Latest news with #TheCastle
Scottish Sun
3 days ago
- Politics
- Scottish Sun
I watched maniac hack his own neck with kitchen knife & took on infamous ‘suicide bomber'…my life as hostage negotiator
One particularly tragic case continues to haunt ex-Met chief John Sutherland to this day EDGE OF DISASTER I watched maniac hack his own neck with kitchen knife & took on infamous 'suicide bomber'…my life as hostage negotiator Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) AS filing cabinets, chairs and shattered glass rained from the sky, John Sutherland felt like he was in a scene from the apocalypse. Hours earlier a man wearing a suicide vest and wielding a homemade flamethrower had stormed offices on London's Tottenham Court Road and taken terrified hostages, including a pregnant woman. 10 John Sutherland spent 26 years with the Met Police, working as a hostage negotiator Credit: Supplied 10 Suspected 'terrorist' Michael Green was arrested over the 'Siege of London' of 2012 Credit: Sky News 10 Cabinets, chairs and computers were thrown from the windows of an office block on Tottenham Court Road Credit: AFP 10 The suspect is led away by police Credit: David Hartley More than 1,000 workers, shoppers and tourists were evacuated as it was feared the 'terrorist' had enough explosives to 'bring the whole building down with everyone in it'. Dubbed 'the Siege of London', it was an exceptionally-high alert situation due to it being three months before the 2012 Summer Olympics. 'It was one of the most extraordinary days of my whole career,' former Met Police Chief Superintendent John, now 55, tells us. 'I was on the scene working out what on earth to do when I heard the sound of glass shattering. I looked up and a window was being broken. 'A series of office equipment - computers, furniture, cabinets, everything - rained down onto the street below. It was genuinely apocalyptic.' Fortunately, despite threatening to "blow everyone up", the suspect's bomb jacket was fake and the attacker wasn't a terrorist but a disgruntled HGV driver. Ex-BNP candidate Michael Green, then 48, carried out the siege to retrieve £1,000 he paid for a driving course after failing his exams twice and feeling he had 'nothing left to live for'. Green forced his hostages to lob office supplies through a window to 'liquidise some assets'. 'He raided their offices as way to settle his grievances after some form of meltdown,' John says. 'It could have ended terribly but we managed to get him and everyone out unscathed.' It's one of many colourful tales from the retired Met officer, who has mined his experiences over 26 years as a hostage and crisis negotiator to pen his Sunday Times bestselling crime thriller, The Castle. I'm a cop turned vigilante who hunted down a one-man crime wave after police turned a blind eye In an exclusive interview, John explains that unlike in Hollywood movies, 90 per cent of his work was 'holding out a hand' to those in crisis on 'the worst day of their lives'. He tackled dozens of threats in London and recalled the simple question he was routinely asked before being dispatched on a job: 'Are you ready to save a life?' 'Whether it was 3am or in the middle of the afternoon, when you heard those words it focused the mind, because it was the only thing that mattered,' John says. 'I've always said the greatest duty and privilege for any police officer is to save the life of another human being, and that is the exact job of a negotiator.' 10 Debris from the office equipment thrown out of a window Credit: Getty 10 Armed police and snipers raced to the scene in April 2012 Credit: Reuters Stand-off tragedy Despite that, it was a deeply challenging and emotionally turbulent role which is voluntary within the police force. When on shift, negotiators are on-call 24 hours a day for that week. Most stand-offs go on for a few hours, but John said it was not unusual for them to last two to three days. One of the longest he was involved with was the tragic Markham Square siege in London's Chelsea on May 6, 2008. John was the negotiator for the five-hour stand-off which ended with wealthy divorce barrister Mark Saunders being shot dead by police. The 32-year-old, who had represented presenter Chris Tarrant, had fired shotgun rounds from his £2.2million home during a mental health episode linked to alcohol and drugs. 10 Barrister Mark Saunders died during a stand-off with police Credit: Handout 10 John tried to talk down the shotgun-wielding barrister for five hours Credit: News Group Newspapers Ltd 10 Mark Saunders during the Markham Square stand-off Credit: Handout Out of respect for Mark's widow, John only says a few words about the tragedy, admitting: 'It was one of the days that will stay with me for the rest of my life.' Previously in his memoir, Blue, John mournfully explained how "a man died on my watch", and he was "the last living soul to hold a conversation with him". Another harrowing encounter saw John talk down an Eastern European man who was threatening to throw himself from the 17th floor of a block of flats in Islington overlooking Arsenal's Emirates stadium. 