A year and counting...

In another couple of weeks there's an anniversary of bureaucratic incompetence.

On June 6 last year I posted about a broken picnic table  in a local park.

Instead of repairing it the council sent people to put red plastic around it.

I said then that At a (much) later date someone is sent with hammer/nails or screwdriver/screws, removes the exclusion zone material and repairs the furniture.

Much later was right, because here it is a year later:

Missing the point

Our little home town managed to get itself in the national media last week.

It involved a case before the Land & Environment Court about short term holiday lettings involving a house here in Terrigal.

It was an investment property producing income from short term lets, as quite a few in the area are, and neighbours complained about noise and inconvenience .

It somehow ended up as a zoning question - residential area, house being used for commercial purposes.

The court found that zoning laws had been breached and that short term letting under 2A residential zoning was unlawful.

Cat amongst the pigeons comes to mind because that's a decision having a major effect on communities all over the country. Not only individual investors are affected, plenty of small towns rely on holiday visitors to keep their businesses going.

Gosford Council has taken swift action to limit the damage and will bring in provisions to allow short term lets.

And it was all so unnecessary.

The problem isn't zoning or short term lets, the problem is who the properties are let to.

The neighbours in this case have complained for years that their "family life has been severely affected by the use of the home for schoolies and bucks and hens parties".

The court missed the point and looked at it as a bureaucratic problem, a breach of zoning laws.

While we were living in Dubai a neighbour two houses away sold up and the house was bought by an investor who placed it with a real estate agent for short term lets.

They decided to advertise it as a party house.  And that's the problem.

On several occasions my neighbours had to call the police because of the noise and antisocial behaviour of hoons who rented it.

Bucks and hens weekends, with noisy drunks staggering around the street in their underwear, screaming and hooting at strippers they brought in, loud thumping music through the night.

They managed to locate the owner and told him what was happening. He instructed the real estate cowboy to re-advertise it as a family holiday house.  Since then, most weekends it's rented and we haven't had to complain once.

Simple, it fixed the problem, the owner still has a return on investment, the town still gets its visitors.

PR-speak

Do they really believe that we believe it or are they just contemptuous of us?

I'm talking about the endless stream of PR-speak attributed to people, usually people in some sort of self-induced trouble, when it's so blindingly obvious that they didn't say anything like it.

The spin doctors can't even be bothered to write them in a believable way, in a way the subject might actually have said it.

It's an almost daily occurrence as the spin doctors get more and more influence over companies, governments and individuals.

There was a classic a couple of days ago when a rugby league player attended an interview with the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority dressed like this:

Photo. Peter Rae Sydney Morning Herald

 

Naturally he copped a lot of flack for the inappropriate dress, which it was suggested was a sign of contempt.

 

So 'he' responded:

 

''I certainly take the ASADA matter seriously and my choice of dress was in no way intentional as an indication of otherwise. In hindsight, I agree that I let myself, my club and the game down and apologise for any distress it has caused. I would also say sorry to both the corporate sponsors and to the Sharks members and fans for not representing the club better than I could and should have.''

You can imagine him saying exactly that can't you?

Surely there can't be anyone who believes these statements are anything but PR spin.  They're an insult to our intelligence.

Foot in mouth in the horsey world

The enquiry's under way into John Singleton's claim that there was a conflict of interest involving trainer Gai Waterhouse and her bookie son Tom relating to the poor running of his mare More Joyous.

Singo says he was told in a roundabout way that the mare wouldn't run well and that the info had come from Tom. 

That didn't please his mum Gai.

I'd suggest her performance at the enquiry was less about the facts than about personal attacks and bitchiness.

She accused Singleton of being drunk and volatile, using foul language, making false accusations about her and her family and bringing racing into disrepute.

It was, she said, a conversation between a trumped up little jockey, a brothel owner and a football player. 

Then she plumbed the depths of ageism, saying of the poor run of his horse: ''Maybe she's a seven-year-old mare and she's old - like you!''

All class and style.

I tell you what, her personal abuse will come back to bite her.  People won't take that kind of bitchiness lying down.

Not happy

Sydney Morning Herald has a timely story today headed "Driver distraction responsible for more car crashes than alcohol".  Timely because my car was crashed into for that reason yesterday.

Coming back from the shopping mall in a heavy stream of traffic, dawdling along at 50kph when, whack, the car behind was in my rear.

Absolutely no reason for it other than the idiot driver not paying attention.

I don't know what he was up to - on the phone, texting, playing with gadgets, changing the radio, daydreaming - but what he wasn't doing was what he should have been doing.

The number one priority when you're driving a car. Paying bloody attention.

From the damage it's obvious what happened. He looked up, saw he was about to crash into me, yanked the wheel hard left but still caught my passenger side rear corner with his driver side front corner.

Mine got the rear and side panels broken, the exhaust pipe dislodged and bits of rubber and metal jammed onto the tyre. Not driveable.

I must say my insurer AAMI, has been excellent.

I called them from the crash site to ask for a tow truck. It took a while because they said they had to complete the claim before the tow truck could be called. But it was all done over the phone, details of what happened, the road conditions, details of cars and drivers etc.

