Give a battling hipster a home
On Monday Common Ventures founder Damian Damjanovski stood up on Q&A and asked Labor leader Bill Shorten why it was that despite starting a business he could not afford to buy a house aged 31.
Resplendent in a fur-collared jacket, he pointed out he has been working since he was 14 years and nine months old and had “never taken a cent” in government funding. Damjanovski’s passionate prose earned the headlines on the news sites on Tuesday morning (watch the video of his question and Shorten’s answer here).
And it seems it also struck a chord with the public, with someone starting a Go Fund Me crowdfunding campaign to raise $1.2m to ‘Buy a house for an Aussie battler’.
“The bog-standard bloke’s fur collar bristled with rage as he spoke out about Australia’s ludicrous housing market and how it’s priced typical hipster battlers like him out of the inner city that his coffee shop patronage helped gentrify,” reads the intro to the page.
Describing him as an “exemplary everyman” it adds: “And whilst his toils have brought him princely displays of wealth-like fur coats and sockless boat shoes, he still can’t afford to buy one of the grossly overvalued and dilapidated inner city terraces he so desperately wants to adorn with Banksy prints and non-Ikea Scandinavian storage solutions.”
“Do we expect him to leave his beloved and fashionable community simply because he cannot afford to live in it? Do we ask him to move into the geographical limits of his earnings but beyond affordable peak hour Uber surge pricing? Penrith to Surry Hills is simply too far for a fixie,” it adds.
“Well, we say good on you, Damian, your artisanal salt of the earth wisdom cut right to the quick and we think you should be recognised for it. We want to help this superfly vox populi to buy an average inner-Sydney home where he belongs…at least until he decides Brunswick might be a better fit for that coat.”
While the campaign has had 88 shares it’s unfortunately only managed to raise $5 of the targeted $1.2m so far.
The fur collar look also got a few comments on Twitter:
It is a shame that the fur collar has distracted people from a serious issue: Housing affordability.
We have a housing crisis in Australia. Plenty has been written about the issue, but little action has been taken to address it. We are locking an entire generation out of the housing market, and somewhere along the way it has become socially acceptable for adults to live in shared accommodation. It’s not acceptable and will create social issues soon enough. Wake up people! We need a serious dialogue about housing affordability, not personal attacks on individuals based on their wardrobe. Is that the best we can do?
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What a tosser.
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I absolutely agree with you Richard!
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Good sport
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