Cranky Queenslander

Place your bets folks. VivaJet is set to launch in November, targeting the business traveller with a "non budget" offering that is sure to please. At least, the backers hope it will please more than OzJet’s offering in 2005 did.

I think it’s rather interesting that the expert editors of Wikipedia suggest that OzJet’s failure was in part due to launching a business class service right before Christmas (when business travel typically is at a low ebb), and VivaJet is set to launch….right before Christmas.

We’ll just have to wait and see what happens, but personally, I’d rather someone tried to find a better way to get me to the airport. It costs me more to take a tax to the airport than it does to fly to Sydney a lot of the time!

Check out this snippet from Mayor Paul Pisasale this week on the upcoming Ipswich Council budget;

…but we are fortunate that Ipswich is experiencing significant residential growth which will help keep rises in general rates at or near to inflation

So let me get this straight; The council gets windfall gains presumably from selling off land and a variety of taxes and fees associated with new developments, however it is going to spend so much more delivering the same services that all that surplus money is going to be gobbled up?

Is this for real? It’s time the Mayor came clean and explained exactly why rates need to go up so much. Unless the council is rolling out NEW services, then the existing rates should be enough to cover the bills this year, just as they did last year.

I think most councils are guilty of wasting our money; Gold Coast Council recently crowed that they had got their rate rise this year down to 4.2% from a projected 10%. That’s not to be applauded, it is to be expected, and honestly, they should have got it lower.

The problem in Ipswich is that the council is elected virtually unopposed. Until the rate payers of Ipswich wake up to themselves and stop voting for these high taxing councils, these rises will continue to be rolled out.

… and I can’t help but wonder why our education departments are spending millions of dollars providing email accounts to students who can get them for free themselves.

The NSW deal switches from a 30+ Million dollar solution to a ~10 Million dollar solution using Google’s G-Mail, but for what? Why do students need a @theschoolsaddress.com.au type of email, that presumably they will LOSE as soon as they leave school?

I know one local primary school in my area that does this too, and I bet if I asked the principal, I would get a whole bunch of spin about how they are incorporating technology into the curriculum and giving their students a head start and what not. Phooey! My niece, who attends this school, had a G-Mail account before she was started there!

I’m all for schools using technology, but really, why waste all this money? Why not just tell the parents to hook their kids up with G-Mail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail… whatever, and just tell the school what their email address is.

State education departments need to run mail servers for the teachers and administrators, and I would hope they don’t start outsourcing that to offshore operators. That being said, there are plenty of low cost mail options out there for that, and I just can’t see the value in providing the students email, especially when you consider that it increases the back end requirements about 20 times!

The Northern Territory’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald says the Federal intervention into remote Aboriginal communities should be abandoned and the legislation underpinning it should be repealed. [ABC Story]

Seriously. Tony needs to get out more. Tony needs to realise how nuts things are in many indigenous communities, and realise that if the rest of us are going to consider ourselves moral human beings, we have to try and do something to fix it.

Sure, the intervention hasn’t worked miracles. I doubt anything we try ever will. But there are two types of people in this world. Those who try, and those who do nothing.

I can tell you I’d rather be on the side of the tried and failed than the did nothing and whined about it brigade.

Tony clearly just feels miffed that the fed’s cut out some of his powers, and would prefer that more children were raped and conditions stayed terrible if it means he can have his powers back. Sheesh.

We need to continue to improve on the start that was the Howard Governments Intervention, and perhaps over the next 10-30 years, with constant review and improvement, we can make a difference in the lives of these people.

Or we can do nothing.

I was cruising the news the other day and came across a story regarding Foreign Minister Stephen Smith wanting us to spice up our international relations with India.

I thought it was interesting that he suggested that we had neglected India in preference to China, considering that his leader Kevin Rudd seems to be pushing for honorary Chinese citizenship. I wonder if he cleared his comments with Kevin first?

The article doesn’t really explain what Steve thinks we should be doing though. Apparently he realises that both countries love cricket, that we have a small but high quality film industry that has assisted bollywood and that we are letting them dig up some of our coal, but stops short of explaining exactly what we should be pursuing.

Did he forget that his own government banned uranium exports to India? Way to strengthen foreign relations Steve, suggest that they are too dangerous to sell uranium to!

Does anyone know what Smithy is on about?

Cool headline, but I am beginning to suspect this is nothing new. I was talking to a source the other day who told me that plans were approved and the deal was done for construction of a the southern hemisphere’s longest transport tunnel linking the airport with the western suburbs.

The story goes that everything is done, except the public announcement. So I headed home to do a little research before posting this awesome news;

Seems that our good friend Campbell Newman has been planning for a tunnel link between the airport and the North/South Bypass Tunnel for some time, and as early as April last year bidding was underway for the project.

So, perhaps my source was just ill informed, or in fact the deal has been done, and we are in the dark. The Brisbane City Council website has nothing up to date on the project, so the latter could well be true.

In any event, I support Campbell’s efforts to improve Brisbane infrastructure, and think the more traffic we can shove underground, the nicer the city of Brisbane will become. 

