Archive for category Corporations

Oh, now you have something to say!?

by Spock... on 2 July 2010
Categories: Corporations, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , ,

As I’m sure you have all heard, today Julia Gillard showed that she has a spine made out of gelatin:

The government has excluded all commodities from the tax apart from iron ore and coal, easing industry fears about the potential impact on base metals projects.

Under the revised deal announced this morning, onshore oil and gas projects including the booming coal seam gas sector in Queensland will be covered by the existing Petroleum Resource Rent tax, levied at 40 per cent.

The rate at which the tax applies has risen from the long-term bond rate – currently just over 5 per cent – to the bond rate plus 7 per cent. That makes the threshold about 12 per cent.

What has been cut to pay for the revenue shortfall this will create?

The $1.5 billion reduction in revenue under the new plan to $10.5 billion will mean the government must reform some of the initiatives that were contingent upon the tax, including the slashing of the company tax rate to 28 per cent.

The government has now said the company tax rate will be cut to 29 per cent from 2013-14, saving $600 milion, but will not be reduced further.

And industry is outraged:

Australian Industry Group CEO Heather Ridout, who was on the Henry tax review panel, says she is deeply disappointed that the proposed business tax cut went from a recommendation to lower the company tax rate to 25 per cent, then to 28 per cent in the original mining tax proposal, and now is at just 29 per cent.

And smaller mining companies suddenly have something to say:

Despite the majors claiming a win with the new resources tax, the mid-tier miners and juniors have said the deal was designed by the big players, with the smaller miners “stuck on the sidelines”.

Emerging Pilbara miner BC Iron’s managing director Mike Young said the government had been “done over” by the major miners.

“The big foreign-owned miners, the three big bad guys that Tony Abbott sided with, have done the government over,” he said.

“Real Australian companies, like BC Iron and Atlas Iron, sit on the sidelines and don’t get consulted.

In fact, they are all coming out of the woodwork:

Meanwhile, West Australian company Atlas Iron says small miners have been sidelined in the negotiations on the tax so far.

“I would be concerned if there was an announcement that took place before there was proper consultation and a consensus because after all, that’s where we thought we were heading with Julia Gillard,” managing director David Flanagan told ABC’s Lateline Business.

“But maybe not and maybe we’ve got a lot more reason to be concerned about the future of Australia.”

He says big miners cannot speak on behalf of smaller companies.

As far as I’m concerned they should all STFU about it right now. Where the fuck were they two weeks ago when the government was being crucified over the issue (and a Prime Minister being disposed)?

Completely silent, thats what. Take this from the Australian Industry Group’s media release page:

Screen shot 2010-07-02 at 9.13.25 PMAnd it goes right back until the 8th of June and no mention of the RSPT. No mention in favour of the company tax cut, just complete silence until today. Just one media release, bitching about the reduction in the cut of company tax.
Get fucked

They have no right to whinge now, so they should all just shut the fuck up. This is what you get when you don’t speak out in favour of a policy that was getting steamrolled. It gets steamrolled.

ELSEWHERE: Jeremy over at Anonymous Lefty tackles the issue beautifully in his post. I wish I had a Crikey subscription so I could read Bernard Keane’s contribution, but I’m sure you subscribers will tell me how awesome it was. And Dave from Albury reminds the ALP who their friends are.

UPDATE: From today’s news, more unhappy industry groups who were silent while the policy was being attacked. For all of you I feel precisely zero sympathy, you made you’re own bed on this one.

Retailers were also unhappy. ”Due to tax concessions to the mining sector, the Gillard government has penalised all companies and small businesses that were due to benefit from the promised company tax cut,” said the Australian Retailers Association director, Russell Zimmerman.

Oh, and some super funds decide to finally speak up in favour in the policy.

Australia’s big super funds expressed relief that mandatory superannuation increases would go ahead despite the concessions to the miners.

4 Comments

At the Press Club with Clive Palmer

by Ross Sharp on 4 June 2010
Categories: Corporations, Foreign matter, Politics | Tags: , , ,

Speaking to The Press Club recently about Kevin Rudd’s proposed S!U!P!E!R! M!I!N!I!N!G! T!A!X!, mining magnate and Professor, Dr. Clive Palmer had this to say …

Do you honestly believe that Jacques Cousteau spent all those decades sailing around the oceans of the world only to come home and be told he couldn’t sit down after a hard day’s work to a plate of fish fingers and a prawn cocktail or three because Wayne Swan had killed all the fish with this super resource tax?

That’s what Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan are going to do! They’re going to kill all the fish with this tax, and the mums and dads of Australia won’t be able to give their kiddies a Nemo in a bag for Christmas because there won’t be any bloody Nemo’s left!

