Ouch ouch ouch!

Last Friday afternoon, I really should have pressed the sell button on my share portfolio.

After one week (so far) of blood letting in the share market, I am down over $30G!

It looks like Coronavirus is the black swan event which we all expected but which none of us were prepared to anticipate.

Now, we can watch and learn an object lesson in what really motivates the share market, as we watch the falls continuing.

There are two motive forces driving the share market. One is Greed, which pushes it up, and the other is Fear. Or, if you are to look more closely at Greed, and define it in the way which millennials would describe it, as the Fear Of Missing Out, there is only Fear.

And now Coronavirus driven Fear, based on the great reliance on China as a key component of the global economy, is causing the markets to fall.

Having resisted the temptation to push the sell button a week ago, I am now left with little choice but to ride out this market fall to the bottom, whenever and wherever that happens to be. This will be an ‘interesting’ experience for me. I knew nothing about shares when the 1987 crash happened, had only a negligible share portfolio in the late 1990s when the Asian financial crisis happened and then tech wreck around Easter 2000, and only about a third of what I currently have invested when GFC hit 12 years ago.

With Coronavirus in the mix, this does remind me very much of Edgar Alan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death – you can ignore the reality around you for as long as you can, and continue to party hard, right up until the Grim Reaper’s representative shows up on the dance floor….

In the past week, the Fairfax press has revealed that Australian swimming champion Mack Horton was apparently going to have a swimming pool named after him at his old school, Caulfield Grammar, but that this plan was quietly shelved due to his public criticism of convicted drug cheat Sun Yang, in order to protect the school’s commercial interests.

One of the stories is here:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/school-refloats-horton-pool-plan-after-backlash-at-china-cowardice-20200224-p543wf.html

Many people have already criticised the school for this cowardice, such that even though the school claims that there were no such abandoned plans, it is now actively considering repairing its damage by actually doing what was rumoured and honouring Mack Horton in this way.

It would be apt to do so. Mack Horton is an Olympic gold medalist, something which, in our wealthy and sporting mad nation, makes him a great hero in itself (I say that with a bit of irony – when I commented on a reigning Brownlow medalist being a hero at age 12, a teacher archly observed what about heart surgeons and others who save lives). But that he has been outspoken in his disdain and lack of tolerance for known and blatant cheating in his sport does elevate Mack Horton above other Australian swimmers, as he appears to represent an ideal of fair play which is increasingly disregarded and sidelined in modern sport in place of the expedience of winning.

The alleged behaviour of Caulfield Grammar is a case in point. The accusation is that they were so afraid of offending the government of Communist China, which allows many fee paying students to come to Australia and attend that school, that they were unwilling to honour one of their visibly successful old boys, who not only has succeeded as a swimmer, but who embodies fair play. Commercial interests are far more important, supposedly, than fair play,

What message is Caulfield Grammar sending to the families of Australians who send their sons there? That standing up for what is right is actually wrong, and that cheating should be tolerated? That is the sort of message which seems to be embedded into our export education system right now, and it obviously is starting to have an impact in the rest of the education system in its entirety.

Civil society and Australian democracy is under threat from various sources. One of those sources is the growing alienation from society and disillusionment in the political processes which many feel – the apathy, anger and anomie which are probably a result of our increasingly online lives and news cycles. But one of the other threats to civil society and democracy is the increasing economic dependence on Communist China, and the growing tolerance of the intentional interference which its representatives are exercising onshore in our society – or the fear of speaking out against it.

That Mack Horton has become, before this swimming pool issue came up, a poster boy for fair play is one thing. The alleged behaviour of Caulfield Grammar has propelled him to a greater status – he is now a symbol for what is going wrong in our civil society and democracy, the fear and greed which is propelling blindness to the motives of a tyrannical communist government which is trying to extend its tentacles into indirect control of our nation.

The best thing which Caulfield Grammar could now do for our nation and to honour Mack Horton, given the obvious contempt that I now feel for its leadership, is to name its swimming pool after Sun Yang. That would graphically and vocally illustrate to the public that there is a threat of us becoming, through our apathy, fear, and greed, a client state to Communist China,.

I consider myself as a personally conservative person, albeit someone who reluctantly describes himself as a libertarian (very reluctantly – I loathe the word). As such, I would have some guarded sympathy for the Liberal Party, albeit as someone who very much regards himself as an outsider looking in.

As a responsible and engaged citizen, I need to keep informed about such matters, given that I do not believe that we can ever take our democracy for granted.

