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.

My White Elephant Solar Panels

This morning, I feel like Peter Dutton is really onto something with his suggestion for rolling out nuclear power.

After all, nuclear power is safe and clean as a source of electricity right across Western Europe, where people enjoy the sort of sophisticated technology which the First World creates. Even that annoying Greta Thornburg is a supporter of going nuclear.

Things like Chernobyl happen in less advanced societies – Communist Russia always had inferior engineering solutions.

As a more stark example, let’s look at all the nuclear powered warships which the US Navy has used over the past 70 years. There has never been an incident with any of those. Well designed nuclear reactors are probably a very green solution to our energy needs.

But why am I suddenly on a tangential rant this morning about going nuclear?

The answer is simple – my White Elephant Solar Panels.

Soon after my official retirement in mid July, my former employer paid me out the unused remnant of my long service leave and accumulated annual leave. The cash sum came to a bit more than I expected – about $16,000, and I immediately earmarked this for some necessary matters.

I spent $2000 immediately on some RM Williams boots, Aquila shoes, and a new double breasted suit from Peter Jackson (joining a private club with a dress code does require a bit of an upgrade to my wardrobe).

Then I turned my mind to necessary home improvements. My split cycle air con unit is an important addition to my lounge room given that my old air con unit is beyond repair and my gas heater needed replacement. The charcoal grey colour bond fence between my block and my nice neighbours to the south is a pleasing replacement for the old fence which was falling to bit.

And on a whim, I decided to splash $4700 on solar panels. After all, with summer looming, I love the idea of running my new air con all day every day without worrying about the electricity consumption.

Right?

Wrong!

The problem is not in getting the solar panels onto my roof – that was pretty simple. The problem is that the installers, even 6 weeks later, have failed to send the relevant paperwork to my electricity retailer so that a new meter can be installed and whatever other niceties can be followed in order for me to start saving money on my bills from having these panels sitting on my roof.

This is infuriating, as this is a very big upfront investment – one which probably will take at least 10 years to break even for me.

So right now, those 14 solar panels are a White Elephant, a pointless addition to my roof.

I am thinking that perhaps I would have been far more sensible to have spent the money on a holiday in Queensland.

The Imminent Demise Of Lambrusco?

Being Australian means that my default red wine is Shiraz. My preference is for the big, sugary, high in alcohol version of Shiraz that you usually find in North Eastern Victoria, particularly around Rutherglen.

I am not too finicky though, and I am fine with most dry reds – for instance, my best friend and I made a passable Merlot in my garage earlier this year.

I frequently will try other wines. There were two positives out of catching a mild dose of Covid two years ago – the first being that I used up a couple of extra days of sick leave that I otherwise would have left behind when I retired, and the other being that for the first time in over 25 years, I could actually enjoy the taste of white wine.

I regularly go out to lunch with various wine lovers. Recently, I started attending ‘Bottle Club’ at one of my two private Clubs, and I intend to attend Bottle Club at the other Club in the new year. The people I have met at Bottle Club know a lot more about wine than I, but I think they have had a 20 year head start on me. However, for well over 20 years, I have been attending lunches with some former colleagues who are a fair bit older than me and long retired.

We had one of those lunches today to mark the 75th birthday of my favourite former boss. My contribution was a bottle of the 2021 Baileys of Glenrowan 1920s Block Shiraz which arrived yesterday. Another wine, which the birthday boy contributed, was a Bleasdale Estate Frank Potts Cabernet blend (in the Bordeaux style – Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Malbec, although alas no Cabernet Franc to round out the blend).

One of our lunch companions decided to play up to his reputation of dubious wine choices. You see, about 40 years ago, he brought a bottle of Lambrusco to a lunch. He has never lived this down.

Today, he gleefully showed up with two bottles of Lambrusco red as gifts for the birthday boy. His glee was slightly tempered by his inability to find any Lambrusco white to bring along.

Which got me intrigued. So after getting home from Richmond (we lunched at 14 Bridge, if you are curious, and it was very good value), and having my afternoon nap, I decided to go for a walk around the two bottle shops in Avondale Heights to see if this is indeed a matter of scarcity.

There is indeed a box of Lambrusco red in the Bottlemart (Avondale Cellars), but no white.

I then popped into the Liquorland, which is the doyen of bogan drinking choices, with abundant cardboard casks in a corner, and did some idle browsing. There were no bottles of any Lambrusco, red or white, present. Nor were there any cardboard casks containing Lambrusco.

Like, WTF???? Is this another of our budget drinking choices disappearing?