A lot has been written about the Rudd Governments tax hike on pre mix drinks that’s been dressed as an attack on binge drinking. Seeing as I am just a little drunk while writing for this blog tonight (yes, I write some of these articles ahead of time…who’d have thought?), it occurs to me to think more deeply about the alleged binge drinking problem.

My first thought was perhaps we need a blood alcohol limit for people just being in a public place. I can recall being particularly wasted as a 19 year old, and sitting on a public bench gathering strength for the final march to the taxi rank, when a policeman suggested to my compatriot that he get me home before I was locked up for the night.

I wasn’t being a nuisance that night (I had enough trouble walking to the taxi rank without trying to pick a fight), but there are plenty of drunk people in our cities that ARE a real nuisance, and perhaps the easy way to deal with it is to legislate a limit for the blood alcohol level you are allowed to attain and still be entitled to walk the streets. Comments?

My other point would be that the real binge drinking problem is teenagers, who are not legally supposed to be drinking anyway. In my experience, teenage girls are particularly fond of over indulging while their parents are off doing god knows what god knows where. Any readers who know teenagers well will know these stories.

I’m not sure how we would police measures to punish parents for allowing such nonsense to go on; Perhaps a rewards scheme for people to dob in alcohol fuelled teen parties so the cops can bust in record the details? If we can figure out how to catch the loser parents who let this go on, I reckon the first step should be to cut off all government benefits. Lets face it, should the average tax payer like myself be funding families who’s kids are off boozing themselves silly every weekend?

Like I said, catching them is the problem. And I have no solution, as I said at the stat of this post, I am a little drunk myself. But I am an adult, and that makes all the difference, doesn’t it?

I was just reading an interesting article about Kevin Rudd’s fantastic election promise to provide every school student in grades 9 to 12 their own computer. I actually thought the idea was to give families money to buy one personally, but apparently the deal now is to give the money to schools so they can install them there for the students to use.

Okay cool. But there appear to be a number of minor problems with this;

First of all, they are rolling this out over the next five years. Thats not the show stopper, but still, one would have thought the simple process of buying computers could be done more quickly.

Second, the process for choosing which schools get funding seems a little odd.  Schools that already are well funded and have a high number of computers are getting the lions share of funding. NSW schools are also on the front foot, getting 71% of the first round of funding, while having only around 33% of the population. How does that work?

Third, the talk from the government now is that the plan is to get schools to a 1 computer to 2 students ratio. Thats a long way short of a computer for every student. The whole idea has now become, in Julia Gillards words, "a long term vision".  Come on Julia, it wasn’t a long term vision 10 months ago!

In reality, no school is likely to need an 1:1 computer/student ratio. Depending on your point of view, they either need less, or a whole lote MORE; Either many students at any given point in time are studying text books and doing written work, or physical education, or art, or music, or anything else that doesn’t normally need a computer, and hence the ratio need not be that high; Or computers should be a part of virtually every curriculum area in which case every desk needs a computer, not every student.

The point is that this is another half baked Labor party stunt that seemed awesome on election night, but in reality, will do nothing for the education of your kids.

Now here is the years best example of Kevin Rudd’s "say one thing, do another" approach to leadership. After months of his party’s constant complaints that "Work Choices" might lead the odd worker to be a bit worse off than they were previously, Kevin comes out and tells us that under his new and improved industrial relations package, workers will be worse off.

Okay, so he said he refused to guarantee they wouldn’t be. By his own standards, that’s the same thing. Why do you think he refused? Because he knows full well that many workers will be worse off. We currently live in basically full employment. Anyone who wants a job can get one, and anyone worth anything can get a better one. So how is it that employers are perceived to have so much power? One reason: Because Kevin said so.

The truth is that Work Choices let employee’s negotiate time off to spend with their family, a higher rate of pay for better quality work, or any other benefit they thought would make their lives easier. But now, we are back to the old style, take what the government says I should give you. Guess what? That’s all you are going to get.

Why is it, for example, that childcare centres, who simply cannot get enough staff (ring one and ask, I guarantee they are looking for staff), refuse to pay any more than the award? It’s because they are not allowed to negotiate conditions with their staff, so they are forced to dole out the same deal to all the staff, some of whom deserve a lot more money, and some, believe me, deserve a lot less.

We’ll just add this to the list of broken or forgotten election promises we’re keeping here at Cranky Queenslander. Rest assured by the time the next election rolls around, it will be a long list!

The other day I decided to scroll through the articles on Paul Tully’s Division 2 blog. This is what I take to be Paul’s official local council blog, the place to spread news and information that enriches the lives of his local constituents.

But is that all he is enriching with this foray into the digital media? Check out this entry from the end of April. Here is the quote that made this a must blog about entry;

This new outlet will undoubtedly give the nearby McDonalds store a run for its money with what many people regard as a superior product.

Many people eh Paul? I think most people can see why my eyebrow is raised here, and I think it might be nice if Paul again comments here and lets us all know that he has never accepted any money from anyone connected to the store, and is not getting free burgers or any other kick backs.

But that aside, does anyone want their government representatives wasting their time promoting a multi national burger joint which sells terribly unhealthy food and makes our kids fat?

I didn’t think so.