I usually only actively practice my Catholicism once a year or so – I sometimes attend the Italian service of the Stations of the Cross at the local Catholic Church in the evening of Good Friday.

Last night, I chose not to do so, as it was dark and gloomy at 7.30pm. But I did go for a walk earlier on before sunset.

What I found was that there were a lot of local restaurants and takeaways open: the seafood restaurant on the corner, the Thai restaurant near the church, the fish & chip shop, the pizza shop, and the gourmet burger joint.

And of course, the McDonalds near the supermarket.

Back when I first moved into Avondale Heights 19 years ago, when wandering off to the Catholic Church on Good Friday to attend that Italian service in the evening, there would only be the McDonalds open.

I think that what has happened in the past few years has not been a growing secularisation of society, but that the Covid induced lockdowns which shut down small business and civil society for two years have taken an indirect toll. That is, small business people do not take the right to open their doors for granted at the moment, and so they treat Good Friday not as a solemn public holiday to close up and stay home, but as another business day where they have an opportunity to try and earn some money and keep their businesses afloat.

I am not really into attending the ballet or opera or such high culture – my main interest in the performing arts is watching Shakespeare and other great plays live.

However, when out for a walk yesterday, I noticed a huge banner in the front window of the local pizza joint promoting a tour which is about to play at the Palais Theatre: China Before Communism, by the Shen Yun Dance Company.

This below link tells you more about how members of the Chinese diaspora are trying to keep alive and to promote aspects of their culture which have been suppressed by the communist regime which currently infests China:

Shen Yun Bravely Presents China’s True Culture, Before Communism

When covering the 1988 US Democratic Convention, the recently late P.J. O’Rourke aptly titled his article ‘On The Blandwagon’. Less aptly perhaps, he included this essay in his next book, ‘Holidays in Hell’. He probably should have waited a few years and then included it in the much more suitably titled ‘Holidays in Heck’.

Coverage of the 2022 Federal Election Campaign, up to Day 4 now, is similarly bland. The main colour to the campaign so far was Albo making a faux pas when he did not know the current unemployment and official interest rates. That more than makes up for ScoMo not knowing what a loaf of bread might cost when he was asked a couple of months back.

To be honest, there is very little difference between the parties in their policies, according to the main coverage which I have been reading. Both of them are trying to buy our love… or at least our votes.

Someone wrote a piece somewhere recently with a photo of the Opposition leadership group (ie Albo, Marles, Penny and Kristina) standing together and saying something to the extent that would you really want those people running the country? That is a bit ad hominem perhaps, but a photo of the Liberal leadership group could probably raise even greater expressions of horror (ScoMo, Josh, and Senators Birmingham & Cash).

If you were to include the leadership of the coalition partners (ie Barnaby and his entourage), your hair might stand on end.

But most of the actual participants are playing nice, and not making such direct attacks on each other’s likability (or lack thereof).

The Coalition’s main current theme seems to be a familiar mantra that Labor cannot be trusted to properly and responsibly manage the economy. This has frequently worked well in the past, although I think that Hawke-Keating did more for economic rationalism (something I mostly still believe in) than any of the Liberal-led governments which had come before.

Now that there is, as Clive and his new sidekick Craig keep reminding us, a trillion dollars of government debt on ScoMo’s watch, I am not sure that this sort of argument holds as much water. If we are going to denounce governments (and potential governments) for printing money and then spending it wantonly, I think that there is little difference between Kevin Rudd at the time of the GFC and Scott Morrison during the Pandemic, except that ScoMo has clearly spent far far more.

The second theme that the Coalition is running with is that you cannot trust Labor as there will be a Labor-Greens-Independents alliance which will end up running the country. I am very skeptical about this for two reasons.

One is that when Albo was manager of government business during the Gillard government, where there was a hung parliament, they were able to get a lot of legislation through the House of Reps despite the lack of a majority, and with limited compromise. Gillard was able to outmanoeuvre naive independents like Andrew Wilkie with pledges which did not end up benefiting them or their agendas the way that they had hoped.

