God save our King!!!!

20 years ago, when I moved into my home in Avondale Heights, I was surrounded by other homes on house blocks approximately 535sqm in size.

My first week, I planted several citrus trees in my backyard, and a gum tree sapling 3m from the back fence. The orange trees are all about to fruit again, and whilst the gum tree is still very spindly, it is quite tall.

After a few years, the investor who owned the house behind me sold up, and it was demolished, replaced with two townhouses which went up much closer to my back fence. I did not object to this development proposal because I mostly mind my own business.

One day, the new back fence neighbour, an elderly chap named Mick who had downsized from a full sized house, popped his head over the fence and helpfully suggested that I get rid of my gum tree, as it was one day going to get huge. I thanked him for his helpful ideas and ignored him.

Where is Mick now? Dead. The gum tree on the other hand is still there and contributing to taking carbon out of the atmosphere and keeping our suburb a little more liveable. Having my own fruit trees and shrubs and a gum tree out back is about more than my own selfish desires – it is about preserving an island of nature in suburbia.

Let’s face it, living in an apartment is not great. I did it for almost 7 years. The positives were that it was extremely affordable as an entry level first home, that it was close to a tram line (and Highpoint Shopping Centre) and that there was a nice faux rural view from the study and kitchen windows towards the green field buffer zone around the Maribyrnong Explosives Factory over the road. Sheep grazed in that field. The negatives included late night noise from the occasional inconsiderate drunken tenant in the same block, having my garbage bin refilled to the brim mere hours after I had collected it, lack of access to the master tap controlling water to my flat, and the footsteps on the walkway past my flat.

Even worse, for someone who grew up in a family home with generous sized backyard, was not having any land to attempt gardening on.

After I got a promotion at work, during which time I had saved enough for a deposit for a house, I sold up and moved 3km down the road to Avondale Heights. The extra travel time to work and taxi fares from late nights out are easily offset by the joy I get from having an actual house with large front garden and reasonably sized backyard to live in.

In this, I am lucky, compared to most people somewhat younger than me. I am a homeowner and my home is an actual house with land.

Melbourne, depending on how you measure it, is now approximately 5 million people in size. We have a rental availability crisis, and an ongoing house affordability crisis.

No matter what happens, in terms of reserve bank or government policy, many people are going to be unhappy.

In recent weeks, I have been reading many articles critical of the Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) attitude of people like myself, who are big believers in the benefits of backyards and lower density housing. It is argued that we need to subdivide further and do considerable infill in housing developments in established suburbs in order to make the best use of the infrastructure which already exists, rather than growing the Australian capital cities further and further outward at greater infrastructure cost.

I’ve also read articles about the cladding of many recently built apartment towers, which make them both a potential death trap to occupants, as well as a money pit for their hapless and frequently naive owners. Other apartments, built when building codes were more lax, are so small and poorly ventilated, as to be extremely miserable places to call home.

When Dandenong is described in The Age as a ‘middle suburb’, you need to get a little worried. It is after all, 30km from the GPO. I guess that my lair in Avondale Heights, 11km from the GPO in the opposite direction, is an inner suburb now – with the vegan cafe to prove it!

There are many issues which are going to need to be considered in the many moving parts to try and restore home ownership affordability and easy rental access to Australians. I do not think that government subsidies for home ownership, nor artificially low interest rates, do anything other than exacerbate the problem.

As you would surmise from my attitude to my erstwhile neighbour Mick’s suggestion about my gum tree which existed before his townhouse, the one issue which I am most interested in is the quality of life which we will face in our cities going forward. We are all increasingly alienated from nature with each passing generation. Our cities are ribbons of black bitumen amid islands of concrete, with more and more of us living in towers of glass and steel. This is not a healthy environment to live in.

The absence of backyards, or front gardens, and trees, is going to have an impact on us, a severely adverse one.

Firstly, have you thought about what the declining tree canopy in the suburbs is going to do to temperatures when we replace our backyards with dual occupancies? The lack of shade to absorb sunlight is going to make our suburbs much hotter in summer. Trees also not only absorb carbon dioxide, but a lot of other omissions from cars, cleaning our air.

