Vale Charlie of Charlie’s Pizza

There is very little left of the Footscray that I remember as a child. Growing up on Gordon Street, we were forced to move north when the hospital expanded when I was seven. That side of the street got bulldozed. Years later, the Baptist Church over the street closed down and then got redeveloped as units (my brother and I went to the kindergarten which had been located at the back of the church). The part of Gordon Street north of Ballarat Road, adjacent to our next family home, has changed radically in the past 50 years too. The ammunition factory is now Edgewater, and the Modern Maid stove factory got developed into housing in the mid 1990s. Individual houses have been redeveloped at an accelerating rate as well.

A lot of the businesses are gone too – long established ones. Ted The Toyman (est 1930s) became Ted’s Cycles and closed within the past five years, a victim of land taxes. The shop front is still vacant. Only one of the many longstanding shoe shops (Harry’s Shoes) remains (Kifts and Hicks are now just memories). The shop fronts which were Jim Wong’s Chinese restaurant (a Footscray institution) and Poon’s (an even older Chinese restaurant which recently relocated to Sunshine) remain empty. Il Paesano Pizza closed about 10 years ago when the new owners ran it into the ground, and Domenico’s Pizza changed owners about 6 years ago.

Nor should you get me started on listing all the pubs which have been redeveloped or demolished outright – although the Barkly is the one I most lament, due to time spent there with my dad on our walks to Footscray shopping centre.

It looks like another Footscray institution is likely to be gone now. Charlie’s Pizza has been at the Ballarat Road end of Droop Street since 1974. News dropped on Facebook yesterday that its owner, Charlie Morabito, died a couple of days ago.

I have not eaten in Charlie’s for quite some years, as I have not lived within home delivery range since 1996, and I never felt it quite the sort of place where I would want to dine in. My brother, however, is a regular there, and loves doing a late night steak there, and would chat regularly with Charlie about local community gossip.

Charlie also originates from my mother’s home village, Ferruzano, in Reggio Calabria. This makes him what we would call a Paesano, a fellow villager. Most of the people from Ferruzano (commonly known as Ruzani, much the way people from Melbourne are Melburnians and people from Footscray are Footscrayites) moved to Melbourne after the Second World War, so there are more of us here than there are in Italy.

He was quite a character, with his 1970s disco wog hairstyle, sideburns and moustache, all carefully dyed black, even though he was well into his 80s. He also liked to pretend that he was a decade younger than he was. You can probably surmise why – he still had an eye for the ladies.

He stubbornly stayed there on that corner of Droop Street for half a century, making his pizzas and watching Footscray shape shift into what it is now. He was one of those constants, at a time that everything around him was changing, something which we locals could rely on.

And now he too is gone, and with him, we probably see the end of his popular pizzeria too. Footscray and its community is much the poorer for this.

Adding Wesfarmers To My Share Portfolio

A few years ago, during the years of Plague and the isolation that ensued, a close friend of mine emailed me with the suggestion that I don’t need to bother with shares. Unlike most people, he pointed out, I belong to a defined benefit superannuation fund with a generous pension on offer, and in which I have huge equity.

He did have a good point – the actuarial value of my current pension is almost double that of my house, and I am getting a large payroll each fortnight than I did whilst working for the Man (lower tax and no 10% gross voluntary contribution to my super fund will do that) .

But I am so used to having a share portfolio over the past 28 1/2 years that I do not ever see myself divesting myself of shares.

However, I think I have made it fairly clear over the five or so years I have had this blog that whilst I enjoy owning a share portfolio, I am not that enamoured of individual stocks.

Most of my portfolio is held in ETFs, Listed Investment Companies, Real Estate Trusts, and Conglomerates. This way, I diversify my holdings and minimise my risk. After all, I have made some fairly poor decisions in stock picking in the past.

The main exception to that is Treasury Wine Estates, for obvious reasons.

This investment position continues with my latest purchase, 100 shares in Wesfarmers (formerly known as the Westralian Farmers Cooperative).

Wesfarmers owns a very diversified portfolio of businesses, most famously Officeworks, Kmart, Target (which I pronounce in the French way because I am facetious), and Bunnings. But it also stays true to its farmer coop roots with a fertiliser business, and various other assorted ventures.

It even currently is the owner of the Soul Pattison chemist chain, which used to be owned by (and the original core business of) Washington Soul H Pattison, which now, incidentally, is my largest shareholding.

Just like the latter, Wesfarmers has very right to call itself a conglomerate.

At $71.50 per share, it looked a little expensive according to the current broker consensus. But, as the Chinese say about the best time for planting a tree (either today or 20 years ago), the best time to buy shares is either right now or 20 years ago. I’m planning to gradually build up my Wesfarmers share holding, just like I have my Soul Pattison (sans pharmacy) shareholding.

Sadly, the AGM is in Perth each year, so I fear that I will not be checking out their corporate catering as I do when I attend company meetings in Melbourne.