The other is that historically, changes of government do not occur with slim majorities or hung parliaments. There have been 7 elections which have resulted in a change of government since the Second World War: 1949, 1972, 1975, 1983, 1993, 2007, and 2013. In only one of those elections, 1972, was the result anything less than a very clear and decisive victory – usually a landslide. If the election goes Labor’s way this time, I think that history shows us that it is more likely that it will have a very clear mandate to govern.

But it really does appear that this election is not currently being contested on policies, much as the Coalition wants to paint the Opposition as unable to manage the economy or control sympathetic fellow travellers. It is being contested on likability – ScoMo versus Albo.

People have now had three years to get to know ScoMo much better than they did when he pulled off his electoral miracle in 2019. Many do not like what they see. Whilst the government has been much more controlled and competent than it was under Abbott or Turnbull, it has developed a facade of almost Tammany-like machine politics, with spoils, purges and patronage, which responsible citizens will find disturbing. Nor do the denunciations from many senior people on the same side, such as Gladys and Barnaby, present ScoMo as particularly trustworthy or likeable.

Albo, from what we see of him, seems to be the last of the True Believers (FYI, ‘True Believers’ is a Labor myth created by the odious Bob Ellis in the late 1980s). It may be that he is merely more effective than others at hiding his ruthlessness from the public eye, or that his internal victims within the ALP have much more to gain from his success than from his failure so that they stay silent. (Note that this is in vast contrast to ScoMo – whose victims and opponents within the Liberal Party are all coming forward right now to try and tear him down and settle their scores immediately.). I like to think that Albo is both an authentic champion for the Aussie Battler and a truly loveable character. But I am not naive enough to unquestioningly believe it.

Most days, I enjoy reading the Pearls Before Swine comic strip, which alternates between childlike innocence (in the character of Pig), and dark cynicism (in the form of Rat). One story arc from 2016 saw Rat, the anti-hero of this comic, run for US President, mostly on the platform of being more likeable than either of the alternatives. He won.

This does speak to me about the level of disenchantment and cynicism many of us in our anglo-phonic liberal democracies feel about the current state of the political alternatives we are offered.

The Australian Federal Election has now officially been called for Saturday 21 May. This will be the 13th time in my adult life that I have voted in a federal election, and I suppose, like many of my fellow voters, I do not feel particularly excited about either of the alternatives, even though, if I must admit it, Albo is the most authentic Labor leader since at least Bill Hayden, and probably since Chifley.

I read somewhere a few years ago that in the mid 1950s, when Australia had a population of some 10 million, about 500,000 citizens were members of a political party. That represents a very large proportion of the adult population being actively engaged in the democratic process – something which is needed to safeguard the strength of our democracy.

Now, in a population of some 26 million, it is probably less than half that. Officially published figures put Liberal and Labor each on approximately 50,000 members, with the Greens on 10,000 members. It is difficult to measure how many people actually belong to the National Party, because they like to count unfinancial members (once you sign up, you are a National Party member until the grave, and possibly even beyond then…).

And the UAP claim to have over 80,000 members. As I do not have any idea about how one joins the UAP, I suspect that, like Tory-Cory’s ill fated conservative movement, you probably get counted once you sign up to a mailing list, rather than paying up a membership fee and getting accepted by a vote at a party meeting.

All that suggests that active political and civic engagement right now is probably less than 1% of the total population, rather than the 5% it was in the 1950s.

Similarly, the primary vote of the major parties has been declining consistently in the past 35 years. In 1987, when I first voted as an 18 year old, the primary vote for both the Coalition (in its then 3 separate components) and Labor was 45.90%. When I last voted in 2019, the Coalition (with now 4 separate components) had a primary vote of 41.44, and Labor had 33.34.

Preferential voting does cause protest and third party votes to flow back to the major parties, but there is no denying that not only have the major parties been losing active members, they have also been steadily losing the support of a larger part of the public.

There are several reasons for this.

