I’m sure you know by now that I take a slightly left of centre position on the political spectrum (!). Well, this awful Liberal government has excelled itself now.*

Last year, the Melbourne lawyer Julian Burnside QC asked us to write an individual letter to an asylum seeker imprisoned in the concentration camps on Nauru and Manus Island. We sent our letter to him in Melbourne and he forwarded them in bulk to the refugee camps for distribution. We included a self addressed stamped envelope for a reply if the refugee wished.

The letter was to express our sympathy at their awful plight and our support and best wishes, to let them know that not all Australians hold the terrible, cruel, racist views of the Australian Government in general and the Department of Immigration and Border Protection in particular. And of the cruel minister, Scott Morrison, who knowingly allowed torture and abuse of children in these concentration camps.

I sent my letter off in mid last year and here it is:

30 April 2014

Dear friend,

I am one of millions of Australians who are totally against the Australian government’s policy of harsh treatment of asylum seekers like you. Not all Australians are hard people.

I want you to know that we wish you could be housed in decent accommodation in Australia while you await processing for a visa.

We feel very bad about the way you are being treated and want to help you. The way you are being treated is not the Australian way. I am one of millions of Australians who want to show compassion to you, not harsh punishment. You have not committed any crime. You are not criminals. We know that.

But our government thinks that by treating you so badly, it will stop other asylum seekers from coming.  This is a very bad policy. You have done nothing wrong.

I hope you can bear the conditions where you are and that this letter will help you. Be assured that many of us are trying to change the mind of the government.

I wish you luck and good health.

You can write to me if you wish and tell me your story. Where did you come from? Why did you leave your country? How did you get here? Are you alone or do you have family with you?  If your life was in danger in your home country, please tell me about it. It will help me to make other people understand and change their minds.

Best wishes,

I wondered a bit why I’d never got a reply, although I wasn’t that surprised.

But on Saturday, I found out why. The letters were intercepted by the Department of Immigration and stopped from delivery! They were never passed to the refugees! Apparently other people had noticed the lack of replies and contacted Mr Burnside. It took him months of enquiries to the department and the minister, with a notable lack of replies, before FOI enabled him to apply pressure. Finally, a few weeks ago, the department of Immigration sent Mr Burnside three large boxes containing the thousands of our letters, all marked RTS, Return To Sender.

The department used the excuse that the Nauru government would not accept the Australian stamps on the return envelopes. But why should that have stopped delivery of the letters?

Mr Burnside thinks this illegal action may constitute a crime, being interference with the mail. If there’s a class action possible, count me in!

What a dirty, nasty, underhanded, dishonest thing the Department of Immigration has done. This is a government department which is paid for by you and me, which is supposed to be fair and impartial. Plainly, they are being directed from above by that awful maggot Morrison. I am furious!

* Of course, Lord Rabbott QC SC KCVO VC Bart. has said Aborigines want to live in their ancestral desert homes as “a lifestyle choice”! Does this idiot know nothing?! Does he learn nothing? Does he think before he speaks?

I say keep it up, Tones. The longer you stay PM, the easier we will be able to reinstate a rightful Labor government next year. What an idiot.

The Egg Nebula (Hubble telescope)

I’ve just finished reading Travelling to Infinity, Jane Hawking’s autobiography of her life with Stephen Hawking. Good read! Highly recommended! I couldn’t wait to get back to it and finish it. We only heard small parts of the story in the press reports over the years. I’d heard that Stephen Hawking had divorced his wife to marry his nurse, and I was a bit miffed about that. It turns out it’s partly true (isn’t it always), but he didn’t marry her, they only lived together. What a difficult person he is. Genius, yes, but very, very, very hard to live with. He makes up for his physical condition by having a super ego, to the exclusion of anyone else’s needs or wants. He was capable of deliberately placing his wheelchair so as to obstruct passage for his wife, and placing himself in the doorway of his daughter’s room to deny her privacy.

He was, in the earlier years, scornful of anyone else’s ideas, always demanding the last word in any discussion. If he didn’t like music or ballet or something else, then he poured scorn on it. He belittled his wife’s religious belief. He was, and presumably still is, a very difficult person to live with, always seeking the limelight, soaking up the praise and honours, wanting to be adulated.

Jane Hawking herself is highly intelligent and has a PhD in Spanish Literature of the 17th Century, as well as being a professional singer of classical music. She also taught in Cambridge.

