Local government & public administration

Whether you're a member of a religion or not, we should at minimum read ancient texts as instruction manuals for life that ancient societies developed through much blood and tragedy. Take the Old Testament and its 10…

It was Abraham Lincoln who said democracy is government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. That’s pretty much the majority view of what democracy is and how it works even today. It’s complete rubbish. And I…

Another beautiful example of elite rivalries. This whole debate is fake, as the sitting councillor is trying to convey here, the same lack of revenue for local government is seen in every town across the country. Rates…

Back to work today for me, after three weeks of not much of a holiday thanks to Covid. I see the socials have been active, accusing Council of selling buildings it doesn’t even own to ’Muslims’, to create a mosque.…

We're living inside a 2000-year period of history that has been mostly dominated by China. Our collective memory is about 10 minutes. The only thing that interrupted the total dominance of China was what they call their…

Is it not obvious that this same pattern repeats over and over in America? Shit happens, people take to the streets, nothing is fixed. This is the broken culture on full display. Basic, calm, public administration…

The local Trumps are building and building. Pauline recently spent a few weeks (on taxpayer coin, while parliament was sitting here) in the US speaking and networking at major Trump events. I’ve shared here how this…

Be prepared in Australia for the targeting of rural and regional people by One Nation, including their newest recruit Barnaby Joyce. They see real opportunity to steal lots of Nationals votes. They’re also targeting…

I did something I had actually decided I wasn’t going to. I upgraded our existing Powerwall for 2 new Powerwalls. Originally the dollars didn’t really make sense, to do it, but the deal the installer offered that…

For nearly all of history, societies have been ruled by kings. It’s the default form of governance for humans. It amazes me that people opposed to the Trumps of the world don’t offer people an alternative king. The…

From tonight the public forum at Bathurst Council meetings will be included in live streaming. It's interesting, that idea of 'the public'. Very often it's the same handful of people who dominate forums like this,…

For a long time here I’ve tried to persuade people that what Trump represents isn’t fascism. Fascism is about the State, and Trump has no real interest in the State. It’s a shift back to royal forms of governance. Back…

I posted about the new way they’re regenerating forest in desserts, where instead of just planting new trees (which usually fails), they’re targeting the roots of old trees that have been cut down over generations,…

WiIl be rainy and dark today, not a lot of solar generation. But no matter, the battery has topped up with grid power at overnight rates. 5 times cheaper than the daily grid rate.

The great myth of ‘the community’, ‘the people’. Every elite aspirant to power evokes the community or the people. There is no such thing as a community or the people, just networks of groups following a tiny handful of…

Probably the fastest way to improve social media is to turn off comments on posts. Not for personal things among friends, but for public-focused posts, from government, business and others. That function stems from the…

The uncomfortable truth is that successful entrepreneurs are pretty much always socially obnoxious. That’s what disruption is, spitting in the soup of the status quo, a fart in the collective elevator. They’re…

When a society says “we are all equal” but behaves otherwise, something lethal happens: • differences still exist • power still concentrates • prestige still accumulates • but no one is allowed to say where. Everyone…

Tonight's Council meeting should be a humdinger. Not allowed to comment on these matters, but I can clarify that elected councillors at all Councils approve all Council budgets, including how money is raised and spent.…

A brilliant story about local government in the age of social media. You can see here how even though the local Council was the only sensible player in the whole saga, it still copped all of the abuse, cost, death…

We're living inside a revolution that will be written about for generations. Just imagine the current Opposition and One Nation coming to power right now, shutting all this down in favour of their old policy of…

Again I can’t comment on behalf of Bathurst Regional Council. But I can express a personal and general view about local government, and use Bathurst as an example. Pretty much every council in Australia is ‘broke’.…

Upgraded home storage. What I love about Tesla is the software, though the hardware of their batteries is also still the best out there. And sexily functional, at a time most batteries are using plastic, Tesla is still…

The very many Australians of all ages contemplating voting for populists like Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce should really keep a watching brief on the terrible collapsing mess of Trumpism in the US. Trumpism is the…

This is the reality. Local government is nearly in ‘financial ruin’, pretty much everywhere. Even those Councils who can balance their books will have millions in arrears on infrastructure backlogs, like roads and basic…

The electricty grid is a wonder of the world. There’s a perception that it delivers electricty (electrons) to homes and businesses like water flowing through a pipe. But that’s not how the grid works. The grid is an…

The Busby Street developments have been controlversial in Bathurst, but that isn’t saying a lot, as anything that happens in a community now generates a pile-on. That’s social media culture, you can see it in the…

When I use the word ‘kidult’, it’s not meant to be just some cheap insult. It’s an analytical term invented by people who study societies, to describe a type of culture, where adult life is replaced by an extended…

Today on my way to work I got the car’s AI to help me refresh my conversational German. This is a full conversation, not pre-recorded tracks, and you can do it with any language, it will teach you to speak it at any…

Insurance is my day job, for Council. Unaffordable insurance is a leading indicator of social collapse, because it means a society isn’t managing risks, leaving it all to insurance. A society that doesn’t manage risks -…

In the past half a century the fear of overpopulation in the world was pretty common. But during that entire time, global birth rates have been in free fall. To the extent that many parts of the world now face a genuine…

For those who like everyday comparisons, Kell just quarter-filled our Kluger (hybrid). The fuel cost $55, for a quarter of a tank. To fully charge the Tesla costs us either nothing, if we use solar and the home…

The Association of Australian Super Funds (ASFA) have updated their estimates for levels of super needed for different retirement lifestyle goals. Quite large jumps, reflecting increased inflation across all parts of…

You may be surprised at how many Australians think this guy is terrific. Some of them are even local councillors elected to local councils. Many more Australians who can’t stand him will happily vote for Pauline Hanson,…

One of the strident critics of Bathurst Council.

Working for a Council, complaints about potholes are one of the biggies. What’s not often said is how much people’s choice of vehicle causes this problem. Modern utes and SUVs are heavy. EVs are often accused of that,…

How good is this? Sharing this one not just for the brilliant engineering, but because it illustrates how cars are being reinvented. Cars are moving away from being ‘mechanical’ devices. The basic mechanical drivetrain…

I’ve been using Tesla’s supervised self-driving for my entire round trip to work each day, a 130km commute on both urban and regional roads. It’s been absolutely flawless. Coming down Tunnel Hill in Lithgow yesterday,…

To reframe the debates around Council rates. They’re framed in these debates as costs to residents, charges. Like buying something at a shop. But Council rates are really public investments. They fund infrastructure…

Think I shared a video from ‘Mr Carlson’s Lab’ before. I love these, though many would find them technical and dry, because he’s an example of somebody with sublime mastery of a highly complex thing, in this case…

The Welcome to Country has become a rallying point for the nation’s Paulines, and her banker, Gina. You see it at local council level too, with the local Paulines, have a watch. Some councillors sit down before it’s…

Towards the end of my time at CSU, it took on a visionary project called Smart Learning (SL). I mention it because the ideas behind Smart Learning were more or less identical to the ideas that run Tesla, as a company.…

Our native Trumpies/Paulines, even at local government level, are maybe not reading the room. At our last election, being associated in any way with Trump was electoral poison. In the US the collapse is well underway.

We're now deep into 'stranded asset' territory, if you buy a car with a combustion engine. Your secondhand value will go into free fall, nobody will want the vehicle as the transition accelerates.

Modern conservatives for decades have sold the idea that government is a barrier to prosperity and aspiration. The dreaded ‘red tape’ of government bureaucrats, with their taxes and regulations. They claim to ‘free’ us…

Australia has up to 2 million more dogs than it has children. As a culture, and like most other nations on Earth, we’re dying out. Our birth rates are at terminally low levels. Cost is often given as a reason for this.…

There is no public backlash against AI. Just as there is none against windmills, and solar farms, and EVs and vaccines. ‘The public’ is not a thing, thinking and acting. Activists enlist members of the public to their…

I don’t back any political team, I think turning governance into popularity contests between teams turned our lives into football games. I think elections destroyed democracy, popularity can only ever lead to…

A couple of facts about this year’s festival. It’s not a local business that’s rescuing it, it’s a Sydney ride business. A ride business Council employed when it was allowed to run the festival, before its newly elected…

There’s concern that AI assists people to do stupid things. Have we forgotten the way social media has almost destroyed our civic life, including our politics, but also our personal lives, and mental health in many…

One of the most interesting ‘data points’ I’ve seen in a while. The introduction of the smartphone corresponded with a pronounced drop in birth rates. As always people assume the device is the issue, rather than what…

Pauline is the PM you get if you allow social media to continue to replace the countries we live in. What she believes is irrelevant, the same as Trump. Her constituency is anger, anger she mostly generates herself. And…

The greatest misunderstanding I think of populist movements like Trump or One Nation is that they're the product of people being economically disadvantaged - cost of living, unemployment etc. The anger of populism is…

Why do humans love music possibly above all else? It’s not for all the reasons they often give. It’s because music is imitation in its purest form. And imitation is the root of not just all human life, but of existence…

All uncontrolled imitation, the simple act of people copying one another (our deepest passion), leads to violence. Here just one more social media viral trend that is progressing to the next stages. Anger, then rage,…

The seductive and dangerous power of music is that it is the only pure imitation. It doesn’t look like or sound like other things. It is imitation for its own sake, which is why it’s like social heroin. And why it…

I think the single most dangerous belief humans have is that their desire to form groups and crowds is benign. That it's a warm and cuddly desire to connect and be together. Let's talk about Love Parade 2010. In reality…

This is the federal President of the Liberal Party. Elected unopposed this year. The reason people stopped voting for the Liberals is because they ceased to exist as the Liberal Party years ago. The problem for Tone is…

Many of us lived the transition from social networking online, which was integrated with our physical communities. To social media, which ‘feeds’ you a version of social life, with no connection to your physical…

Globally birth rates fell off a cliff at the exact moment of the introduction of the smartphone. At the same time the amount people socialise also fell off a cliff. But in reality they were shifting to socialising…

I live in the regions, and I want them to survive. They won’t when their only idea is to become tourist locations for bored city people. Tourism generates activity, people passing through, it doesn’t and can’t create…

I drive the Great Western Goat Track every day to work, currently crippled by the malfunction of a 200-year-old 2-lane bridge. A joke as a highway even with that working. This is the nation’s fundamental artery linking…

Farmers and the Clean Energy Council have quantified what’s at stake in the idiot war some in politics have invented over renewables in regional and rural areas. This is the projected income to both local towns and…

Council meeting again tonight. Another great example of the terrible mistake we’ve made with the idea of ‘the people’, and ‘community consultation’. Now it just means asking anybody who wants to offer an opinion, to…

Chesterton’s Fence is a principle stating that you should never remove or change a rule, tradition, or system until you first understand exactly why it was put there in the first place. Chesterton, like Edmund Burke…

Just to give a sense of the sort of analysis AI can turn out in a matter of seconds, I asked it to describe what it saw as the legacy of Live Aid. A superb analysis, and describes the kidult culture I often write about.…

I thought a good example of the way social media works. Pretty much everybody would read this and assume it was about AI. The big growth in data centre electricity use in Ireland happened before the introduction of AI.…

You can never provide a public service more efficiently, privately, because somebody has to make money out of it. That money is taken from the service.