One is that people frequently wish that there was an alternative to the major parties, but in the past did not see an alternative as electorally viable, so they did not bother. Now, in the past 15 years, we have seen the Greens taking lower house seats off Labor, and independents taking seats off the Coalition. Given that the electoral viability of an alternative candidate is much greater than was the case traditionally, there is a snow ball effect, feeding the viability of alternatives to the major parties.

Another reason is money. Since the early 1990s, public funding has been assigned to candidates based on what proportion of the primary vote they win (with some minimum limits). This was done so as to try and prevent political parties from becoming too beholden on large influential donors (not that this seems to have stopped Communist China from buying influence through various sympathetic billionaires), and also because political parties are rather lazy about needing to fund raise – public funding makes it so much easier. An unintended consequence is that a strong independent or third party candidate can end up with a war chest for a future campaign.

On top of the public funding, we now have crowd funding. If you feel strongly about an issue or an independent candidate, then you can donate to their crowd funding campaign.

A third reason is that the major parties are alienating their supporters. Showing up at 6am on Election Day to decorate a polling booth and then stand there coping abuse from the odd moron who does not appreciate your civic contribution til 6pm, and then scrutineering til 8 or 9pm is a thankless task, and the parties are not exactly great at thanking their supporters for doing it. Party members have very limited say in selecting their candidates, with interventions by state or federal executives increasingly frequent.

Take for example two recent examples. Branch stacking by machine politicians in the Victorian ALP has resulted in the disenfranchisement of the entire state party, which is now ruled by a committee appointed by the federal executive. ALP members in Victoria have no say in anything to do with the election except whether or not they should make the individual effort to actually campaign.

On the other side of politics, the NSW Division of the Liberal Party was unable, due to deliberate bad faith behaviour by the Prime Minister and his nominee to a key committee, to endorse its candidates through the usual process (ie a ballot which involves local party members in each seat). This recently resulted in a very cynical intervention which enabled candidates to effectively get appointed by the Prime Minister. Matthew Camenzuli, a member of the NSW Liberal Executive, unsuccessfully challenged this bad faith behaviour and was summarily expelled from the party last week.

Both examples show how the major parties are holding their grassroots members in contempt, and seeing them as solely campaign fodder for election day and its lead up, rather than as partners deserving of a say in the way their political parties are run and who represents them.

The consequences downstream will be that people will not volunteer their time and their money to support the parties with whom they normally feel an affinity.

Whilst the major parties are increasingly alienated from (and alienating) their grassroots supporters, they are still both very willing to look after their semi-retired apparatchiks with plum appointments at tax payer expense. Six days before the election was called, the Attorney General announced a giant life raft of appointments to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. The count of apparatchiks appointed to those positions is higher than the 6 or 8 reported in the mainstream media – at least 13 Liberals and 1 National were appointed. Whilst such appointments have long been regarded as spoils by both parties, who have long rewarded (or pensioned) senior supporters accordingly, this does not make such conduct at all laudable, especially where it flies in the face of the spirit, if not the letter, of caretaker conventions.

Whilst Albo has claimed underdog status and said that Labor has, post war, only won government from opposition three times (Whitlam, Hawke, Rudd), we should remember that the Coalition has similarly only won government from opposition three times (Menzies, Howard, Abbott), given that Fraser was, post dismissal, caretaker PM when the election occurred in December 1975. Also, in that time, there have only been three governments which have won more than three terms (Menzies-Holt-McEwan-Gorton-McMahon, Hawke-Keating, and Howard), and three governments which lasted two or three terms (Whitlam, Fraser, Rudd-Gillard-Rudd).

So what is the takeaway for 21st May? I think that the electorate will probably see a major swing to the opposition, and that the Coalition will lose a significant number of seats, including potentially several to independents. The Greens probably will not gain more seats, as there is an “It’s Time” vibe to the campaign. I see parallels in this election to the 1996 and 2007 elections – where a change of government followed a previous upset defeat of the Opposition in an unlosable election.