Bernie Finn Returns – Yet Again!

I have written about former local state upper house MP Bernie Finn on various occasions in the past, particularly when I suggested he get given a knighthood (I was being facetious, if you don’t quite know how to read my tone!).

I will be honest and concede that his first coming as an MP in 1992 was of some value. He won the lower house seat of Tullamarine in the state election where the Kirner government got deservedly flushed down the toilet. That was a habitually Labor held seat, and he was not expected to retain it in 1996, but somehow he did. My impression was, that as a relatively youthful MP, he did a good job in holding a place on the Coalition backbench.

By 2006, when proportional representation had been introduced for the state upper house (a mistake I say – the upper house vote should be restricted to homeowners and other ratepayers rather than allowed to the plebs), Our Bernie got a second chance. He topped the Liberal ticket for Western Metropolitan, which guaranteed him election.

As the Liberals decided not to permit sitting state MPs to be challenged for their preselections for many years, he was able to retain his seat for four consecutive terms.

During that time, he increasingly showed a maverick and rather feral nature, leading some to ponder whether it would have been better to open up preselections for challenge earlier.

In the end, he was expelled from the party room over some tone deaf social media comments on abortion – an issue which, whilst supposedly near to his heart, he had never bothered actually taking a stand on in parliament.

As I have written before – his expulsion was way overdue. He really should have been expelled when he secretly reneged on a pairing arrangement and voted in a division when he had begged for an exemption as he did not want to be present in the parliament at Easter. That the opposition leader and the parliamentary party tolerated his underhand behaviour at that time did not do them any credit.

After his expulsion, Our Bernie returned to his first political love, the DLP, and brought a disgruntled Labor MP Adem Somyurek (famed for branch stacking) with him, in time for the 2022 state election. Our Bernie was not successful in his bid for reelection under the auspices of the DLP, but his boon companion was.

At the time, I described the DLP decision to run Our Bernie and Mr Somyurek Esq as a Hail Mary Pass.

My thoughts at the time were the following:

Hospital or Hail Mary Pass? The DLP Gamble Their Principles on the Prospect of Electoral Success

In that post, I observed my views on the DLP’s gamble thus:

This does not strike me as without significant risk. Neither has the integrity or idealism which normally represent a DLP candidate , but represent a blatant lack of principles and a proven disregard for ethical behaviour in their public life (Finn in his Good Friday ‘pairing’ stunt and Somyurek in his branch stacking).

If either was to be elected, who is to say that they would not then desert the DLP for another opportunity later down the track? Or even worse, were to remain as DLP MPs whilst repeating their history of reprehensible behaviour.

I more or less warned that:


The more likely outcome is that the DLP do not win any seats, but appear discredited and cynical through the cold and calculated decision to gamble their principles and ideals on two tired old renegades. This could end up costing them support amongst their existing members.

Interestingly, neither of these gentlemen remain in the DLP today – and whilst the DLP actually did help one of these chaps get elected, Mr Somyurek is now listed on the Victorian Parliament website as an independent and Our Bernie has jumped ship, again, for the resurrected Family First party as their lead Senate candidate for the next election.

So I think that the decision by the DLP in 2022 to back the Finn-Somyurek ticket has only served to discredit the DLP, and they don’t even have a current seat in any parliament to show for it – something that they will need, if they don’t have 1000 paid up members, to contest the increasingly imminent federal election.

Perhaps Our Bernie realised that, prompting his decision to join Family First.

What has inspired me to write about Our Bernie today is that after much inactivity on Facebook, he has recently appeared in my Facebook feed, in full throated voice, unmitigated and unfiltered. I’m not quite sure when he started posting on Facebook, as I have only been able to doom scroll back about two weeks, but it is clear that he is posting many times per day, every day. I can only assume that he is sitting around with a glass of decent shiraz in one hand and his smartphone in the other, thinking of what next to say.

His utterances (I will not dignify them with the description ‘writings’) are mostly aimed at his dislike of most of his former colleagues in the Victorian Parliamentary Liberal Party (except for his replacement, Moira), his joy at Trump’s reelection, and his Moiraesque views on abortion and gender issues. Interspersed between those are some ad hominem jabs aimed at Dictator Dan and Albo.

In other words, they are quite self-serving and immature – particularly for someone whom I believe to be into their sixties by now.

We have this to look forward to between now and the federal election, and I dearly hope that Our Bernie does not block me on social media, as I find him quite entertaining.

Puneet Puneet Redux

When walking to the bus stop this morning, I saw the front page of the Herald Sun – a shrink wrapped copy lying on the driveway of a house somewhere around the corner.

‘Bring Him Back!’ was the headline.

Having grown up reading The Sun News Pictorial in the morning and The Herald in the evening (prior to their sad merger into the one entity in 1990), I knew exactly whom the headline writer was referring to: Puneet Puneet.