The nurse is named, and we must assume the lawyers have passed the book for libel, but she became the dominant nurse among a rota of half a dozen or so, and took over the whole household. She seemed to want to live in the reflected glory of the great man, and fed him stories about his wife and the rest of the household, including about the other nurses. Most of them left in disgust until she was the sole carer, dominating him and his own wife and children. He allowed it to happen because he lapped up her praise and attention. Eventually he fell under her spell and moved out to a “luxury flat” in Cambridge with this nurse. That meant that his wife and children had to leave their house, as it was provided by Cambridge University for the use of Professor Hawking, not his family. They had a year’s grace, but had to find somewhere on their own.

However, Mrs Hawking wasn’t completely blameless. Although entirely platonic, she befriended another man while still in her marriage to the professor, and this male companion spent many years with her after the early death of his own wife from leukemia. He even spent most of his time in their house, helping with Stephen and acting as Jane Hawking’s close companion. It was in full view of Stephen and initially with his full approval. After the professor and the nurse, (who was still married with her own child!), moved in together in their new flat, then Jane Hawking divorced him and was eventually free to marry her long time companion.

You have to feel for her. She went through hell for more than 25 years, bringing up three children and this stick figure of a genius husband, only to be betrayed and backstabbed. I know a bit about that, being betrayed and backstabbed by family. I know what it’s like. Highly recommended reading.

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Gee, this model railway planning is much harder than it looks, for a first timer like me, anyway. I’m typically trying to do it on a big scale, of course. If I started small it would be much easier. Luckily it’s all being done on the computer screen, so it doesn’t matter how many times I scrap ideas and start again. Marvellous software – AnyRail. Here are a few plan snippets that I’ve gathered to try to incorporate:

This is London King’s Cross from one track plan.

This is London King’s Cross in another plan I’ve just found this morning.

Loch Oran. This is a much simpler and easier plan. I like it, but it doesn’t bend around the L shape I want. Just an idea.

This is from a manufacturer’s web site – Kato of Japan.

This is from the blog of a German guy. Interesting. It’s multi-level, hence the black and red tracks.

Waverly Station, Edinburgh. I’ll almost certainly use this at one end.

Doncaster. I’ll use this too.

A new box of goodies arrived this morning from Hatton’s in Liverpool, UK. All small stuff like station platforms and ramps, but a couple of sets of electric rail catenaries, just to try out. I’m not sure if I’ll incorporate any electric trains (I mean model locos with representational power pickups from overhead wires, like our Perth trains). The fine plastic moulding work of these catenaries is amazing.

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I’ve dropped nearly 4Kg in the past few months and I think I can keep it off, too. Cutting out carbohydrates (very little bread), cutting the beer down to no more than one a night, often none, no nibbles with the beer, and cutting the evening meal right down to soup or some such. “Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper.” I’d never heard that until about a year ago. It seems to be good advice. I’ve restarted the process to have the gastric bypass operation, though. I can’t go on like this. First appointment 2nd April. Presumably, then, gastric band removal 2 or 3 weeks later, say end of April, then wait two months and have the big one in July.. I must admit, I’m scared of it, not the operation, but how I’ll cope with the strict requirements from then on. There’s no going back on this one. It’s for life. But I’m desperate. This is primarily to fix diabetes, secondarily to lose big amounts of weight.

Australian Financial Review, Sat. 28 Feb 2015

Anyone who uses a Self Managed Superannuation Fund is obliged to know and understand the rules. Ignorance of the rules is not accepted as mitigation. All trustees are equally liable even if only one makes mistakes.

When I was in Beijing last November I saw something remarkable from the bus. It was a footbridge over one of their w-i-i-i-de dual carriageways through the city. On the railings in cut-out metal letters was this:

It’s one of Einstein’s Equations of General Relativity! This is China. Knowledge is respected. Education is paramount.

I was quite impressed by my short visit to China. Can you imagine any Australian city using an equation like this as public artwork? They obviously do it out of respect.

I found other examples of street art that made me think, “Gee, these are not flag waving militaristic heathens.” Quite the opposite.

I’ve been watching If You Are The One every night on SBS2 for months now, and again, I’m quite impressed. The level of education among the girls is quite remarkable. Out of 24, up to a dozen will either have a PhD or be working toward one. Many have Masters degrees. Most have been to uni. Same for the guys – many have high qualifications, at least a bachelor’s degree. Many also do altruistic voluntary work, and one guy last night donates 10% of his salary to charities. I could go on – watch the show and be surprised.