You have to ask yourself whether an Albanese led Labor government would be necessarily a bad thing? A healthy democracy requires strong competition, and governments do get stale, arrogant and out of touch when they are in power for too long. I just hope that Albo is too busy doing necessary things to safeguard our national security and economy to go off and do silly (but still highly destructive) things like trying to implement a republic or increasing taxes on middle Australia.

I finished reading the corporate expose ‘The Cult of We’ a couple of weeks ago. It is a fascinating account of how the office rental business WeWork rose from obscurity in New York City to become a ‘unicorn’, ie a start up worth over a billion dollars (at one stage it was valued by investors at $47 billion).

I had, by the time I had finished reading that book, a pretty good impression of the personality and character of Rebecca Paltrow Neumann, the wife of the co-founder Adam Neumann. Cousin of the much more famous Gwyneth, Rebecca comes across as both a typically spoiled Long Island Princess, and a cringe worthily bad would be actress.

And then I discovered that there is a mini-series on Apple TV+ newly released about the whole fascinating WeWork debacle, starring Jared Leto as Adam Neumann and Anne Hathaway as Rebecca.

Anne Hathaway’s riveting performance as Rebecca Paltrow Neumann alone is enough reason to watch this series (aside from the fact that Apple TV+ do not offer too many shows, so what they do offer needs to be very good for the premium I pay for my subscription). It is a master class in acting.

I have never really thought too much about what makes someone a good actor. You just see them and go ‘Wow’ sometimes, and just relax and enjoy it. Hathaway however has just made me think about how much hard work acting is.

In portraying a real person, the work done both by Hathaway as an actress, and the various writers who have sought to capture and keep alive the character who is Rebecca Paltrow Neumann, is amazing. Any real person is not two dimensional or wooden. They have frailties, vanities, strengths, flaws, compassion and resentments. To say nothing of other human characteristics.

Hathaway’s performance brings Rebecca to life for the audience – we see Rebecca the way that we (especially if you have read all about WeWork as I recently have) believe that she really is – we see her being selfish, sympathetic, and sinister, in varying degrees and sometimes simultaneously. It is still not the real person, but this is close as you can get to portraying the real person within the imperfect art form which is drama.

Do yourself a favour and watch this series. If for no other reason than to get to appreciate just what a brilliant and possibly underrated actress Anne Hathaway really is. [The WeWork corporate train wreck itself is itself a fascinating story to follow!]

As the holder of a microscopic small share holding in the ASX listed craft brewer Broo Ltd, I have been quite interested in following the recent developments in the company, particularly the apparent falling out between the founder, Kent “Groges” Grogan and the recently appointed new board member.

In the past couple of days, a compromise has been reached and announced to the ASX. Namely, Groges and the other member of the board will step down and be replaced by new directors aligned with the chap who was challenging Groges for control of the company. Groges will remain an employee of the company with the same remuneration package that he previously enjoyed.

So all seems rosy and kiss & make up etc.

Whilst my 120 shares in Broo are now worth less than a total of a dollar, and do not really warrant me studying this company in any great detail, the 11 years in which I have been a share holder of it and the general fascination I have with investing in the alcohol producing sector means that I still feel a grossly distorted interest in studying the company.

So in the past week or so, I have been reading through the various company announcements and news articles (try reading BrewNews for such interesting stories) on Broo to get a better idea of the business than I had when I wrote my last post about it over a week ago.

It turns out that Groges has been selling down his shareholding over the past couple of years (good on him for cashing out some of the effort he has put into the business over the past 12-13 years), and doing off-market share issues to ‘sophisticated investors’ to raise funds to keep the business going. As a result, he is down to about 25% of the voting rights in the business (I estimate my voting rights at about 0.00001% of the total), which probably means that the investor block challenging his control does have the numbers to take over from him.

I feel increasingly glad, from what I have read over the past week, that I did not participate in the IPO at the ASX float 6 years ago. Lots of things have not gone all that well lately.

