Shareholder returns

Company returns to shareholders are not enough.  For example, say a company has a half a billion shares on issue: for every $5 million it spends on increasing remuneration, that's one cent removed from the dividend to shareholders.  Currently we have boards and executives enjoying huge remuneration increases that massively outstrip shareholders' returns.  It has to stop.  You can make it stop.  You have a superannuation fund: it almost certainly owns shares in large companies.  Write to your super fund and demand that they vote against these huge increases.  Here's the letter I wrote to mine - feel free to cut and paste so you can send it to yours.  It will probably be far more effective and efficient than camping in the city square with some smelly hippies!!

Complaints Officer

HESTA Super Fund

PO Box 600

Carlton South, Vic 3053

Dear Sir/Madam,

I write to you upon receipt of my annual report.  Thanks you for actually making money this year.  You managed to make about 10% which is pretty good.  However when I look at the segmented earnings I see that the return on share investments was not as good.

It is for this reason that I must demand that you vote against company remuneration reports for any companies I have an interest in who propose to increase directors and/or executive remuneration beyond any increase in shareholder returns from profits.

It is inexcusable for these already well paid people to continue to expect that shareholders stand idly by whilst company profits are used solely to line their pockets.  Super Fund managers must start to take action to protect the long term interests of members.  Shareholders should not be expected to have capital gains be their only avenue to profit from share investing.  This seems to have become commonplace over the past decade and it must cease.

Given recent articles in daily newspapers and other media, I believe that I should expect to see some board spills over the next 12 months as fund managers exercise their fiduciary duty to their members and vote against wage rises and excessive remuneration packages at company AGMs.

Please do not disregard this notice.

Sincerely,

Graham Bushnell

Bushnell is back! Some short comments on current topics.

Occupy Anywhere Protests
Congratulations 'organisers': Those who are members of rent-a-crowd anonymous and 'I've got an irrelevant axe to grind' international now have somewhere to go.  They are currently bottling up city streets all over the world chanting about being poor or gay or short or fat or not rich enough or controlled by the man.  BEST IDEA EVER - we'll just have a giant protest with no purpose or proposed outcomes!

Apparently it started as a protest against those fat cat bankers.  Have to say I can agree with that.  Squandering my savings, stealing my investment returns as bloated wages and generally not adding anything tangible to the progress of society.  But Western countries re still allegedly "free", so they have a right to do that stuff if there's a market for it.  I won't be asking for more government control (of anything).  I will be voting against remuneration reports and directors at annual meetings and I will be writing to my super fund to request they do the same for my stolen money.  No one can add their bullshit agenda to that kind of protest.


Industrial Relations in Australia
Again congratulations!  This time to the lefties who voted in this terrible minority government.  Strikes are back in fashion.  As are go-slows on construction sites and closed shop workplaces.  Union power is growing again and holding back the economy - right when it can't afford to be held back in most sectors.  Union membership is still in decline.  More power to another minority!

Note to workers: Your union doesn't look after you - it looks after itself.  By that I mean its political power base and leadership.  Why else did they all merge in the 80s and 90s?  Easier for the ACTU and ALP to control.


Mining Tax
Pray that this is not passed by parliament in it's current form.  It is diabolical.  The original proposal as per the Henry Taxation Review is the correct structure for this tax.  It is fair and even.

The mining tax is an important policy that must be passed as it will slow down the investment in mining which is crowding out the rest of the nation's economy.  Don't think that these projects won't ever happen because of a tax - that is utter crap.  They just won't all happen at once.  Since you can only dig up the country once, it's important that we don't sell it all in the next 40 years.  It's also really important for the owners of the holes (taxpayers) and not just those doing the digging to get the best returns possible.  This tax will also provide a revenue stream for all that infrastructure and middle class welfare taxpayers keep asking for.

Like a child, I went on a tram ride

So the other day I was in the city running some errands including returning a novel that was missing 50 pages (weird!).  I was kind of bored after achieving my weak ass goals, but not ready to return home yet.  For some reason unbeknownst to me, I decided that I would take a tram ride from the city all the way to the end of the route and back again.  Choosing route 59 to Airport West seemed like a good way to check out parts of the city I have never seen.  Here's how it unfolded.

Once I boarded the tram at Elizabeth and Collins Streets, I was surprised at how full it was at about 3pm.  Also I noticed that from the half of the tram I could see, I was a about a 3:1 chance to win a game of spot the round eye.  Now I'm just making an observation, not insinuating anything here.  This was not a persistent feature of the passenger mix across the whole journey.  Other passenger types I got to enjoy was the girl who talks the entire tram ride to her non-replying boyfriend (she had a large coffee in hand), schoolboys (they reek like the dog pound) and the smart arse schoolboy who has to try and piss the driver off by pressing the door buzzer as many times as possible at each stop to the point where the doors freeze.  No crazies or drunks.  First time for everything on a full tram!

It was nice to ride past Victoria Market and realise that not very far out of the CBD, most of the buildings were only two or three stories tall.  Looks like a good area to maybe live in as the tram heads along Flemington Road toward the hospital precinct.  Nice old houses, wide streets.  Probably costs a mint.  Further out I got to see what Essendon, Niddrie and Moonee Ponds look like.  Finally they stopped being fantastical places that exist only in conversations.  Essendon and Moonee Ponds looked like fairly nice places.  Niddrie looks like a bucket of shit - maybe it will be the next Brunswick in the property game?  Oh and what you see of Airport West also looks like a bucket of shit.  I can't even recommend it as a parking destination.