Puneet Puneet (what a name!), as everyone knows, is Melbourne’s answer to Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs. Except that Biggsy seems to have had a lot more panache and verve in his career as a fugitive from justice.

As a recap, Puneet Puneet was a 19 year old learner driver who had an unfortunate accident in Southbank in 2009 where he killed someone. It did not help that he was drink driving and speeding either. He pleaded guilty to the subsequent charges early on and was released on bail pending sentencing. He then ‘borrowed’ the passport of a friend and fled Australia.

Since then, attempts to have him extradited back to Australia have proven ultimately fruitless. He was arrested at his wedding in 2012 (one of his friends could not resist the reward money to inform on his whereabouts), and has been in and out of custody since then. The Herald Sun today observed that he has had 147 court appearances so far whilst fighting his extradition.

The sole ‘current’ road block to his extradition comprises domestic violence charges laid in 2022. Apparently extradition cannot occur until those charges are dealt with – which can take 4 to 6 years.

The article in today’s Herald Sun was another plea from Puneet Puneet’s victim’s father for the Federal Government to do something to expedite the extradition. I can sympathise with his desire for the delays in his son’s killer facing justice, but I also have long since formed the view (as in an earlier post on this case https://lostforwords.blog/2020/04/24/the-strange-and-highly-dickensian-case-of-puneet-puneet/) that the Indian legal system is sufficiently Dickensian as to make the Courts of Chancery in Dickens’ tedious novel Bleak House seem efficient.

So far, to the frustration of involved parties, the legal team behind Puneet Puneet have tried all sorts of absurd but highly effective tactics to delay extradition. At one point, a new judge was appointed to the case and wanted both sides to repeat their verbal arguments – making me wonder about the probity of the new judge’s motives.

Now there is the domestic violence accusation. I do not know what to believe. But I do not envy Mrs Puneet. I expect that her parents arranged her marriage to this highly successful chap because of his family’s relative wealth. To have her groom torn from her during their wedding celebration would have been humiliating (but possibly also a blessing). Since then, he at one point disappeared whilst on bail with his mistress (a woman who probably does not have her parents to blame for her connection to such a fine and honourable gentleman).

Does the domestic violence accusation have merit? I could easily expect someone with the demonstrated character of Puneet Puneet in the fifteen intervening years since he fled Australia to commit domestic violence. But it is very possible that this is just a cynical ploy by his legal team to buy even more time, and that Mrs Puneet has been bullied by the family and the legal sharks into making these allegations mainly to help him evade justice in Australia.

After all, the societal and cultural attitudes demonstrated in many parts of India towards women are not exactly convincing that domestic violence is abhorred and prosecuted. Don’t take my word for it – look at section 6 of the US State Department Report on Human Rights Practices for India:

https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/india/

I am very cynical about the likelihood of Puneet Puneet returning to Melbourne anytime this decade (if at all) to face justice. The only consolation to the family of his grieving victim is that the Puneet family has probably spent a large part of their family fortune on keeping him away from justice, and that he has, at least, spent considerable time in remand at various intervals over the past 12 years.

But what will happen if he does return? Will he be allowed to recant his original guilt plea and demand a trial? Will his legal team argue that the publicity and opprobrium he has incurred since his flight means that he cannot get a fair trial?

I do not expect any of this to end very soon.

The Upcoming War On Home Owners – How Victoria’s Debt Can Be Repaid

When I was much, much, much younger than I am now, and actively used to read books on Libertarianism and the like, I remember one libertarian writer observing that if everyone lived in mobile homes and could move wherever and whenever they liked, they could hold governments accountable simply by voting with their feet (or wheels). So, if for example, a government were to impose extortionate taxes and conscription on its citizens, overnight they would lose all their citizens as they would have driven across the border.

Much as I dislike the term ‘Libertarian’, I still think that the philosophy is great in theory. The mobile home example is just one paragraph in a much more nuanced political philosophy, although I think that most American trailer park rednecks might consider themselves Libertarians without knowing what it means or how to spell it (or wanting to move their mobile homes at all).

One of the problems with the mobile home example in practice is that most of us don’t own mobile homes, nor do we want to live in them except as a matter of last resort. We like living in real stand alone homes, on land that we own, and where we celebrate when we end our bonded servitude to the banks by paying off our mortgages.

Upping stumps and moving to an entirely new jurisdiction is an expensive proposition, even for those who do not have the binding links of having family, friends, jobs, community ties and other bonds in our home cities.

And for most people, their home is one of their greatest and most valuable assets.

Which is something which policy makers in state governments know very well.

A few days ago I promised to explain how the Victorian state government can repay the giant debt the state currently owes after a decade of profligate spending.

As a crash course in the scale of Victoria’s debt, there are approximately seven million people in Victoria right now and a debt of approximately $188 billion. This equates to $27,000 for every man, woman and child in Victoria.

Has your jaw dropped yet?