The proposed sale of the Ballarat site where Broo was proposing to set up a state of the art brewing facility (an idea that they abandoned in favour of getting CUB to brew the BROO) remains tied up in red tape. This site, which was probably paid for by capital raised in the IPO, is the largest asset owned by the company.

The brew-pub in Mildura, which now doubles as company HQ, and which probably also got paid for by the IPO, is also up for sale, and last year narrowly avoided being sold up to pay debts owed by the company to AGL (not something I discovered til this past week – because I have not been following announcements and news about the company too closely).

The current distribution deal in QLD, where most of Broo is currently consumed, appears not to be converting Queenslanders into Broo drinkers. A large amount of packaged beer is now being sold at deep discounts as it approaches its best before dates. That does not bode well for further sales in QLD. Nor have I seen Broo for sale in bottle shops around Melbourne in quite a long time (and believe me, I have looked).

A distribution deal to sell Broo in Communist China fell through over a year ago. This does not surprise me however – doing deals involving Communist China on anything except iron ore and coal are truly fraught with peril (I learned this the hard way almost a decade ago when a future former friend persuaded me to invest in a chancer’s business venture which was trying to get a deal for something in China).

So what do I see as the future for Broo?

The two main tangible assets are the Mildura brew-pub and the Ballarat land. Both are for sale and might fetch a total of up to about $9 million (although there are a lot of ‘ifs’ about the Ballarat sale, which could result in it selling for a whole lot less).

After those sales, the main other asset is the Broo brand, along with the various related beer recipes, which is currently being brewed on contract by CUB. The value of this brand is rather intangible – it does not seem to be widely available anymore, or to be very popular where it is available.

Without the other assets, I suppose Broo can continue to operate as a contract brewed beer brand, but it probably would make more sense for someone like CUB to buy the brand and then see if it could relaunch it within its own distribution networks. This would be an end to the raison d’être for Broo’s existence (ie an entirely Australian owned beer company), but I fear that the writing has been on the wall for quite some time.

And the last asset is the ASX listing of Broo Ltd (ASX code BEE). Left as a shell company on the ASX, it could be then repurposed for a ‘backdoor’ ASX listing by some other business, who would ‘sell’ their existing business to Broo in exchange for an issue of a very large number of shares, diluting the holdings of existing shareholders considerably more. Doing this is a much cheaper way of listing on the ASX than by floating a new company directly.

Indeed, if I were advising the new directors as to what to do with Broo Ltd, I think that the above four paragraphs summarise the course of action that I would recommend, and also what I think is most likely to happen to Broo Ltd as a company and Broo as a beer brand.

Of course, selling my $1 worth of shares would cost about $20 in brokerage fees, so I am going to hold onto them and see what happens next….

Today at the Academy Awards ceremony we had the unscripted entertainment featuring soon to be Oscar winner Will Smith slapping presenter Chris Rock.

Apparently, the cause of offence was a feeble joke about Will Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith, starring in a remake of GI Jane. Presumably her baldness, rather than her poor choice in movie scripts, was what caused the soon to be Oscar winner to take offence.

In the olden days, a sound thrashing, often delivered in the Wild West, or the Australian Goldfields, with a horsewhip, was a suitable way to remedy a public insult, particularly against one’s lady.

More recently, a PVC pipe rather than a horse whip was rumoured to be used when a certain technocratic political leader supposedly ‘fell down the stairs’ after causing offence to the family of some young lady.

We do live in boorish times, when the internet has multiplied the rudeness of contemporary television programming, such that the actions of frontier newspaper editors who earned horse whippings in the olden days seem perfectly polite in comparison.

But in this case, was the violence of Will Smith justified? The joke was a weak one, but that does not deserve sanction in itself. There are many worse and tasteless things that one could joke about, in relation to the Smith marriage. There has been significant coverage in the past year or so about mutual infidelities and the apparent openness of that marriage.

Yet Chris Rock did not attempt to make fun of those issues, the type of thing which the fictional Ari Gold of Entourage would have gloated about most crassly.