You only to have read “Mein Kampff” to realise that. Right there, there’s Kevin Rudd’s name, right next to The Mad Hatter and Mao Tse-Tung and that Gatsby bloke, the Robert Redford fella. Google it on Facebook, and you’ll find all those emails, right there, they’ll be staring you straight in the page of your face.

This government wants to take all our rocks and give them to Hugo Chavez! You know what he’s gonna do with them? He’s gonna throw ‘em at Tasmania! He’s gonna bomb the Salamanca Markets with the rocks we owned, the ones Kevin Rudd gave away, just because they make pies with scallops down there but all the scallops are dead, so now they’re making them with snails instead!

Why should ordinary, everyday Australians be forced to eat snails with their pie?!

A miner’s not a bird.

If a miner was a bird he’d be back up a tree chewing on a worm in Perth. Or a snail.

We don’t eat seeds.

We’re all about rocks, we make televisions out of them. And flying duck ornaments.

If Rudd and Swan get this tax over the line, your grandmother can wave goodbye to her ducks!

And we’ll just take our business elsewhere.

To Saturn.

There are these huge rings there, full of rocks, full of flying rocks, so we’ll just go there for our ducks.

We’ll take all the discarded fishnets that are useless now because they killed all the fish and we’ll catch rocks with them instead, we’ll throw them out of the spaceboat and make our ducks on Saturn.

Yes.

7 Comments

Ask a stupid question …

by Ross Sharp on 22 April 2010
Categories: A funny thing happened on the way to ..., Corporations | Tags: ,

At a job interview …

Q: If we were to offer you the job, where would you like to see yourself in 10 years time?

A: In 10 years time, I’ll be 61 years old, so I’d like to see myself as retired.

Stupid job interview questions.

Have at it.

14 Comments

iFad? No, iVerydisappointed

by Bob Dumpling on 1 February 2010
Categories: Corporations, Media, Music, Technology | Tags: , , , ,

Well the iPad has arrived but can you hear that noise? It’s the sound of Apple losing their shit after reading Alan Kohler in Business Spectator. Yep, worse than David Pogue ranting about AT&T or another Hitler/Downfall video bemusing on the lack of camera & multi-tasking… the worst has happened. Alan Kohler is disappointed in the iPad.

It seems Kohler already bought a Tablet (like an HP or something, whatever “the iPad looks like just another tablet computer”) and hated it… and having filled his home with iMacs and Macbooks, he really hoped for something extra special. But the iPad, from what he has seen, fails to live up to his high-technicolour dreams.

Worse still, Kohler is pretty sure that the iPad is not going to save newspapers. I know that’s what we all hoped for, in fact, for as long as I can remember Steve Jobs has always said that more than anything else, he wanted to ensure the ongoing stability and prosperity of global media enterprises.

So the ‘Tablet’ (which he insists on continuing to call it post-keynote) must indeed be a bitter pill for Alan Kohler to swallow. But if this article with it’s infantile, “I hate the way the world is heading, where’s my mummy?” tone makes you want to stab something… lock up your kitchen ware because that other giant of Australian business journalism, Michael Pascoe wrote an absolute doosey last week.

Pascoe thinks Apple is “an IT gadget company” with the temerity to (I know, this is incredible) over charge innocent Aussie consumers.

As far as reality denial goes, this is an extra special article. I’m sure you have heard of Melody Gardot? I hadn’t but I live in the suburban equivalent of an iron lung so to me any cultural reference point is like mainlining speed. Anyway, Ms Gardot has a massive is on the cusp of a massive singing career which is being totally hampered by Apple iTunes Australia’s barbaric pricing structure. I know, it’s shocking. Read it and embrace the rage.

But seriously, this would be valid were it not for the teensy-wincey fact that Australian’s are used to being rogered by music publishers, book publishers and all sorts of other protected entities. The other fact that our elder statesmen of Australian journalism can dabble a bit in the world of tech-journo and appear so out of touch, makes me disappointed that the death of media isn’t all that deadly.

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Workers of the world, open your wallets …

by David F on 19 November 2009
Categories: Corporations, Politics, Society | Tags: , ,

This article caught my eye yesterday:

Australians work more than two billion hours of unpaid overtime a year, a $72 billion gift to their employers, a new study by an independent think tank shows.

The Australian Institute research shows a typical full-time employee is working 70 minutes of unpaid overtime a day, which equates to 33 eight-hour days per year, or six-and-a-half standard working weeks.

Across the workforce, the 2.14 billion hours of unpaid overtime represented six per cent free labour for the economy depends.

“While Australians might have a reputation for taking ’sickies’ and ’smokos’, the evidence suggests otherwise,” the institute’s executive director Richard Denniss said when releasing the research on Wednesday.

During the past decade Australia had simply accepted the “dubious honour” of working the longest hours in the western world, when other developed countries had sought to reduce working hours.

“The amount of unpaid overtime worked in Australia is the equivalent of 1.16 million full-time jobs,” Dr Denniss said.