The next time some pumped-up ambitious social climbing influencer using social media to promote themselves tells you your local council is incompetent and corrupt, and that's why you have potholes, think about this.…

Heh, read the comments. A disaster for the whining pissants on social media, who will lose one of their favourite fantasies, that councils are wasting all the money. There was never any money to waste.

Cities are remarkable in a way I only recently came to understand. Throughout all of history humans have struggled to find ways to live together, without violence and death. That’s because humans relating only to other…

Every machine is the folding together of the social relationships of the people who made it, and the people who use it. People and machines are not two separate things. Machines aren’t ’tools’ for people. A machine…

This table tells you why your Council rates keep going up. And why we can afford to buy ridiculous nuclear submarines for the US to use as missile launch platforms in the Pacific against their hated ‘commie’ rivals in…

I've created this image to explain the magic of an ordinary city street. It's like a special x-ray image of things you normally can't see. A project I've been working on for a while. Behind the simple facade of an…

In historical terms, many urban environments are remarkably peaceful and functional. Not utopian, not without issues, but compared to human history as a whole modern cities are very livable environments. We often…

American culture has always been hostile towards the very idea of government. Watch all those old Western movies where the Sheriff is the tiny line between gangland and civic life. Not much has changed. Puritans founded…

Next time somebody says councils should have enough money without increases in rates, or you want a bit of a whinge about potholes, as if Councils ignore them, have a look at this.

The community is getting more angry, and more violent. Coles workers should try working for a council. The more social humans get, the more violent they become. Unlike the warm hugs idea that being social = people…

It’s sad, disappointing and entirely unsurprising that humanity turned AI into just one more pathetic status game squabble between rival groups. Social media culture does that to everything, everything is a pile-on. Few…

Everywhere is getting more angry and violent. Schools are horrendous. See the enormous jump in incidents since Covid 'lockdowns'. Lockdowns are often blamed for this, but it's what people did during lockdowns that's the…

While social media life has delivered another victory for Pauline Trump, this time in WA, have a look at what AI is doing for scientific research. Google has developed an AI system called Co-Scientist, that dramatically…

I was paying my rates the other day, and looked at the itemised costs. And while my rates are quite high for a regional town, when I looked at the itemised bill I thought this is such a pittance for what I’m getting.…

With Bathurst coming up, even if you’re not a car racing fan, there’s a genius to V8 Supercars that I think it’s still super important for everybody to understand. A specific Australian genius, that goes well beyond car…

None of the public narratives about AI understand the first thing about what AI is or how it works. Most fundamentally, AI is changing what computing itself means and does. Traditional computers operate symbolic…

The annual flag worship is almost upon us, so just a few of my thoughts on Australia Day. I have zero time for any of the debates over the day, they're all fake arguments set up to create division, to harvest votes. I…

Much of what I post comes from the mostly unknown world of governance. What it is that makes it possible for people to live together. It’s not even art, let alone science. It’s a bloodsport with some core insights…

The catastrophic collapse in birth rates around the world is usually attributed to the young not having enough money to raise families. It is that too, but there’s a fascinating extra bit. We’re in a ‘relationship…

Today's Sydney Morning Herald is the thinnest I've ever seen it. Feels about a dozen pages. It costs $4.80. Nobody is getting value for money there. Social media is hollowing out all of our established institutions and…

The real genius of Tesla is its software. It uses software to integrate technology into a person’s life in all sorts of new ways. The functionality and design of the software is unmatched in the industry, nobody else…

Many, if not most people, hate their local Council. Abusing it and its staff is like sport. I think we need to look in the mirror at our attitudes and behaviours. Loved this exchange, the bile and abuse went on for many…

This is the car Kell and I just bought. Not the actual car in the picture, but the exact same model, colour etc. The Model 3, Long Range. People know I spend a lot of time looking at all the EV options out there. What…

Trump and others hate what they call the ‘Deep State’. Sounds scary! All it means is the professional civil servants that actually run countries, who annoy popularly-elected dickheads who can barely tie their own…

The Nerd Reich is well underway. Simpletons still think this is a battle of Left vs Right, like those who think the Bathurst 1000 is still a battle of Fords and Holdens. Decades of slogans on ‘red tape’ and…

This person is using Facebook as if Facebook IS Bathurst. That’s the new norm, we live inside social media platforms, we’re not talking about our towns here, this IS our towns. Seamless, people don’t see them as two…

This plays well because for 70 years we’ve been encouraged by wealthy and powerful people to see public servants (it’s in the fucking name people) as our enemy. The people SERVING the public. Why do wealthy and powerful…

A privatised government is an oxymoron. (Morons might have to Google what an oxymoron is.) Again, to make public servants - people who SERVE the public - the enemy is the obvious end of our public life. By definition.…

Privatised public services not only cost a lot more (they’re much less efficient), they don’t even provide the service. This was the reason humans invented government in the first place, to create economies of scale.…

Look at what Trump is actually doing, right now. You won’t believe what you’re reading, but it’s actually happening, right now. It’s been planned for a long time. Ordinary people have been played by slogans about red…

If what the Trump-Musk forces are doing to the US concerns you right now, be assured the Australian arm of the lunacy is geared up and ready to go here too. Social media is their assault weapon. You’ll find many foot…

So many councils under pressure to raise rates to meet basic costs. I still think it’s a startling fact that the average person spends more on take away food, alcohol, recreation and travel than they do on their roads,…

This is populism. The belief that democracy is elections. The elected should have all the power, and get rid of everything else. That’s a recipe for total social collapse, and fascism. Hitler and Mussolini were…

Public and domestic sewage systems are now continuously blocked by people using wet wipes instead of toilet paper. These then create ‘fatbergs’, enormous balls of fat and other wastes which block even main sewer lines.…

On the way into work yesterday, one of the local politicians was doing election shots in the park. My attention was drawn more to the glorious, colourful corruption and incompetence of Council, on display in the flower…

For people with the debilitating condition of range anxiety, more real world examples. To drive to Sydney from Lithgow with an EV battery at 100% to start, you arrive all the way over on the coast with a battery still…

You despair of the public having any memory at all. It was cutting of the public service by the Morrison government that led to the rorting by big consulting firms, brought in to do the work of the sacked public…

On Council meeting duty tonight. Or as I prefer to call it, the cage fight between Facebook and democracy.

Electricity is still very cheap in America. This is cost per kWh. In Australia most people pay at least twice these rates, sometimes triple. Why the difference? It’s mostly the last place people expect to look.…

The public have been told that Covid has become ‘endemic’. It’s a lie, it will never be an endemic virus. Endemic means it’s always there, but at very low levels, with occasional small outbreaks. Covid is and always…

The genius of the renewables transition is that everybody wins. (Except foreign fossil fuel and nuclear companies.) For example, with OVO's supercheap overnight rates, and free energy between 11am and 2pm every day,…

When governance is your job, it’s a bit like how everybody thinks they know about education, because they went to school. Everybody is a supposed expert in government, because they vote. Most don’t have a clue. For…

A brilliant idea. And even if you’re not a renter, it’s a brilliant option to buy a home battery and tap into the super cheap and even free rates some retailers are already offering, even if you don’t want to install…

Seeing this in the US now, people with duelling cameras on sidewalks, filming each other in Western-style standoffs. Then they mace the other if they get too close. This is the idiot world social media has created, do…

Social media had a big Bathurst victory yesterday. You’ll read about it in Council news in the coming days. Meanwhile in the US a social media cult destroying America is under assault from a social media mob destroying…

I can't comment much on Bathurst issues, but see this mistake all the time. 'Management' of local government i.e. full-time Council staff, don't make the big decisions about what happens in a town. Those decisions are…

The thing most populations now are completely addicted to, social media, is destroying their societies as they use it. This Lithgow experience is shared by councils everywhere. If you think ‘attack’ is too strong a…

Trump wants to be free of the rule of law entirely. Democracy isn’t elections, it’s parliament + judiciary + executive power. Elections aren’t even in the top level. But populists like Trump tell people elections are…

I get some snide remarks at work about still masking. Often from people coughing between their chortling. I see firsthand their health falling off a cliff, a day at a time, as their immune system gradually shuts down.…

Community doesn’t want higher rates. Council cancels events and services to save money instead. Community outrage at cancelling of events and services. Community funds alternative events, using money it won’t pay in…

The biggest story in the world yesterday, that was barely reported. PNG turned off social media. It’s had enough of these platforms trashing its society. But just wait, it won’t last. Ordinary people and businesses…

In Bathurst social media warriors are outraged that Council has a single electric truck. But it’s an open question whether towns even exist now anyway, or whether they’re just a collection of social media groups. (And…

Status runs societies. People who glory in anti-establishment protest in their youth fall over themselves for knighthoods in their autumn years. Fake wars against the establishment are one of the fastest routes to…

The piece Waleed Aly wrote about justice 6 years ago is still so important. Do people notice the increasing, even violent righteousness that is dominating how we respond to things now? The Tesla attacks are a great…

For those still wallowing in memes about fascism and Nazis, here are the 4 main aims of Project 2025, the blueprint Trump is following. 1) Restoring the family “as the centerpiece of American life”. 2) Dismantling the…

Hilarious, the man who wants to spend half a trillion dollars on nuclear reactors Australia doesn’t even need thinks spending on health and education is a ‘waste’ of money. The cuts to the public service he wants would…

Last night a local councillor described net zero as climate 'extremism'. Giving people the vote is the dumbest thing humanity ever did.