In this case, Chris Rock made what was a rather weak but good natured joke, which did not deserve to be taken as an ad hominem attack on the Smith family. Nor did he deserve to be assaulted in that way.

Of course, weak jokes and pathetic attempts at humour are par for the course at the Oscars – that the humour is so feeble and pathetic is what can be considered part of a far more sophisticated and witty mega-skit.

How does this all play out? Denzel Washington, in intervening, has shown himself to be all class and a gentleman. Chris Rock is just a barely funny has-been comedian. As for Will Smith, I think that he has just jumped the shark in terms of his career.

Did you happen to know that most of the well known beer brands in Australia are now foreign owned? Japanese to be most precise. Kirin have long owned the portfolio of beers held mostly under the Tooheys umbrella, and Asahi have sometime in the past decade ended up as owners of what used to be known as Fosters Group (commonly known to us beer lovers as Carlton & United Breweries).

I will proudly admit that in late 2011, I was one of the few people to show up to the Fosters Group EGM to vote against the agreement to allow its takeover by SAB Miller (which has since been taken over by Asahi).

Coopers, in South Australia, is the only major Australian beer company which remains Australian owned – completely in the hands of the Cooper Family.

Even most of the micro-breweries around the place are owned by one or other of the two big companies – Tooheys or CUB, which means that they are either Kirin or Asahi. Little Creatures and James Squire are both Kirin, as is Furphy’s.

I forget who it is who now owns Mountain Goat, but I can assure you that Japanese beer interests bought it out quite a few years ago.

This is not to say that there are not heaps of micro-breweries out there which remain in private local ownership. The bar Mrs Parmas in Little Bourke Street will only serve beers from Victorian locally owned micro-breweries, and I think that most of the beers on tap in the various hipster bars around Footscray (eg Mr West’s & Bar Josephine) are from similar locally owned operations.

One person who has made a career out of the issue of foreign ownership of beer brands is Kent ‘Groges’ Grogan. Over a decade ago, he founded a micro-brewery brand named Broo, and promoted it on the premise that it should always be owned by Australian residents rather than foreign interests.

Whilst it was a private company, this was not too difficult. In early 2011, he offered beer drinkers a chance, for each slab they bought online from him, to acquire 10 shares in Broo. I bought 2 slabs, and became the proud owner of 20 shares.

I still have the share certificate I printed out, and am thinking I might frame it and hang it in a particular room in my home prone to be frequently visited by beer drinkers.

Groges did want to list on a stock exchange, but listing rules do not normally create the sorts of foreign ownership preclusions that he wanted, and extensive lobbying of MPs did not yield fruit in the form of laws particular to his company. Nor did the National (aka Newcastle) Stock Exchange turn out to be a viable option.

So in the end, the company did a five for one split (that takes me to 100 shares, yay!) and floated on the ASX in October 2016. I did look at the prospectus, which offered me a chance to acquire more shares at 20 cents each. I am not an accountant, but I did do some quick counting on my fingers and guesstimated that fair value for the shares was probably around 2 cents at that time.

They did go up as high as about 40 cents briefly (at which time I should have sold and used the proceeds to buy a couple of beers), but since then, they have gradually eased downward, to the point where my guesstimate now looks optimistic (1 cent is the current price on the ASX website).

In late 2020, there was a need to seek more working capital, and so shareholders had the chance to buy one additional share for every five shares held, at 1.8 cents. I transferred my 36 cents on the Bpay number, and got another 20 shares. Now I have 120 shares in Broo.

You can probably surmise that whilst I have an active interest in following this company more than that of the more boring but larger shareholdings I possess, I am not exactly counting on this to fund my long desired country property. But because it is a beer company, I have fun reading their company announcements.

What the company currently has, aside from its brands, can be summarised as the following:

. contracted brewing of Broo by CUB (from memory)

. a pub in Mildura which serves as company HQ (I am not sure whether they also brew Broo there)

. some land in Ballarat where they wanted to build a brewery to brew Broo – made redundant by the above decision to get the brewing of Broo outsourced. They are trying to sell this land for $7,500,000, but there are some snags on the sale.