“In an economy where unemployment is rising, overwork is an obvious area for government to address.”

The survey found 45 per cent of workers, and more than half of all full-time employees, work more hours than they are paid for on a typical workday.

The online survey of 1,000 respondents, commissioned by the institute, found that 44 per cent of people who work unpaid overtime said it is “compulsory” or “expected”.

Slightly fewer (43 per cent) said overtime was “not expected” but also “not discouraged”.

Australians also work three times more hours or unpaid overtime than they volunteer to community organisations.

In response to its findings, the institute has nominated November 25 as national Go Home On Time Day.

This research is merely confirming what plenty of us know already. In short, a majority of Australian workers are doing charity work for their bosses by compulsion, or, at the very least,  without explicitly agreeing. Most workers are subject to theft, in other words.

Dr Denniss, the executive director of the crowd who published this research, suggests that the problem is one for government to address. He neglects to mention that government has been addressing the issue of overwork for years — addressing it by entrenching it in the labour market and economy at large. This is still the case, in spite of the Federal ALP’s new and ‘radical’ IR laws. For all the histrionic talk of union thuggery, the unions of Australia are barely able to cope with serious OHS matters, much less run a campaign against overwork.

Rather than have some Mickey Mouse ‘Go Home on Time Day’, workers should be going home on time every day, unless there’s a damned good reason. Miserliness of one’s employer is not such a reason.  The GFC was always likely to encourage employers to intensify their exploitation of staff. And rather than relying upon the benevolence of employers in order to finish work on time, workers should consider staging a ‘Tell the Boss to Fuck Off’ day.

7 Comments

Come fly the crowded skies

by David Bonnici on 18 November 2009
Categories: Corporations, Technology | Tags: , , , , ,

When Boeing first introduced its 747 in the late 1960s, it presented a future of luxury flying. A spiral staircase led to a swanky lounge area that looked like a super cool bachelor’s lair, where you spent long trans-continental flights chatting up fellow jetsetters while swirling ice in martinis.

Assume the brace position

Assume the brace position

Of course three decades later we know the reality is a little different. For most of us the spiral staircase, which leads to business class, is merely a cause for envy as are herded into cattle class areas resembling a student squat with seats barely more comfortable than stolen milk crates. And the closest we ever come to bar chat at 38,000 ft is going to galley to beg for a Bundy and Coke from uncaring Qantas stewards who prefer we sleep all the way from Hong Kong to London.

So it was with much scepticism that I viewed similar presentations from Airbus Industries about its giant A-380, which showed an airborne dream world of bars, gyms, massage rooms, cinemas and private bedrooms that will allow you to join the mile high club even of you’re not a contortionist with a penchant for fucking in filthy toilets.

First thing I thought was, nah, they’ll just shove more seats in the gargantuan bus of the skies. Sadly I was right. French airline Air Austral will be stuffing 840 seats in its all-economy superjumbos and it won’t be the only airline to do so.

While many see this as an efficient, environmentally friendly way to transport people around the world, I see nothing but rough skies ahead.

Think all the shit that comes with long-haul flying and double it. Twice as many screaming kids, twice as many fucktards who will storm the gate door when the flight is called forgetting the marvels of ticketing means there will be no shit fight for the best seats and that the plane ain’t going nowhere without them.

There will be twice as many fools who reckon 21ABCD actually says 34EFGH and will actually think you’re being unreasonable when you ask if they can get out of your seat.

There will be twice as many greedy people filling overhead lockers with Krispy Kreme donuts meaning you’ll have to walk half a kilometre to find a place for your bag, twice as many spivs in suits arguing with cabin crew about using their mobile phones and laptops on take off, and twice the chance of suffering concussion from a backpack strapped to the back of an idiot with poor spatial judgement (true story, once on a Virgin Blue flight a woman did that to me and when I yelled “Ouch, watch it would you?” it turned out to be the lovely Sigrid Thornton – the bitch).

The chances of sitting next to a fat bastard who has over-active sweat glands and no sense of personal space will double, as will the likelihood of being subjected to advice about the real estate market, the-next-big-thing racehorses and where to find the best prostitutes in Macau.

Then when you get to the other end you’ll have landed with three other 840 seat A-380s meaning you’ll have to queue up behind the entire population of Tenterfield to clear immigration and customs.

My advice is when you next book your next flight choose an airline that flies 350-seat A-330s or 777s.

6 Comments

The race to stupidity

by Bob Dumpling on 3 November 2009
Categories: Corporations, Media, Society, Sport | Tags: , ,

I’ve waged a fairly dogged war against horse racing (NSFWS: not safe for weak stomachs) over the years. I hate it and I’m incapable of calling it a ‘sport’. It’s a corrupt, antiquated, gimmick which  reaches a crescendo every year with the Spring Carnival and of course, Tuesday’s Race 7 at Flemington. As you can imagine, this is a difficult time of year for me.

