Category Archives: Uncategorized

Not In My Backyard – The Australian Dream Is Fast Becoming A Nightmare

20 years ago, when I moved into my home in Avondale Heights, I was surrounded by other homes on house blocks approximately 535sqm in size. My first week, I planted several citrus trees in my backyard, and a gum tree sapling 3m from the back fence. The orange trees are all about to fruit again, …

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Are Disruptive Innovative FinTechs Today’s Equivalent of Video Rental Libraries?

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

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Treasury Wine and the many apparently defunct brands

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 …

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Personal Finance and The Micawber Principle

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 …

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Seventeen Faceless People: My Thoughts on the Aston By-Election

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 …

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Another reason to hate St Kevin’s

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 …

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The Liberals have a ‘Woman’ Problem: Her Name is Moira

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 …

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