Did you miss me? I’m back from the partial circumnavigation attempt this week on a Bavaria 31.

Actually, the waters of Pittwater and Broken Bay are just an enlarged boating lake populated by adult versions of the pedalo. In fact, the charter company specifically banned us from taking the yacht out to sea across an imaginary line drawn from the heads at Palm Beach to Lion Island. Not that they’d ever have known if we did as the boat didn’t have that newly-invented device that hit the market this year, an erm, GPS plotter.

With a couple of small kids on board and Charlie being heavily pregnant, we weren’t really up for a strenuous week of smashing through 2m swells and tacking down the coast though, so the location was perfect. Even more so as we’d picked the week before Easter so practically had the place to ourselves.

That is until Friday.

This is the point in today’s post where long-held prejudices about people in boats raise their ugly head….

Some quick points to be made;

1. I now know that it’s a universal truth that the size of the motorboat one owns is directly proportional to the measurement of one’s waist and inversely-proportional to one’s height. This week I witnessed the Australian version of this formula in addition to the British, French, Italian and Greek variations seen previously.
2. Jetskis are driven by idiots. No exceptions to this rule have ever been confirmed.
3. If you are anchored in an idyllic bay of stunning natural beauty and the sunset is ruined by an amplified rendition of shit 80′s music, you have just been joined by one or several motorboats.

Probably the most amusing aspect of the week on the water however, was the prevalence of mooring buoys. If you’re not into messing around in boats, here’s a quick education about parking them for the night; you have three choices – tie up in a marina like sardines, tie up to a mooring buoy or drop the anchor. Of these, anchoring is free and generally more pleasant if you like to keep a bit of distance from the nearest neighbour and not hear them having domestic arguments/drunken sex all night.

All one needs to anchor is a modicum of intelligence (pick a place where there is a lump of land between you and the direction the wind is coming from and calculate what the tide will do to the water level overnight, etc.), a decent anchor and a little knowledge of the technique to use.

Which probably explains why 90% of the boats in Refuge Bay use mooring buoys. The place is full of them, at an estimated cost of around $3,000 a year to maintain (this is Australia – a government regulatory body has to send a diver down once a year to check the safety standards, of course). So in addition to marina fees, most of the boats we shared the anchorage with also pay for their buoy in another part of the bay. The same bay we sailed into and dropped anchor in for free.

I suppose people can and do spend their money how they wish, as evidenced by the floating beer fridge/powerful stereo moving devices many choose to purchase but it does seem a little bourgeois and not strictly in line with my preconceptions about the hardiness of the little Aussie battlers.

It’s been a shite week for the dozen or so of us who work in the private sector here in Australia. Me and my 11 fellow net-taxpayers (there are a few more who pay tax but get it all handed back in rebates and benefits) have been given several pieces of news that set alarm bells ringing in the region of our wallets.

Firstly, the National Pornband Network has decided that a competitive tendering process to select suppliers and pricing rates is not the best way to spend 43 billions of taxpayers dollars, despite it being exactly the way that the world’s most profitable companies choose to ensure best value for money. It would seem that they started the process with four suppliers but didn’t like the prices that came back from any of them. So, a couple of things may have been happening here; either the requirements written by the government (not known previously as a subject matter expert on data networks) were expensive to satisfy OR the suppliers have got together in an illegal cartel and fixed their prices. Of course, the government decided that the latter was the most obvious answer so is, erm, going to choose a supplier and tell them what they are prepared to pay but not prosecute any of the offenders.

Conclusion of this taxpayer? The supplier’s lawyers will craft a deal that fits the price dictated by the NBN but with high costs associated with every request to change anything like dates, locations, equipment, etc. Example; the price stands as long as the NBN team can ensure that the road is dug up and ready on the exact day that it says on the plan, any deviation to this costs $fuckingloads.

Second tax hit of the week; the treasurer, Wayne Swann (more parents should name their children “Wayne”, don’t you think?) allegedly leaked the bad news about this year’s budget. The bad news being that tax revenues have fallen short of the forecast to the tune of $13bn. That’s about £525 for each Australian resident. Except most of them are net-receivers not payers of tax so you can probably triple that figure for the “few”. It reminds me of Churchill’s quote about much being owed by so many to so few, except it seems that getting free flying lessons in a Spitfire isn’t part of the deal this time.

Third tax hit of the week; the insane fucking Carbon Tax had some more bad news. Unsurprisingly, the unions are petitioning Julia Gillard to carve a deal that sees several industries getting out of having to pay it. Industries such as, erm, anything associated with steel production and road transport. The government is such a lame duck in parliament that there will have to be a swathe of concessions to get any kind of legislation through. Brilliant. So that probably just leaves lettuce farms, cycle rickshaws for tourists and therapeutic crystal-production as the only areas to pay the tax. Oh, and me and my 11 fellow non-public sector colleagues.

Lastly, and I can’t stress enough the concern this caused me, NSW had a record downpour of rain on Friday night. 57mm in one day. If you’re not an Australian taxpayer, that might simply sound like a lot of water to you but in reality, every drop that fell took us closer and closer to an emergency press conference by Julia Gillard where she would have to announce a levy (different to a tax, apparently) to help repair the damage across the state. In fact, at the height of the storm, a leak developed in the roof above our kitchen and I wasn’t sure whether to call the letting agent to arrange the repairs or a Federal department in Canberra.