Trees, and back yards in general, also attract nature. I have regularly seen fruit bats in my garden, and that gum tree offensive to some has hosted owls and kookaburras and possums. Geckos can be found in my garden, and I once saw a larger lizard hiding in the wood pile (I do like a good BBQ). Cockatoos and corellas love eating the apricots and peaches on the branches I cannot reach on my fruit trees.

As a home owner who has a reasonable amount of land surrounding his house, I see it as my civic duty to have trees on my land. Not only does that make my own home a little more pleasant, especially in summer, but it contributes that little bit more to making living in a large metropolis that much better for my neighbours. I can hardly wait for when the avocado trees I have grown from pips tower over my back yard, encasing everything in shade.

If this makes me a NIMBY, then so be it. I am not going back to living in a flat, even if mowing the lawn is a huge nuisance.

www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-09/scotlands-sturgeon-speaks-following-husbands-arrest/102203468

Hipster girl band Camp Cope did a ballad entitled ‘Footscray Station’ a few years ago. Part love song, part protest anthem, it sums up what hipster types and Millennials see in Footscray, mostly from an angle different to my own, it being my childhood home town.

For most of my adult life, first as a uni student and then as an office worker, I have spent much time commuting through Footscray Station at least a few times each week for over three and a half decades.

So with hipsters like Camp Cope and their ballad in mind, it perhaps was apt that my first encounter with one of those disruptive FinTech companies was at Footscray Station in November 2019. People were handing out those perforated promotion offer cards, although rather than being for some sort of tech based food delivery service like Uber Eats or Marley Spoon, it was for Rate Setter, a peer to peer lending platform based in the UK.

The offer was for $50 credit if I were to open an account and deposit $100 in it.

Given that I was curious, and the interest rates were much higher than what was being offered by the bank, I opened an account and over the next three years gradually deposited $1000 into it. I also invested in it like a Millennial might, into green energy loans.

Along the way, during the early days of the Plague, such companies risked getting into trouble, as I learned from reading the Financial Review, and Rate Setter’s Australian branch soon spun off into its own ASX listed business named Plenti (ASX code PLT).

I added PLT to my watch list, and even genuinely pondered buying some shares in it at some stage. Starting in late 2020 at around $1.20, it topped $1.50 in mid 2021, before starting a steady downward sloping gradient to where it now stands, almost 2 years later, at $0.37.

I think that PLT’s performance on the ASX has probably matched my enthusiasm for the underpinning business model. Back in 2019 with higher interest rates on offer than the banks, and with an ability to instantaneously deposit funds in via OSCO, I got immediate gratification out of using it as a small auxiliary savings account.

Since then, the deposit function has changed to one run by BPay, where the funds do not immediately transfer over. Nor, maddening, do my attempts to lend my money to borrowers match as quickly. Interest rates also dropped, and now, with bank interest on a rapid rise, the margin in Plenti does not seem as tempting.

So for the past year or so, I have been gradually withdrawing my funds from Plenti as they get repaid, rather than reinvesting them into other loans.

And this is the rub (as Shakespeare put it in one of the alternative versions of Hamlet’s soliloquy). The banks and existing financial institutions are still able to offer investors something more reliable and appealing as an overall package than what this disruptive and innovative peer to peer lending platform can, and at the earliest sign of real trouble, it could end up no longer viable.

Buy Now Pay Later is another new trend which has been welcomed with open arms and open legs by consumers, particularly those who do not have good credit ratings, responsible spending behaviours, or ready cash in the bank. The collapse of the Australian start up in the BNPL field, Open Pay, two months ago, is a salient point for investors. It started in early 2020 at about $1 and soared above $4 by mid 2021, before gradually declining down to $0.195 at the time it suspended its operations in February.

I believe that one of the stock tipping newsletters to which I sometimes subscribe (although not the one which talks about Astrology as a way of predicting real estate prices) did mention Open Pay (ASX Code OPY) as a company to punt on a few years ago. I am glad I did not invest in it then. I have made enough dog investments in my time.