For instance, the last time I saw a bottle of Brandivino was in January 2009 when I was on Christmas Island (I used it to cook a huge amount of Bolognaise sauce when I hosted a lot of colleagues for dinner). How will Gen Z kids understand Cold Chisel’s anthem ‘Breakfast at Sweethearts’ if Brandivino does not exist?

Then there’s Stock Gala Spumante with the plastic cork and the leopard foil jacket. I have not seen that on offer in many years.

Nor does Kaiser Stuhl exist as a brand anymore – I remember it mostly as a cardboard cask, but I remember in my youth that it offered a Rose in a frosted glass bottle.

And I recently mentioned in this blog my propensity, some 3 decades ago, to enjoy the truly awful Demestica red in Lonsdale Street over Greek food on Friday nights.

Which reminds me of Kokineli – a cheap and cheerful light Greek red wine, a bit closer to Rose or Lambrusco in style. I have not seen that in any bottle shop recently. (Not, mind you, that I would actively seek it out except on the drinks list in a Greek restaurant.)

And now Lambrusco seems to be going the same way, into oblivion?

For shame….

Should I Adopt A New Investment Strategy?

Telstra shares hit an all time high of $9.20 in February 1999. I know this for certain because at the time I had 600 shares in the company from the original T1 float, and had temporarily moved to Canberra for a few months in late January 1999 – it was a moment I could well remember because of my new adventure.

I bought another 400 shares for $7.20 in the T2 Telstra float later in 1999.

I think I more or less broke even when I sold my Telstra shares in late 2002, but only because I counted dividend income towards what I had gotten out of my investment.

It left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth really, and I have avoided Telstra shares since then, even though I am a pretty loyal Telstra customer.

Around that time, I bought 500 Coles Myer shares, because at that time, anyone who had 500 Coles Myer shares got a shareholder discount card. Oh those were the days!

Sadly, I was unable to get much value out of the Coles Myer shares for too long because the Coles supermarket at Highpoint West closed down in 2000.

I guess like a lot of newish shareholders, the Telstra float and the Coles Myer shareholder discount card looked pretty appealing, but did not ultimately benefit me or any other likeminded investors in the long run.

I hardly think of that epoch in my share portfolio anymore.

Nor do I really own many shares which are actual businesses listed on the ASX anymore. Most of my portfolio is listed investment companies, real estate trusts, exchange traded funds and conglomerates (ie Washington Soul H Pattison). The one current exception is Treasury Wine Estate, and readers of this blog would know very well why I own those shares.

I am thinking of changing my ongoing investment strategy going forward however.

I am retired now, and have plenty of spare time to spend attending corporate AGMs, alongside all the other grey retail investors. This past month or so, being AGM season, I joyously attended the Treasury AGM (I urge all my friends to become shareholders of this company) and was pleasantly surprised as my mother’s proxy with the post meeting catering at Insignia Financial.

I’m curious as to what other company AGMs might be well catered, demanding my attention and attendance in future.

And so I am thinking about a new strategy in my future investing. I am seriously considering investing my dividend income (approximately $20k per annum) in ASX Top 100 companies based in Melbourne.

There are, aside from Treasury Wine, about 30 of these companies. These include BHP, Rio Tinto, NAB, ANZ, Coles (sans Myer these days), Telstra, CSL, The Lottery Corporation (NB I do buy the odd ticket to the megadraws, but not all that often), Transurban, and Australian Financial Investment Corporation.

So… if I were to buy a marketable parcel in each of the 30 (ie about $500), I could own a shareholding in each of those in time for the next AGM season, at which time I could attend all the AGMs and discover what the catering is like.

I think this is as valid an investment strategy as any, and could be quite amusing.

The Stultification Of Literature: The Real Threat From Artificial Intelligence

Not that anyone can tell too closely from my library (which is sorted in what I call ‘autobiographical order’), but I have a marked preference for the works of Anthony Trollope over those of Charles Dickens. I am pretty sure that I have read all of his novels and most of his short stories, although I have probably read just about all of Dickens’ stuff as well.

There were many similarities between the two men. Both were sons of failed barristers who were unable to maintain the genteel lifestyles to which they were accustomed. Both reversed the family misfortunes through their talents as writers. And both were able to write witty and prescient characterisations of deadbeat spongers – in the case of Trollope, the character of Sowerby in Framley Parsonage, and Dickens the character of Skimpole in Bleak House.

Trollope’s reputation faded towards the end of his life due to his honesty. He wrote an autobiography where he gleefully admitted to the joy he got from all the money he earned from his novels, and what he could buy with it, and how he would write a certain number of pages every morning whether or not he felt inspired.

Dickens loved the money even more than Trollope, but never fessed up to it quite so publicly. As he was paid by the word, a lot of his novels (eg David Copperfield and Bleak House) are far longer than they need to be, and the language is unnecessarily verbose as to spoil one’s enjoyment of them.

