Let's go down to the shore in boats

Twitter was ablaze with #yachtbanter today when for the second year in a row CEOs were stupid enough to (a) participate in KPMG's boat race and (b) to go on the record at said event about what troubles them in 2018.

To get us in the picture the AFR happily reported:

It was a postcard perfect day at the Sorrento Yacht Club for the 20th Annual Couta Boat Classic in Victoria. A morning shower briefly threatened festivities for Australia's captains of industry but swiftly disappeared like so many bottles of Bouchard Aine and Fils Rose at the race's conclusion.  

Not content with sharing with all of Australia this picture of largess hosted by one of the 'big four accounting firms' (yes one of those making all the money from the outsourcing of Government policy work) the CEO's titilated us with details of their concerns for 2018. The AFR told us:

Australia's top business leaders have nominated the destructive impact of rising costs on stretched household budgets as one of their key concerns for this year. 

Chairmen and chief executives have singled out spiralling energy costs for consumers and business and the impact it threatens to create for the economy as a "must-watch" issue.

One captain of industry decided he should do some serious sucking up to the Prime Minister by blaming it all on State Governments (at least I assume that is the reason for his statement, because as the ACCC price inquiry has shown it has nothing to do with state policies).

Of course, concern for stretched households can only go so far. We were also told:

Rising costs in the form of looming wages growth and the numbers of full-time employees were also front of mind for the banking, hospitality and entertainment sectors.

And there you have it - the sheer idiocy of CEOs informed by a leading accounting firm who can't figure out that the households with 'stretched budgets' are the same things as the workers for whom there might at last be 'wages growth.'

Yes it has been fair enough to pizzle these execs for pontificating from their pontoons. But we miss the real detail - they are all fundamentally idiots who shouldn't be trusted with a couple of bucks to buy an ice cream let alone running major corporations.

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Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans JWL

Never accuse Tony Abbott of being quick on the uptake

So The Oz reports this morning that Tony Abbott has 'slammed the government’s in-­principle support for including international carbon credits in Australia’s energy policy.'

We are told that Minister Frydenberg announced the new stance when 'releasing the final report of his 2017 review of climate change policies on ­December 19.'

The same story tells us 'In recent days, the Prime ­Minister has hailed his government’s national energy guarantee as a “real breakthrough” and key achievement in 2017' and that the government won support for the guarantee in the Coalition partyroom.

It all gets very confusing because he advice from the Energy Security Board that constituted what was agreed by the partyroom clearly said 'Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs) and international units could be permitted to meet a proportion of the retailer’s guarantee.'  The conditional 'could' here refers to the hypothetical state of the guarantee being implemented, not something subject to another decision.

The biggest issue of course is that the prospect of trading in carbon credits flows two ways. The way we are heading it is more likely that Australian businesses would be sellers of carbon credits, not buyers.

But never allow logic or economics to get in the road of Our Tone's ability to try to turn something into a slogan. The Oz quotes him saying 'I don’t support carbon trading, which is a carbon tax under a different name.' 

Redfern - how bad can the NSW government get?

The single word 'Redfern' has recently been most evocative of the song in Keating the Musical (here at 14:44) which itself derives from PJK's great speech in which he observed:
 It might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of land we had lived on for fifty thousand years - and then imagined ourselves told that it had never been ours.

But today just over 25 years later 'Redfern' is now evocative of the absolute mess that the Liberal Government (in the thrall of every developer led proposal and desire to sell its own assets) is making of Sydney.

Redfern is known to most Sydney-siders as 'that stop before Central' as most train lines pass through it. Otherwise it was renowned as a working class suburb that housed the home ground of South Sydney.

At its Southern end on both sides of the tracks lies the Everleigh Railway yards the Eastern portion of which was re-purposed as the Australian Technology Park in 1995.

In 2015 the NSW Government's own property development arm UrbanGrowth NSW sold the site to the Commonwealth Bank for $263 million.  After years of decentralising its workforce to Parramatta, Sydney Olympic Park and Lidcombe the bank had had enough of waiting for the promised transport infrastructure.

Over more recent decades as the University of Sydney has expanded into Darlington, Redfern station has become the favoured transport hub for many students. During term an almost continuous swarm of students four abreast stretches from the station in to the campus.

But the NSW Government like all its predecessors has meanwhile done nothing to increase the capacity of the train network. Current transport plans dominated by light rail and the metro whittle away at the network but still it is the trains that carry the heavy load.

The original plan for a Chatswood-Parramatta train line was to alleviate some of the train volume on the main Western line. But that plan was long ago abandoned as NSW Treasury viewed the new line as nothing more than an opportunity to rip apart the engineering culture and industrial relations nightmare of our trains.

As part of the latest attempt to squeeze more capacity out of the infrastructure, the latest timetable has some interurban trains bypassing Redfern.

Sydney University Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence said the decision for trains on the line to bypass Redfern in favour of Central Station had "added greatly to the university's already significant public transport pressures."

But the latest people to discover the problems of Redfern Station are Mirvac who is developing the ATP site for the Commonwealth Bank. With 10,000 bank employees expected to use Redfern or transport more focus is turning on Redfern.

A spokeswoman for the bank, meanwhile, said it had been "working with Mirvac and relevant government agencies to explore how accessibility to the site, and known issues with Redfern Station, can be improved for our people and the community prior to our move". 

 A Mirvac spokeswoman said: "Mirvac is aware of accessibility issues at Redfern Station and is in constant dialogue with a number of parties, including the state government and its agencies, on how to improve the access at the station."

It is a fascinating tale. UrbanGrowth NSW has enticed the bank out of Western Sydney. The bank is moving because the promised transport in Western Sydney wasn't delivered. Even before the development at ATP is complete, the pressure of bringing more and more people to the CBD and surrounds means service to Redfern has been reduced! Now the bank and its developer realise Redfern station can't cope with the extra passengers they hope will be delivered on non-existant trains.

You couldn't make this stuff up!

REDFERN!