It won't be long now until the clown car drives off the road all by itself. No need for you to become a violent gang member and head out to loot and burn anything. No threat of fascism or Nazis, that's all cartoon…

Ah Jacinta, sprung. You can find terrific photos of local councillors in some towns doing the same.…

Last night’s meeting was a bearpit. Bathurst is heading for a very nasty collision, on rates. I wish I could comment more on that. My personal view is add up how much you spend on recreation (including travel), dining…

Zoom out and look at the ridiculous world we’re now living in. A council is offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to install an EV charger, at no cost to the town, and the council votes it down because a majority of…

You could just not post a picture of your baby at all. People know what a dummy is. Everything from the tiniest, most intimate and personal trivia through to our professional and political lives is being actually lived…

The UK's energy system is privatised. It also has nuclear power. The whole thing is such a train wreck that a growth industry there now is energy theft, with ordinary people and organised crime finding ways to steal…

Gig culture when focused specifically on business is called a gig economy. The transformation of the adult world of work into fleeting ‘gigs’, usually mediated through online platforms. Like a nation of backpackers.…

I see Peter Dutton is trying to get the welcome to country fired up as a last-ditch election issue. Some local councillors are passionate about it too. I agree, let’s get rid of all of these signs, they cost a fortune.

I took this yesterday, to capture everybody’s two favourite things. Tesla and local government 😉 (Plus that beautiful blue sky in the building facade.) Spot the wankpanzer revving up through the gears to try to get…

Reform UK, the UK’s One Nation, just dominated local government elections there (like our State elections - the UK doesn’t have States). It did that by doing what Trump did in the US, targeting the lower socio-economic…

Something I posted about here a few weeks ago. Ordinary petrol and diesel cars have been getting so quiet in recent decades, they've had to pipe fake engine noise even into the BMW M5, to satisfy those who like the…

In Australia household solar generates more electricity than all of our coal-fired power stations combined. And it’s still growing at an enormous rate. That was thanks to John Howard, who introduced the subsides for…

One of my favourite examples of how suggestible and manipulable people are. When wind turbines first appeared in the Central West, most people didn’t care, while for others councils even built viewing platforms to see…

Like being at a Council meeting.

Australian banks are bastards. Almost the worst offering of fixed mortgage rates in the world. They offload all risk to customers. Nearly the entire ‘cost of living crisis’ is our variable mortgage rates. And petrol and…

There are still people who think we overdid it for Covid (people who don’t understand exponential growth and pandemics). If a pandemic influenza emerges, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Killing machines, mortality rates…

One of the great myths of democracy is the idea of ‘the people’ or ‘the community’. There is no such thing. A tiny handful of activists stir up trouble, and then attribute that trouble to ‘the community’. We see that…

Nearly everybody moans about 'red tape' and 'bureaucracy'. That's because people are mostly pretty dumb. Right now that red tape and those bureaucrats are giving Trump the kicking that's needed to save American society.…

Our seats-based governance means it really matters if you can target locations rather than ideas. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

The Tesla Model 3 and Model Y are the least stolen vehicles in America. That’s delberate design at work again, they’re extremely difficult cars to steal. Every movement of a potential thief is captured automatically by…

An Australian senator. I can think of some councillors at local government level who have similar wet dreams.

Bathurst’s councillors still wrestling with the issue of revenue. I encourage everybody to go to the iPart website and have a look at the special rate variations approved for just about every Council in the State over…

All local Councils are externally audited every single year, by the NSW Audit Office. They also undergo separate and regular external performance audits, and have external auditors and audit committees scrutinise their…

Early Council meeting today, probably another fight. One of the most frustrating things about kidult culture is its general attitude of ‘chill’, of ‘have fun’. Until doing that for years and taking no responsibility for…

And there it is. The US push to dramatically increase defence spending is a push from its weapons manufacturers to drum up more customers. That's the US way, privatise basic public services and then shamelessly…

Meet Big Rob. One of the social media warriors taking over governance of our societies. Trump is the godfather of all of these opinionated numpties, their hero. They’re righteous, stupid, and often abusive and violent.…

The most important room in Bathurst. Council’s records archive, dating back to first European settlement. This is the ‘red tape’ opinionated windbags complain about, that actually runs societies. Without this room…

When Rod’s not busy getting very rich being a permanent teenage rock star, he’s being a permanent little boy, building model railroads, and complaining to his local council about potholes in the roads to his vast estate.

Bathurst Our Town doesn’t celebrate the lives of great engineers or teachers or nurses or tradies who die. But musicians, yes. Because they’re like our gods. Kidult culture. What Bathurst Our Town does most is give…

Bureaucracy is the only democracy. Everything else is just a pissing contest, for status.

As the boomers have aged, their enormous demographic clout has gradually removed all of the public services they benefited from, for free, in education, health care, energy etc. That’s what the privatisation push was.…

If you’re getting solar, do a shade analysis before buying (good installers will do it for you). For example this mighty tree in my street was factored into our system. By 3.30 most winter days, it shades our entire…

Rousseau said a society has all of its habits at once. When we destroyed public health by ‘living with’ Covid, we destroyed all of it. Vax rates down for every disease now, and millions convinced they can infect their…

I’ve had a day with multiple reminders of the kidult bullshit those at the front-line of actual provision of basic public services have to deal with. I know it annoys some to speak of kidult culture - well folks, come…

A retired couple who own a $2 million home and with other assets of nearly half a million dollars would still qualify for an annual aged pension of over $41,000 per year. And look at the growth rates along the bottom…

Betsey was a member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and formerly Chief Economist at the Deparment of Labor. Here she’s noticing the destruction of adult, institutional culture by kidult culture. The enemy is…

Comments by a Bathurst councillor last night calling out misinformation and disinformation movements, referring to a program on ABC’s Compass. This is the issue of our time, the Trumpian populist tricks that shock jocks…

NSW only recently had local government elections. Social media Bathurst isn’t happy with who won, so is now trying to mobilise more ongoing abuse aimed at the Council. People really should pay attention to how kidult…

If you work at the front line of public service, the thing you will overwhelmingly notice is that what humans do above all else is complain. That complaint in turn is driven by the status games I often talk about.…

Why do taxpayers pay for new airports? They long ago stopped owning any planes or airlines. It's a huge subsidy to airlines and freight companies. Some analysts also see airports as stranded assets nobody will want,…

Just one of the fringe loon groups targeting local government in particular, wasting vast amounts of Council time with their endless requests, a deliberate strategy. These are gullible, simple-minded people targeted by…

It’s Council meeting day. I feel this particularly on these days, the kidults storm the building.

Another example of social change. Remember the huge to-do about reducing urban speed limits to 50? Now barely rates a mention. If you drive through these areas now at 50, you can directly feel that 60 was much too fast,…

People can be such gullible numpties. When they built the wind towers near Blayney, people were so excited to see them they even had to build a viewing platform. Then the National Party was in crisis, after Barnaby…

For those sceptical that Trump is actually re-animating the King and court model of governance, not ‘fascism’, the gold is the giveaway.

This is my bread and butter every day. The Council will no doubt cop a bashing, but read it and you’ll see the obvious cause is that some wally fell over, and then sued Council for a huge sum. This is kidult culture…

People spend all day defaming councils online. I'd be a bit more hesitant about that from now on, if I were them.

How well do you really understand the town you live in? Victoria right now is looking for a ‘sovcit’ (sovereign citizen) who murdered two police officers. Lithgow has already had a sovcit siege. The ‘March for…

What Chirs Bowen should also point out to counter the idiot ‘when the sun doesn’t shine’ social media slogan is, we’re ASLEEP mostly when the sun doesn’t shine. We don’t need anywhere near as much energy then. Even…

Anybody dealing with the public now is feeling this every day. They’re under assault. As the article says, it got a lot worse after the lockdowns. Often this is given as a reason we shouldn’t have locked down, but then…

Nampijinpa Price got the boot yesterday, from her own side. One of Australia’s leading Trumpians. For Bathurst residents it’s worth noting she’s also a pin-up poster girl for the social media-led coalition dominating…

Javier Milei is another Trumpian, who promised to take a chainsaw in Argentina to what all Trumpians see as the enemy. Government. It’s been an absolute disaster. Now relying upon loans from the IMF and US to the tune…

There are 2 Denyers available to view tonight. I'd choose Deal or No Deal, this other one is a rerun of a boring program from before the last local government election.

As somebody who has worked as a governance professional for a quarter of a century now, it’s this sort of basic fact about democracies which I think is lost on just about everybody. ‘Authoritarian’ and ‘democratic’…

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-04/cost-of-living-pressures-on-ratepayers-as-qld-councils-up-rates/105833630?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link

As another week begins in local government, another week of constant abuse from members of the community, I thought this was timely. You can see here that all councils, everywhere, are financially collapsing. Not…

This huge event in town for the past 2 days has been organised and run brilliantly by 3 Council staff. Just 3. Why only 3? Because local Trumpians have determined Councils waste money, so it’s a now a fire sale of staff…

This happened in Lithgow on Friday. Cut water to much of the town for the weekend. I know people resent the idea of kidult culture, but it was another classic example of it. What was the overwhelming response, from the…

Two experiences yesterday that give a flavour of working in local government. One was trying to think of a way to rescue ducklings trapped in a fountain. The other a long phone call tirade from a resident about Council…

People love the 2025 version. The same attempt by Council to green George Street recently was met with widespread whining and resistance. The difference? Towns now are really competing social media groups, who latch…

I’ve worked in governance for a quarter of a century. In my experience, every single person who advocates for democracy being run by ‘the people’ has never worked 5 minutes in actual governance in their life. Nor have…

It took all of one day for rare earths to become the new battleground between rival social teams. Western democracies bring this on themselves with the idea communities or ‘the people’ run nations. All that does is turn…

House prices in Australia. You can see the exact time the catastrophe started. Not coincidentally the reign of the ‘lying rodent’ (his party’s own words), John Howard. Also the time we began bashing migrants, another of…

Not much thought goes into anything in public life now. For example the idea that Councils should raise their own money. Just think even for one second, the perversity of the idea of government (at whatever level)…

The same demographic trend but now looked at via the birth rates. You can see from the 1970s, fertility rates went into free fall. The 1970s was the decisive shift away from adult-centred life, the countercultural…

The National Party's push to turn windmills into a regional political issue could end up costing councils a fortune in wasted legal fees, if they get involved. Tamworth Council for example has just had a judge more or…