So my ideas of China have changed completely from the old Red Guard Mao suited Communist days. China has changed enormously and I’m impressed.

Illustration from Sony

A few years ago, maybe 2010 – 2013, I was telling friends that the newer LED backlit TVs were able to modulate the brightness of the LEDs to adaptively enhance the contrast.

I don’t know where I got the idea from, but after a while I realised that I was wrong, talking out of my hat. (But I kept quiet about it, of course, heh heh.)

Well, it seems I was ahead of things, not wrong after all. Dolby Laboratories in the USA has come up with a new technology called HDR TV:

“An HDR [High Dynamic Range] monitor has better black levels, but the primary difference is selective backlighting, where thousands of LEDs behind the LCD panel can be individually turned on to provide extremely bright backlighting exactly corresponding to the highlights in the image. All of this is only at the prototype stage but Dolby assured us that they’re working with several partners well known in the industry.” [Red Shark web site]

I was right after all. I don’t remember reading anything about this in 2010 – it just came into my head. I should have patented it.

LCD TV screen technology is just marvellous!

This is the old style backlighting using fluorescent tubes. My TV is still of this type.

The rear-most layer is now white LEDs instead of fluorescent tubes. Much thinner and cooler.

TFT means Thin Film Transistor. Do you realise that for every red, green and blue pixel on your screen, you are actually seeing the backlight coming through transistors that are so thin they are transparent? On the inner layers of an LCD screen is a mass (millions of items) of electronics that is transparent!  Every piece, smaller than a hair thickness, is absolutely precisely placed and has to work perfectly.

I always marvel at the comparison I make here: a set of curtains for a large lounge room will cost many hundreds of dollars. A good quality lounge suite will cost $3,000 to $5,000.

But your TV, this marvel of precision technology with all its thousands of manufacturing steps will cost less than $1,000, usually much less. Where’s the value??!! Why should we pay curtain makers the same as a TV for a few hours cutting and sewing. Why does the material cost so much when it is churned out in huge rolls at minimal cost by big machines in a relatively few steps?

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“In the climate debate, the consequences of doubt are likely to be global and enduring. Climate-change sceptics in the United States have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative action to combat global warming. They haven’t had to win the debate on the merits; they’ve merely had to fog the room enough to keep laws governing greenhouse gas emissions from being enacted.”

Lord Abbott SC VC KCMD OA AO has pronounced that “Climate change is crap” and despite every opportunity, has not retracted or modified this view. He advocates coal and coal mining as the energy of the future, regardless of its polluting and contamination of rivers, coastlines and oceans.

I wonder what he’s being paid?*

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Along the same lines, before the 2013 election, our Tones promised that large areas of Tasmania’s forests, including areas in the World Heritage List, would be released for logging by timber companies.

The United Nations immediately condemned this as unacceptable, but he ignored them, of course.

Now it’s come out that two of his ministers asked for any decision to be delayed by six months for further discussion, as did the timber companies. But that doesn’t bother Lord Abbott – he’s proceeding regardless. And it’s come out that he made another “captain’s call” in November 2013, giving the go-ahead to the Tasmanian Liberal government without any cabinet consultation.

As I said, I wonder what he’s being paid?* Should be a nice little retirement nest egg, eh Tones?

*As PM, of course.

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Radio National ran a very interesting item this morning (Occam’s Razor) about the South Australian government’s plan to hold a Royal Commission on nuclear power, uranium mining and waste storage. Hooray!!! I heartily approve.

That means we will be able to say to Britain, France, Japan and other countries, “We’ll take your nuclear waste fuel rods, thank you very much, and here’s fresh uranium from our mines to replace them. Ka ching! That’ll be $X billion dollars, please.”

The speaker said he believed the foreign companies would pay for the new fast breeder reactors to be built here, simply because it makes economic sense to do so. Cheaper than storing their waste at home for millennia.

He said each reactor produces around 320 MW (that’s megawatts, millions of watts). That’s a big power generator, and it’s atmospheric greenhouse gas pollution free! Combine that with the wave power I mentioned before and the move to solar panels for homes and we’re talking ample power, atmospheric pollution free, very low cost, totally reliable, for centuries to come.

People jump up and down about the dangers of nuclear power, and how the waste is toxic for millennia. Well, that was last year.