My favourite part of the day was on the way back into town when five ticket inspectors got on board.  Why five?  Are they expecting to have some dance crew step to them like in the movies?  At this point there were more Yarra Trams employees on board than passengers.  Anyway, once I pulled my earphones out and realised the guy wanted to see a ticket, I opened my wallet and started to pull out my myki.  Inspector man didn't even wait to see the whole card before saying, "that's fine" and wandering off.  No way to check that it wasn't validated.  Who pays for trams, honestly?  So the lesson of the day was that five gestapo can't even check if you've voluntarily activated your myki on a tram.  The combination of myki and ticket inspectors seems to be an absolute winner for freeriders like me.  It's disturbing that $1.3billion buys such a retarded system. 

Don't ever feel guilty about not paying for tram rides!  It's not your fault it's so easy.

Personally I think Yarra Trams accruing large losses will be the only way to remedy the system.

Social Engineering or Just Stupid?

Please read this article from today's Herald Sun:

Men banned as Muslim women win council backing Paul Tatnell

MAN bans are spreading as two more council functions are declared off-limits because it is "not appropriate" for men to mix with Muslim women.

And in a surprise twist, VCAT backed the latest bans, declaring there was no discrimination and councils no longer needed to apply for exemptions.

The Darebin City Council ban will be in force for a music concert to be held in December, while another female-only event to mark the end of Ramadan was cancelled last week. The council sought the bans because it was "culturally inappropriate for young women to participate in recreational activity with males present".

But Ratepayers Victoria president Jack Davis said the bans were "another case of segregation".

"I think it is totally wrong. I think it's ridiculous and I do think it is discrimination, and it goes against what the average ratepayer wants," Mr Davis said. "We are seeing more and more of this kind of stuff."

Moreland council recently banned men from a dance event while Monash council put up curtains at a public pool so Muslim women could have privacy during a female-only exercise classes.

Darebin Mayor Diana Asmar said: "The December event is a 10-week workshop series that teaches young women DJ-ing skills. The program culminates in a social event that the young women plan and run themselves." "Darebin's approach is to always identify barriers to community participation and address them," she said.  Darebin council, with the support of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, originally asked VCAT for an exemption under the Equal Opportunities act so it could have women-only events.  VCAT ruled the events would not discriminate against anybody and special exemption was not needed.

An Equal Opportunity spokeswoman said the decision meant "organisations do not have to go through a formal VCAT hearing to put in place practices to assist groups to achieve substantive equality".

A spokesman for the Islamic Council of Victoria, Nazeem Hussain, said the Darebin decision was not "controversial or surprising in the slightest".

I want to take this article and turn it on it's head.  I have no problem with any group of women having a women only party for any reason - so long as when men do the same they aren't pilloried by the feminist mafia.  Not knowing much about Muslim culture I'm not sure about what is and is not considered appropriate behaviour, but planning a social event in Australia that leaves out males does seem a tad odd.  The pool with curtains seems to be a reasonable idea as it is only necessary during the affected class.  All that culture stuff aside - the REAL question here is why is a local council organising this sort of thing?  It is an absolute waste of taxpayers' money.

Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, governments do not need to and should not organise and pay for either social events or barely useful short courses.  Governments should be providing the infrastructure for community clubs to run their own functions.  By this I mean that councils should maintain ovals for sporting clubs and provide club rooms or libraries with meeting rooms for chess or book clubs to use.  A local council does not then need to add education and socialisation to its agenda.  They really should operate under the "if you build it they will come" principle.  Either that or stop bleeding the ratepayers.

If a community can't figure out how to organise its own social events then it is probably a doomed community anyway.  Best to let it whither on the vine.  No need for some government to try to prop it up.

Women who have fought for equality and opened up clubs such as the VRC and MCC to female memberships should also be concerned.  Local councils are undermining their efforts and will gradually bring back segregation if not checked early and firmly.

Lastly a side note to the whole thing.  If Muslim women aren't supposed to attend functions with men, one has to ask whether a 10 week disk jockeying course is really appropriate behaviour also?  Last time I checked there was Fernwood Gyms, the Lycaeum Club and perhaps one other women's only club around town.  Not too many DJ gigs going at any of those!

Fast and Furious 5

OK another movie review for you folks.

If you haven't seen Fast and Furious 5, you should.  It is, by a good margin, the best of the Fast and Furious series.  Don't be put off by the fact that Paul Walker couldn't act dead if you shot him in the face or that Vin Diesel is only slightly more life-like than your average department store mannequin.

This movie is a great merger of the action sub-genres of heist and chase.  Dwanye 'The Rock' Johnson is the super cop chasing our favourite fugitive protagonists who in turn have decided to go head to head with Rio De Janeiro's barrio kingpin.

I can assure you that there is precious little time wasted on character development in this movie.  It has as many characters as Ocean's 11, but few have much to say.  The line, "I had a life before I knew you." is used both for comedic purposes and to cover the lack of depth for most of the characters.  This movie is all about cars and stunts with the predictable cheesy and corny lines to accompany crashes and races.

Whilst I had offered nothing more than back-handed compliments to this movie, it is very entertaining.  The director, Justin Lin, keeps it moving at a good pace, whilst the script and locations allows for some great car and foot chase scenes.  It is a simple story well done. The combination of stunts and CGI is good as it keeps a degree of realism to the movie.

Next time you want a night off and some brain candy, give this movie a look - unless you don't like car chases!