Dickens also was a sanctimonious prig, as you can tell from reading Hard Times. Skimpole aside (I do love Skimpole, as I have met various deadbeats and spongers in the course of my life), he was also incapable of developing convincing characterisations of the people in his novels.

But for all I can can fault Dickens (and there is a lot as the only few of his books that I have enjoyed are The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol, and A Tale Of Two Cities), I can never fault his work ethic, which was every bit as strong as that of Anthony Trollope.

Both wrote every one of their words themselves.

Compare that to Alexandre Dumas, who used a factory of ghost writers to produce most of the works which bear his name. I believe that Dumas created the business model followed in more recent times by those publishers who (a bit like the producers for late rapper Tupac Shakur) keep coming up with new works vaguely attributed to such authors as Tom Clancy or Virginia Andrews.

But now we get to the present day, and the advent of Artificial Intelligence.

Many people believe that Artificial Intelligence is going to end in some sort of apocalyptic nightmare like in the Terminator or Matrix films, where the machines murder or enslave us. I must admit that the idea of a killer robot does leave me rather apprehensive about such advances.

However, most of what AI has achieved so far is to stultify the content of a large part of the internet.

For example, Facebook runs mostly on AI, which polices its rules very arbitrarily, and without room for appeal (try talking to a machine).

It also contains much AI generated content, which mostly consists of stories stolen from actual Reddit forums where the AI creates a monotonous voice which recites a distorted version of those real stories, usually with several key phrases thrown in (common ones I have noticed are ‘my mother says I am tearing the family apart’, ‘I not only survived but thrived’, ‘strap in, this is going to be a roller coaster’, and ‘this led to a whirlwind of emotions’). Such short videos are monetised with lots of ads of course, which is what motivates those people.

Then we get to Amazon, which publishes all sorts of novels electronically on its Kindle platform.

I was a fan of CS Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series, although I never got around to following it up with Patrick O’Brien’s Jack Aubrey series. I did recently finish Julian Stockwin’s more recent but very similar Kydd series. All of these follow seamen in the Golden Age Of Sail (ie the Napoleonic Wars) as they build their careers in the Royal Navy and becoming dashing frigate captains (frigates can have individual adventures, unlike the larger ‘ships of the line’ which float in large boring fleets).

To my surprise, there are an abundance of such series in Amazon Kindle, and I do not believe that most of these have actually been published in hard copy format.

The publication date between each novel in some of these series is remarkably short, making me wonder about how they can write such novels so quickly without an abundance of coffee, sugar, and other stimulants.

Where I really raise my eyebrows is in Military Sci Fi. My favourite military Sci Fi author is Jack Campbell Jnr, whose Lost Fleet series is inspired largely by the Anabasis of Xenophon. Campbell writes, at best, one novel per year.

When browsing Kindle, I find many military Sci Fi series, some of which are many books in succession (we are talking over 20) and where the publication dates are very close together. There is one author who (with one attributed co-author), in the 18 months since I started reading his recently concluded series, has added about 10 books (of 400 pages each) to the series, which ends after 16 books. He also has several other series on the go at the same time.

And I was delighted to learn of the imminent release of the latest instalment in yet another Napoleonic War series recently, which follows a roguish infantryman much in the form of Bernard Cornwell’s highly popular Richard Sharpe series. This is Book 17 in a series where Book 1 was released 4 years ago. Obviously I wonder as to how does someone write so many novels in the one series at a rate of one every 3 months?!?

I do notice that in a lot of these novels, the proof reading leaves quite a lot to be desired – one naval novel series has the hero relying on a solicitor whose name alternates between ‘Snodgrass’ and ‘Snodgravel’, whilst the wife’s maiden name is confused between ‘Morehouse’ and ‘Morehead’. In the peninsula war series, the characters all use the word ‘okay’ constantly – a word which originated in the USA about 35 years later.

So what conclusions do I draw from my observations after 18 months of reading ebooks on Kindle? I strongly suspect that a lot of these series rely on Artificial Intelligence to do a large part of the writing, in order to produce so many novels so quickly.

Unlike Trollope, Dickens, CS Forester, Bernard Cornwell, Julian Stockwin, and even Tom Clancy, who wrote every word of their novels, I believe that this is not the case for these ebooks I see on Kindle. The difference in the quality of the writing, the poor proof reading, the repetitious nature of some of the prose and themes is all indicative that AI has been writing these poorer quality novels.

So this is really the big threat from AI – not that it is going to destroy Mankind as a species, but that it is going to undermine what makes us Human, our creativity and imagination. It threatens our Humanity, not our biological existence.