Technology and science don’t stand still. There’s a new type of fission reactor called a Fast Breeder Reactor (not the best choice of name, methinks), which uses existing nuclear waste as its fuel. It can pass this old fuel through again and again, nearly 100 times, gaining energy from it each time, and the final waste product, although still radioactive, will decay in only about 300 years.

As well, these new reactors use a different type of cooling (liquid sodium) that is inherently fail safe. If the cooling process goes faulty or is shut down, the reactor just stops. It can’t overheat or explode. (Where will that much sodium come from? Salt is sodium and chlorine. It’s easy to separate them. Salt is fairly cheap and abundant, wouldn’t you say?)

People should find out the facts before they pronounce on things like nuclear power. Or phone tower radiation. Or wind tower health effects. Or power lines. Or vaccinations. There are an awful lot of idiots polluting our discussions.

“A Four Corners investigation has found rorting of the [Job Services Australia] scheme is rampant. Forgery, manipulation of records and the lodgement of inflated claims for fees are widespread.” [ABC News]

It’s not ordinary employees who are committing these crimes, it’s business owners! The Liberal Party mantra – The law is for the little people – allow me to make myself rich and some of it will rub off onto you (the so-called trickle down effect). Get out of my way with your rules and regulations – I’m running a business here. Why should I pay tax when I’m paying payroll tax etc?  Eh, Rell? Yeah.

When those apprentices and young casual workers were electrocuted in metal roofs during the home insulation scheme in 2009, it wasn’t them who ordered themselves up into the roof spaces without training or safety rules. It was their bosses! The business owners. They saw a money earner and they grabbed for it, at any cost.

Yet the government minister Peter Garrett was blamed for it. Why the hell should he take the blame? He didn’t know this was happening, how could he know?

A Nationals senator is calling for a Royal Commission into the finance and financial advice industry, as he says up to $60 billion has been lost to small investors in dodgy advice and schemes in recent years. The National Australia Bank has recently made big payouts to small investors who followed bank employees advice in recent years. The Storm Financial company in Qld was another scandal, heavily involved with the bank we trust, the CBA. So much for integrity.

I doubt these fine business people vote Labour.  Grrrrrrr.

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I’ve got no water. No warning, just cut off. There seems to be a truck and workmen down the street a bit. If it doesn’t come back soon, I’ll have to walk down and “ask” them.

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Cheap appliances. My $50 Coles coffee capsule machine seems to have given up the ghost. It is supposed to show a green blinking LED in the button as it heats up, but it’s just blinking red all the time now. Less than a year’s use. Not happy.

And my $350 robotic vacuum cleaner has also stopped. It seems to work for about a minute, then just stops and goes back to standby. No indication of any fault or error. Damn. I bought it through Amazon and they asked me to review it. I never got around to it, but I was going to say, “It works, but not very well.” But it doesn’t even work now.

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I partially dismantled my one and only model loco last night prior to installing a new DCC decoder board which should arrive any day now. I followed the instructions, but I couldn’t get the old PCB out. I loosened the screws even more and “sproing”, it came apart and the wheels fell off.

I spent about 15 mins last night trying to get it back together without success, but my eyes were tired so I gave up. More work today.

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I’ve got a work guy coming this afternoon to do all the odd jobs around the house. I’ve gone downhill in the past two years that I’ve been here. I’ve lost all my strength. I can’t do the stuff I used to do. I can’t get up a ladder very easily, let alone work up there. It’s disheartening. It’s the leukemia, I think. I can feel the lymph modes at the back of my jaw much more now. Hmmm.

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3.30pm Huh! He came, but right off the bat, he didn’t want the work. First job: fix my reticulation sprinklers on the verge. “Sorry mate, I don’t do reticulation.” He’s got a mate who does, but …

OK, next job: weeding and revamping my garden at the front. “Sorry mate, I don’t do weeding.” He’s got a mate …

OK, I show him the garage and the cleaning up I need. Not hard work. But he starts sucking his teeth and looking through his diary and says, “Hmmm, I might be able to fit you in on the 17th.” The 17th of March!

I say, No, it’s too long. Just text me the names of your mates. So, a complete waste of my time. I’ve waited five days just for him to turn up and tell me this. Rack off, mate.

