Internet habits are tough to kick. From 2008-2009 I was in a shitty office job and relied on the Sydney Morning Herald as a brain enema every couple of hours. More recently, the mindless process of putting "smh.com" into the URL bar occasionally returns once my daily youtube comment trolling is complete. Today was one of those days. Happily this caption hollered at me from the "finance" section:
Look, it's clickbait. I get it. Sydney property and rent prices are always click fodder. But when you click on that headline, the one thing you'd hope to see is decreasing rent prices. Right??
Nope. Rents are going up. The article says so.
"Average rents around the country grew at their slowest pace in 20 years in the December quarter, with a rise of 1.2 per cent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics"
AND
"It all adds up to "extremely benign" rent inflation, which they predict will remain very low at just 2 per cent this year"
Ah! I get it. You mean the RATE of rent increase is declining. So instead of DOWN, DOWN, DOWN. You kinda just mean UP. That's cool. But it's kinda the opposite, though.
For real, journalism is a tough game, but is it too much to ask for the 14-year old intern proofing the landing page to understand what a rate of change is? Here's the graph they provide in the article.
Gee that blue line is heading DOWN DOWN DOWN! So is population growth. Real talk: the population still increases.