'He was standing on the wrong side of the window on a ledge that was six inches wide, if that,' John recalls. 'Inexplicably, the windows opened into space with no balconies. It was one of the days that will stay with me for the rest of my life John Sutherland 'I don't know how long I was with him, all I know was that it was a hell of a long way down and any of the next moments could have been his last. 'It was difficult talking to him because I didn't speak his language, but as a negotiator you try to find common humanity and understand the story of the person you're dealing with. 'For him it was a perfect storm of being unable to get a job because he had no address, but not being able to have an address because he didn't have a job.' John admits he had no idea whether he would be able to coax the man back inside after he'd reached such a heartbreaking 'point of desperation', but thankfully he succeeded. Heartbroken OAP John tells us the key to a successful hostage negotiation is the art of listening, as was proven in an extraordinary case at an old people's home. Upon arriving, John was taken into a communal area where a man in his 80s sat in an armchair holding a large kitchen knife to his throat. 'There was almost a surreal nature to the scene, he clearly represented no threat to anyone else but a significant threat to himself,' John recalls. He approached him slowly and sat in an armchair nearby, knowing he could move much faster should he need to flee, and "asked the old boy tell his story'. It was difficult talking to him because I didn't speak his language, but as a negotiator you try to find common humanity and understand the story of the person you're dealing with John Sutherland 'It transgressed, later on in life, he'd fallen in love with a fellow resident of the home but his feelings were not reciprocated," John says. 'In fact she had been fairly unkind to him and he was an old boy with a broken heart. I listened to him and he agreed to put the knife down.' The need to be heard and 'feeling that they matter' were common themes, with John recounting many stories of people on the edge after mental health struggles. They include a man threatening to jump into an icy cold pond on Hampstead Heath at 3am and a drug addict holding a hypodermic syringe in his neck 'as a weapon'. Life in the balance 10 John has turned to writing crime novels Credit: collect By the time John arrived at one difficult incident there was already a line of territorial support group (TSG) officers on the scene, clad with long shields. He recalls: 'The man in his 20s was in the kitchen-diner of a flat on one side, with a knife to his throat, and I was safely behind the shields trying to engage with him. 'This poor young guy was seriously mentally ill. It was one of few times in my career where I've spoken to someone directly and knew mine wasn't the only voice they were hearing.' John remembers him 'pacing continually backwards and forward, like a tiger I'd seen in London Zoo', twisting the knife more and more. If there's a life hanging in the balance, you can't wait for anyone else. You have to get on and deal with what is in front of you John Sutherland 'One minute he was with us, partly lucid, the next he was somewhere else,' he recalls. The man eventually surrendered after speaking to his mum on the phone. In another incident a man with a kitchen knife was furiously 'sawing backwards and forwards on his head and neck' while holding his ex-girlfriend and child hostage. John recalls the "curtain of blood running down his face and soaking his clothes", adding it reminded him of a scene from the Stephen King film Carrie. Race against time Whenever he received a dispatch call, John says there was an element of adrenaline, which was followed by exhaustion "so deep you're almost unable to speak or walk" afterwards. But he remained motivated by the 'profound sense that today we did something good'. He retired in February 2018, and John has now turned his hand to writing books including memoirs Blue and Crossing The Line, and fiction titles The Siege, The Fallen and his latest novel, The Castle. 'Psychologically and emotionally I draw on my lived experience," he says. "Alex, one of the lead characters [in The Castle], is a version of me, but is a million times more interesting. 'But my deeper purpose to all of it, which I feel very passionately about having worked as a hostage and crisis negotiator, is for people to re-learn the art of listening. 'In the world at the moment it seems that most of us are shouting at each other and not listening. Listening is in danger of becoming a lost art. 'While I hope my thrillers are thrilling, subtly they have something to say about the ways that we listen and how it can do some good in the world. It can save people's lives.' John Sutherland's latest novel The Castle, a Sunday Times bestseller, published by Orion, is available for £9.99 in paperback, as well as in eBook and audio formats.