Dr John isn’t a medical doctor, though a large part of his success is allowing people to believe that. He influences millions. Had a young woman turn up to work to tell me that Council should be spreading Dr John’s news…

Most of what looks like 'community concern' in public debate today is really 'astroturfing'. Corporations, political parties, elected members of councils, and think tanks target a handful of loons in local communities…

Close up of springs in an anglepoise lamp. More generally called balanced-arm lamps. I’ve posted about these before, and how the human body operates via a similar principle, though using a different mechanism. These…

It’s belief in ‘the people’ as an actual thing that destroys all democracies, all republics. All populist utopias. Every attempt to lead a society somewhere is seen as a tyranny, against which an insurrection is then…

Two things to see here. One, the energy/climate debate is a fake debate. The entire industry already decided the answer years ago. It doesn’t matter whether your political team disagrees, it’s irrelevant. Second, the…

Tonight Bathurst’s councillors decide the fate of the general manager. There is a strong belief amongst the social media crowd that removing the general manager will find a magical extra $10-$15 million a year. It’s…

Somebody wrote a very smart pushback to the populist political surge in local government, in Bathurst. The Facebook invasion. The only thing I’d add to this is that General Managers implement the decisions of elected…

Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister are masterpieces, but are also terribly understood in what they show. Humphrey is almost universally understood through a modern American lens, as ‘red tape’ bureaucratic obstruction.…

All sides of politics talk nonsense about debts and deficits in government spending. Governments create money, they don't need to tax or borrow to have it. And as you can see in the actual data, governments go into…

Saw a lot of this sort of thing after the storms in Bathurst, with truckloads of abuse for Council staff. The 'nature strip' or verge (road reserve) is indeed Council land, and sometimes it plants trees there. If those…

I wasn't unhappy to learn that Andrew Tate lost a lot of money in the current Bitcoin slide. Alan Kohler's assessment of crypto more generally is spot on. The Trump family uses it for what it is, a giant Ponzi…

From the Council courtyard, firsthand example of one of Tony Rinaudo’s underground forests. A tree was chopped down in the courtyard a couple of years ago. It continues to live underground, now it’s re-shooting. His…

The idea that modern governments need to collect tax from you so that they have money to spend is ridiculous, and centuries out of date. The money you have is not, despite what politicians say, ‘your’ money. All money…

I do know people hate our culture being described as kidult. It’s not an insult, it’s only a description of how the culture operates. (It is also a disaster, but that’s different to it being an insult.) Twee…

Less than 24 hours, and the culture of the feels has kicked in with the crowdfunding. No question that he saved lives, but the precedent here is deeply problematic. For so many years we were told ‘not to take the law…

Singapore's Polyclinics are probably the future of healthcare. The great logjam in the Australian system is actually the GP. GP practices are fairly small, don't cover a large range of health services and often act more…

Work Christmas party today. Hundreds packed into an inside space. I’ll be the only one there in a mask, which many will find weird. Because we now live in a culture where what you think and how you act is shaped…

In my recovery I’m thinking again about my social media use, from 2026. I’m tired of debates and arguments over basic things with friends and family. The societies we grew up in had institutionalised expertise that took…

I share this not as medical advice, though it was medical advice to me, from senior Covid specialists and researchers. If you go to your GP with Covid, you’ll probably get told to take some Panadol, drink plenty of…

Let me plug again why you should have air purifiers at home. My favourite - the IKEA Starkvind. Unbeatable on cost, less than $200 for the freestanding model or $250 for the version that also acts as a brilliant coffee…

All Councils have their accounts independently audited each year, by law, by the NSW Audit Office. The results are published for public viewing.

It is nice when somebody else says things you're not allowed to say in your job. Not as exciting as a narrative that goes 'bloody Council pulled out, and the business community stepped up to do it for them'. But there…

Who knew that crowdfunding was a mass movement of mobilised stupidity? I don’t go anywhere near mass crowdfunding things, no jeans for genes, or red noses, or bandaged bears. All adolescent cutesie things that nobody…

Reading the comments on this one, worth pointing out that the State government designs, builds and maintains all highways, including the parts of highways that run through towns. And all traffic lights on highways.…

We should have been highly sceptical from the start that the financial industry was asked to determine how much super people need in retirement. It's very lucrative business for them. The 'comfortable' rating for…

Great publicity for Lithgow. Councils don’t have enough money to fix or build basic infrastructure now. People don’t want to have the conversation, but pay far more for personal recreation, travel and dining out/take…

This stuff is dishonest. Firstly it uses the most expensive electricity in the country, in fast-chargers, up to 70c/kWh. That's more than twice what many pay at home for electricity, and more than 10 times what you pay…

A personal post, a bit long, but a rare one about me, the person. I know many people who avoid the news, feeling that the world is too depressing and they don’t see a way out of the numerous problems societies are…

This very interesting graph compares the cost of driving 100km for petrol and EV, at different prices for electricty. Yellow is one of the EV rates of 6c/kWh now on offer from some retailers. Blue is an average grid…

Personally I think we need to see more of this. The ‘sovereign citizens’ and other loons who bog down basic services with their ridiculous conspiracies and funded slogans in areas like renewables, Covid and basic town…

An election year for local government, and these groups are continuing to set agendas for towns. Illiterate, ignorant. The surge of bats has been gone for almost two months. The other dimwit is looking for somewhere to…

You won’t find a State or town in the country who has anywhere near enough money to provide the basic services people demand, like repairing these roads. We as the public need to start to make some tough decisions about…

How progressive tax works is one more thing I think has been lost in public understanding in our time. We have a progressive tax system, where there are increasing rates of tax as you earn more, because that way each…

The ‘live with the virus’ slogan has driven a huge escalation in anti-vax beliefs and behaviour. We’re told that vaccinations will protect us from Covid, but nobody is getting them. And they’re also stopping their…

Heat is easily the greatest killer of all natural disasters. And extreme heat is growing very fast, every year is breaking records from the year before. Councils are having to plan ways to try to cool towns down. It’s…

I find many are unaware of political strategy. The Nats had lost a lot of farmers, because the party became addicted to fossil fuel and mining dollars. Now they’ve found a way to marry those two together, by whipping up…

Some politicians will tell you superannuation is 'your money', so you should be able to withdraw it whenever you like. That's a lie designed to destroy the super system. Look at those tax rates, a huge portion of your…

Next time you see protests anywhere about Council rates, it's worth noting that the 2022 floods in NSW caused damage to over 13,000km of roads. That's enough road to cross Australia 4 times. Those roads were already…

And another climate event. Beyond the capacity of councils to afford. Meanwhile communities spend a huge proportion of their weekly incomes on personal entertainment, dining out and travel, and then complain when…

Prices on EVs are still tumbling. This is the long-range Tesla Model 3, over 600 km on a charge. Dual electric motors, one per axle, so accelerates like a rocket ship too. Nearly $10,000 off now on this model.

Look where they used to build public housing. Some of it is still active. It's a tremendous asset for government, not a cost. n some areas tenants could even buy it at cheap rates, outside the idiot 'market'.…

I did the Bathurst Council meeting last night, and can’t comment more than that. But in neighbouring Orange you can see the sorts of things that now dominate politics at all levels, while societies collapse around us.…

From the late-1970s, a political movement created what we today call 'the economy'. To replace what we previously called society. Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the big drivers of the shift. Thatcher said 'there…

I've often posted about how 'the economy' isn't even a thing. It's a political invention designed to replace public life with the dominant cultural form humanity has used for nearly all of its history - feudalism. How…

Singapore has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world. How did it do it? Public housing, built by the government. Every newlywed is offered a cheap apartment, on a 99-year lease. 80% of the country now…

This is the very good reason Council has kept the park closed for the past few months. Happening with lots of trees.

Rod decided to do his own road repairs, because his Ferrari kept bottoming-out (we all feel for him). Part of a trend that’s obvious everywhere. No money for councils to fix roads, the public and their 5-car families…

This is the social media business model (not a joke, this is actually it). 1. Offer people a way to network socially. This is like social heroin for people, irresistible. 2. Transform that network into an economy of…

Ben Chilfley Dam, autumn. Social media warriors blame the Council, and say ‘it’s only on the edge of the dam’. The world is cooking. And is full of dumb cookers. Never swim with blue-green algae, unless you want motor…

This is a social catastrophe that still has a long way to run. Cities and towns (including Bathurst) can’t even house essential workers. The standard idea that it’s all a problem of ‘supply’ isn’t right. It’s a lack of…

In Norway, super doesn’t cost you a cent. Instead they set high rates for royalties for their oil production, and fund the entire scheme with that. Currently the scheme has about $450,000 per person saved, for every…

Boy jumps from bridge. Dies. Crowdfunding launched before the body is even cold. (How vulgar is crowdfunding now? Disgusting.) Council asked to take more measures to stop idiots jumping off bridge. How about a sign that…

Council does ok for people who just stand around leaning on their shovels all day.

So far we've paid $10 billion to the UK and US, for them to use on their own nuclear production facilities. And we're also taking their nuclear waste. They saw a sucker coming when ScoMo inked this deal. Right up there…

Keep an eye out for news about the bird flu outbreaks in the US. Now in cattle and cats, and also humans. It’s when viruses cross into humans from animals and then jump from human to human that they can become…

US houses are less than half the cost of Australian houses, relative to incomes. How do they do it? It's not the market at work. American housing is nationalised, government provides the capital to banks through…

Every autumn and winter is a gardening challenge, because massive trees over the road in a schoolyard deposit literally cubic metres of leaves up our driveway. Every year I use a leaf blower to deposit them back in the…

Most local councils are tens of millions of dollars short of having enough money to do even basic road maintenance. Climate change will now make many roads unusable. Meanwhile the public, hypnotised by social media,…

This is a trend gaining real speed. Child-free spaces, on holidays, in restaurants etc. In societies that already have plummeting birth rates. The focus is recreational lifestyles, free of the ‘interference’ of…

At work a few weeks back, a young woman appeared at the counter. She said the community needed to know a message from John Campbell about Vitamin D, and what could Council do to get the message out? Campbell is a Covid…

The pushback against travel is accelerating. Because the stupidity of travel is also accelerating, at exponential rates. Even domestically people are flocking to every event and tourist location, at…

I can’t really talk about Council business, but a couple of important general points about Mount Panorama. Council doesn’t run the racing events, and therefore isn’t entitled to a huge share of the revenue from those…

In a week dominated by the question of violence against women, the Council of Europe provides an excellent summary on the topic. “There is no single factor that can explain gender-based violence in our societies, but…

Good. But much simpler to just cancel all HECS debts. If a person earns more because they have a degree (something quite rare now), they already pay more tax. Ridiculous to tax them twice, it’s a tax on education.…

A technical guy I know recently bought a BYD Seal. A no-nonsense bloke. His review below (note he uses standard grid power to charge at home, you can get much cheaper rates again than what he's using). I got a BYD Seal…

This sets the locals off. Like Council puts the algae in the dam, or something. Welcome to climate change, blue-green algae in mid-autumn. The dam had only just reopened from the last algae alert. Quite a beautiful…

Armidale. Applied for a special rate variation (SRV) of 58.8% last year. This was on top of a 10.5% SRV it had approved in 2021-22. It was approved because the independent regulator saw that the Armidale Council had…

This is Johnny McEntee, one of Trump’s closest fanboy staffers. Responsible for hiring and firing Trump’s staff during his presidency, and predicted to head up ‘Project 2025’ if Trump wins again. Project 2025 includes…

With the September local government elections hurtling towards us and candidates beginning to campaign, just a reminder how the last notable election decided by social media turned out.