At the moment, I am in a situation where I find myself wondering what Elvis would do, or, as he sang in one song:

Stop!

Look and Listen baby

That’s my philosophy

It’s called rubber necking baby

That’s all right with me!

You see, there appears to be a lot of dissension within the organisational base of the Victorian Liberal Party at the moment, based around a website and related email newsletter called Abalinx. Here, read the website for yourself: http://www.abalinx.com

The author of this website, retired army warrant officer and excessively enthusiastic Liberal Party volunteer Peter Adamis, currently, after publishing his epistles for some time, has incurred the wrath of the state executive of the Liberal Party, and appears to be facing some sort of hearing in March, which might result in expulsion or something such.

I do not know this chap, although I know, at least by reputation (and at best very vaguely), various of the people whom he names in his website and his related email newsletters.

I must say, on reading the various articles he publishes on his page, that I do not necessarily agree with him. He seems as enthusiastic about the Liberal Party as Joffa is about Collingwood Football Club, which is probably a little too one eyed for most people, including most Liberal sympathisers. However, unlike Joffa, he is not enthusiastic or uncritical about the organisational leaders of his beloved organisation, and that appears to be what has got him into trouble.

His writing sometimes is a little too obscure and rambling, and sometimes a little repetitive and critical in an ad hominem way, and sometimes too uncritical of those people with whom his sympathies lie (some of those people, to be honest, are perhaps best described as a-holes). And the writing is not that great.

However, putting his thoughts out there, in the way that he does (raising his dissent against matter which are shut down by the leaders of the supposedly grassroots based party he supports), is important for our democracy, especially at a time when Communist China has been buying many people within both of our major political parties with donations or consultant fees (look at Sam Dastiyari for example, or Santo Santoro, as frightening examples of the insidious attack on our democracy).

Transparency is important, especially at a time when the major political parties are becoming political machines increasingly unaccountable to either their members or their voting bases, and increasingly receptive to cheques from rich people who happen to be members of the Chinese Communist Party.

Expelling Peter Adamis from the Liberal Party would be a sad mistake. It would be better to expel the politicians and apparatchicks who accept fees and donations from members of the Chinese Communist Party, especially as the Liberal Party of Australia was established to be a Liberal, anti-Communist party, defending individual liberty.

The decision by General Motors to retire the Holden brand and withdraw from the Australian car market entirely has disappointed and upset many people. There has long been a perception that Holden was an Australian company, and that Holdens are Australian cars.

I expect that many people, never having reason to reflect on the matter, did not know that GMH was simply the fully owned local operation of the American company General Motors, the largest car company in the world. It was never a publicly listed company on the Australian Stock Exchange, nor privately owned by Australian interests.

It simply was an American company which, like many other car manufacturers the world over, took advantage of government policies intended to foster local manufacturing industries, through subsidies and tariffs.

There is an iconic photograph of Prime Minister Chifley in 1948, standing next to the first locally produced Holden. A milestone moment in local industry and Australian history. And it did so much to make people believe that Holden was as Australian as Vegemite (btw, is Vegemite still foreign owned, or has someone in Australia bought it back from Kraft yet?), whilst Ford, despite being a worthy car, was American.

It’s probably the greatest marketing snowjob in history.

I recall, in the 1990s, that there even was a Holden shop at Highpoint Shopping Centre, where the local bogans could buy their own Holden Racing Team jackets and hats and other merchandise. (Note, I use the term ‘bogan’ affectionately – we all are a little bogan in our own ways, even if most of us drink craft beer these days.)

And who can forget Kingswood Country, the greatest of Australia’s sitcoms, where Holden loving true blue Aussie Ted Bullpit would constantly spar with his Italian son in law in a manner far too non-PC 40 years on, and where he would never let anyone else drive his Kingswood (and not too much later, the Commodore).

If you want to get another snapshot of how loved Holden was in the 1970s, try and buy online a copy of ‘My Love Had A Black Speed Stripe’, a very dark comedy about a Holden factory worker who loved his new car far more than his wife. (My high school actually still had a class set of them in the early 1980s so that it could be studied in English, although not in my year.)

Holden, even on its way out the door, is going to leave like the Cheshire Cat in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, disappearing such that the smile will remain long after everything else has faded. My brother plans to buy himself a 2020 Commodore in around 6 years time (he never buys new cars), and that way, he will be still driving Holdens well into the 2030s. Another Holden devotee, a very distraught colleague of mine, has suggested that I stop putting money into superannuation and start buying up Holdens instead. If I had a large enough shed to store them in, perhaps I might.