India.com
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- India.com
6 Best Works of Franz Kafka: Stories That Changed Modern Literature
photoDetails english 2908398 Franz Kafka, is renowned for his exploration of themes like alienation, existential anxiety, and the absurdity of bureaucracy. His distinct, surreal style often called "Kafkaesque" is evident in works such as The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle, and In the Penal Colony. Scroll to read more about him. Updated:May 30, 2025, 03:23 PM IST About Kafka 1 / 7 Franz Kafka was born on 3rd July, 1833 in Prague, Czechia. His work explores themes of alienation, existential dread, and oppressive bureaucracy. Kafka's writing style is marked by dark humor, and nightmarish scenarios, often referred to as "Kafkaesque'. The Metamorphosis 2 / 7 This iconic novel was published in 1915, The story shows the tension between individual identity and societal roles. The protagonist's emotional journey highlights the cruelty of conditional love and the deep human need for understanding. The Castle 3 / 7 This novel was published in 1926 in an unfinished book, The novel delves into themes of bureaucracy, alienation, and the search for meaning. Kafka portrays a confusing, indifferent system that frustrates K's, the protagonist's every effort. In The Penal Colony 4 / 7 Published in 1919, this short story examines themes of justice, punishment, and blind adherence to tradition. Kafka's storytelling triggers discomfort and contemplation, using stark imagery and ethical ambiguity to challenge the reader's sense of fairness and authority. The Trial 5 / 7 This amazing novel was published in 1925. The book explores existential anxiety, powerlessness, and the human longing for clarity and justice. The protagonist, Josef K., is arrested and prosecuted by a mysterious and inaccessible legal system. The charges against him are never revealed. Letters to Milena 6 / 7 These deeply personal letters offer a rare glimpse into Kafka's emotional world. Addressed to Milena Jesenská, his beloved, they reveal themes of longing, vulnerability, love, and spiritual connection and the fact that despite their intimacy, Kafka and Milena never lived together which makes these letters more intimate. The Hunger Artist 7 / 7 Published in 1922, is a short story that follows a professional artist who performs public fasting as an art form. Over time, audiences lose interest in his act, and he is forgotten by his audience. The story explores themes of isolation, misunderstood artistry, and existential longing.
Hamilton Spectator
19-05-2025
- General
- Hamilton Spectator
‘A wall of fire': North Hamilton home deemed a total loss after Victoria Day blaze
By the time a couchbound Art Scullion noticed smoke drifting past his back door, the kitchen was already on fire. 'Thirty or more seconds and I wouldn't have made it out,' Scullion said, sitting on a patch of grass across from his top-floor apartment at 364 Hughson St. N, which was razed in a fire Monday afternoon. 'It's just took over. I've never seen a house go up in flames like that.' Scullion and other tenants of the multi-unit north-end home managed to make it out unscathed from the Victoria Day blaze that caved in a roof, shattered windows and billowed smoke visible for blocks. Art Scullion sits on the grass across from his multi-unit home that was razed in a fire Monday afternoon. As he spoke to The Spectator, a man came by and gave him a bag of shirts, socks and and a pair of Crocs. At its peak just after 1 p.m., eight fire trucks were posted at Hughson and Simcoe streets, batting a well-involved structure fire platoon chief Dean Morrow said began in the rear of the home. Morrow said the blaze quickly extended into the attic area before it broke through the roof, forcing crews to douse it from overhead with aerial ladders. 'It spread quickly,' Morrow said. 'We weren't able to get at all areas of the multiple apartments inside before it spread through the entire attic.' Firefighters remained on scene as of 3:30 p.m., extinguishing hotspots and waiting for more parts of the roof to collapse. The persistent blaze drew dozens of curious onlookers who crowded around the home some neighbours said is known locally as 'The Castle' due to its size and a wraparound L-like shape. Firefighters battle a blaze in a multi-unit home at the corner of Simcoe Street East and Hughson Street North. 'I was in the basement and my sister was sewing next to the window, and she all of a sudden yelled 'Smoke! The Castle is on fire,' said longtime resident Silvine Mesquita, who lived across the street. 'She woke my husband up.' Shirley Slater, a next-door neighbour to the affected home, knew something was amiss when her cat was staring at the window. 'Then I heard pops and crack and bangs, sounds you don't usually hear,' the 79-year-old said. 'I looked out the back door and there was a wall of fire.' Others spotted evidence of the blaze from blocks away. 'We could see the thick black smoke from under the York Street Bridge,' said Dinka Derewczymski, who was out for an afternoon bike ride with his kids. 'They wanted to check it out so we followed the smoke.' Morrow deemed the home 'a total loss' and said the fire caused 'well over' $1 million. As the roof continued burning, tenants of the home watched on in shock, sitting on the lawn of Bennetto Elementary School as concerned neighbours came around to offer support. 'I've got all my medications in there,' Scullion told The Spectator when asked what he left behind, just as a man came up to him with a bag that contained shirts, socks and a pair of Crocs. 'There's more if you need,' the man told him. Red Cross has been contacted to assist displaced tenants, Morrow said, adding an HSR bus would also be at the scene. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