BNPL is still mostly unregulated, which carries all sorts of risks. One is that it does not run automatic credit checks and therefore both becomes a lender of first resort to many people who are not too familiar with consumer credit and who could develop irresponsible spending habits, and of last resort to those who already have reached the end of the line in terms of their financial tether. That risk is one of major defaults by customers, who, if they have no other protections left to them, can always resort to bankruptcy. The other risk is that of regulation – BNPL is currently mostly unregulated, but with consumer advocates arguing that this needs to change, and this will eliminate the competitive edge BNPL start ups have over the Banks.

At the same time, we have the major banks launching their own BNPL type products, as are the major tech companies. When these two parts of the business establishment catch up, the existing BNPLs will either go the way of Open Pay, or get bought out.

Open Pay was not the only company recommended to me by that stock tipping newsletter. Another was RAIZ (ASX code RZI). According to the Apple App Store entry for RAIZ, which is headed ‘Invest The Spare Change’:

“Raiz helps you easily save and invest your money. Get started in minutes with as little as $5, invest your spare change into a diversified portfolio with automatic round-ups, and give your money a chance to grow in the background of life.“

I think RAIZ is similar to another disruptive app based investment FinTech, Spaceship. A great idea, and one which will possibly appeal to novice investors, probably the same sort of people who have been using BNPL services but hopefully have gotten that under control and now want to start building their financial health.

HOWEVER, the major banks and financial institutions are not going to stand still if they see such possible corners of the investor market slipping through their fingers to disrupters. Commsec, for example, launched a beginner’s stock investing app in late 2021, called Commsec Pocket. It allows you to start investing in a range of Exchange Traded Funds from with as little as $50, and with an initial fee of $2 (rising to 0.2% of the value if over $1000).

Commsec Pocket piqued my interest on a sleepy afternoon a year ago, so I did download it and play with it for a while, til I got bored because I am many years beyond the time when I would want to start investing with less than $1000, let alone ‘as little as $50’.

And this is the problem which RAIZ and Spaceship will face – I doubt that most of their investors are going to be putting in sufficient to give them the fees to make it worthwhile, and that after a while, they will either give up on the app or upgrade to a fuller service like Commsec Pocket. Meanwhile, new investors may simply just go with offerings like Commsec Pocket or something similar from an established financial player.

As for RZI as an investment, I still have it on one of my Commsec watch lists. Starting at around $1.20 in 2018, it struggled for a while til rising to $2 in mid 2021. Since the start of 2022, it has been on a steady slide down to under $0.40 at present.

Aren’t I glad that the only money I lose on those stock tipping newsletters is what I pay for the subscription?

I think that the problem with a lot of those FinTechs is that whilst they have a great idea, to be successful they need to grow big enough and disruptive enough that they shift the entire paradigm of the market they are entering, the way that Uber has done for the taxi industry, Amazon for retail, and Netflix for video rental. Otherwise they fail.

The Netflix quip is most salient. They once approached Blockbuster Video to buy them out, and were laughed out of the office. When did you last see a video store? I think that a lot of those disruptive and clever FinTech innovators are going to last as long as video stores – they will not be able to supplant the existing major players who will simply imitate their good ideas and implement them in a better way.

A few weeks ago I discovered and then posted about the disappearance of some formerly highly popular brands owned by Treasury Wine Estate – namely Rosemount, Ingoldby, and Jamison’s Run.

Since, then, I have retrospectively been doing my due diligence as an investor (I do, after all, own 1,000 shares in the company) to see what is going on with those brands.

Normally my due diligence as a shareholder in wine companies involves buying and drinking a lot of wine bottles. This time, instead, I went back through all the annual reports since Treasury separated from Foster’s Group to get a handle on what has been going on in the company.

A quick look at all the brands listed over a decade ago indicates that there were over 80 brands owned by Treasury. Now, they only list about 20 on their website. Some appear to have been retired, and some have been divested (eg Bailey’s of Glenrowan).

Sadly, there does not appear to be any real discussion of this strategy in the annual reports.

As someone who has bought and drank many different brands of Treasury wines over the years, this does bug me a fair bit.