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I’m sure you know that I have a very poor opinion of Liberal Party politicians and members. Well take a look at this: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2015/02/21/inside-sa-senator-cory-bernardis-business-web/14244372001523#.VOmiBuaZGUk

Yet another Liberal politician who doesn’t know the difference between proprietary and propriety. Who can’t understand why they can’t use their taxpayer funded office to further their personal business interests. Who doesn’t understand ethics. Look at Nalder, the Liberal WA state minister who used his ministerial office and staff to arrange business meetings with some Chinese guys in connection with his own business in China! He couldn’t understand why this was wrong. He still can’t. And Barnett didn’t sack him. He’s a Liberal, and the law is different for them as we all know.

What is the difference between people who run dodgy businesses, tricky financial planning businesses, get their parliamentary and private interests mixed up and break the law, and trade unions? Answer: one lot has a government Royal Commission imposed on them at HUGE cost, and the other is allowed to get away with it.

This awful Prime Minister and his incompetent government have undone decades of careful diplomacy with Indonesia in a few stupid sentences.

See http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/21/aceh-residents-use-koinuntukaustralia-campaign-to-offer-to-repay-australian-aid  The people of Aceh are outraged at Sir Lord Rabbott AO, OA, KCMD, Order of the Stuffed Shirt, VC, over his suggestion that our aid to Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami makes them owe us. I don’t blame them. This is sheer stupidity. This guy is a rank wanker amateur. A prize ocker fool.

Already this whole business is having an effect. Australians are left out of Indonesia’s change to free visas. We still have to pay. How embarrassing. There is now a growing mood of hostility to Australia in Indonesia, a complete change from before our stupid government came to power in 2013.

I’m sure a big proportion of Aussies will be saying, “Too bad. Why does it matter?” I read the other day that 52% of Aussie visitors to Bali don’t know that it’s part of Indonesia. I cringe.

Well, Indonesia is 220 million people, ten times our population, and not far away. With good relations, we sell them food and manufactured goods (fibreglass swimming pools is one example from WA that I know about). And education, which is just as valuable an export as cattle or anything else.

With bad relations, regional cooperation on drugs and people smuggling stops, just as one example. Too bad? I don’t think so.

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I’ve said before that I check all my supermarket bills for errors, and I find them all the time.

Well, a week or two ago I got a letter in the mail with a bill from Unicare for $51. There was no indication of what it was for, just a code number.

Unicare? Who are they? I assumed it might have been a QE II Medical Centre bill for the eye tests I had in January.

I nearly paid it on-line, until I noticed I had a Unicare pdf file on my desktop. It was a receipt from when I’d made an on-line purchase a few weeks ago. I had bought and paid in the one transaction.

So this Unicare, based in Welshpool in Perth, tried to bill me again, and I nearly paid it again! See what I mean? They’re out to get us. Inefficient accounting, obviously. I phoned them and said I’d already paid and the receptionist said, “Oh, please hold and I’ll speak to our accounts person.” So I held, then after a minute or two she said they’d phone me back, but they haven’t.

I was talking about the Carnegie wave power plant that’s just started up on Garden Island in Cockburn Sound. (That’s near Fremantle and Rockingham for my remote readers.)

Here are some more pictures, all courtesy of the Carnegie web site. Rather nice, I reckon:

You can see the undersea pipe coming ashore at lower-left/middle

This picture looks as if it should be rotated 90deg. right, but it looks funny then as well.

I like this! Free power, or relatively cheap, pollution free, permanent, independent of day or night. The only drawback is that you need to be beside the sea, but aren’t we all? 🙂

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I’ve spoken before about the Lockheed Martin announcement last year of a new compact fusion power generator. Their web site is still there, but I have been wondering about the lack of talk about it. Scientific people seem to be ignoring it.

I’ve just been listening to a radio program that talks about it and, oh dear, it seems that Lockheed Martin are refusing to talk about it apart from their web site, will not take interviews, have not published any details apart from a patent and don’t attend any conferences about fusion energy. Oh dear.

The suggestion is made that they are doing it to attract development money since their defence contracts have been reduced. Oh dear.

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Oh dear again. Last night was the last ever episode of  Foyle’s War, the BBC drama about detective Christopher Foyle (always called Mr Foyle) during WW2 and immediately afterwards. These last four episodes seem to be it. They didn’t kill him off, but it was pretty final.

This series has been the epitome of good TV as far as I’m concerned. Immaculately made, restrained, credible, beautifully recreated wartime scenes (how do they do it?!). I’m sure there’ll be repeats for a long time to come, there already have been, but it’s not the same.