The tow truck arrived in about twenty minutes, he drove us home then took the car to their yard, it being end of business on Friday. It'll be assessed on Monday, a repairer appointed and AAMI will call me to give me an update.

They also booked a hire car for me online. By the time all this was done it was too late in the day to pick it up so I asked for it to be ready this morning.

A bus ride into Gosford to Hertz, where the car was ready and waiting. No forms to fill in, just a copy of my driving licence and a credit card bond. Apparently my insurance is transferred to the hire car for the duration.

It's all a bloody nuisance but I must say AAMI have made it a lot less inconvenient than I thought it would be.

Context at last

"It costs how much? Are we being ripped off?"

Up on the masthead of Sydney Morning Herald this morning.

It refers to a full page story in the business section, headlined "Lucky country becomes the land of eye-watering prices."

It's just the latest in a whole series of media stories along the same lines, but at least this one has some context and includes points I've been making in earlier posts on the subject but which have been missing from earlier media stories.

This one quotes a Deutsche Bank report which shows Australia is one of the world's most expensive countries. Sydney comes in at number five most expensive overall and we're at or near the top of cost lists for various items.

But in this story there's context, at last.

What I said in my post about it in February was: We live in a capitalist system in which the market rules and market forces apply, so companies charge as much as the market can bear.

In Australia we earn far more on average than comparable countries. We earn more, so why do we expect to pay the same as or less than people who earn lower salaries?

Compare the US and UK for example, with conversion into Aussie dollars. The minimum wage in Australia is $15.51. In the US it's $7.25, the UK $9.13. The average wage in Australia is $73,000pa. In the US it's $47,000, in the UK it's $39,100.

We earn almost twice as much, so relative to our earnings we pay much the same, even less in many instances, for stuff we buy. Companies' pricing is based on ability to pay, on what the market will stand.

Nothing like that has been in the mainstream media stories, until now, so they've been misleading. Exclude the facts that get in the way of a good story, you might say. Ruth Williams'story today has the balance that's been missing.

She quotes various people making sensible comments and giving the all-important context.

Choice believes that many companies charge more for products in Australia simply because they can. ''It is about marketers deciding what is the highest price they can charge,'' chief executive Alan Kirkland says.

The Deutsche research confirms that many things that cost a lot more in Australia - such as hotel rooms, a flower delivery or a beer in a pub - involve labour, reflecting Australia's high wages.

Chris Morris, whose Colonial Leisure Group owns a portfolio of Australian pubs and restaurants and a conference and wedding venue in Dorset, England, says labour costs are a big factor in inflating the price of a beer. He estimates that Australian labour would cost, on average, three times more than in Britain.

Stephen Koukoulas, managing director of Market Economics, says the higher wages mean that, in many cases, Australians can actually afford to pay the higher prices.

Wages in Australia are about 50 per cent higher than in the US or New Zealand, and average weekly earnings have risen roughly 3.5 per cent a year for the past five years. Australian wages have outstripped inflation for more than a decade.

''If you want to pay the same as what Americans are paying, then accept American wages. You can't have the low prices without the low incomes,'' Koukoulas says.

And in a comment that applies to so many of these lists:

Saul Eslake, chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch Australia, says the Deutsche report would have been more useful had it compared prices of items as a proportion of earnings in each country. This would show how affordable or expensive each item was for a person earning the local currency.


That's what it's all about, affordability. To simply compare prices is meaningless - for example, the report compares the price of a pack of cigarettes here against the price in Manila. Manila, where, for example, an HR manager on average will be paid $14,000 a year, in Sydney over $100,000.
There'll be many more of these stories and I sincerely hope the authors balance them by including the context.


Sydney Morning Herald story here.

The dangerous business chain

Another example is coming to light of the ridiculously long chains of supply that companies are getting themselves involved with, and getting themselves into trouble as a result.

I've posted about this before, the extra costs it causes, the middle men profiting, the loss of control over supplies.

The latest one involves Target, who are in legal trouble as a result of a chain.

Department stores Myers and David Jones have exclusive rights to sell Estee Lauder's MAC cosmetics, but Target decided to bring in grey imports of the range, advertising it at up to 40% discount.  Now they're being sued by Estee Lauder for selling counterfeit MAC product.

Target's problem is the chain - they don't know where the product came from.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Target has launched its own investigation to uncover where its supply of MAC was sourced...worryingly revealing that it cannot be sure who the eventual manufacturer was for the alleged counterfeit make-up.

Instead of dealing direct they stupidly got involved in a vague chain. They went to an Australian importer. The importer went to a wholesaler in Arizon. They went to a tiny one-woman company in Texas, called Mudd Puppy. The trail goes cold there and they're taking legal action against Mudd Puppy to reveal their source of supply.

Ridiculous. Stupid. Unprofessional.

We're not talking about a corner store here, a small family business.

Target is part of Wesfarmers, a huge conglomerate that dominates our retail economy. There are over 300 Target stores which turn over nearly $4 billion a year. You'd think they'd be able to source stock without setting up an unnecessary, costly and dangerous chain.

Why do so many companies do it?



Sydney Morning Herald has the details here