Anyway, in a fit of pique as a petulant reaction to these tax bombshells, we’re taking the week off. Going on strike. Boycotting any tax revenue-generating activities. In fact, we’ve chartered a Bavaria 31 and will be doing a bit of creek-crawling up in Pittwater and Broken Bay. All aboard.

“I ain’t gonna work on Julia’s farm no more”.

A good friend of mine who, to protect his person and reputation, shall remain anonymous except to say that his name begins with an “M” and ends with “agic”, got busted by the traffic police yesterday. The crime?

Failure to prove that he had paid $80 to be issued a piece of plastic.

So the circumstances; waking up on Sunday morning in his penthouse bachelor pad, he nudged the pair of supermodels out of the black silk sheets and jumped into his Italian sportscar to drive to Bondy for an early morning jog and swim. Not wishing to carry his wallet on the run or leave it in the car, he left it and its contents at home. On the drive back, he was stopped by an RBT (Random Breath Test – for those not in Australia and not able to view the “gripping” TV that is their police reality show) unit.

Policeman: Can I see your driving licence?

Magic: It’s at home, I’ve just been for a swim and didn’t want to carry it to the beach.

Policeman: Ok, that’s $86. Put this in your mouth and blow, please.

Magic: Oh, is it Rotary Club night already?

I’ve done the research, and here’s some interesting various current legislation (in NSW, other states are different obviously – this is multi-layered government-land);

1. You can be stopped by the police and breathalised at random.

2. Failure to comply with a breathtest carries the same penalties as failure to pass one.

3. Failure to physically carry your driving licence while driving is an offence.

4. Unless they suspect you of a crime or being witness to a crime, a policeman cannot force you to identify yourself at any other time.

Now, I’m a new immigrant to Australia and as such, I have to accept the laws and comply with them. That I will do.

However, I was under the impression that the Westminster system was adopted and in force here which is founded on “Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat”, or that the burden of proof is on the accuser, not the accused. I’m used to police needing to have a legitimate reason to stop me from going about my business, for example; erratic driving, faulty brake light etc. The concept of me being selected at random as today’s presumed guilty party is anathema.

Further reading of the legislation relating to the RBT units indicates that these should be operated, as the name suggests, at random.

So my advice to Magic, Pyrmont’s very own Rosa Parks, is to challenge the algorithm used. By which, I mean ask the police what recognised mathematical or computational method of producing random selections was employed to determine that yesterday was his turn to get pulled over. Surely if it truly was a “random” breath test, then there would need to be a device indicating to the police whether each passing driver was to be selected or allowed to continue unhindered. Otherwise, the alternative is that the police employ their own personal prejudices to persecute and victimise their own bete noir demographic.

Maybe the cops are playing “car colour snooker”, where they play a red then a yellow, a red then a green, a red then a brown, etc.

In which case, it’s probably time that Magic put that shiny new Fiat 500 up for sale.

Maybe my current client is not typical of the Australian business landscape, but I’ve spent the last few weeks going to meetings where I’ve regularly been picking my jaw off the floor at the commercial naivety and poor judgment being demonstrated at a senior level in a regulated financial entity.

Some examples to illustrate this;

Stupid Colleague 1: “Hi TNA, we didn’t ask them to but a supplier has given us a proposal to outsource some of our financial processes and it looks pretty good, can we just go ahead with it?”

TNA: “Yeah sure, that sounds perfectly reasonable. While we’re at it, why don’t we drop our pants and bend over with a tub of vaseline in one hand and our open wallet in the other?”

Or,

TNA: “Shall we sit down and plan the budget for next year for the investment cost of the project we want to run?”

Stupid Colleague 2: “What do you mean, isn’t the business case enough?”

TNA: “Erm, no. Surely we have to allocate the investment cost in the budget to ensure that the funds are available. Isn’t that how the budgeting process works here?

Stupid Colleague 2: “What’s a budgeting process?”

(sound of The New Australian slamming his cock in a drawer repeatedly)

These are just a couple from this week but it’s repeated day in and day out. I’m particularly shocked at the number of deals I’m finding that have been agreed without any real commercial competition, golf-course handshakes in other words.

This means one of two things; either the person agreeing to these deals is corrupt or incompetent.

As far as I’m concerned there’s no middle ground on this, there’s either an awful lot of swimming pools being built for free in the backyard of my client’s executive’s houses or the executives actually have no idea how to get value for money when writing large contracts. I’ve not worked out which it is yet.

However, maybe an indication can be found by looking at the global view and asking ourselves how well Australian companies fare when they try to operate outside the cosy environment of the national boundaries. I can only think of a handful of internationally successful Australian companies; BHP Biliton, Rio Tinto, Westfield and Macquarie. Of these, the first two are successful mainly because of the Australian government would prefer to grant mining rights to Australian companies and Macquarie is really a spin-off from a British company (Hill Samuel).

So the evidence seems to be pointing to Australian business acumen being a little below the level required to play on a global scale. That conclusion certainly matches my recent experience in the Sydney central business district.

Without wishing to sound spiteful, probably the best thing to happen to Australian businesses would be a recession; the poor practices and commercially naive staff would be quickly cut from the corporations like the cancer that they are. Of course, that assumes that the government wouldn’t step in first with some kind of “GFC-2 levy”. On second thoughts, that’s absolutely guaranteed to happen. Hit the “more government button” again…….