My other favourite show is Silent Witness. It’s not quite as good – the lab scenes are just too clean and slick to be believable, they only ever seem to have one case on at a time, such a light workload, but the story lines have been fantastic. And Emilia Fox! Whoo whoo … ! Talk about thinking man’s crumpet.

But how come … ? Last year, Leo was killed in a suicide bomb explosion while on a job in the Middle East. That seemed pretty final to me. But recently he’s back in episodes that I don’t remember seeing before. Not that I’m complaining, but …

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Crumbs, this model railway planning is harder than it looks. I’m on about version 7 by now and struggling to get the point work right. It looks easy but when you place a point (a switch, a turnout) on the drawing, it’s locked in place. You can unlock it and move it, but then you have to move all the track to make it connect up again. This takes a lot of work. I can see that this planning is going to take months before I start physically laying track.You can see how I’ve attempted to reproduce the complex tracks on the left, but I’ve got sick of it and I’ll have a go at the Waverley Station end on the bottom part. It takes hours!

I’ve found some pictures of typical WA railway locos – not all of these are in WA, but they’re all Aussies:

I’ve just noticed – the wheels look odd, but it’s because they’re narrowly spaced. This is the WA country rail network in the Wheat Belt, where the track would still be 3ft 6inches spacing from the old days. The Australian standard is 4ft 8.5 inches, Standard Gauge, but our counry lines wouldn’t have been upgraded – far too expensive. So these WA locos look as if they’re balanced tippy toe on the rails. Huh.

  By the way, what other hobby wants the models to look dirty and grubby? As they come out of the box, they’re clean and shiny new, but real trains aren’t. They’re muddy and rusty and oil stained. So in theory, we “weather” all our model trains, including adding rust to the rails and oil stains all over the sleepers. You can even buy your models pre-weathered, at extra cost. Crazy. I don’t think I want dirty trains, not yet, anyway.

A product of the management of ASC as a prototype for Australia’s next subs. © PJ Croft 2014, 2015

Yesterday I was talking about the subs Australia is currently trying to either build or buy. In a timely way, the news comes today that Sweden, Germany, Japan and Britain have all submitted tenders or proposals based on their own proven designs. And where was ASC, our Australian company? The Australian Submarine Corporation in Adelaide has not submitted a bid. Why? They didn’t know they had to. They weren’t ready. They didn’t understand the tender process. [See today’s West]

I can guarantee you that all the engineers and technicians and skilled tradesmen will be shaking their heads in amazement, gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists at their management.

Why is it that Sweden, a country with a smaller population than us, can build submarines successfully to their own design, and we can’t? Why is it that Sweden can design and build terrific fighter jets and we can’t? Why is it that we bought our new nuclear reactor (Lucas Heights) a few years ago from Argentina??? Argentina! How embarrassing.

I’ll tell you why. Senior managers in this country are incompetent, that’s why. They are lazy, complacent, risk averse, timid and don’t know their stuff.

At the place I used to work, the managers were a joke, laughable, good at anything but managing. I could tell some stories.

I’m reading a book called Mayday at the moment, about all the management blunders that nearly killed QANTAS in 2011-12, and may still do so yet. That grounding in 2011 was unnecessary and hugely costly, not only in money terms but in trust and reputation. People don’t trust QANTAS any more.

Yet Alan Joyce and his henchmen at the top got salary increases of up to 40% at that time, while they were adamant that the rank and file were not going to get more than 3%, the inflation rate. No increase, in other words.

Now I’m reading about Fairfax. I read the book, The Rise and Fall of Fairfax a few weeks ago. Total chaos in the upper management ranks over decades. Now Fairfax profit has fallen very low, down by 86% this year, and the company’s losses amount to $2.5 billion dollars in recent years,

“Hywood’s bold plans to turn the business around are self-evidently not working – except to enrich the company’s executives, who have awarded themselves tens of millions of dollars worth of cash and shares by way of bonuses for their dismal performance.” [The Guardian]

This is the way it works in Australia – no matter how much damage the CEOs and CFOs and boards do to companies at the expense of workers and shareholders, they STILL award themselves massive salary increases and bonuses. Alan Joyce, the CEO of QANTAS, saw his salary and bonuses increase from $3.7m to $4.5m in one year alone, while telling the workforce they couldn’t have more than 3%.

I could go on, but I don’t have to. I do have to go and be sick.

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