1986 was definitely not a great year in my life. Aside from my default from being 17 and facing that semi-adult rite of passage that involves finishing high school (at my local school, where the likelihood of successfully completing high school in six years, from when you started six years earlier, was about 12.5% at best). my father, who was a smoker and a former coal miner (from his late teenage years), got sick at the start of the year and departed this life in mid July.

I would have to say that staying stable and sane and trying to successfully finish high school at first attempt gave me a few challenges, ones that I realised not too many years later had ripple effects on the person that I was that had taken several years to fully manifest themselves.

Staying sane, and trying to get through the stress of exams and the aftermath takes some doing. To this day, Suzanne Vega remains my favourite singer, even though I am not too thrilled with much that she has recorded in the past 20 years. At the time, I played a copy of her self-titled debut album over and over again as I studied for my Math exams and all the rest (is not everything Math if you are doing science?).

But that is not all, from that time, that I feel fondly about, in terms of remembering the barely sane not quite 18 year old I was, who was starting on his first steps into the jungle and inviting stupidity that is adulthood. For example, Paul Simon put out Graceland, an album which was a tad controversial at the time, but which had a great song (and filmclip with Chevy Chase) which resonates with me at the time that I was drawing a deep breath after the ordeal of those final exams.

And there is Huey Lewis and the News, at the height of their success.

Ok… Fore! is not exactly a classic album from any era, and it sure is nowhere near Graceland if we are just looking at music from that year. But it was a popular album, a hit if you will, of honest middleweight rock from the mid eighties.

I doubt that ‘Happy to be stuck with you’ is going to be a bridal dance at many weddings, but perhaps ‘Power of Love’ might be.

But Huey Lewis is a bookmark in time – he and his band represent a point in my life when I was starting to recover from the first major calamity in my life at the same time as I was summoning all that youthful hubris needed to embark on the scary entrance into adulthood. I survived that time. Looking back, I am rather surprised that I have actually thrived as much as I have since then. I have faced and slain several dragons since then, so to speak.

And now, over 33 years later, I discover that they are back, with a new album “Weather”, and a single ‘I’m there for you” with the same mellow tones and middle weight rock that I loved back then, when I was on the northern edge of seventeen.

Thank you Huey, thank you!

Sometime in the 18th Century, Bishop George Berkeley wrote his thoughts on empiricism. He could be credited, perhaps, with the ideas which underpin the question ‘If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does the tree make a noise?’

I suppose the good bishop would, given his writings, be sympathetic to the dilemma as to ‘If you commit vandalism in a place where vandalism is legal, have you committed a crime?’

Hosiery Lane is apparently some sort of Melbourne tourist attraction, where people currently known as ‘street artists’ (but whom I am more inclined to consider vandals) are encouraged to express their talent with spray cans without fear of recrimination from the authorities. [And there I was, thinking that all our railway lines are similarly galleries for our ‘street artists’ to decorate without fear of reprisals from the law.]

Supposedly, people from all over the world like to visit this alley off Flinders Street and admire the graffiti art painted there.

Message to the World: WE DO HAVE REAL ART GALLERIES IN MELBOURNE!

Anywho, I was out for a walk at lunchtime as part of my current health kick, and decided to detour down Hosiery Lane for a look and to inspect the recent vandalism.

By that, I mean that a few days ago, some masked lads with fire extinguishers filled with paint went and covered up all the ‘street art’. The police have found a technicality (painting over the ‘street art’ is actually legal there, but dripping paint on the pavement is not) to try to hunt them down and prosecute them for this heinous outrage.

You know, I could not find any but one trace of this supposed outrage by those vandals. No blue paint covering up the work of other more respected ‘street artists’. No traces of paint on the pavement except those left from other artists making their masterpieces. All the various murals which have been painted and painted over in perpetuity appear to be as intact as they ever have been, until the next artist decides to paint over their work with their own masterpieces. The only exception is the picture I have posted above, a hopefully more permanent record of this amusing incident of vandalism in the one place where vandalism is not illegal.

I was thinking just now about former musical enfant terrible Ben Lee, who in his early album Breathing Tornadoes (back when he was quoted, whether in jest or hubristic earnestness I know not, as saying he was the best Australian singer-songwriter ever, or something like that) included a song titled ‘Cigarettes can kill you’. [Is that sort of cheeriness why Claire Danes dumped him?]