Back in 1992, when the Cain-Kirner government was thrown out of office after a decade of what, in comparison to the Andrews-Allan government, looks like fiscal restraint and high integrity, there was a significant degree of debt. Premier Kirner, in the last days of her government, legalised poker machines, hoping for a river of gold in taxes from those in order to save her from a humiliating election defeat. Her government had already sold the beloved State Bank of Victoria off after its dodgy merchant banking arm had incurred gigantic losses.

The incoming Kennett government had to be very careful with money. They privatised utilities in order to retire debt, and had little choice but to raise taxes where they could – petrol taxes and financial institution duties on bank accounts. One way or the other, they got rid of the debt.

Taxes on bank accounts, aside from bank interest being taxable as part of your income tax, appear unthinkable 30 years later. I’m not sure, due to the doctrine of rational ignorance (ie I didn’t care enough to read the fine print), whether FID was eliminated in perpetuity when the Federal-State deal on GST and related tax reform was agreed upon in 1999.

As it is, there are several taxes which state governments seem totally uninhibited about levying currently.

First, we have gambling taxes. A major cut of the money which the casinos and pokies venues make goes into state government taxes. After all, Joan Kirner did not legalise poker machines and lay the groundwork for a casino in Melbourne because she wanted, as a committed socialist, to increase the liberty of the common people. She simply was clutching at straws for an alternative source of venue to save her pathetic government from defeat.

Then we have payroll taxes. These are politically unpopular, as they are a tax on employment. All the same, just as when a drug user talks about needing to get clean but the reality is that they cannot go without their drug of choice, our elected leaders love to talk about cutting or getting rid of payroll taxes, but the budget realities do not permit that.

Motor vehicle taxes are the next sort. There are all sorts of ways to justify motor vehicle taxes, mostly in the form of car registration fees each year – for the upkeep of roads mostly. Fuel excise used to be taxed by state governments until a High Court case in 1997. Since then, the federal government imposes a fuel excise (separate to GST) and shares it with state governments. [Personally, I think we should impose a registration fee on bicycle ownership, but that has more to do with my monomaniacal hatred of cyclists, rather than any real desire to fix the bottom line of the state budget.]

Finally we have land taxes of various forms.

The indirect and most obvious one inflicted on home owners is the municipal one – our much hated council rates. A lot of ill is hidden in those. Over the past 20 years, much cost shifting on services which should be provided by the state government has gone into getting local governments to undertake services which should be done at the state level, and where the local ratepayer is now footing the bill.

The council rates notice is also where the fire services levy (now recently renamed the emergency services levy) is collected. I noticed that recently, as one of his final acts, the miscreant former state treasurer Tim Pallas quietly renamed and doubled this levy. Obviously this is not done in order to double the services available to protect Victorians from fire (eg buying those giant water bombing helicopters useful for bushfires), but simply because the government needs to find money from somewhere to address the gaping wound of the state debt.

Then there is the stamp duty on property purchases. I saw this as annoying when I last upgraded my home, but I do think it is probably a necessary user pays tax to protect the land titles system and put something towards the upkeep of infrastructure.

Land Taxes have been imposed in one form or other for many years. They usually are taxes which are imposed on any real estate aside from your principal place of residence. The land tax threshold was lowered last year to any non-principal residence holdings of a value of $100,000 or above ($100,000 does not get you very much in Melbourne these days – a Brighton Beach Box goes for about $400,000). Any holdings valued at above $1,000,000 now get taxed at 0.9%.

Then there are those windfall taxes on rezoned land. I am not sure how they work, whether it is immediate (unfair) or when land is sold, but they are there supposedly to pay for more infrastructure to support the population Ponzi scheme which the Victorian (and Australian to be honest) economy increasingly bases itself upon.

And if we go back in time, there are Death Duties. These were abolished in the late 1970s. The only Death Duty which exists now is the indirect one of Capital Gains Tax on a deceased estate. However, the recent introduction of tiered probate fees in Victoria for estates, where estates above $7 million will incur a fee of $2318.90, represents an increase of up to 625% – a death duty by stealth. [And if you think that is only going to affect very few people, just remember that quite a lot of elderly home owners will have accumulated a lot of house and share and superannuation by the time they are in their mid 80s – a house in working class Footscray can easily go for $1.3 million right now.]

So… how do I see the Allen Labor Government moving to cover the $188 Billion debt it has created?

There will be some squeezing around the edges with more taxes on gambling and on car registration.

Most of the tax burden is going to fall on land owners, increasingly on home owners.

Council rates first. The Emergency Services Levy will continue to be increased. Cost shifting of services to local government will continue, and with it, increases in rates. This will affect home owners and investors equally (unless councils start to discriminate against investors, as is policy in some areas), except that investors can claim income tax deductions and home owners cannot.