So this year I won’t speak about my disappointment that PETA doesn’t protest the Spring Racing Carnival; that fixed horse racing continues unchecked or that Your ABC is totally flogging the race for all it’s worth.

Instead, I’m going to make an observation about what happens on the other side of the track. And that is, the giddy feeling our nation gets all worked up about on race day.

Having watched people get dressed up, wearing ill-fitting suits and unspeakable hats. Having observed people passed out or projectile vomiting in the mid-afternoon sun. Having heard on countless occasions people bemoan their sudden loss of dough, I’ve realized that the Melbourne Cup experience is nothing but a school formal for grownups.

It first becomes obvious on the Tuesday morning. The crowds self-consciously adjusting their clothing, like an astronaut trying on their space suit for the first time.  You look like a clown and no amount of floral appendage or hair product is going to change that.

Then there’s the charity element. The over the top production with soulless event coordinators and PR flacks, spruiking their token charity…doing something for a ‘good cause’ when the reality is, we’ll direct millions of dollars to the TAB.

And worst of all is the elitism of this whole façade. The ‘sport of kings’ includes a bird cage, the Emirates tent and the Flemington car park. This is not dissimilar to the forgettable school formals of our youth, the cool kids in one section and the riff-raff elsewhere.

So when you head off to your Melbourne Cup social function with some B-grade celebrity host or spend money you don’t have on something fruitless and unsatisfying; just reflect for a moment on the fact that the Melbourne Cup is a regression. That it is neither remarkable nor rewarding. It’s time Australia grew up and finally left school. And if you need another reason to undestand why the race at 3pm should be unwatchable, check out the short informative video on the site here.

And if that’s still not enough, we all agree that as a nation we have to prevent this.

10 Comments

This biscuit will gas your baby

by Ross Sharp on 27 October 2009
Categories: Corporations | Tags: , , ,

On occasions all too rare in Australia, on occasions all too infrequent (which means “all too rare”), one man (or a woman, if you insist) will rise above the seething mass of anonymous humanity, will rise above the tide of the ordinary and the average and, with a few wise and well-chosen words, strike at the very root of complacency that lies within the hearts and souls of us all to awaken the otherwise dull minions of humankind to the presence of darkest evil lurking in our midst.

Today, such a man is Sam Watson, deputy director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland.

Mr. Watson implores us all to realise …

THIS BISCUIT WILL GAS YOUR BABY.

This biscuit will rape your mother, sodomise your wife, gouge the eyes from the nodding head of your old, gray papa and inject the veins of your first born with a mixture of dishwashing liquid and food dye.

This is one evil motherfucking biscuit.

It will skin your dog, flay your cat, and throw your goldfish into the compost heap.

This is the biscuit that other biscuits fear to share a tin with.

It will blow up bridges, drain harbours, bring down tall buildings and kill off the stock exchange with one bite.

This is the Bernie Madoff of biscuit bastardry.

This biscuit will invade Poland.

At the peak of its deranged megalomania, this biscuit will imagine it’s a full size Weston’s Wagon Wheel and roll into Russia.

Who will stop this biscuit?

Who will stand with Mr. Watson and, in trenches dug deep, fight alongside this brave and outspoken warrior for justice in his fearless quest to bring about an end to the evils of Biscuitism once and for all?

…

…

We did think of asking the ANZACS, but they crumbled. As usual.

Fucking losers.

25 Comments

You’ll Love Coles Godwin’s

by Molesworth on 27 October 2009
Categories: Corporations | Tags: , , , ,

Is it possible to call Godwin’s on biscuits?

The left-wing MSM is ablaze with the news of the apparent racial conotations of the  “You’ll Love Coles Creole Biscuits”. For those confused, like your beloved Internet mole, some university guy was around to clear everything up:

“The word Creole comes from a period when people’s humanity was measured by the amount of white blood they had in their bloodstream. This is the same kind of thought that underpinned horrific regimes like the Nazis,” Mr Watson said.

Of course. The same kind of thought that lead to “horrific regimes” also concocted a form of biscuit, beloved by the elderly. Is there anything Hitler isn’t capable of? It’s a wonder Mr. Watson hasn’t shone his investigative torch on exactly where the precious metal in “You’ll Love Coles Gold Bullion” comes from.

Remember – everytime your children take a bite of these biscuits, they’re supporting Nazism! Coles have been raising a generation of little Hitlers behind your back! Is it merely a coincidence that this has arisen only a week after the BNP’s Nick Griffin appeared on the BBC?

And while we’re at it, has Mr. Watson considered the feelings of the Allen’s Retro Party Mix mascot?

Retro Party Mix

This fellow is a member of the same brutal regime that lead to the proliferation of disco music – a far worse crime.

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