And of course, they can. 100 million people are estimated from dying from tobacco smoking during the 20th century, and perhaps a billion may die from it this century (assuming asteroid strikes, nuclear war, global warning or the Rapture do not end our history first). But it does not stop people from smoking. In China, for example, the annual pro capita consumption (an apt word perhaps) of cigarettes is 2043, whereas in Australia it is 917.

Of course, whilst I am a non-smoker, I cannot exactly preach. Red wine, red meat, and sugary snacks are my poisons of choice, and I am finding it pretty hard to lose weight.

As I have expressed in this blog previously, I am rather skeptical about the coming apocalypse, whether it is coronavirus or something else. But I do keep an eye on the coronavirus epidemic, and I note that three hours ago, the number of people infected was up to 60,328, with 1368 dead, compared to 28,262 infected and 565 dead a week ago. If it keeps doubling at this rate, you do not need to have passed high school maths (I actually have) to know what the numbers are going to look like by Easter.

It is possibly the most serious new illness we have seen in a while, and it’s human cost in the short term looks like being appalling. But putting it in some sort of twisted context, there is still little for most people to worry about.

If you are relatively healthy, rested, and well nourished, and fortunate enough to live somewhere with high quality health care and low air pollution, coronavirus is unlikely to be a problem, even if you do catch it.

China is a rather different place. With the exception of during our recent bushfires, air pollution in China is significantly higher than that we experience in Australia. We also do not have the same working hours. My working week is 37.5 hours (up from the 36.75 hours I had when I first entered the full time work force three decades ago), which allows me much time to contemplate exercising, eat out, garden, read, listen to music, or to blog. In the workers’ paradise that is Communist China, the mandated working week is 44 hours, and the average week is 46.3 hours. The poor bastards working in a smart phone factory work 72 hour weeks.

Put yourself in the position of some unfortunate overworked, weary smart phone factory worker. Not only do they work miserable long hours, but they do so in an environment with much more air and water pollution, and where they are going to smoke 2.2 cigarettes for each ciggie Australians do. And whilst I have the first world problem of too much sugar and red meat in my diet, I doubt they are going to be over-nourished.

When something like coronavirus arrives in such an environment, which affects the respiratory system, it is going to hit a large population which is, due to the underlying living conditions, going to be less resistant to it.

This is all going to have great potential for awfulness in coming weeks for people in poor developing countries, where we have exported our pollution, and where first world economic hegemony results in some modern form of third world helotry. It is the unpinning living conditions in those places which are going to make them more vulnerable to coronavirus.

I am reminded, even more than usual, that most of my problems are first world problems, and that living in the first world: with clean air, clean water, decent health care and nutrition, the Rule of Law, comfortable work-life balance, and with all the trappings of lower middle class material affluence that I enjoy, is a blessing that I should never take for granted.

Anyone, man, woman, boy, or girl, who loves their father and idolises him as a hero, cannot help but be moved to tears by the narrative of Scout Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird.

It is a narrative of a ten year old girl, frustrated by having a father who is somewhat elderly compared to the other fathers, and therefore slower and less able to play with his children.

She narrates the story, mostly, from the start onward, naive and oblivious to the high regard her father, Atticus, is held in by their fellow townspeople, who insist in him representing him (unpaid of course) in the state legislature, amongst other things. To her, he is just older and slower. She does not see any greatness in him.

Yet through her oblivious narrative, the greatness of Atticus Finch as a true hero gradually emerges as layer after layer is pealed away. For me, it starts at the point where she observes that the townspeople ask Atticus, as the man regarded as the surest shot in town, to shoot a rabid dog dead. I remember that vividly from when I saw the film at age nine, let alone from when I read the novel, many years later.

At that point, Atticus is just showing a hint of his heroism, the tip of an iceberg, prowess without the principle. But this is just the first hint, seen through the eyes of a ten year old girl, that her father is more than just a useless boring old man.

Not long after that, when the victim of the story, an innocent black man, is falsely accused of rape, where the entire town clamours for southern ‘justice’, is when the heroism that is inherent to Atticus Finch emerges. He gathers his children and he tells them that despite the town being against it, it is is his duty to represent someone in a criminal trial. He makes it very clear that this might be the most important thing that he does in his career, and that he is doing it for their sakes.

This is the moment where, whether Scout realises it or not, her father steps out from being a respected village elder and becomes greater than anyone in the entire county (or perhaps the country). He becomes the embodiment of the Rule of Law, the representative champion of due process.