From the revised 2021 annual report released on 28 February 2022, I learn several interesting things about the shareholding.

. There are 8098 shareholders. 7374 of those (yours truly included), do not hold a marketable parcel. Presumably we are the ones who went out and bought at least a slab each in January 2011 in response to Groges’s cry for greater Australian ownership of Australian beer.

. There are about 945,800,000 shares held – which at a value of about one cent (it does tend to fluctuate) each makes this company worth between $9-9.5 million

. The top 20 shareholders own 67.98% of the shares

. Groges himself now owns 38.23% of the shares

. Amongst the largest other shareholders, I am particularly interested in three on the list – Knight 61 Investments (5.52%), CE61 Investments (3.24%), and 61 Financial Information Technology (0.88%).

The use of the number 61 intrigues me as it does not appear to be a coincidence. The revised annual report also advises us that a long standing director of Broo resigned in late 2021, and that a new director, David Zhu, was appointed in October 2021. David Zhu is described on the report as a director of ’61 Financial’.

[As an aside, I suspect that 61 as a company name is inspired by Chinese numerology – 6 is considered a lucky number, and 1 usually signifies winning (rather than loneliness).]

Why today I am reading so much into the shareholder information on this annual report is not so much to see how many other people have non-marketable parcels in this company (something which does occasionally intrigue me), as to the stoush that seems to be playing out in the 3 man boardroom of Broo this month.

The following notices on the ASX website are most interesting:

https://cdn-api.markitdigital.com/apiman-gateway/ASX/asx-research/1.0/file/2924-02497960-3A589592?access_token=83ff96335c2d45a094df02a206a39ff4

https://cdn-api.markitdigital.com/apiman-gateway/ASX/asx-research/1.0/file/2924-02500632-3A590038?access_token=83ff96335c2d45a094df02a206a39ff4

Basically, what has happened is that very recently appointed director David Zhu earlier this month sought to call a general meeting to remove Groges and the other director of Broo from the Board. In response, Groges has sought a resolution to remove Zhu from the Board.

I do not know what is happening, but I can guess. Most of the small shareholders like myself are happy to watch Groges ‘live the dream’ of trying to build a micro-brewery business which is not going to give in to the temptation of selling out to foreign investors. After all, Groges seems to be a good bloke and he is patriotic.

But there are other people out there who might see arbitrage opportunities – the land in Ballarat and the pub in Mildura are tangible assets, as are the beer brands, which might be worth more if sold off rather than maintained as part of an ongoing business.

And even where a company itself is loss making, lowly capitalised and trading infrequently, its very status as a publicly listed company on the ASX has a certain cash value. It is far cheaper to do a reverse takeover of an inactive company already listed on the ASX than it is to do an IPO – you can save tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. [For an example, look at ZMM, the current manifestation of a company first listed in 2007, or BNL, at least the third version of a company listed in 1994 – both of the latter have predecessor companies I took a punt in once.]

I do wish Groges luck in his boardroom stoush. I hope, if I do get to Mildura later this year, that I might go and visit him in the pub Broo owns. But sadly, it appears that some shareholders are not interested in ‘living the dream’ his way.

Declan McManus, who is most commonly known to us as the singer Elvis Costello, is someone of whom I have been a moderate fan since the late 1980s.

I was rather saddened but somewhat unsurprised by his recent announcement that he will no longer be performing ‘Oliver’s Army’, his anti-military song (the British Army traces its origins back to the Model Army created by Oliver Cromwell), due to the use of the sometimes racially inflammatory use of the n-word in it.

It is a very boppy song, and the context in which the n-word is used, implying that the poor white trash of the UK are the ones who end up on the front lines fighting for the Empire, is one where I think that the use of the n-word would not have caused offence, although it would probably have some significant shock value.