Scroll.in
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Punishment in search of a crime: Franz Kafka's ‘The Trial' turns 100
'A book,' a 20-year-old Franz Kafka wrote to his friend Oskar Pollack in 1904, 'must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.' It is a quintessential Kafka image. I see an ice-axe, the sharpened point of its curved metal head shattering a vast plane of ice into hairline curves that ramify in all directions. This kind of blow, this shattering of the surface of the world, produced one the greatest novels ever written, The Trial, and introduced to literature one of its most compelling characters, Joseph K, a senior bank clerk doomed to a tragic fate. In its opening sentences, the novel's premise is established with lightning speed. One workday morning, K wakes up to find two strange men in his bedroom, who inexplicably place him under arrest. Later, he is sentenced to death for a crime he knows nothing about by a judge he never sees. One hundred years after its publication on April 26, 1925, the blow of that axe is still being felt. The feeling it engenders is crystallised in a single adjective: 'Kafkaesque'. It is a modifier that has become as famous as Kafka himself. The Trial was written over the period 1914-15, when Kafka was in his early 30s. Like his two other novels – Amerika (alternatively known as The Man Who Disappeared) and The Castle – it was never finished. Kafka was a perfectionist who, as his diaries reveal, struggled with his artistic self-worth. He published little in his lifetime: two short story collections, some story extracts, and his novella The Metamorphosis, which went largely unnoticed. We would not even have the novels if not for the intervention of Kafka's close friend and literary executor Max Brod. Thankfully, Brod ignored Kafka's instructions to destroy his manuscripts after his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of 40 in 1924. The Trial was the first of the novels to be published posthumously, with the others appearing soon after. The Kafkaesque Fellow Czech writer Milan Kundera, whose youth was shaped by Stalinist communism, characterised the Kafkaesque as a state of powerlessness when trapped inside a boundless labyrinth. He also saw in it an inversion of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. No longer is a crime met with a punishment; rather, the punishment goes in search of a crime. For poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka pioneered the notion of a 'neo-bureaucracy' of 'corridors, of segments, a string of offices' that marked 'the transition from the old archaic imperial bureaucracy to modern bureaucracy'. They found Kafka's worldview so powerful that they incorporated it into their influential theories of capitalism and schizophrenia. Joseph K's grisly fate plays out in an anonymised city, most likely derived from Kafka's home of Prague. The city's Austro-Hungarian ornamentation is stripped to bone, leaving only a kind of proto-brutalist substratum. It's a powerful setting. Has a writer ever generated so much strangeness and awe, so much psychological power, with such basic materials? Much of the novel's action occurs in genteel boarding houses, bank offices, run-down tenements, a dilapidated artist's studio, a quarry. Its potentially grandest setting, a cathedral, is rendered in dark, blurry tones. From these modest elements, Kafka builds vast panoramas, sweeping landscapes, all in the theatre of the mind. It is a phantasmagoria assembled from the world of concrete things – Kafka is nothing if not a writer of specificity – yet it seems to be moulded from some kind of dark matter, the very stuff of consciousness: sensory data that is as close to mind as the senses can be, but which dissolves in instant, only to reconfigure as a new room, a new office, a new studio. In these rooms, a varied cast of characters orbit the hapless K, each exerting an influence, both direct and indirect, on his fate. In K's personal world, there are his landlady, his love interests, bank colleagues, his uncle and guardian. In the world of the trial, which increasingly bleeds into every aspect of his existence, there are the petty officials, his lawyer, the painter, the priest. In his encounters with them, K shows the many sides of his personality. He is, by turns, polite and dismissive, decorous and licentious, driven by a burning sense of injustice, yet prone to periods of lassitude. What he is not is paranoid. The theme of paranoia is central in The Trial (and in the Kafkaesque itself), but it exists at a much more pervasive level than that of the mere individual. To see K as paranoid limits our understanding of what Kafka is trying to achieve. In fact, K's response to his arrest is anything but paranoid. He displays a misplaced confidence that everything will turn out for the best. Instead of fearing the invisible forces arrayed against him, he is often combative and sardonic, ruining his chances of acquittal at every turn. In Kafka's Weltanschauung, the world itself has become irrational, arbitrary and malevolent: a machine for the production of paranoia. K's stance is that of someone who is trying to remain sane in a world gone mad. One