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.

I’m mostly up to date on streaming Daisy Jones and the Six, and season three of Ted Lasso is two days away. So I need to find something to amuse myself with as I idle away the last hours of the Labour Day long weekend.

So I have decided to do some idle speculations on the identity of the author(s) of Real Freedom News, the insider blog which has been annoying the devotees of the Victorian Liberal Party since early 2021.

Let’s start by saying that it is not me. I quite like John Pessuto, the current state opposition leader, who has come in for some minor flak from that blog. I also have, without fear or favour, been openly (and hopefully clearly and wittily) critical of such luminaries as Michael O’Brien, Matthew Guy, and apprentice neurosurgeon Tim Smith in equal measure. Plus I am not interested hiding my opinions and much prefer to let people know what I think of them without using a pseudonym. Hence I stand by the opinions I write from time to time in this blog which is in my own name.

To say nothing of the fact that I am an outsider, not an insider, and do not have access to the intimate and gory details of the internal workings of the Victorian Liberal Party which, up til last November, were being dragged out for all to see like a traitor’s entrails.

The best methodology to use to try and unmask the author of that blog is to ask two questions: Cuis Scit (who knows) and Cui Bono (who benefits). [Given that I spent some 4 years and $4000 trying to learn Latin at the Centre for Adult Education, you might sympathise as to why I throw the odd Latin phrase into my blogging.]

Let us start with Cuis Scit. The RFN blog reveals considerable information about social media pages, the machinations of both the state Administrative Committee and the various other local and state governance bodies, and many of the personalities (including some ad hominem attacks which can be considered either defamatory or very funny depending on your perspective).

The RFN blogger is obviously involved at a relatively senior or highly active level, which probably reduces the number of possible suspects to members of Admin Committee, State Assembly, State Electoral Council executives, and state MPs and their employees. From 11,000 or so nominal members of the state Liberals, this reduces the number of suspects to three or four hundred people.

That is quite a lot of people. You can then eliminate more, if you are an insider and know who is privy to what information, by looking at the omissions. For example, if someone has access to one damaging fact, which is published, but does not have access to another fact, which is not published, then you can eliminate those insiders who had access to both damaging facts.

I don’t know enough to know that sort of detail, but I would be very confident that the senior people studying the RFN blog’s content would have formed up a profile (much as the experts who profile serial killers) of people who might have access to some information in some circumstances but not to all of it.

Then we get to the next question: Cui Bono? This is where you can really start to eliminate suspects, and where the fun really starts. The easy way to do this is to look and see who DOES NOT get attacked.

Anyone on the Michael O’Brien side of the previous leadership rivalry can be eliminated, as they were all attacked. Even sad little Bernie Finn got described as ‘bonkers’ in a very funny attack – all because he had tied his colours to the O’Brien mast so whole heartedly.

John Pessuto and his supporters are out as well – RFN implied in at least one post that he had sympathies to Communist China.

So we then turn to the Matthew Guy side. At the time that Guy was able to return as opposition leader a not so glorious second time, RFN posted a photo of several of the key numbers people who had helped to overthrow O’Brien, triumphantly (and probably without irony) proclaiming them as ‘Heroes of the Revolution’.

That is where you start looking for suspects. I observe that praise for Matthew Guy disappeared from RFN when he cut his staunch supporter and drinking buddy Tim Smith loose after the latter put his new Jaguar through the living room of a house in his electorate after a few too many glasses of fine wine. Instead, Guy was excoriated for having shown disloyalty to his erstwhile friend. That eliminates the Guy camp.

So my theory is that the author of the RFN blog is someone close to Tim Smith. The blog disappeared shortly before the November 2022 State Election – probably because something which so many might consider disloyal would be considered especially so in the heat of an election campaign, and maybe, just maybe, because people close to Tim Smith still thought that he could make a comeback right up til nominations closed.

As a further wrinkle – I believe that the authors of the RFN blog are the same people who previously were sending out spam emails to likeminded people under the heading ‘Concerned Liberals Committee’. Those emails ceased, and their contents were added to the RFN website on its creation.

