richo ended up working for him! The corrupt Gladys Berejiklian once said, unconvincingly, that she wasn’t “Photios’s girl”. After Photios had selected her first cabinet.
Safe to say if Nassif does ever return home, he’ll need all the help he can get – so it’s handy that Toplace has been registered since 2020 as a client of Premier State, the firm run by Liberal moderate powerbroker and lobbying supremo Michael Photios.
Unfortunately, that relationship seems to have aged, and Nassif may have to look elsewhere, with Photios telling CBD he had not worked for Toplace for many years.
Photios the Pest
Be that as it may.
The fact is that Sydney’s developers had a symbiotic relationship with the NSW Liberal Government that Photios controlled. Until recently. Here is how the scam has worked. Australian governments tick the multi-culti box by importing massive numbers of migrants. Big business loves migrants. The Liberal Party loves big business. Where do we put them? Well, we build endless apartment blocks, the ghettos of the twenty-first century. We reward developers with extra floors. They pay their bounty. Brown paper bag money. Then the lobbyists step in and claim their share of the cream off the top.
An exquisite scam. Everyone’s a winner. It is how the modern Australian economy “works”.
The developers get even more floors if they throw in some social housing. Everyone loves social housing. Except, perhaps, the people who get to share the vertical ghettos with the clients of the social housing industrial complex. And guess what? The apartments, especially when built next to railway stations, also tick the climate change/sustainability box. This is called “new urbanism”, a trendy leftie urban planning philosophy that hopes one day to make cars extinct. And which suits the big Liberal and Labor backers who build these modern towers of Babel. And who destroy the fabric of our once great cities.
Terry McCrann has opined on the Melbourne scene:
Melbourne transformed into ‘construction site’ under Premier Andrews.
Construction Wastelands
Not just the Premier State, then. Danny has form, of course, on every last front.
All goes well until the apartments and the companies that build them start falling over.
The new Government in New South Wales has no intention of addressing the systemic corruption of the Ponzi economy.
On June 15, Minns offered property developers – who are generally treated in NSW politics like Middle Eastern bikie gangs, as tabloid punching bags – an extra 30 per cent height on apartment buildings worth more than $75 million, if they subsidise 15 per cent of the homes.
A few days later, the planning department qualified the promise, which it said would apply to buildings within 800 metres of train stations and other transport “hubs” in Sydney.
The property industry was pleasantly stunned. One apartment developer spent $260 million on land in Sydney the day of Minns’ announcement. The lot was suddenly worth more; he was worried the seller would realise. He didn’t.
… Mirvac’s shares rose 7 per cent in one week. Billionaire Harry Triguboff, owner of Meriton, became even richer. Architects began, mentally, redrawing plans upwards.
Just make them higher!
The new Premier clearly understands the Ponzi scheme, and his pathetic role in perpetuating it. Just give it a soupcon of social democracy and all will be well. The 1980s accommodation of socialism with capitalism is a hybrid that is now destroying us all. Our cities. Our authentic Australian culture. Our productive economy.
Meanwhile, Chris Minns’ colleagues in Canberra and their bureaucrats continue with the mass immigration scam. Which will only perpetuate our endless economic and social grief. As the buildings fall down. And their builders go broke, and, in some cases, flee the country. The lobbyists do ok, though. What a sick place Australia is.
