[SeaGypsy]

No way known house prices will double in Oz again; discounting inflation prices are flat or falling slightly.
Wages are barely keeping pace with inflation and without government top ups the mortgage market would have been routed the last 10 years. The mining boom is completely dependent on China not imploding. Australians still live in cloud cuckoo land when it comes to long term thinking. Oil availability is going to squeeze Australia's mining industry simultaneously to squeezing China and India's capacity for growth. This is definitely going to happen within the next 10 years; when it does Australia will have some Detroits of it's own.

[papa moose]

Yeah, i'm not disagreeing with you just pointing out that property values are directly connected to peoples perceptions of property values and not much else.

[SeaGypsy]

Money supply precedes perception.
Which Australian City will be our 1st Detroit?

[Pretorian]

Money supply precedes perception.
Which Australian City will be our 1st Detroit?

You dont have nearly enough of Negroes in Australia to have your first Detroit, even if you will put all of'em in 1 running down city and jack up imports of these from Africa. Well, not anytime soon anyway. As for having an abondoned/ semi-abondoned city-- if you will have any, that will be for a good reason. I am looking around and I cant find any other country that is richer than AU per citizen in resources. Granted, the number is going down every few minutes or even seconds.

[papa moose]

Money supply precedes perception.
Which Australian City will be our 1st Detroit?

I'm going to assume your asking about abandonment of the city not the % of negroes

I can't see any one Oz city dropping faster than the others.
If i had to choose a state capital i'd say BrisVegas, altho if parliment ever left Canberra then it would definitely go Detroit.

[SeaGypsy]

Every city in Australia has it's strengths.
Brisvegas (Brisbane) is very strategicly located farming land wise.
Water supply could turn into a really major issue in all cities bar Darwin.
Unlike the USA we have no inland cities. Canberra the capital can hardly be described as a real city, nor Alice Springs, Dubbo, Toowoomba etc. We have no monofocus cities to liken Detriot for utter dependence on a single industry. We also have no equivalent to megalopolis in Australia, no cities close enough to merge.

Militancy is very rare in rural Australia compared to the USA. Factionization is not the usual mode of existence, usually there is a very high degree of mutual support in emergencies and authorities are held in high esteem. The scariness factor of moving out bush in Australia is there, but it's nothing compared to heading out into hillbilly USA. People are more worried in Oz about crocodiles, sharks, snakes, jellyfish and spiders than about their fellow human beings. We have had a few Psycho killers like Ivan Milat but he is the only one to paralell human monsterism in the States. I beleve our murder rate is 1/50th of the USA's.

Australia is extremely fortunate population density wise. Personally I think it will be a better country as the mainstream economy gradually bites the dust due to resource constraints. Realistic land prices will soon come about for farmstead size blocks. Grass roots communities in Australia are very strong and will get stronger as things get harder. I can see an eventual flood back to country in Australia. As cities run out of opportunity, increasingly people are 'tree changing' already.

[papa moose]

Actually before my previous post i checked on Wiki to see what passes as a city around here, one that jumped out was Lithgow(??), now i haven't been to Lithgow in 20 odd years but back then it was already heading towards a ghost town.
You are right about the lack of scary hillbillies, unfortunately that is matched by the lack of doctors, teachers and job opportunities in small towns which makes a tree change unpalpable to She Who Must Be Obeyed at this point.
Water is lacking just about everywhere south of Tropic of Capricorn and is scary regardless of TEOTWAWKI.
Sydney is something of a megapolis (NSW stands for Newcastle-Sydney-Wollongong don't ya know) but the feel i get is that our cities are basically just trading posts for their hinterlands and will continue to serve this purpose for a long way down the Olduvai slope. The oddity may be that as long as BAU can continue resource prices will grow meaning the longer BAU lasts the more prosperous Oz should get, unfortunately this would just lead to a harsher landing at the bottom of the cliff.

[SeaGypsy]

Another thing could happen which would throw a spanner in the works for Oz.
Sub Saharan Africa is said to be likely as rich as Australia in minerals. China is busily doing deals in Africa and Latin America to secure resources. As these come online resource prices could plummet in line with African mine wages as compared to Australian or Canadian. Oil costs make or break mines. During the last oil spike at about $90 a barrel many of Australia's smaller gold mines shut down, larger ones slowed down. Production returned after the oil price fell. What oil price can Australia's mineral exporters stand? Every one of the mega resources of Australia is dependent on oil, but we import 80% of our oil. Gas projects are opening production worldwide, resulting in a falling LNG price and we don't have NG vehicles or machinery besides gas turbines for electricity production.

[papa moose]

I read an article recently that the WA govt was planning a pilot program to try and turn the Pilbara into a basically diesel free region.
(FYI the Pilbara is a dry area of northern West Australia that exports LNG, iron ore and salt).
I don't believe for a second that this program will actually happen but i think it's a plausible blue print for future operations. The nation as a whole is "criss-crossed" by NG pipelines but domestic consumption is a tiny fraction of the NG industry currently, there is a lot that could be done to swap remote power gen and heavy machinery to NG and CNG.
I'm not saying that would make all our problems go away but it would be a sensible start making use of proven technology... wouldn't it? Of course any useful solutions to PO bang up against the world's population overshoot of humans.

[papa moose]

LOL we've hijacked a thread about Detroit on the America's board and turned it into a discussion of Australia's mining industry.

[SeaGypsy]

Yeah well who wants to talk about bloody Detroit? What a miserable hole it was before, at least now the air is getting cleaner and there's some groovy photo op's around!