But I will get over it.

I happen to like reading books about personal finance, although I doubt, at age 54 and with my roof, retirement, and share portfolio all long since sorted out, that I really need to do much more than plan out how to live long enough to spend what I have saved and what I will passively earn from now on. [Really, I should focus my reading pleasure on the 100 book backlog piled on my mantelpiece and coffee table rather than remind myself of what I already know.]

Hence I just finished reading Ramit Sethi’s book ‘I will teach you to be rich’, which is perhaps best described as an American version of ‘The Barefoot Investor’ (a book which not only have I read, but of which I have bought multiple copies of and handed out to friends and family alike in recent years).

At the end of the day, I get the feeling that these books are much of a muchness, and their message can be summed up as a more sophisticated version of the Micawber Principle, which I will repeat here:

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”

This is taken from Chapter 12 of the Charles Dickens novel ‘David Copperfield’. Dickens himself was always preoccupied with money, probably because his father had been imprisoned for debt, and improvident spongers like Micawber and Skimpole from ‘Bleak House’ are amongst my favourite of his caricatures.

Most of Dickens’ novels are, to my mind, almost unreadable due to his preoccupation with money. This is because he was paid by the word, so his books frequently became far more verbose than they needed to be for the storyline to proceed, given he would pad them out for the extra cash.

But this all does get me thinking about the modern culture of self help books – of which I have probably read far more than my fair share – and which are for the most part an American inter-war development.

Self help books divide into two categories. One is the Personal Success category, and the other is the Get Rich category. The two archetypes in each respective field are Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to win friends and influence people’, and Napoleon Hill’s ‘Think and grow rich.’

The Personal Success genre is mostly about changing personal behaviour and mindsets in a way which make you able to better deal with other people, so as to improve your success in your personal and professional lives.

Carnegie’s work can be summarised as saying please and thank you, remembering names, and shaking hands firmly. Getting along with people is important if you are to get ahead in life, after all.

Mind you, one of the more recent books in this genre, ‘The Game’ by Neill Strauss (although perhaps not so much the sequel), seems to be more an inside expose of the subculture of pick up artists and how they implode emotionally, rather than a proper guide on improving one’s success with women.

Napoleon Hill, on the other hand, was all about how to change your mindset at a very inherent and innate level, so as to become rich. It involves challenging your own values, attitude to risk, and ability to interact. It demands a lot more of you.

Having read Hill, I think he was a decent guy, but I don’t see that the secrets to wealth he sets out in his book work that well, and he left the way clear for a large number of later writers who are not as decent as him. For example, when I read Kiyosaki’s ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ 20 years ago, I found the general tone and apparent amorality of the author to be quite repulsive. Yet he advised the reader that it is easy to change and become just like him.

But that is not so easy for people. I suspect that following the formulas in ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ involve a similar level of behavioural and attitudinal change as in ‘The Game’ – not everyone is going to want to behave the way that either the fragile womaniser ‘Mystery’ does (Strauss’ book is hilarious in describing his implosion), nor the avaricious Kiyosaki to attain success in Love or Money.

And that perhaps is why books like ‘I will teach you to be rich’ and ‘The barefoot investor’ are so popular. They do not expect people to change who they are or how they think or what they believe or their values, only that they go and apply the Micawber principle to their financial life.

A friend of mine came over yesterday for a couple of beers and to drop off some of his wine making equipment in anticipation that we will make wine again this year. He grew up in the far outer eastern suburbs which Aston encompasses.

His view of the Liberal Party’s decision to parachute in an outsider from inner Melbourne to this seat is probably similar to that of many of the locals who voted against that candidate. To him, Rosheena Campbell promising to buy a house in the electorate and move her family IF she won the by-election is similar to someone promising to buy a lottery ticket if they win the jackpot first.

I felt it best to hold off on expressing my thoughts about the Aston By-Election until after the result was known, although I will be very clear now that I am not surprised about the outcome.