I can’t talk about Council business. But I can comment on FB fun fairs. I notice the main FB French Revolution team has now split into two warring factions with visceral hatred for each other. I think that symbolises…

The Unsatisfactory Husbands Club. Thought this was very powerful, I’ve posted a lot about love and how little I think we understand it, thinking of it as a feeling. The stories of these couples shows what happens when…

Very real, driven by social media from extremist groups in the US and State-sponsored groups from Russia. Your local Council has to deal with this every day now.

Wyoming. Remember this every time somebody complains about maybe having to cut back on their take away food and travel spending, to pay more rates.

In the energy debates, lots of mention of 'baseload power'. The public is encouraged to believe this is the minimum amount of 24/7 power that is needed to keep society running. That's not baseload power. Baseload is…

It can be very frustrating to not be allowed to comment on your own work publicly. But I can at least say it’s worth noting this amazing festival is put together by THREE PEOPLE. What reward do Council workers get for…

Lithgow Council pushing back hard here. And it’s a Nationals-led Council, in a LNP seat.

One turn of these big wind turbines generates enough electricity to power 5 homes for a whole day. Only one rotation. Just one of these can power 5000 homes, day and night.

As a man of course there’s a continuous battle with maturity. When you’re doing the stocktake at Council stores, and the plumbing section lists cocks, lubricants and nipples in consecutive order, the struggle is real.

I’m ending my working life in local government. And am more happy with that choice every day. Meaningful work, unlike jobs where you just sit around in meetings all day discussing bits of paper that never lead to…

I share energy things because many of the public are missing out on the fantastic innovation out there, living in a fog of social media propaganda. One of the great things about Tesla is their superb software. Whether…

Studying history gives whole new perspectives to the present. Right now the US is like ancient Rome. Rome had a republic, what we’d call a democracy today. It was a complete disaster, nothing but violence and blood and…

I’ve studied social media since it began. It’s both the most seductive thing humanity has ever invented, and the most dangerous. It’s classic bait-and-switch, the platforms vacuumed up whole populations, by offering…

Loved this from Transurban: "...a state-owned tolling entity would add a level of bureaucracy without benefiting motorists." The same Transurban who spent $36 billion building the tollways, and is charging taxpayers…

Those who look at what’s happening in the US politically with horror, need to carefully assess the teams at this year’s local government elections in NSW. Local government is where a lot of the Trump base target local…

Maybe it’s working so long in governance that makes me see and think this. But when you watch professional sport, who are by far the most skilled people out there on the court or field? It’s the referees. By far. The…

Here’s an example of how social media took over the world. It’s a bait-and-switch operation. First it offered us the bait of ways to ‘connect’ with our friends and family. It then sold us as data, to media companies and…

Because government actively suppress this information now. Epidemic diseases come in waves, we’re currently on the downslope (again). This is the time people stay ‘see? It’s over’. Which then generates the next up-wave.…

As somebody who works in governance, the greatest danger by far to human life is what is sometimes called populism. Governing only by what is popular. It sounds harmless, even democratic. Try raising your kids or…

List of special rate variations approved in NSW in the 2023-24 period. There have been 7 more Councils since. The basic services people want and need have to be paid for.

Had to do a quick run Into Sydney yesterday, and always find being on the roads gives some of the best insights into human behaviour. Like these newer adjustable speed limits. A great idea, when they monitor traffic…

It’s disingenuous to say to young people today that their parents also had high house repayments. The relative price of houses between then and now is literally chalk and cheese. The fabled ‘we paid 17% interest rates’…

You can check who your candidates are for the upcoming local government elections here, in NSW:…

All of the things described as problems in this article are the things I use to remove our energy costs completely. Smart meters rock (I asked to have one years ago). Time of use rates rock. A home battery gives you the…

Social media is such a sewer, that in 14 Council areas they couldn’t even get enough people to run. They see the all-out assault elected people receive, from social media mobs. I know fine people in our own areas who…

Is your town about to be run by a Facebook group? Do you know the actual beliefs of the founders of that group? Do you think a FB group has any idea how to run a town? Has the group’s success been just slagging off the…

The origins of local government are fascinating. it wasn’t invented as some way to give local people a voice, or any of that other democracy claptrap. It was mostly invented to control disease. It’s a public health…

I watched (livestream) the meet the candidates session at the RSL club this week, for the local elections. Many repeated the line often that there needs to be more ‘consultation’ with the community. The thing as a…

Council pounds and animal shelters are overflowing. If you want a pet, please rescue one from one of those locations.

One of the social media sports is to mock the local council about potholes and roadworks. People seriously imagine Council employees come to work every day, and say ‘let’s not fix the roads.’ Like a Council needs…

Another social media favourite when sinking the boot into Council workers would be to have a superior chuckle at the circle of guys just ‘standing around’ while one does all the work. Nobody ever explains how you’d get…

The Bathurst 1000 will never be a river of gold for Bathurst Council because it’s not a Council event. Council owns the track, not the event. It gets a track hire fee, but not some enormous cut of the race revenue,…

Reading some of the social media around upcoming LG elections. ‘Councils should be run more like a business’, that’s an old favourite. Councils are nothing like a business. They’re a government. They provide services,…

This is what answering a Council switchboard is like, every single day.

This is the reason anti-EV and anti-renewable piffle proliferates on social media. Collapsing fossil fuel companies fund it, to try to maintain their status. It's over, they're just trying to buy time.

Brought to you by the incompetence and corruption of local government.

I’d be sceptical about the fitness industry’s claims about ‘core strength’. The core is not a group of muscles (usually they mean the abdominals). That part of our body is a sophisticated interplay of a range of things,…

Social media connects people like this to each other, making them a powerful political force of rank stupidity. Before social media they were just isolated individuals in the community. Even local government elections…

Still lots of counting to go. But in both Bathurst and Lithgow, the local government election has so far produced the same pattern we’re seeing at State and federal levels. The equivalent of a ‘hung parliament’, with no…

My favourite post-election saying is ‘the people have spoken’. Many winners say that. Even some losers. Forgetting the people also spoke for the other candidates who got elected, and even the ones who lost. And the same…

The main reason we’re seeing a massive influx of bats to places like Bathurst is still the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires. Those fires destroyed enormous amounts of native habitat. Bats are actually a main way that…

We’re about to enter that time when people elected to Councils with their dreams and big plans collide with the reality of running a town. It’s always the same equation. Services cost money. Money comes from rates. You…

Policing, teaching, nursing, doctoring, aged care, local government. Etc. All the essential services are in a state of collapse. Not only is it impossible to now do these jobs, the people who stick with them are under…

For those who don't follow these things, the new Bathurst Council: Ben Fry Jac Underwood Sophie Wright Natalie Cranston Stumpy Taylor Warren Aubin Elaine West Tony Gullifer Jess Jennings

Local government elections are over. There will be ony two ways forward from here, no matter who was elected. Higher rates, or lower services. There is no magic bucket of money hidden by ‘corruption’ or ‘incompetence’.…

Bathurst elects its next Mayor and Deputy Mayor today, streamed live for your viewing pleasure from 2pm, on the Bathurst Regional Council YouTube page. (Link below.) The stream will come online a bit before 2, and just…

One interesting thing to consider when buying a car (which should be an EV of course), is insurance. Teslas for example are expensive to insure. But it’s not an EV thing, becaue BYDs cost about half as much to insure.…

One of the profound changes EVs bring is the degree of remote control and diagnostics drivers have. Tesla pioneered this with the extraordinary Tesla app (which if you have a Tesla home battery also integrates with your…

There's a bizarre idea that 'bureaucrats' come to work every day, sit down and think hmmm, what new rules can we invent today? All rules happen for the same reason. 1. Because people are demanding. 2. Because people…

We're particularly casual about infecting children with Covid. And it's now playing out. In Finland death rates for those between 5 and 9 are up 250%. Deaths of babies 0-4 are up 38%. Australia refuses to even vaccinate…

I challenge the now common idea that this sort of thing is ‘community concerns’. Having seen this from the inside in local government too. So often it’s a handful of local activists, stirring up shit, usually through…

Origin is another energy company offering amazing electricity rates to EV owners. 8c/kWh, that’s about $5 to fill the ‘tank’ of an EV. Have a look at the difference, it will cost you at least 15 times that to fuel a…

I had a look at Origin's new subscription model the other day. Very interesting, you get to trial any car they have on their list, and can switch it with 30 days' notice if you want to try another one. Gives you an…

This is the sort of rank populism that plays well in our times. ‘Get rid of red tape!’ The problem with that idea is that the people who say it have no idea how things get practically done. ‘Bureaucracy’ is just the…

Technical issue on Council's switchboard this morning. I wonder if Leanne's job is posting to FB?

Thought I’d capture some of the corruption and incompetence of council on my way into work today. Video with audio.

