I thought I'd give a plug to this outfit...www.kiva.org

For those who haven't heard of Kiva, it's a micro-loan manager.

Essentially, you make micro-loans in the amount of $25USD to burgeoning businesses in less fortunate parts of the world. I personally have lent to people in Peru, Honduras, Vietnam, Bolivia and others that slip my mind at the moment.

How it works: if there is an entrepreneur who requires a $100 loan to buy stock for his stall, Kiva and their field partners will raise those funds from 4 separate individuals in $25USD blocks.

The loans are repaid generally over 12 months or a little more, however, they are interest free loans.

The best charity one can give is to help people help themselves. I just wish I knew of a similar program for Australian entrepreneurs out there giving it a go.

Housing affordability...

I'm so over the constant chatter of a housing affordability crisis and lamenting of the first home buyer.

I've said it before elsewhere, and I'll say it again here...there is no such thing as a housing affordability crisis!

The crisis is that the younger generation think they can have everything they want when they want it and on their terms.

Well sorry to say, all you youngin's...it does not work that way!!!

Just because you grew up in a suburb that now has a median house price of $800,000 does not mean you must buy your first home in that suburb. That you do buy a house in that same suburb is merely a discretionary decision you make during the purchasing process...not a right that you are entitled to.

So, if you can't afford to meet the market in your suburb?

How about a unit? Substantially lower entry costs...

How about a different suburb? Again, lower entry costs depending of the dynamics of that different suburb.

For goodness sake...units in my area of Sydney, which is a lovely area reasonably close to the CBD, start around $350k...you can't tell me that in this day and age, for someone that is working, that this is unaffordable.

Get a grip all you young ones and learn to start at the bottom, do the hard yards and work your way up, just like everyone else!

What a wonderful world...

Sometimes you just hear something that touches you, and makes you think to yourself "wow, that's beautiful".

A while ago I was driving home from a rather boring and difficult meeting and I tuned in to my favourite talk-back radio station. They were talking about how expensive it is to die, the cost of the grave site, the tombstone, cremation and even the requirement of a permit to allow the scattering of ashes.

Anyway, this woman calls in and says that she's 85 years old, and her husband is 87 years old, and today they're celebrating their 65th (!!!) wedding anniversary. How fantastic is that?

She then remarks, "we don't have time to think about dying and cremation and all that stuff, we're far too busy being in love and enjoying our lives together".

Now, how beautiful is that that an 85 year old woman can say she's still in love with her husband.

I hope that's me in another 50-odd years or so!

There's an L in there...

It's not Austraya...

It's Australia.

There is an L in there.

I wish people would get it right!

Wilkie puts a nail in the country's coffin...

So, Andrew Wilkie, independant elect in Tasmania has put a nail in the coffin that is this country; announcing yesterday that he would support a Labor minority Government.

I haven't read his press release, but I've heard snippets of it played on the radio and tv. I believe, and someone can correct me if I'm wrong, that he made reference to Labor's economic management and how he feels that it would be better than the Coalition's management.

How is that so?

Treasury announced that the costings of the Coalition's policies show up an $11b hole, and the Coalition have retorted that there are differences in calculations used by the Coalition as compared to those being used by Treasury.

How on earth can Treasury calculate their interest payments based on a 4.9% interest rate?????

Talk about having their heads up their backsides! Please Mr Henry, can I have some of that money that only costs 4.9% because the best I can get right now is about 7.9%! The banks, if you remember, didn't even pass on all the interest rates cuts that the RBA announced over the last 2 years, so I'd really like a bit of what you've got.

What a joke.

Anyway, even if there were an $11b hole in the Coalition's figures, isn't it a whole lot better than the $43b hole that is the NBN in Labor's costings? I should think so! Labor is so concerned about this NBN that they haven't even put it in the budget...talk about great economic management! If the CEO of a publicly listed company did that surely he'd find himself in the do-do big time?

Morons.