There will be many different theories offered forward this week as to why the Liberals made history as the first opposition to lose any of their seats in a by-election since 1920. One is that the Federal Liberal Party is out of touch at the moment in general, and that Peter Dutton in particular is unelectable. Another is that the Moira Deeming controversy of the past couple of weeks has revolted voters who would usually vote Liberal. A third is that, as my friend from the area put it, you can no longer parachute in a candidate from outside with impunity without there being consequences.

My personal views are mostly similar to those of my friend, but with one nuance. This is that the Liberal Party’s hand was forced by the self-serving resignation of Alan Tudge without notice, which left them scrambling to preselect a candidate within a very short time frame, whilst the Labor Party already had one on the ground.

In short – much of the blame falls on the highly reprehensible Alan Tudge, for holding his own party in contempt and showing great ingratitude to his local rank and file supporters.

Let me explain. Normally, under Liberal Party rules in Victoria, a preselection, particularly in a safe or winnable seat, requires a convention at which every locally enrolled party member of 2 years’ standing is entitled to vote for their preferred candidate. Those members make up 60% of the preselection convention, with the other 40% made up of a variety of party members from outside, mostly those chosen at random from the roll of current delegates to State Council.

This means that a local party member is, in theory, going to have a say in who is going to represent them at elections (and hopefully in parliament), and which then is going to serve as some recompense for the donations of time and money which those members then put in to try and get that candidate elected and then reelected.

Usually, unless someone falls out of favour within the party as a whole, an elected MP is going to sit there until they either retire or lose their seat.

Which means that the actual real opportunity which local party members in a seat like Aston have to choose their own candidate comes along only once every 15 to 20 years.

By not giving the party enough notice to conduct a proper preselection, Alan Tudge denied those people who had sweated for years to get him and keep him elected to Federal Parliament (ie getting up in the early hours before dawn on election day, holding fund raising auctions and raffles, letterboxing his ugly mug into homes, standing for hours in all sorts of weather with how to vote cards) the chance to choose his replacement.

Instead, the party went for their emergency expedited process, getting the state Administrative Committee and the local Chairman of the Aston Federal Electorate Council to undertake the preselection. In short, 17 faceless people chose the candidate on behalf of the Liberal Party in Aston – only one of whom, instead of 60%, was a local party member.

Let’s look at the import and impact of this. If Rosheena Campbell had been elected, it is highly unlikely that her next preselection would have been contested, or the one after that, and so on. Local party members would have had virtually no say at all in a direct internal vote as to their candidate for very many years to come.

With that in mind, I suspect that they voted with their feet, and chose to stay home last Saturday in droves, rather than committing 12 hours to set up a polling booth, campaign all day, and then to scrutineer when polls had closed.

On the bright side, the defeat does mean that, provided that the Liberal Party head office gets its act in order, local Liberals in Aston will get a chance to choose who represents them at the next Federal Election.

But for all of this debacle, I feel that the blame falls mostly on the shoulders of Alan Tudge, the ungrateful retiring member.

I must say that I have never met anyone who went to St Kevin’s whom I liked. Self entitled brats.

And we all know about the misogynistic songs they sing in public.

The train this morning was infested with a host of them, making their way from the western suburbs to Toorak.

One of them was sitting there with his feet on the seat opposite him. Typical.

Yesterday’s announcement by the state opposition leader that he was going to seek the expulsion from the Victorian Liberal Parliamentary Party Room of recently elected MP, the Hon. Moira Deeming MLC, did not exactly come as a major surprise to me.

Her prior high profile as a Melton Councillor, where she was outspoken as a rather monomaniacal critic of, and campaigner against, contemporary transgender issues, was strongly indicative of an inseparable attachment to an issue which is currently highly divisive, and from which she was not going to relent if she was given a broader platform.

Her preselection in the lead position on the Liberal Party’s Western Metropolitan Province (replacing the equally controversial incumbent, Bernie Finn) guaranteed that she was to get that broader platform.

And just like Yosemite Sam in his response to Bugs Bunny’s impersonation of Teddy Roosevelt, Moira was going to speak loadly and carry that bigger stick.

And use it too!