And it is both morally and musically a better use of that word than what Kanye West uses it for in his music (have you heard ‘Gold Digger’, the song which presumably was the bridal waltz at Kanye and Kim K’s wedding?).

As I indicated above, I was not surprised. Whilst I do not really follow his career closely, I did once watch the TV program ‘The Juliet Letters’ about some music he did just after the first Iraq War where he expressed some rather harsh views about some female fan in the military who had written to him from the war zone.

Which leads me to conclude that Elvis Costello has been what we now call ‘woke’ since prehistoric times.

But I don’t really care about that as he does have quite a lot of other fine songs I enjoy, such as ‘Veronica’, ‘Watching the Detectives’, and ‘Ship Building’ for example. He also does collaborations with various fantastic musicians, such as his current wife, the delectable Diana Krall, a jazz singer known for her fantastic interpretation of the American Songbook, and Burt Bacharach.

As a particular treat, he did a performance with Fiona Apple in 2006, where she did two of his songs, and he did two of her songs. Google their performance of ‘I want you’, a song where Fiona Apple sings with unbridled yearning of great intensity (I would have attached a link from YouTube but somehow that doesn’t work).

My passing acquaintance with the music of 80s angst minstrels The Smiths is limited to what you would expect someone like me to have. Namely, their appearance on the Pretty In Pink soundtrack (a flawed movie given that the ending was changed at the last minute so that the rich handsome guy gets the girl instead – although Ducky getting Kirsty Swanson as consolation prize seems better to me than ending up with Molly Ringwald), and the theme song from Charmed (you definitely would expect me to watch a show about three beautiful women who happen to be witches).

In other words, The Smiths and their frontman Morrissey have had very little impact on my life.

Today I got around to watching Panic on the Streets of Springfield, a recent episode of the Simpsons which parodies Morrissey. A similar character becomes Lisa’s imaginary friend until Lisa goes to see the real live version in concert. There, as the former vegan rock star shoots hot dogs into the audience, Lisa is disillusioned about her new found idol.

Morrissey in recent years has horrified his former fans. He has made many racist utterances, encouraged skinheads, and endorsed the extreme right wing For Britain party. His comments on the Me Too movement also are quite lacking in empathy, to say the least.

All sorts of fans and former collaborators, like the far-left rock icon Billy Bragg, are horrified by the views of Morrissey now, an angry and hateful late middle aged man.

They can no longer excuse his utterances as being ironic or provocative, in the way that a young Morrissey might have been.

But if Morrissey is a jerk now, what was he like in the 80s when he was in his heyday as lead singer of The Smiths and then on his solo career:

The kind people
have a wonderful dream
Margaret on the guillotine
because people like you
make me feel so tired
when will you die?
when will you die?
when will you die?
when will you die?
when will you die?
because people like you
make me feel so old inside
please die
and kind people
do not shelter this dream
make it real
make the dream real
make the dream real
make it real

Those are the lyrics of Margaret on the Guillotine, a song on his 1988 debut solo album Viva Hate. It is about the then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

He similarly composed another nasty song, The Queen is Dead, which lacks any of the punk charm of the Sex Pistol’s God Save The Queen.

And it is only in the past few years that Smiths fans and such folk have finally woken up that Morrissey is a jerk? He always was a jerk. It was just that they loved and lapped up his hatred when it was aimed at people like Thatcher and the Queen. Now that they realise that he is definitely not woke and is quite hateful to a lot of people and causes they care about, they are suddenly horrified.

Morrissey strikes me as a joke, a hateful joke. But the joke is mostly on his former fans. That they want to ‘cancel’ him now, rather than in 1988 when he wished death on the Maggie Thatcher whom they hated shows their inherent hypocrisy.

They are similar to a Jacobin mob intent on murder and mayhem (quite apt when their anthem is about a guillotine). Morrissey was their Robespierre. And like Robespierre with his guillotine, when the mob grew weary of him, they turned on him.

Morrissey has shown up all those hypocritical people who were his fans for the hateful totalitarian-sympathising mob that they were and are. They richly deserve him.