How about stamp duty? This is erroneously linked to the cost of buying your first home, and there is a myth that abolishing stamp duty (or converting it into an ongoing annual payment) will make home ownership more affordable. My feeling is that converting it into an annual payment will be a politically expedient way of introducing a new land tax on residential home owners – a tax which can then be regularly increased according to when it is necessary or expedient to do so by the state government.

Land taxes next. Property values tend to increase, unless you happen to own an apartment as an investment in Docklands or something similar. There is probably very little need to lower the threshold for the value of a non-principal residence below $100,000, nor to raise the amount payable in tax for those valued under $1,000,000. After all, capital growth will eventually see many more properties nudge over the $1,000,000 mark and into the 0.9% bracket. There may not be a need to even increase the tax paid in that bracket, but I would not rule it out.

There even could be a push to introduce a land tax threshold for principal residences, where any value above a threshold of, say, $2 million would be taxable. As property prices rise, most homes in Melbourne would probably creep into such a threshold within the next decade. Do I think that this government is capable of doing such an appalling thing to home owners? Of course I do – there is very little else in the course of their abuses of power over the past decade which they have not done.

And of course there are death duties. I do not think that a direct or overt death duty is necessary. I think that the very clever and cynical idea of tiered probate fees, as recently introduced by the state government, is sufficient. Capital growth, both in land and shares, will push more and more deceased estates into the higher fee tiers. Whenever more money is needed, then there can be the expedient of increasing the fees on those higher tiers.

This is an appalling state government, where the opposition has just become that much more ineffective with today’s change in leadership. What we will now see, particularly if we have the calamity of their reelection in two years’ time, is an effort to repay the debt they have created through irresponsibility by imposing the costs on home owners.

Why It Is Unwise To Try Persecuting Comedians

I’m expecting some friends over tonight for a few pre-Christmas drinks. Whilst idling around my lounge room with my iPad in the meantime, I was distracted from my original plan to either watch something on Netflix or read something of dubious literary merit on the kindle app by a push notice on You Tube.

It notified me of a new video by Friendly Jordies, the outspoken activist comedian. The title is ‘Raygun Has Entered Her Villain Era’.

To recap from the Olympics a few months ago, we were introduced to Raygun, who gained great fame as our least successful Olympian and most notorious break dancer.

At the time I wrote quite positively in my blog about my impressions of her:

As for Raygun herself? She seems to be someone who has a very strong love of life and who is very good humoured and fun loving. I hope she continues to love life, and that perhaps regardless of the joyless sour commentators like Peta Credlin on Skynews that she becomes a folk hero, complete with product endorsements and TV hosting gigs.

That is it – I had a positive impression of her, despite all the awful Fox News commentators like Peta Credlin who wanted to tear her down so viciously (I might share most of Credlin’s political beliefs, but that does not meant that I ever want to break bread at the same table as Credlin).

HOWEVER, I don’t feel so positively about Raygun since then.

In recent weeks, a satirical comedy act called RAYGUN: THE MUSICAL was announced.

Dr Gun has reacted to this in a way which has significantly diminished her credibility. She engaged lawyers to threaten the creator of this satire and the venue where this performance was to occur.

Not only did Dr Gun demand the prevention of this satirical performance, but she demanded pre-emptive legal expenses from the venue owner to the tune of $10,000.

The performance ceased. The venue owner offered the $500 of revenue as a settlement to Dr Gun’s lawyers. This was rejected.

Incidentally, the $500 was intended as a donation to a women’s refuge.

I now recant everything I said about Dr Gun being a fun loving person with a strong love of life who is good humoured.

I think that she is avaricious. [NB Avarice is one of the seven deadly sins.]

But I am not a powerful voice against her.

Let’s look at the legion of professional comedians who are denouncing Raygun:

Friendly Jordies, with his 1 million You Tube followers, is a powerful voice – one who can crowd fund $1,000,000 if a legal challenge occurs.

Lewis Spears, who disclosed RayGun’s legal threats and described her as a Karen and a ‘privileged private school graduate who sends lawyers after small businesses and comedians after jokes’ has over 500,000 followers on You Tube,

Nikki Osborne (aka Bush Barbie) 60,000 followers, is good at patronising her in a very clever faux bogan way.

Ozzy Man – some long haired bogan with over 6 million followers. He has pilied on.

Bearing – an animated right wing bear with over 500,000 followers.

These people are all calling Raygun out on her hypocrisy and her legal bullying of people who might not be able to defend themselves against her resources (she is not suing the US TV channels who mock her, just the local independent comedians who do not have money).

They point out that despite her legal threats, Australian law permits and protects parodies, and that her arguments are not going to hold up in court. They also dissect her public video statements as being mendacious. She pretends that the legal threats and demands which have been exposed by Lewis Spears do not exist.

There are a legion of comedians who feel that Dr Racheal Gun has attacked freedom of speech and the legally protected right of parody under Australian law by allowing her legal team to threaten and bully a legitimate comedian and the venue where a charitable performance was to occur, and to lie about that.