I know that I was getting the Concerned Liberals Committee emails from at least the second one, although as I had to retrieve them from my spam filter, I am not exactly sure when they started. The question I have is to where that ‘Committee’ got my email address from? I did subscribe to an email newsletter by a somewhat controversial identity active in the Liberal Party just before the lockdowns got going, but never seem to have been added to his newsletter. His website is still up, although requires some digging to strike gold, but he seems to have expressed sympathy for Tim Smith and hostility to similar people as the RFN blog did, so whilst I don’t think he did it, I think I know from where the ‘Concerned Liberals’ got my email address.

All of this reminds me of the great Australian political journalist Alan Reid. He used to describe leaks as ‘small p politics’ – something which was motivated by personal gain or acrimony rather than by principles. He built his career in the 1950s and 60s, when Labor were busy using small p politics to tear themselves apart.

I must say, sadly (given that I am a committed constitutional monarchist), that I am wholeheartedly sick of the entertainers commonly known as Ginge and Cringe (aka the Duke and Duchess of Sussex).

Netflix is wasting millions on indulging their egos with their ‘content production’ whilst excellent shows like Warrior Nun (what is not to love about that concept?!?) get cancelled.

The latest coverage of our dynamic duo surrounds the announcement that their children are actually now to be known by their ‘birthright’ titles of Prince and Princess. This is after Duchess Cringe has spent the past few years publicly bagging out the Royal family and manipulating Duke Ginge to do the same, for fun and profit.

The only surprise in the whole issue as to whether the children were to take those titles related to the decision making of the cringeworthy parents. Anne, the Princess Royal, was entitled to have her children Peter and Zara take on the titles of prince and princess, as was Edward, the newly elevated Duke of Edinburgh. The 1917 Letters Patent signed off by George V, and which have not been modified or replaced since, make it clear that the grandchildren of the Monarch are princes (I use the masculine version here as the gender neutral plural).

Ginge, aka Prince Harry, could have chosen to emulate his aunt and uncle and take a more plebeian position on the upbringing of his children, sans titles. This would indeed have been more principled (no pun intended), after his many interviews and the publication of his memoir Ginge, where he reveals family secrets and continues to perpetuate the false narrative which his wife Cringe has been pursuing. But I think that there is a sense of self-entitlement devoid of a sense of duty not yet seen, even with buffoons like the Duke of York.

Now onto Duchess Cringe, she who has been anxious her entire life to escape the gravitational pull of the trailer park entombing most of her extended family. What can we say about someone who constantly makes statements which are regularly contradicted (even by her loyal thrall Ginge), internally inconsistent, and run contrary to known facts? Naturally, she is a narcissist, but I think that this is almost a mandatory requirement for even moderate success in show biz. I fear that she has other more serious personality defects, such as what psychiatrists call ‘borderline personality disorder’, and is probably a sociopath to boot.

The reports of how she treats staff, (former) friends who have served their purpose, and her disgruntled and grasping extended family tend to support such a diagnosis. Her whole narrative is one of a woman who is keen to succeed despite the odds and despite the embarrassment she feels at the people close to her, whom she considers to be a liability to her.

Take her former starter husband, Trever Engelson, for example. He is a TV producer, and seems to have moved on, keeping a more dignified silence than the extended Markle clan (who seem to me to both share the same attention seeking traits as our beloved Meghan, and to understand her true nature). However, Trevor’s original impulse, as mentioned in his Wikipedia bio, was to start developing a sitcom for the Fox Network about a man whose wife leaves him for a prince, and the hilarity which ensues from the necessity of remaining in each other’s lives.

This was a worthy idea, and I want to encourage Trevor to retool his show and pitch it once more to the networks. It could be called Ginge and Cringe, and focus on a newlywed royal couple moving to Montecito and all the new social climbing celebrity friends they make, and their rather clumsy attempts to make money and preach of their worthiness to the world in general.

It could go for a season of ten episodes at least.