way he does this is by refusing to internalise the values of a perverted system. He is innocent, as far as he is concerned, and never passes up an opportunity to declare it. His naivety in the face of the court is his purity. There is no court more perverse than the one found in The Trial. It is ingeniously staged, revealed to us only in glimpses. We first physically encounter one of its offices on the top floor of a working-class tenement building. A small door is opened at the back of a cramped, grubby flat and behind it, where we least expect, is a large, crowded room, buzzing with the activity of the hearings in session. This is where K attends his first and only hearing. Like the tenement building, the room is dirty and dilapidated. The hearing is a farce. The magistrate mistakes K for a house painter. Because of his strenuous proclamations of innocence, K's hearing never gets off the ground. Later, K visits this room again when the court is out of session and takes the opportunity to nose around. Examining the magistrate's reference books, he sees that one is full of clumsy pornographic drawings. Another is titled 'What Greta Suffered from her Husband Franz'. The Trial is full of such absurd humour, trompe l'oeil effects, and manipulations of scale. It also contains touches of what would come to be called surrealism. For example, when the amorous wife of the court attendant shows K her hand as she tries to woo him, she reveals that two of her fingers are joined by an overgrown web of skin. Though we see little of the court, we experience it everywhere through its proxies and their endless discussions on how it operates. K's lawyer, the bedridden Herr Huld, describes a network of judges that 'mounted endlessly, so that not even adepts could survey the hierarchy as a whole'. In lengthy monologues, Huld explains the court's endlessly deferred processes. Reports can be drafted, only to have their completion delayed for any number of reasons. Even if they are submitted, they usually end up circulating up and down the system in great recursive loops with no definitive outcome. Titorelli, the court painter to whom K is sent to progress his case (even though he has no official status), describes the behind-the-scenes operations of the court. There is the lobbying of judges that must be pursued in order to influence the outcome. Verdicts, Titorelli points out, can only end in a pronouncement of guilt, but not necessarily death. K's best option, he advises, is to admit his guilt, but to choose a category where final sentencing is deferred, perhaps forever, perhaps not: there are no guarantees. His case could be reactivated at any time, resulting in the gravest of consequences, or perhaps never – who could tell? How is an increasingly dispirited K meant to negotiate such a menacing world, accept its insane norms? The priest in the penultimate chapter proffers an answer. K should not 'accept everything as true, only as necessary'. K responds: 'A melancholy conclusion […] It turns lying into a universal principle.' Dialectic of unenlightenment Part of the dramatic brilliance of The Trial is the way Kafka brings all of this deferral and recursion to an abrupt halt in the form of the ultimate act of closure: death. In its combination of menace and comedy, K's execution is arguably one of the most chilling chapters in all of literature. It has the hallmarks of a sacrifice, but one that has no point, no reason or explanation. On the eve of his 31st birthday, one year after his arrest, K's executioners, taciturn men dressed in black, appear in his room. They frogmarch him out of town to a disused quarry, where they lay him out on a stone and, under the moonlight, plunge a knife through his heart. Everything about the execution is primaeval, ritualistic, atavistic. What is the nature of this nightmare world, where such an arbitrary execution can take place? It is not only a world where lying is the norm, a world where reason has lost its way: it is much worse than that. This nightmare world consciously works at every point against reason, against the Enlightenment belief that reason leads us to a truth. Any possibility that humanity is continuously improving, that each successive generation draws closer to the truth, is repudiated. Within the ideals of the Enlightenment, The Trial suggests, there lurks the dark glow of the irrational, the persistence of a power that loves nothing but itself, a power that will destroy capriciously and without explanation. This is illustrated in the novel's final scene. K finally acquiesces to his fate and dies, to use his own words, 'like a dog'. With this thrust of the dagger, Kafka sets in motion a reverse teleology, a dialectic of unenlightenment, one where we fall backwards into a corrupt moral order we believed we had transcended, at least in principle. 'I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us,' the young Kafka wrote in his letter to Oskar Pollak. 'If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?' Kafka is still waking us up, 100 years after the publication of The Trial. Whenever power goes awry, serving sinister forces that enact the law according to a perverse set of whims it calls justice, we know we are in the world of the Kafkaesque. Yes, Kafka's worldview, for all its comedy, is bleak and dark. But it sheds a unique light: the kind of illumination of human nature that is essential, revealing aspects that, once seen, cannot be unseen. Without it, we would not only be asleep; we would also be blind.