I agree with them. Raygun, alias Dr Rachel Gun, is a hypocrite and a liar. I do not like her anymore. I think we need to look more closely at the governance practices which enabled her to go to Paris as a representative of our Olympic team, and at all the other monetisation agendas she has pursued since then.

And let’s not forget that a womens’ shelter has missed out on $500 because her vexatious legal threats have stopped the first performance of a comedy act.

She is not funny, she is not kind, she is not compassionate. She is greedy, and selfish, and vicious, and nasty, and mendacious.

And many of you (not me as I don’t think failure in sport is a big thing) will say that SHE HAS DISGRACED OUR NATION AT THE OLYMPICS.

The moral of the story is don’t be stupid and arrogant as to ignore Australia’s legion of comedians. They will come for you (and they will crowd fund faster than your private school contacts will bankroll you), and Rachel is now a Karen.

The Father Christmas Letters

I suppose a few of my primary school teachers were potentially great, but flawed.

My grade five teacher (let’s call her Miss T) was a quite accomplished, well read, and well travelled woman who taught us how to knit, to play a bit of piano, and lots on nutrition. Unfortunately, she was not very good at teaching Maths, so I spent grade six playing catch up.

My grade four teacher (Mr L) was also quite interesting. He had anger management issues in relation to the dumb kids in the class (luckily I am clever) and used to use the strap and metre long rulers and canes a lot. The rest of us used to enjoy the theatre, relieved that we were not the victims.

He also was quite left wing, openly. He taught us that the IRA and PLO are justified in what they were doing, and that Australia should become a republic (this was 1978). Not sure whatever became of him, but I discovered a few years ago that he was an actual committed communist (Google had a photo of him in the 1981 Melbourne Mayday march).

Mr L also had the hots for Miss T. There was one day where Miss T sent two children from her class to our class with a message: “Mr L, Miss T wants to borrow your strap.”

Mr L then replied with an outrageous lie: “Tell Miss T I do not have a strap.”

Total lie! We saw the strap in action several times a week.

Mr L then pulled the belt off his jeans and handed it over to the kids, adding: “Tell Miss T she can borrow this!”

When you are nine, it is unlikely that you are going to understand the subtext for such a loan. As an adult, I think it is pretty obvious what was going on.

Mr L left at the end of the year – supposedly because he was shifting to another school nearer to his home, although it was rumoured that he and our school principal Mr G (a very conservative church going solid citizen who was active in local government as a right wing Labor councillor) argued viciously over politics.

Miss T, on the other hand, rebounded into the arms of Mr R, the deputy principal. He left his wife and teenage kids and shacked up with Miss T, which was quite a scandal in 1980 amongst those parents who were in the know (like my mother, who heard from my former kindergarten teacher whose daughter was a teacher at my school).

Both Mr L and Miss T were very well read – or at least as far as I can tell, looking back as an adult at what I can perceive from what I saw as a nine or ten year old.

Mr L seriously encouraged us to read, and introduced us to some of his favourite authors. He read Banjo Paterson’s poems to us – the funnier ones that a kid will enjoy rather than the classics like The Man From Snowy River and Clancy Of The Overflow. He also read Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding to us.

Of course, as a nine year old, I did not get the satirical subtext of The Magic Pudding, which I discovered much later, about the irresponsible economic policies followed in Australia in the post Federation era.

Mr L also read The Hobbit to us, serving as my introduction to JRR Tolkien. I still consider that this had a huge lifelong impact on me. An early introduction to The Hobbit led me to read The Lord Of The Rings in early 1980 for the first time (I have lost count of how many times I have read it since then).

Since then, as a Tolkien fan, I have read a lot of his other books, and reread them. For instance, in preparation for the lamentable fan fiction Amazon series The Rings Of Power, I read The Silmarillion for the first time in almost 40 years.

I am not exactly sure when I read The Father Christmas Letters. It was either around 1980, when I was still in primary school, or in 1981 or 1982, in my early high school years.

The Father Christmas Letters was a posthumous publication of Tolkien’s letters to his children at Christmas, between 1920 and 1943 (he had a big family). The letters were written as if they were from Father Christmas, complete with fabricated stamps from the North Pole, and lots of illustrations, recounting the adventures that Father Christmas and his sidekick, the North Polar Bear, had over the course of the previous year.

I quite enjoyed The Father Christmas Letters at that time, when I read the book in a cosy corner of the school library.

Now, well over 40 years later, I was pondering that particular Tolkien book, and decided on the spur of the moment to order a copy through Amazon the other day.

It arrived last night, and I settled down on the front porch with a glass of shiraz to read it. As an adult, the creativity and the love for his children really shine through in his letters, which involved painstaking writing and drawings. There is a great poignancy to it.

The one problem with the new version is that the formatting is different from that of the original edition, which was more like a picture book in size with the drawings in full colour and sized such that you could enjoy the artwork for its own sake. The pictures in this version are not as large or set up as an integral part of the publication as they were in the first book.