Ultimately, Atticus is defeated in court, and his client is destroyed in the prison system. But that Atticus, the elder of the village, is prepared to stand up and speak for the falsely accused is important. He knows that he will probably lose when he does so, but he knows that something more important will be lost if he remains silent: the Rule of Law. For a father, as Atticus is, that is more important than the potential hostility his children may feel from fellow townspeople expressing resentment to them for his defence of a black man.

Whilst Scout does not, as a ten year old, understand this, she is an honest and truthful witness to the deeds and decency of her father.

It is all fiction, but fiction does set us examples to live up to. I have been told that Atticus Finch has been cited in some Victorian law schools as an example of the standard of ethics to which lawyers should aspire.

Today, we learn in the news that Nicola Gobbo, the Lawyer Formerly Known As X, got a first class honours in legal ethics at the University of Melbourne and even wanted to do a Masters degree on legal ethics.

What do we take away from this? That legal ethics is something that you can rout learn and recite parrot like in an exam, rather than live and feel and be moved about?

Everyone, thanks to Magna Carta, is entitled to Due Process of the Law under Anglophonic legal systems. This is one of the major things that makes Anglophonic societies more successful than other societies in Western Civilisation or anywhere else. People have rights, including to a fair trial and to independent representation.

That Nicola Gobbo, expert in legal ethics, was prepared to betray her oath to the court and her commitments to her clients and become a police informer is particularly heinous. It represents a conspiracy between herself and senior members of the Victoria Police to pervert the course of justice and undermine the Rule of Law in this state.

It does not matter that her clients were people generally regarded as heinous, such as Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel. Those people deserve a fair trial, and competent representation. That they were denied this through a conspiracy involving senior police officers and their own barrister means that the Rule of Law has been eroded. This needs to be further investigated, and addressed, and the people involved sanctioned.

The most serious crime is not whether people have been unfairly or unjustly convicted. The most serious crime is that the Rule of Law in the State of Victoria has been seriously compromised by those who are meant to protect it. They deserve to now face the full force of the Law, including gaol time, if it is so found to be deserved.

For someone like Nicola Gobbo, who has claimed to be on the side of the Law whilst having a long standing history of using it to be self serving from her earliest days of being a law graduate, I just wonder whether she was simply able to rout learn and tick off multiple choice quiz answers to pass legal ethics. It is just as well that Atticus Finch is a fictional creation – he seems too good to be true.

I think I was about 15 when I first started reading The Chronicles of Pern by Anne McCaffrey. Teenagers have a very limited budget, so I mostly borrowed the books from either the local public library or the school library. I only ever bought one of them, the second book, Dragon Quest, which I was unable to find in either library.

Dragon Flight, the first of the books, is a classic in fantasy, and got me pretty much hooked on the series. It is set in a fictional world where people live in mostly medieval style, protected from a sky borne threat called ‘thread’ by dragon riders. I enjoyed it because it is an excellent example of escapist fantasy literature, involving a totally fictional world with dragons, albeit swords without sorcery.

For the most part, the rest of the first trilogy and the companion trilogy about harpers are much like that. Enjoyable because they require a suspension of disbelief.

Where the books started to pall for me was when Anne McCaffrey started to introduce elements of science fiction. Of course, you cannot have a world with both humans and dragons without some sort of explanation, and her rational nature meant that she could not help herself, but had to introduce an explanation. We discover that Pern is a distant world colonised by humans, who have forgotten the technology that brought them there, or their original home Earth, and who genetically engineered the dragons from a local alien species.

And when the heroes of the first novel, the leaders of Benden Weyr, F’lar and Lessa, start driving the gradual discovery of this forgotten technology and history, the series descends from Fantasy into a hybrid science fiction.

I enjoy both Science Fiction and Fantasy. But I do not like it when both genres are combined. The only place where I believe that has successfully worked is in Star Wars, with the Force. In every other instance where an author has started a fantasy story, and then combined it with science fiction, it spoils it for me. You can either have sword and sorcery, or you can have space opera. You cannot and should not have both.

What prompted me to start writing these reflections was my finding a copy of All the Weyrs of Pern at the book exchange at the Highpoint Shopping Centre this afternoon, when I was changing buses on the way home (the book exchange is at the bus stop). This Pern novel is the eleventh, and involves the discovery of an artificial intelligence which has lain dormant for the 2000 years since Pern was colonised.