Back to the marginal cost curve for renewables, to one of the miracles of our lives. SWB = solar, wind, batteries. You can see that the lowest cost SWB grid generates between 3 to 5 times *more* energy than our entire…

If you wonder why we ended up 'living with' a pandemic, when you read Scott Morrison's true passions, it'll become clear to you why he wasn't focused for one second on the basics of running a country. Like disease…

Sometimes it just takes a moment to pause and reflect. I don’t transact personal life much on here, because I think it’s profoundly unhealthy that these platforms have captured our social lives. Increasingly all of our…

Anyone working in local government will chuckle reading this one. All the ridiculous idealistic rubbish about ‘community’, in complete contrast with how people actually behave together. Societies are status games, not…

The Trump team imploding before he’s even sworn in. Those looking for entertainment closer to home could do worse than watching how local social media stars are faring in local government.

This is the side of solar that is less spoken about. Every person you see with solar panels on their roof is a mini power station. They’re providing some of the electricity you use, and they used their own money to…

You have to watch this show. (SBS has it streaming on demand.) Guy Martin is one of the UK’s leading petrol heads, ex-motorcycle racer. Lovely, funny guy. This doco is so entertaining, and shows him exploring the world…

The dog v cat person thing. I like both animals. But from working in local government, I can say there are 100 complaints about dogs for every complaint about a cat. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a complaint…

The people who scour YouTube and other online forums looking for reasons to deny the emergency of climate change need to spend a day with the road crews in local councils. Humans have zero chance of surviving dramatic…

When a commercial plane flies, it occupies an area in space. But it also occupies an envelope of time. A schedule. This spaces planes out to allow them all to fly as quickly and as safely as possible. This is a key…

I don’t like over-ripe fruit. I like fruit to be firm, even crunchy (like a good crunchy pear). Eating a super-ripe piece that dribbles down your chin - gross. The same for bananas, once they start to get really ripe…

The 'NSW Government’s Stronger Country Communities program' is a vote-buying slush fund, as most grant schemes are. Government first strips essential funding, then hands it back in much smaller novelty cheques precisely…

Regional areas are expected to need another 11,000 GPs in the next decade. 50,000 teachers are also expected to leave teaching in the next TWO years. Try finding a tradie to do anything without waiting months. This day…

Working for local government is a bit of a hiding to nothing thing. Everybody almost universally hates it, and treats you with contempt. The pay is some of the worst in the job market. And there’s no funding, to do…

Paul Toole benefited from being in government for his time as member to date, showering his electorates with millions in novelty cheques, in true Nationals pork-barrelling style. It’s given him an aura of getting things…

For those interested in solar and EVs, it’s a full-time job keeping on top of the amount of BS social media generates about them. Here’s another myth, that solar panels cause a disturbing number of house fires.…

Yup. The worst failure of governance in all Australian history.

Councils have no money, and their staff are walking out the door in search of higher salaries. The only way they can afford this sort of additional charge is to charge higher rates, for which they'll then be blamed. In…

When you get solar installed, a good installer will give you projections of how much you will generate per day, for every month of the year. This is ours, for those interested. They’ll also give you an estimate of how…

Think I may have posted this before. It’s from Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlin’s book ‘On Kings’, published shortly before both of their passings. They were leading anthropologists. Both thought monarchies were the…

Social media's assault on democracies continues. Mostly engineered by activist loons in the US, who organised and directed most of the 'Dictator Dan' rubbish in Victoria, for example, through social media. In Bathurst…

Preface: I like dogs. But I think the reason they're so enormously popular is one not often spoken about. I was thinking about it while watching Get Back, the Beatles film. The band were fighting, on the point of…

I was watching The Drum yesterday, and something about this person, Sandy Chong, didn’t seem quite right. (She’s the CEO of the Australian Hairdressing Council.) Her skin didn’t look real, just a featureless area of…

A plug for the Tesla battery, they've done a superb job with it and much of the genius of it is in the in-built AI. For example, if you have an electricity plan that is time-of-use, where you pay different rates for…

New York had 10 inches of rain today. It’s still raining. In local government there’s already no money to fix this sort of damage. It’s only going to get much, much worse.

This is so interesting. Where vaccination rates are high, for any disease, deaths from malignant cancer are lower. Cancer is (I’m sure, based on research underway globally for a while) heavily caused by infections. As…

You really should watch this. The outrageous story (that some of us have lived firsthand) of the privatisation of the pubic service, through outsourcing to the big 4 consulting firms. More than 15,000 public servants…

“Deaths among young Americans documented in employee life insurance claims should alone set off alarms. Among working people 35 to 44 years old, a stunning 34% more died than expected in the last quarter of 2022, with…

Watch the first few minutes of last night's Bathurst Council meeting. This is happening in Councils everywhere. https://www.youtube.com/live/STvFqPF05-I?feature=share

Lots of good sense here about housing, an area of Australian life with traditionally no sense at all. Anybody who tells you 'supply' is the issue is part of the problem. Note the important point that Councils approve…

There is only one answer to the housing and rental crisis. And it’s also simple. Governments need to become property developers again. They need to build and sell and rent lots of houses, at much lower rates than the…

After WW2, fewer than half of Australians owned their own home. Menzies wanted to change that. He knew 'the market' wouldn't achieve it (it hadn't ever), so what did he do? He made the government build LOTS of public…

If you want to understand why so many local councils are raising rates, have a look at the data here. And Google ‘vertical fiscal imbalance’. Social media as always will mostly be your worst possible guide. (My views on…

Everybody loves a pile-on, on local government. Some food for thought. In the past 25 years councils have had to assume a whole range of community services that nobody else would provide. They now offer up to 150…

The huge amount of electricty renewables are producing during the day is making energy retailers charge huge amounts in peak times. That makes batteries even more financially viable, if you use them during peaks times,…

I admire that people will basically bankrupt themselves, rather than admit the solution to this is sitting right under their noses. The same people who love 'Australian Made' campaigns. Except for energy, where sending…

The Big 4 consulting firms that incompetent senior managers in every industry and in government throw billions at every year are like the Wild West. No regulation, everybody is a partner because that way they escape any…

The grid is changing fundamentally, have a look. It’s no longer a one-way grid, where the electricity flows from power stations to homes and businesses. It’s two-way, most of the energy is actually now generated at…

The problem is easy to see, and nobody wants to admit it. Social media is a disaster for societies, a 24/7 assault on the trust that holds them together. It makes all views equivalent, the most pig-ignorant, bigoted…

Peer-to-peer electricity trading may be coming. It's like 'Uber' energy. What this means is somebody like me, who has lots of surplus electricity every day, would be able to sell it to friends and family at heavily…

The bats are an increasing issue not just for Bathurst, but many other towns. The Botanic Gardens in Sydney used a novel approach to drive them out about a decade ago (not sure how it's going now), and it's not simple…

Having a home battery opens up many doors, not just your own use. Amber Electric one of the new companies that allow ordinary people to access wholesale electricity, rather than retail. This can be a way to make big…

Who remembers petrol at 70 cents per litre? It’s currently about $2.17. If you convert electricty costs to cents per litre, filling an EV costs about 40 cents per litre. And that’s using grid electricty, which is…

I'm thinking about setting up on LocalVolts, so we can sell our surplus energy to friends and family at much reduced rates to what they're paying electricity retailers right now. Have a look, only a short vid.

CSU was the worst I’ve ever seen for meetings. Every day full of them, from beginning to end. It wasn’t always like that, changes at the top end brought total incompetence at that level, and the organisation spent all…

Tesla Powerwall sales in Australia are booming. The thing I love about the Amber wholesale company is that it allows people with batteries to sell their excess power into the grid at peak times, which is the only time…

The smart thing Tesla understands is that a big part of making the shift to EVs will be a social shift, not engineering. The engineering is a no-brainer, ICEs are rubbish and the sooner they’re gone, the better. Tesla…

PepsiCo’s factory in Australia. Rooftop solar doesn’t just mean homes, it means businesses. Many businesses are doing this not because they have a single ‘Green’ bone in their bodies. They’re doing it because it saves…

Had another person say this week ‘why are you still wearing a mask?’ They asked in the way I know very well, what they mean is ‘nobody else is wearing a mask, why are you?’ Their measure of what to do is what other…

As a local government worker I always appreciate the advice from this FB group on how to run the town. It’s a powerhouse of insight.

One more inspirational insight, if only Council had thought of it. (Most of the bats left weeks ago.)

I’ve had a few people ask me why I’m so critical of social media. There are many reasons, one of which is that my work takes me into places where the direct impact of social media on real world things happens. Like the…

The Shetland Islands for decades has been powered by diesel generators, the top picture. In the middle of 2024, it will shift to being powered entirely by wind. So much wind power that they will export nearly 10 times…

I can retire in 5 years so this stuff doesn’t make me lose sleep at night. But I feel for the people who work for local government who are subjected to nothing but a steady stream of ignorant abuse, day in and day out.…

Think about the logic of this. A test paid for by government is not ‘free’ - it’s OUR money, buying a test for us. What we’ve ended up with instead is us paying twice - once in taxes, and then out of our own wallets at…

Advice from Treasury (yep, pesky bureaucrats) to government about opening up.

Such a good point. WE make the surges. Our ‘it’s all over’, ‘you have to live your life’, ‘we can’t live in a bubble’ behaviour on the way down generates the next surge.

The people who will do best in 2022 will be those who wear a mask, even if government says you don’t have to. And those with no debt. If interest rates go up, many Australians with big mortgages are going to be in a lot…

‘We’re tired of the pandemic, let’s just say it’s over’ is the standard script worldwide now. Another reminder that it’s already killed more people than World War 1, and deaths are still climbing. And that returning to…

'Bureaucrats' are patient, funny people.