It seems to me that the editor has aimed at an adult audience, rather than at the children who would get the most delight out of reading about Father Christmas and gawking at the artworks.

All the same, I did enjoy it, even if the original edition gave me so much more joy as an eleven year old.

The Liberals’ Moira Problem Explodes

Back in March last year, I wrote a post on the Liberal Party’s Moira Problem, ie the problem that the Liberal Party had in dealing with the newly elected The Honourable Moira Deeming MLC after her participation in a rather chaotic gender identity rally which was gate crashed by neo-Nazi morons.

I mostly restricted my observations at that time to the damage that her election had done to the Liberal Party grassroots in the Western Metropolitan Province in Melbourne, and the concerns that had been expressed to me about her.

Her willingness to use the bully pulpit of her newly won seat in the Victorian Parliament to engage in a one woman crusade on gender identity issues was pretty obvious before she elected – which is what caused more conciliatory heads in Liberal Party circles to have serious concerns about her candidacy.

I was rather concerned that a big mistake had been made – I have never been a fan of her predecessor Bernie Finn, who shared some similarly socially conservative views, and whom I used to delight in ridiculing in this blog.

Hey, I am an extremely personally conservative chap – I subscribe to Newsweekly after all (although I have not bothered buying the book Pat Byrne Esq has written on gender issues which is regularly advertised in its pages). I don’t necessarily disagree with most of her concerns about gender identity issues. But I do not really see any of this stuff as a hill to die on.

The current State Labor Government is what we need to focus on, not whether the highly woke author JK Rowlings is not woke enough for contemporary progressives (to interpret Moira Deemings’ personal hobby horse in a simplified way).

The Andrews-Allen Labor Government has probably been the worst government in Victorian history since the government of the aptly named Sir Thomas Bent, over a century ago. The excesses of abuse of authority during the pandemic were unforgivable, and illustrated Labor’s principles taken to their logical technocratic extremes. Then there was the debacle with the 2026 Commonwealth Games, which does look very much in retrospect like an extremely cynical exercise in buying votes in marginal regional seats at the last state election with a rubber cheque.

Most people will not appreciate that the state government apparatus, ie the Victorian Public Service, has been excessively politicised and converted into a tool aimed at ensuring the reelection and continued rule of the Labor government. This is a matter which belies the claim that we live in a democracy.

Of course, we can never overlook the $188 Billion current state debt – that is about $30,000 for every man, woman and child in Victoria – which has been incurred in infrastructure projects, some of which are of dubious merit. How do we ever pay that debt out? [Rhetorical question – I will address this in a later blog post sometime.]

So I consider that there are enough serious problems with the current government which merit it finally being flushed down the toilet like so many turds in November 2026.

So… Moira deciding to become a cultural warrior was, in my opinion, a misguided action, something more in line with her personal agendas, rather than in the broader interest of the Liberal Party or even that of the Victorian people (who really need to get rid of this awful government).

It has become, in the intervening 21 months, a major distraction to the proper work of the State Opposition. The whole expulsion debacle, with the ensuing lawsuit, has diverted both attention and energy which the State Opposition should have devoted to constructively criticising the poor governance being imposed on our state by Chairman Dan and his chosen successor, Jacinta Allen.

Now, the tragicomedy is about to come to its penultimate act. Moira has won $300,000 in her defamation case against the Opposition Leader, John Pesutto, and is about to get reinstated in the Liberal Party room. There is a leadership spill that has been called, and it looks like Pesutto will lose the leadership.

I believe that Pesutto losing the leadership is going to be a sad mistake for the state Liberals. He is a decent fellow who has a consensus building and conciliatory approach to leadership. The expulsion of Moira from the party room was not his sole decision – it required a majority vote of her peers, and was decided after those peers lost patience with her inability to perform as part of a team. I have serious doubts as to whether anyone else currently in the state parliament has the ability to unite the Liberals and lead the coalition to victory at the next state election.

And that will be the final act in this tragicomedy – the November 2026, which I fear the Coalition will lose as the result of this turbulent upper house MP.

Apocalocyntosis

The Ancient Roman philosopher Seneca was not quite as stoic as reputation made him out to be. He could not help but feel a degree of spite and vengefulness, as evidenced when he celebrated the death of his enemy, the Emperor Cladius, which he welcomed with spiteful glee.

The evidence of this is the short satire Apocalocyntosis. This word, which to my eyes is more Greek than Roman in origin, means Pumpkinfication. This is a pun on the term Apotheosis – which is the Latin for Deification – turning into a God. The Roman Senate, in its spineless era of the Julio-Claudian dynasty (as opposed to its later spineless eras), had a habit of declaring dead emperors to be Gods – deifying them in death rather than defying them in life.

Claudius was no exemption – he got deified, although Seneca, with the protection of his pupil Nero now on the imperial throne, felt safe enough to assert that the late Emperor had undergone pumpkinfication instead, much like the carriage in Cinderella does in the Disney cartoon when the clock strikes midnight.