The Star
01-05-2025
- Business
- The Star
Australia's housing crisis needs a deeper fix
PERHAPS, no other movie depicts the Australian dream of owning a home more than the 1997 classic comedy The Castle, in which the Kerrigan family takes on developers to save their house. Fast-forward 28 years and nobody is laughing. For the first time, Millennial and Gen Z voters will outnumber those aged over 60 at polling stations on Saturday. Housing is a – if not the – top concern in this federal election. Most are resigned to never being able to get into one of the world's most unaffordable markets. Policies put forward by the two major parties are unlikely to make things better. If re-elected, the ruling Labor Party promises to allow all first-time buyers to purchase a home with as little as a 5% deposit. It is committed to building 1.2 million homes by 2029 but, at the current rate, could fall short by as many as 400,000 dwellings. The opposition Liberal-National coalition wants to allow first-time buyers to deduct some mortgage interest payments from their taxes and tap pensions for initial deposits. Economists believe that both policies will drive prices higher because they are skewed toward demand. That is why more ambitious reforms need to be part of the discussion to add to supply and improve affordability. Revamping a tax system largely seen as favouring speculators and investing in regional centres to ease the strain on the major cities should be among policies on the table. This is now even more crucial. Labor shortages, increasing costs, complex approval processes, and land availability around transport hubs and essential services mean Australia can't build homes fast enough to satisfy demand amid record numbers of migrants. Rents are also soaring. To demonstrate a genuine commitment to reform, making longer-term rentals viable now that people are being priced out of ownership should be considered as part of any housing policy. Renting has been seen as a transitional stop to owning. Australia could explore arrangements similar to what is available in Scandinavian countries, which have also experienced rapid population growth and increased demand for homes, Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Immigration, told the Bloomberg Australia Podcast. Long-term rental is a more natural approach for most of Europe. 'In Australia, owning your home is the big deal,' Rizvi said. Australia is not alone in dealing with a housing crisis. But owning a house (or more) is so embedded in the national psyche that it's even been called pathological. It has stood as a symbol of stability for a young, migrant country. My first memory of Australia as my family drove out of Adelaide airport in 1982 is of stand-alone houses. I was mesmerised. I had grown up in a Soviet-era apartment block in Bucharest; as an adult I lived in high-rise apartments in Hong Kong before finally returning to Sydney and purchasing that quarter-acre block. One of the most contentious debates is about what is known as negative gearing, a popular way for property investors who borrow to reduce their taxable income. While some argue that it has added stock to the rental market, it's also seen as driving up prices by fuelling demand for investment properties, pricing out first-time buyers. The Melbourne-based think tank Grattan Institute said this kind of financial leverage goes 'beyond the broadly accepted principle of offsetting investment losses against investment gains'. More than 65% of household wealth – which stood at A$17 trillion in the December quarter – is tied to property due to the rising value of land and homes, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. And politicians have skin in the game, including the prime minister and the leader of the opposition. More than half of members of parliament are property investors. It's no surprise that nobody wants to see values decline. Negative gearing is such a hot topic that any suggestions it should be tweaked generate frenzied debate. It has been a poisoned chalice, costing elections. The question is, are Australians ready to accept that to tackle affordability from every possible angle, a generous perk in its current form has had its day? As more people will likely live in apartments, minimum quality standards need to be enforced. Examples of poorly built homes abound. Better, smarter and more functional units should be built for those who may never be able to afford stand-alone homes, families and downsizers. Australian house prices have been defying gravity as long as I can remember, despite predictions of a crash. Sydney's median house price is at a record A$1.19mil (US$760,000), and the average home costs almost 14 times the annual disposable income. This has made it the world's second-most expensive city to buy property after Hong Kong. — Bloomberg Andreea Papuc is a Bloomberg columnist. The views expressed here are the writer's own.
