Environmental Scientist makes Blue Moon edition of Courier Mail

Regular readers should not be shocked. This kind of thing only happens once in a blue moon, when the 'developers' friend' struggles for token objectivity.

The front pages of the Courier Mail showed its priorities were unchanged, as it devoted two feature articles to another fait divers of Queensland's nightmare property market. This time a 25 year old man has spent 28 million to build a rather large house on the site of five blocks of land he purchased at Mermaid Beach over the last 6 years.

Meanwhile, on page 19, Griffith Uni School of Environmental professor, Tor Hundloe, tells us that,

"Of the 6.5 billion of us today about two-thirds are poor, a half of these are very poor and a billion starving,,, [but] we would need two to three mother earths to ... give every person a lifestyle equivalent to ours."

And, on page 27, journalist Paddy Hintz writes about the lot of the poor in Australia, in "Wanted: a room to rent",

"Rental experts are now predicting that - for good or for bad - room-by-room renting will continue its stellar rise as a serious option for those who haven't been able to scramble on to the mortgage bandwagon."

I wonder which lifestyle Tor Hundloe means, when he talks about 'a lifestyle like ours'? The Mermaid Beach 5 lot house lifestyle, or the 'room somewhere with one big chair' which hungry and homeless Australians must dream of.

Australia, like the rest of the world, is indeed a land of increasing contrasts.

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