People in the know (after all, I am an outsider and don’t witness such things directly), have told me that many of the local Liberals of Western Metropolitan (which comprises an area covering 11 lower house seats) were dismayed that she was going to get the one seat out of the 16 in the area (11 lower house and 5 upper house) which is going to be won every four years by the Liberals.

One person, whose opinion I greatly respect, expressed fears that she was just so conservative in a confrontational way that she would either leave of her own free will to join Bernie Finn in the DLP, or be pushed out in a manner similar to that of our beloved former MLC (note to King Charles – where the blazes is Bernie’s much deserved knighthood????).

Her continued status as a Liberal, although not as an MP as such, now hangs in the balance, to be decided on Friday by her peers, who are to vote as to whether she deserves expulsion.

It has not taken long at all. The state election was less than 4 months ago, and she still has 11/12s of her term to sit in parliament.

The egregious conduct which has caused her to face expulsion was her prominent participation in an anti-transgender rally on Saturday. She hosted a prominent speaker from overseas in a rally which might most nicely be described as provocative. That a moronic mob of neo-Nazis chose to storm it and do their obscene salutes in public probably was not her intention, but she now has to wear the consequences of it.

If you want to participate in a debate on controversial issues regarding significant social issues, then it is important to try and do so respectfully, rather than provocatively. Doing so in a way which will attract morons to your cause in such a public manner and then pleading ignorance of the outcome is similar to unloading a truckload of cow manure in the middle of the street in summer and not expecting it to stink.

Quite a number of long term dedicated Liberals local to the Western Metropolitan area had grave reservations. One, Fred Ackerman, a decent fellow who had sought the endorsement himself, actually went as far as to resign and stand as an independent against her, to give local Liberals a conservative but non-confrontational alternative. [I disagree with his decision and the optics of it, but I can see why he did it.]

Quite a number of others chose to support Mr Ackerman by campaigning for him. Several have already been served with notices to show cause as to why they should not be expelled from the volunteer arm of the Liberal Party, and apparently others are awaiting such notices.

I am advised that Moira and her cohorts took photographs of those apostates and then demanded that the Liberal Party State Administrative Committee take disciplinary action against these people (none of whom actually claim a material benefit from being members, but whom usually are in the habit of donating much time and money over many years to that cause).

How does that all sit now? The number two on the Western Metropolitan ticket got up (which has only ever happened once before), but the divisiveness which has been caused through the election of Moira at number one is going have lasting effect. She is going to hold that seat for another 3 years and 8 months, and she has, with the ear of the party administrative committee prior to Saturday, forced the start of proceedings which will force out some long term Liberal Party members from an area of Melbourne where active Liberals are rarer than koalas. Losing such members, on the basis of a single transgression, is going to do lasting damage to the Liberal Cause right across the western suburbs of Melbourne.

A few weeks ago I was lamenting, mostly out of nostalgia rather than any real attachment, the apparent demise of various once ubiquitous wine brands now owned by Treasury Wine Estate.

Oddly enough, the astute will notice that I did not mention Kaiser Stuhl in my list – they have been gone for a while, and I think they stopped making wines by the bottle in the 1980s, so why would I lament the absence of their cardboard casks?

Today I had reason to lament something else I remember fondly. I was in the potato chips part of the supermarket aisle just after lunch, in search of a salty snack to reenergise me for the afternoon, and I saw Samboy chips – but solely in the bizarrely named Atomic Tomato flavour.

In my childhood, my favourite brand of potato chip was Samboy Salt and Vinegar. The taste really was sharper and more superior to that of other chip brands and I fondly consumed it for many years. I remember when I was on Google+ in a burger discussion community several years ago (Google+ was closed down around this time 4 years ago, if we are to talk about defunct brands I like), one of the other Australians did mention (to my approval) his fondness for Samboy Salt and Vinegar.

For whatever reasons, the brand, much loved of many Australians, has been run down in recent years by its parent company and its previous Filipino and current German owners, who obviously do not share the attachment to Samboy that so many of us locals do.

Hence I put this out into the ether as one more wish for the resurrection of Samboy in all its most glorious classic chip flavours.

But especially Salt and Vinegar.