I sighed, shook my head, and put the book down rather than taking it home. I gave up on Pern when I read the colonisation origin novel Dragonsdawn, many years ago. I do not want my fond memories of reading Dragonflight further spoilt.

Anne McCaffrey is not the only author to spoil her perfectly good fantasy novel series with the introduction of reason and science. L.E. Modesitt Jr, a rather prolific writer from about 15-20 years ago, would sometimes write straight science fiction. But frequently, he would write Fantasy. His Recluce series is now at 22 novels, and I quite enjoyed the first five of those novels. I stopped at number six, Fall of Angels, when he introduced a science fiction element (one which did not seem particularly believable in any event) to explain the origins of many of the people in that fantasy world. I simply stopped reading the book partway through, and have never returned to that series.

Sadly, I did not realise until most of the way through one of the series by Mark Lawrence and one by Joe Abercrombie that their fantasy worlds were actually set in a post-apocalyptic future. That discovery, and the inclusion of such elements of rational explanation, diminished my enjoyment of their fantasies. (I also find use of a post-apocalyptic world as the vehicle for a fantasy story to be rather misanthropic, as if the author is hoping for humanity to get nearly wiped out.)

What is wrong with just suspending disbelief entirely and indulging in some fantasy, preferably sword and sorcery, without finding rational explanations for things? Imagine if Tolkien had introduced nuclear bombs and laser guns into Middle Earth? Ugh! Or, alternatively, if you had machine guns and jet fighters instead of swords and dragons in Game of Thrones (btw, I did not enjoy the prose style in Game of Thrones so I stopped reading the first book 100 pages in).

Perhaps I am just a hopeless romantic – I like the idea of seeing some mystery and magic in my reading, without the constant need for rational explanation. I wish more so-called fantasy authors would realise the necessity of this and not season their work with misplaced traces of reality.

For someone who has never bothered learning to drive (this is actually a very good thing for the safety of the world), I do have quite a thing for the aesthetics of muscle cars.

Indeed, if I were to win a very large amount on the lottery, I would buy the old Stan Cash furniture tin shed in Maidstone and turn it into Zanatta’s Museum of Bogan Cars: 1970s Valiants, Holden Monaros, Toranas and Kingswoods, Ford Falcons, and lots of Kingswood panel vans. Lots of panel vans. All painstaking restored and artfully painted in gaudy colours – lime green, bright orange, purple.

But, given I am more likely to get struck by lightning than to win the lottery, my dream of a bogan car museum will remain unfulfilled. Instead, I can just appreciate the cars I see around town.

Now that Holden have abandoned the Commodore in favour of more anaemic models, and Ford no longer offer the Falcon, most newish cars I see around the place are some sort of hybrid between a hatchback, an SUV, and a station wagon. They seem to have the side profile of Sonic the Hedgehog. Maybe they are very practical, but they are not very pleasing on the eye.

But what I have noticed is that there are quite a lot of Ford Mustangs out there on the road these days. A couple of years ago, they would not have been seen at all, but now, I see at least one per day, usually jet black or fire engine red (side note – I once was going to paint my toilet fire engine red – that would have been quite the cure for constipation!), or milky white (why oh why?). Mostly new models, although I have seen the occasional classic model from the heyday of the muscle car 50 years ago.

Why is this so? I suppose there is a microeconomic explanation. Part of it has to do with the demise of Holden Commodores and Ford Falcons, the type of car that most men will want to drive (my brother is a Holden man through and through, and has been reduced to getting a Calais now, after decades of Kingswoods and Commodores). With no more powerful Commodores and Falcons rolling out, the Mustang looks more and more like a mainstream choice, rather than a luxury self-indulgence.

The other part has to do with the affordability of other big ticket items. A new Mustang starts at $50,000 and can range as far up as $75,000. Median house prices currently are around $750,000 in Melbourne, about 10 times the average full time wage. That means that what once would have been a house deposit is now only half a house deposit. People are giving up on the idea of buying a home any time soon and deciding to enjoy themselves. High end restaurants, overseas holidays, and luxury cars (I see a lot more Mercedes, BMWs and Audis on the road these days too, and I drool when I see a Maserati or a Jaguar, even though I know that the people who drive these latter two cars tend to be utter tossers).

Hence the resurgence of the Mustang.

[Sadly not for me, the non-driver. And when they do introduce driverless cars, I will get myself an electric powered ute or SUV, and get it to drive me around rural wineries. That is me living the dream.]