Netflix – please do this – it will atone for cancelling Warrior Nun and continuing to broadcast that appalling Royal family biopic.

www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/royals/prince-edward-becomes-new-duke-of-edinburgh/news-story/0f340b6de3889db6984e255983d2f42d

One of my favourite characters in literature is the Scarlet Pimpernel, the elusive hero of a series of novels about the French Revolution, a mischievous fellow who somehow is always half a step in front of the Jacobins in his efforts to rescue worthy people from Madame Guillotine, much to the annoyance of the zealots.

To that extent, I find the concerted attempts (as reported the Age yesterday) to unmask the authors of the anonymous Liberal Party insider blog ‘Real Freedom News’ highly amusing. Whoever is the author(s?) of this blog obviously is irritating a lot of Victorian Liberals, as well as amusing a whole lot more. They are, in their own blogosphere manner, a parochial Victorian right wing form of the Scarlet Pimpernel.

This blog is in itself quite fascinating. From early 2021 til last October, it aired to public view many insider issues around the Victorian Liberal Party, including machinations of the Admin Committee (the strange term for the State Executive), and the personalities and private lives of many of the parliamentarians, candidates, and prominent activists.

The existence of that blog even caused Liberal Party HQ to be subject to a workplace safety inspection, given some of the concerns which were raised within it.

As someone who sees himself very much as an outsider rather than an insider, I do not know the truth about anything that has been written in that blog, although I do find it highly plausible (just like Agent Mulder, I want to believe!). But what I do know is that the emergence of such a blog is not in itself the malaise, but merely a symptom.

In most political parties, there are far more sinners than saints, and I doubt that there would be any blameless people in any of the divides now facing the Liberal Party. Blogs like this have emerged before – prior to the 2010 State Election, a couple of employees at Liberal HQ were discovered to be the authors of an anonymous blog attacking the then Opposition Leader Ted Ballieau.

Telegenic but shallow on policy, Ballieau was not exactly a success when he become Premier, and his first action was to settle factional scores by blacklisting a large number of people from jobs in the offices of his ministers, a feat of micromanagement which crippled his government.

Now, there is a giant existentialist crisis facing the Liberals in Victoria. The volunteer arm of the Party barely exists outside of the federal seats of Higgins, Goldstein and Kooyong, seats which it lost last May.

In recent years, there has been a divide between the more socially progressively minded (forgive the use of two adverbs in a row) Liberals and those who are not only socially conservative, but religiously inspired. There were accusations not too long ago of Mormons and members of various protestant churches (I find it hard to tell the difference between pentecostalists and evangelists, so I don’t know how to describe those people) being stacked into the Victoria Liberals.

These issues continue to spill over into the public, whether it is news about branch stacking allegations involving conservatives, or about the views of prospective MPs who belong to very conservative churches.

I believe that these issues, given that they involve different views of the direction that the Liberals should go, are more serious than any since the old divide between the economic ‘Wets’ and ‘Dries’ of the 1980s. Everyone is an economic Dry now. I doubt that social policy divides, particularly as Liberal philosophy encourages individual liberty and tolerance, is something which can result in easy agreement when some people are committed to particular illiberal religious teachings.

But this is by-the-by.

Where blogs like Real Freedom News and its predecessors emerge, it is because the authors feel that they are not listened to internally, and that they hence need to air their grievances publicly.

The commentary in Real Freedom News has frequently spoken of dodgy machinations around parliamentary preselections, and selective action by party authorities on alleged branch stacking (ie only taking action against factional foes rather than allies).

When people make such accusations see the light of day outside of a (no longer smoke filled) room of faceless men (and women), it is because they are concerned, and feel that they are not being heard when they raise their legitimate concerns.

When insiders talk to me about their own concerns and frustrations in the management (or is it cat herding) of the Victorian Liberals, they do feel frustrated at matters where they feel injustices have occurred and have not been addressed, or have been wilfully overlooked.

It is therefore no surprise to me that Real Freedom News has found such a wide audience.