"Randwick Council announced on Wednesday night that Malabar, Maroubra, Coogee, Clovelly and La Perouse beaches would also be closed for 24 hours while council lifeguards looked for any further sightings of sharks." One…

Paul Keating, in 1997. Back when we had leaders, and not just marketing men spewing empty slogans at us. Read this and then turn on the news. "The decision to expand NATO by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech…

To this day I struggle with the idea that even Lithgow falls over itself to vote for the National Party. It's testament to the skill of the State LNP in rorting targeted grants that the impression is given that the Nats…

Really good article about regional roads. While federal governments give away hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts, to people who don’t need them, basic infrastructure in every town in Australia is falling apart.…

"More than half of Aussies who took out a new home loan with one of the major banks lied about their circumstances on the advice of their banker to make sure their loan was approved, shocking new research has revealed."…

It's staggering to me that a man who is bone-idle, part of a weird religious cult, and a master at blaming everybody else for things he's supposed to be doing, still rates higher as preferred PM. You have to really be…

When interest rates are close to 0%, house prices go through the roof (ha) because people can afford to take on a lot more debt. It creates a bidding war on properties. So when interest rates go up again, the debts…

Another very senior ex-Liberal saying what I always say, the Liberals are not the party many think they are. Hijacked by pirates. In other news, Australia dropped from 25 in the world to 39, for press freedom.…

Yesterday the PM called basic checks and balances on political power 'public autocracy'. He's been running the (Trump) line that once somebody is elected, they have a 'mandate' to do anything they like. This is what…

Prominent independents have had fake corflutes like this one plastered all over their electorates today. It’s under investigation. If found, the perpetrators face jail time, or a $11,000 fine as a minimum. How pathetic…

Both the US and UK are prey to destructive libertarian (‘freedom’) politics. I reckon the way they’re structured helps explain why. If you look at the electoral regions in both the UK and US, there are so many of them.…

"As one of the countries with the worst transmission rates of COVID-19 in the world, we urgently need a change of mindset to one where reducing the number of cases matters. We must reduce transmission rates, and to do…

Vote for a change to this disaster. I can guarantee you a vote for the LNP is a vote for a continued criminal refusal to do the basic public health work we’ve been doing for 150 years. The second they said a pandemic…

Latest polling suggests the election could go right down to the wire. Unbelievable, as it was last time, that such lethal incompetence as the current government is currently even in the ballpark to win. It will be a…

Thanks to Julia for finding this one. This morning's press conference, with the PM. Claiming all the Covid deaths in Australia are people 'with Covid', rather than them dying from Covid. That's a disgusting lie. Covid…

The problem with democracy as we do it is, that it pays no attention to basic competence. If you go for a job interview or have a performance appraisal at work, how good you actually are at the job is critical. If you…

Governance is my profession. People know I love to talk about stuff here, including why the LNP in 2022 was not just a threat to Australia, but also to itself. The Liberals in particular may not even survive as a party.…

A public service announcement. Because the NSW Government certainly won't tell you.

Another public service announcement. Because Dom is making sure monkeypox isn't in the news either. This from the UK.

Perfect example of a press release from a lobbyist (Property Council of Australia in this case, acting for landlords of commercial property), pretending to be a news story. The whole bloody country is run by property…

Millions of COVID-19 patients may have an undiagnosed, potentially fatal acute kidney disease, according to a new study. University of Queensland researchers say one in five virus patients admitted to hospital and two…

What’s going on in schools and hospitals is a national emergency. It’s hard to know how this all ends, we’re not the country we once were. This is the result of decades of gutting public services and institutions in…

Another hike in interest rates coming today. I think it’s worth remembering that this only matters because much of society has no money and is living off debt. And that this is why the gutting of the living standards of…

Most of the core work local governments do had its origins in public health. Providing clean water, removing sewage, collecting and disposing of garbage, approving buildings, administering local parks and sporting…

Lithgow Council suggesting rate rises of 26.5%, or cutting services. Some very hard questions need to be asked. Also employing expensive financial consultants to do work the large number of very highly paid senior staff…

Covid change in the past 2 weeks, by local government area. Have highlighted Bathurst for reference. Percentage is percentage change in the past 2 weeks. The “1 in” figure on the right is what proportion of the LGA…

People don't get fat because they over-eat, they over-eat because they get fat. An obese person is metabolically 'starved', their body keeps storing fat because it thinks it's starving (and the person feels that as…

“Such a lack of transparency is indicative of a lack of respect for the institutions of government and for the general public who have a right to know how power is allocated.” I criticised this government for years, not…

I like to share vehicle technology, because I’m convinced people are not really aware yet of the revolution underway. Mitsubishi’s new Outlander PHEV (plug-in hybrid) is a case in point. It has an 84km full-electric…

On the after-effects of Covid, as the article says, the deaths months after infection aren't being counted as caused by Covid. The staggering stat for me is that death rates for those of working age, 18-64, are up 40%…

This is the Vogtle nuclear power station in Georgia, USA. The only nuclear power plant the US currently has under construction. For those drunk on the hopium of nuclear power slogans from politicians, here's fun facts…

The next 2-3 years are looking grim for Australian households. Worse than the 1990s recession. All because the Reserve Bank, which believes the economy is a thing, is raising interest rates to stop inflation, by making…

When we watch period dramas, I’m guessing most of us identify ourselves with the main characters, because that’s how the shows are written. But in historical terms, we’re actually the servants in these shows. It’s 2022…

A few people asked me to say a bit more about home batteries. I’ll talk about the Tesla Powerwall 2, because it’s what we have, but there are multiple brands out there now. But the Powerwall is probably still the best…

Blocking solar farms because they ruin the view. The view is a landscape cleared and trashed by farming, which these same farmers and local councils have presided over for more than 2 centuries. And we laugh at people…

If you know governance and politics, this has been evident since the beginning of the pandemic. NSW’s strategy is not based on public health advice, it’s based on trying to keep the economy open. That approach has…

“Wayne Errington and I discovered that early on members of federal cabinet were arguing for a Donald Trump style laissez-faire approach to the virus.” Governance is my job. People think I have a personal gripe with…

The Economy is ordinary commercial transactions, stripped of decent wages and working conditions for workers. The modern ‘lean supply chain’ business. That disrupts basic social conditions of life and work, which in…

In which Tony moans about 'orderly queues' as being anti-Australian. The same man who said the greatest risk to Australia was immigrants not forming orderly queues. I call Australia Day Australica Day, because I think…

How do those who support the NSW Government and Gladys possibly justify that only 1% of the $177 million of bushfire relief money went to Labor electorates? And that the Blue Mountains electorate (Labor), that had the…

A chicken and egg question. Which came first, government or the private sector? Probably many would say the private sector. But as with money, the freedom of private life is a creation of government. There was no…

Remember Gladys' rorting of local government grants? Then her rorting of bushfire relief grants? Total of about $500 million. Now there's Dine and Discover, another rort scheme, dressed up as Covid relief this time.…

It costs up to 5 times as much to maintain ‘infrastructure’ over time than it costs to build it in the first place. Buildings, roads, sewers, pipes, parks etc. That funding is rarely forthcoming. Many local councils for…

It's not actually clear that Socrates said this, but it does the rounds occasionally and is interesting. I'd add "The strongest minds discuss how ideas shape events and people". It's difficult to discuss this sort of…

There's no question the great political experiment of the past 50 or more years, is libertarianism. The idea that governments get in the way, and we need to do everything to 'free' individuals from them. All the…

The tabloid theatre (like toilet paper selling out) which political libertarianism generates. Everything is about the individual. At a time of collective emergency, the pile-on starts, on ‘naughty’ transgressors. No…

This incorporates vaccinations into projections. I think the reduction in transmission used in this model (80% for a double-vaccinated person) is way too optimistic. But it gives a way of looking at possible futures.…

I worked with academics for many years. Like many others, they have a hatred of administration, or bureaucracy. But administration doesn’t exist, in fact the law refuses to define it, for that very reason.…

This is what both frustrates me and gives me hope. Numbers are how many days until each age group reaches the vaccination threshold (70, 80, 90%). I've circled NSW in red for the 90% threshold, you can see by about…

The world seems more stupid today. I know a lot of people feel that. It's not because individual people are getting dumber though, I don't think. It's because a huge part of a society acting intelligently is its…

“Singapore had previously announced in June it would be abandoning its zero-Covid strategy in favor of a new plan to live with the virus. The shift was possible thanks to the country's high vaccination rates, which are…

Probably the greatest thing I’ve ever learned is that how an anglepoise lamp operates is also how our bodies work. They support us in whatever position or shape we choose at the time. Standing, sitting, walking etc. All…

Pictures tell stories. What the pandemic showed so clearly was who the really essential workers are in our socieities. Nurses, teachers, supermarket staff, sewer and water workers etc. Leading politicians are…

The housing industry, and politicians getting big budget revenue from housing prices, have spent the past nearly 3 decades selling us a lie that has ruined the lives of entire generations. The lie - that high housing…

In today’s Covid news, the supposedly ‘mild’ Omicron variant. Hospitalisation rates in Denmark about the same as for other variants. Overwhelmingly the Danish being infected in the early days are 20-29, which will…

Do you know who funds firefighting in NSW? It’s insurance companies (about 74%), with local government (about 12%) the next biggest contributor. Together they fund nearly 93% of all firefighting.

I would say what makes a person smart is if the ideas they have capture and change reality in some powerful way. It’s the ideas that make them smart, it’s not them (ideas don’t belong to any of us, they can be shared by…

We’ve spent 50 years flirting with one catastrophic idea: that society doesn’t exist, it’s just a collection of separate individuals. It explains our massive and ongoing accumulation of debt, the increase in family…

I think the response to the bushfires was as dysfunctional as the response to Covid-19. Bushfire relief looked like people acting nobly, and Covid-19 looks like people acting selfishly and in panic. But they’re people…

Similarities between Trump and Henry VIII. Populists like Trump are bringing back arbitrary sovereign power, ignoring due process, nepotism is on the rise etc. Like Henry Trump is also a compulsive womaniser. Enter one…

I wonder if the Chinese view of the world might make us notice what populists we really are. Nothing will make you more popular in our society than outrage against the establishment, against tradition and bureaucracy…

“What we've seen is people are cherry-picking data. So they look at the lowest possible case fatality rates and say, "Oh look, it's like seasonal flu." Or they pick, "Oh it doesn't spread so fast because of this," or…

Distribution, you’d think it was as simple as an equal share for all. Alas no, if there’s only food for 20 people sharing it equally among 100 means all 100 starve. These are the impossibly complex sorts of questions…

This is the national governance scheme for response to the pandemic. Lots of committees, lots of levels. All of this does add up to a not bad system, there’s a lot of expertise in that picture. But it’s all very boxy,…

Well now, 'supply chains'. Who'd have thought. Who will people play social media ping pong with now the hoarders and busloads of evil foreign supermarket pirates are off the hook?