I was reading the BRW last week (volume 32, number 33) and there was a letter published on Page 16 (Letters to the Editor), and I thought I would reproduce it here. It was authored by a Mr Michael Johnson.

Did we really deserve this?

They say we get what we deserve. Never has this been more true than in the 2010 federal election.

Sadly, the outcome of the former prime minister John Howard's "comfortable society" is a country that is seemingly devoid of vision,
of leadership and has the political conversation of that of a small, inwardly focused aged-care ward.

In 2010, and at a time when someone needed to stand up, both parties chose what they believed was the safe route.

They chose to focus on the title of power not what is required of those who will wield this power on behalf of all Australians.

What the country is calling for is a vision for the future. A vision that is more than what we are at present or what we have been historically.

Australia needs a vision and a sense of purpose that harnesses the ethos of the clever country through an innovative industrial sector, that proudly claims the value-adding opportunities that our rich natural resources provide and delivers equality of opportunity that underpins the now-cliched term "a fair go for all".

The greatest tragedy is not what has been said, claimed and done, but
what has been left unsaid, ignored and removed from the national
conversation".

He's probably not wrong!

Book Review...

I recently finished reading a book I'd heard mentioned on my favourite talk back radio station.

The book is called "Betrayal" with the tagline "The underbelly of Australian Labor".

Don't you just love how underbelly has become the new descriptive for everything that's not-so-kosher?

Anyway, it's written by a guy named Simon Benson, whom I believe is a senior political journalist for the Daily Telegraph newspaper (my apologies to Simon if this is incorrect).

It's all about the NSW Labor party and in particular, the nameless, faceless, power-hungry, factional puppeteers behind the scenes. A large portion of the book talks about the attempted privatisation by Morris Iemma (former NSW Premier) of the state's electricity networks, and the struggles involved with that.

It's probably quite evident already that I am not a Labor supporter, but I must say that Morris Iemma was treated pretty bloody poorly by these people.

And, I must hand it to Michael Costa - what a character. I do admire his straight-shooting style. He says what he means, and means what he says, and I believe that he genuinely had the state's best interests in mind in the carriage of his role as Treasurer.

The book is a fantastic snapshot into how Labor runs its politics, and I've got to say that I finished the book disliking Labor more than I did before I started reading it!

It also goes some way to showing what Kevin Rudd (former Australian Prime Minister) is like. If only we'd had this book before Kevin 07!!

Paul Keating (former Australian treasurer, then Prime Minister) was quoted as saying "...where goes NSW, so goes Federal Labor".

If that's true, and I believe it is, then that's a real worry!

For anyone who's interested in politics, then I'd recommend this book. It was a good read, entertaining even.

PC on overdrive...

gay a. (-er, -est) happy and full of fun; brightly coloured.

"Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
Merry, merry King of the bush is he
Laugh, Kookaburra, laugh
Kookaburra, gay your life must be"

My punctuation of this old classis song is probably incorrect, but that's not the point of this little rant.

I swear, the world is going barking mad!

What on earth is wrong with the word "gay" in this song?

Well, some PC mad Principal at a Victorian public school thought there was something wrong with it, so he's banned the word and instead, replaced it with the word "fun".

What next for crying out loud?

The Power of the Individual...

I was watching the Insight programme the other night (on SBS, I think), and the topic for the night was the state of the future Federal Government.

Mr Michael Lavarch (former Attorney General and now Dean of Law at QUT)made a very interesting point that I haven't heard raised anywhere else yet, and it was this (in my words):

It's not only the independants that wield so much power in the new Government (regardless of which team wins the battle), but any single individual of the 150 member Parliament has the potential to create havoc.

All it will take is one single MP to have a dummy spit about his electorate not being looked after as much as the next person's electorate, and if he doesn't get what he wants for his electorate all he need do is pull the pin, and down comes the fragile house of cards.

Now more than ever, each team will require complete loyalty and discipline from their players.
Stability? My arse!