In my intellectually self indulgent way, I did elude to Seneca in my retirement speech 18 months ago, where I claimed that day was my own apocalocyntosis.

Eighteen months on, I think that pumpkinfication in my own life has taken on a more literal and practical aspect.

For the first time in my life, I am attempting to grow pumpkins. They do take up a lot of space and attention, so I have not tried them before. Besides, I have only a passing fondness for pumpkins, and much pretty to attempt tomato growing most of the time.

This year, I got some pumpkin seeds (butternut variety) from my mother and planted them in some polystyrene boxes left over from our wine making efforts in March. Once they started growing large enough, I transplanted the most viable seedlings into large pots and deposited them in various corners of my garden.

Apparently the vine puts down new roots in the soil as it grows, so starting them off in large pots is not going to stunt them.

So now I have six healthy pumpkin vines making their way around my garden.

It’s still early days, but if I am successful, I might buy some giant pumpkin seeds online and try, next year, to grow some of those giant 50kg pumpkins which require much cow poo and water.

I’m also making a similar serious attempt to grow cucumbers – a salad vegetable I have never had any great luck with. This year, things seem to be going much better. I have three vines which are actually flowering and have baby cucumbers already showing.

I know that it is cheaper to simply buy veggies from the supermarket, but doing this is much more fun.

The Impermanence of a Stock Exchange Listing

Years ago when I first started learning about investing in the share market, I remember reading, in one or other of the various books I had bought to teach myself about share investing, that the author observed that many large companies did not remain listed on the stock exchange. He mentioned various big name companies which, through mergers and acquisitions or bad decisions, disappeared from the ASX over the years.

I was pondering this over the past few days, when looking through my watch lists of possible share purchases and former share holdings.

The first company I invested in was Mayne Nickless in 1996. It was a logistics company which was about to divest its 25% holding in Optus, and which had a small side business in private hospitals. It ended up divesting most of its operations and becoming a pharmaceutical company – disappearing from the ASX entirely after a while, and then returning relatively recently as Mayne Pharma.

I think I learned a lot from the $1000 I bought in Mayne Nickless as my first investment. I had the experience of having actual share certificates for both the initial shares and the few which got issued afterwards during dividend reinvestment (share certificates are now a relic of finance history). I participated in the spin off of Optus shares – my first ever IPO. And I got to enjoy the ups and downs (mostly downs) of being a share market investor for the first time.

After about three years, I got rather fed up with Mayne Nickless and sold my shares. The company was going nowhere despite (or because of) all their many changes in strategic direction. Even looking now at it’s successor, Mayne Pharma, which only bears a passing resemblance to the company I once invested in, the business does not look like something I could rely on for the materially affluent lower middle class life I wish to maintain.

Besides, an investment which had dropped below the initial $1000 I had put in was not exactly a life changing sum.

Since that time, I have bought and sold (or been stuck in one case with a dud) many companies, and when looking at my investment history, it turns out that a lot of them besides Mayne Nickless no longer exist in their original forms, if at all.

Here, off the top of my head, are several of my past investments which have disappeared from the ASX board:

Southcorp (friendly take over by Fosters)

BRL Hardy (friendly take over by a US based business partner)

Fosters Group (take over by a foreign beer company – I voted against it at the EGM)

Australian Leisure and Hospitality (take over by Woolworths, and since demerged as Endeavour Group)

Broo (I have written about this one frequently in this blog)

Optus (taken over by Singtel)

Coles Myer (taken over by Wesfarmers and then remerged and refloated)

Harris Scarfe (whilst the business still exists, despite having been in and out of administration at least twice in the past 25 years, the ownership structure which was listed on the ASX collapsed around 2001 – thankfully after I had lost patience and sold out)

Robust Resources (a penny dreadful gold mining company which had been recommended by a stock broker in his column in the Herald Sun as a speculative buy – it did not pan out obviously)

Coca-Cola Amatil (formerly a tobacco company which reinvented itself as the local subsidiary of Coca-Cola – and then was taken over by the European subsidiary. Not a great investment of mine – it slumped from $13 to about $9 in less than a year before I bailed)

Ethane Pipeline Trust (taken over by its major shareholder during a share price slump – after I had bailed out at a loss)

Westfield (Westfield was a multi-decade success story which disappeared from the ASX after its founders, the Lowy family, decided to cash in and support a foreign takeover).

There are others. There was a period where I would take small punts on penny dreadful resource stocks – none of which took off and made me rich. [One of which, WHL Energy – a mistake from 2012 or so, has since reinvented itself through its using its listing twice as back door floats into totally new businesses.]

So even with really big names like Coles Myer or Fosters or Westfield, survival (or at least independence) is not guaranteed.

My takeaway is that share investing can be rather expensive when things go wrong, but it is fun.