One thing i'm enjoying right now is how the people who are the real brains and muscle of society are coming into the limelight, while the celebrities, sports stars and shock jocks disappear into their country estates.…

For years we've had to endure zealots tell us society isn't real, only individuals are real. Free market, libertarian hocus pocus. Then suddenly, they get their wish in lockdown, because everybody is just an individual…

One of the guides we need I think. By 2050 10 million of us will die of superbug infections each year, at current rates of growth. Ewald is sure most of our chronic diseases, like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimers, MS,…

"Australians and our governments have been so careful to balance the needs to get our economy back to a COVID-safe level so it can support people's incomes and we can return to higher rates of growth into the future."…

We should thank Australian universities for this, they assembled over 100 experts from diverse fields to assess where Australia should go from here with Covid-19. You'll see they suggest either elimination (my…

The ten favourite albums thing - what if the question was 'what are the BEST 10 albums of all time?' That's a can of worms in my experience, because it nearly always degenerates into some version of 'it's just a matter…

Remember the idea was, we'll relax some restrictions, then wait 2 weeks to see if there's any impact on infection rates? All kids back at school next Monday, announced just over a week since some kids started going…

From the news: "Accelerated reopening of the economy, earlier easing of restrictions and larger gatherings are expected to be recommended to national cabinet within two weeks, if the trend in low daily coronavirus…

It may actually be good for us to take antibiotics regularly. Most chronic and acute disease may actually be due to microbes. It’s been shown that those who take more antibiotics can have lower rates of disease of most…

Casinos in Australia put over 20,000 staff on the JobKeeper scheme. They still managed to pay full dividends to shareholders. They're good donors to the political parties. Just something to keep in mind when people talk…

I’ve worked in governance for a couple of decades, a job where you try to figure out how to get large groups of people to move in one direction. My main criticism of the COVID strategy we’re following is that it’s a…

'Cutting red tape' is seen as the way to 'get the economy going'. What's hilariously perverse about this is - do people even know what all that bureaucracy is doing? It's people converting social life into data, to…

An example of how the body works as a single integrated system. You've probably seen pictures of people meditating like this. Notice how the palms of the hands face upwards. That might look like an incidental detail,…

Anybody who knows anything about Australian governance (that’s unfortunately a tiny number of people) knows this is true. The federal government has virtually zero role in a pandemic. The National Cabinet is a stunt,…

You can see the origins of Big Pharma in this pandemic I think. In the absence of basic, cheap public health systems, the US is always after the latest wonder drug, the latest snake oil to get them out of the hole that…

National Cabinet is a PR stunt. Parliament was dissolved so there's been no opposition allowed to the government's decisions for months. Our knowledge of our own governance is so appalling that the corruption of that…

HIV is a nice example I think of how treating disease as a medical thing means losing control of it. Look at the HIV stats for Australia. Strong public health action from the 1980s through to the mid-1990s pushed HIV…

I have nothing against the defence forces, but a thought experiment...we would never expect the defence forces to make a profit or even break even. It’d be a ridiculous expectation, we know they’re performing a public…

Brilliant story about how power is shifting away from governance and senior management of corporations towards shareholders, usually superannuation funds (i.e. you and me). The excesses of the corporate world have been…

No need for conspiracy theories. Governments are victims of regulatory capture. Lobby groups bought them out, they stopped trying to influence politics and instead bought the parties. Then they funded mass persuasion…

The October long weekend celebrates Labour Day. The achievement of the 8 hour work day, by unions. 8 hours rest, 8 hours work, 8 hours leisure. The bitter irony of introducing Daylight Savings on the same weekend?…

Humans always have hierarchies, because humans value things, and those values create hierarchies - some things are better than other things. I think there’s a misunderstanding of democracy as being ‘rule by the people’,…

I suspect quite a lot of people in Oz actually like Trump and what he stands for, and are just a bit shy to say it. They hate bureaucracy, they hate politicians, they think mainstream media is trying to fool them etc.…

3 cases per day. We had that many in NSW today alone. The Swiss are highly organised people. They also all wear masks. Did you know we're following an 'aggressive suppression' strategy here? Except we aren't, it's more…

Reserve Bank dropped interest rates to 0.1% today. To me it’s a great example of how ideas are everything, they’ve been forced to do this because of the government’s fanatical belief that government spending is bad, and…

I’ve always been a fan of the possibility of social media. But the reality is destroying our societies. I always talk about populism, and it’s social media that makes populism powerful. Every lunatic can mobilise…

Governance is my profession. This is a fascinating graphic doing the rounds. It’s slightly misleading, there aren’t far fewer Republicans (red), they’re just spread out a lot more. And their Congress (peoples’ house) is…

Today they'll persecute this poor lying sod (everybody lies, first rule of governance) to escape their lie that this is some new strain of virus. Here's a little governance quiz, which strategy will work? 1) A long and…

When zero and even negative interest rates don’t help with the ‘economy’, zealots still don’t shift their views. People don’t have money, it’s as simple as that. Making it cheap to borrow won’t help, because they…

A public service announcement, because I doubt they'll spend much telling people this. NSW Health advises that if you're in crowded shops this Christmas, please wear a mask. Notice, no rule saying you should, which…

If you wanted electrical work done, you’d ask an electrician. But experts in areas like science, governance, and public administration are told their views are just ‘opinions’ like anybody else’s. This contempt for…

‘Let them eat cake’ is for me the perfect motto for Trump and Brexit, and for everybody who hates governments and bureaucrats. As if getting rid of governments and bureaucracies will free everybody up - it’s the same as…

This is a vortex tube. A miraculous thing hidden in industrial sheds. Compressed air enters the chamber (the bit with EXAIR written on it), and forms a vortex; like a mini-tornado. That vortex separates the air into two…

At first glance this looks like a boring list of numbers. But this shows the age distribution of voters across all Australian electorates and States. It’s a window into who we really are as a country. If you look, what…

Find one big public issue that isn’t explained by the old replacing the circle of life with eternal unchanging youth. Faces that don’t age, countries that have to be shaped in the patriotic image of the past, tradition…

I love this everyday example of reframing. Trip hazards on footpaths are a local council nightmare, they create legal messes. What they've done here is found all the non-level bits and sprayed them with high-vis yellow.…

‘The private sector is always more efficient.’ A slogan I’ve heard since I was a kid. One of the most powerful fantasies of our time. Exhibit A, electricity. Look at how the roles of people in the electricity industry…

How many relationship problems are due to the fact that people mature at different rates? We tend to blame individual personality for a lot of these problems, just as we say the problem with politics is individual…

This happened in Lithgow recently. The investigation as to why turned up the interesting fact that nobody even knew how the Lithgow reticulated water supply works. They still don’t, some of it is still a mystery. The…

The disaster of averages! The average voter doesn’t exist, it’s a statistical calculation. And it turns out, when you survey actual voters, they’re *more* extreme in their specific views than most politicians. This is…

Barnaby Joyce said the other day that bureaucrats actually run the country. We agree on something. He thinks that's a bad thing, I think it protects us from the country being run by idiots like Barnaby. Bureaucrats are…

Most people identify themselves in the political 'centre' too, as 'moderates', even though their views are clearly either Left or Right, or a combination of Left and Right (which isn't a centre, it’s a mixture of Left…

Economics is actually pretty interesting. Either government invests in the country, or you and I do. Modern conservative governments give money away to the rich in tax cuts rather than invest in the country, so that…

Here's an idea for 'stimulating the economy'. How about diverting the vast rivers of taxpayer dollars flowing to Canberra, to State and local government, where the services people use actually are? At the moment…

The privileged sing from the same song sheet the world over. Boris is telling the UK these tax cuts will energise the economy. Just as Trump did in the US, and ScoMo here. It's complete self-serving bullshit, all it…

The flip side to tax 'relief'. We're absolute dopes not to see this. The more they cut taxes, the more they shift the cost of basic public services back onto us. Anybody noticed the price of education, health,…

Poor Philip Lowe is whistling into the wind here. ScoMo and the LNP actually believe big tax cuts are like fairies at the bottom of the garden, the whole 'economy' will magically grow and fix everything. We're so…

England celebrates almost winning a World Cup! Go NZ, let's keep England's perfect record of zero World Cups intact. (Australia has 5 Cups, by the way, for any Brit people warming up their boos, so even with a win…

Michel Serres once called our times the "reign of the Beatles - the shit-eaters". (He loved the Beatles.) What he meant by that was obviously a play on words referring to beetles, who like to eat turds. And the…

The great demographer David Foot predicts which societies will succeed and which won't by looking at their demographics, the distribution of people across different age groups. For example he sees Germany, Russia and…

Isn't this magnificent? The House of Lords has its problems, but one of them isn't its full name: "The Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in…

After trashing: - parliament through populism - the press by constant talk of 'fake news' - universities by constant attack on academics - civil service by constant attack on bureaucrats - unions by constant attacks,…

“Behind massive street demonstrations there is rarely a well-oiled and more-permanent organization capable of following up on protesters’ demands and undertaking the complex, face-to-face, and dull political work that…

The Local Government Act has this quite intriguing clause in it. Glad to see it made it as far as legislation, one of the greatest justice issues of our time. (d) Councils should have regard to achieving…

In some countries mortgage rates are negative, meaning you pay back less than you borrowed. Depositors then pay to have their money in the bank. There may not be a better illustration of how countries are really just…

Hatred of: - referees - politicians - local and State governments - bureaucrats - call centres, etc. I think our populist age could be summed up as - hatred of the 'middle man'. We want our stuff direct. Uber and social…

Trump has arrived in Australia. ScoMo actually plagiarised Trump directly this week. Populism I think is politics for utopians, meaning people who don't think politics should exist at all, that we shouldn't have…

Here’s the double standard in public life. The Commonwealth Bank has been charged with 87 criminal offences, by ASIC. Does it register in the news? Not a lot. One union official is charged with 2 offences and is…

I've worked in governance for two decades. Whether it's a sporting club, or a major organisation, or a parliament, you only have to spend a day in these places to know the real reason governing people is hard. People…

Microsoft Excel is considered by some to be the most dangerous piece of software on the planet. Tens of billions of dollars of financial transactions worldwide are managed with Excel spreadsheets every year, as well as…

Have a look at this, if you believe in moderate or centre-based politics. This is for the US, but the same patterns occur everywhere. They captured all varieties of non-aligned voters: those who vote for independents,…

The average (median) age of workers in Australia is about 40. If you’re uncomfortable with immigration, look at that number. Somebody has to do the work. Boris Johnson has just announced huge importing of health care…

Straya is topping the world! Personal debt champions. Some of that personal debt is public services outsourced to you and me to fund ourselves. It balances ScoMo's budget, and screws you and me.

Jeremy Corbyn is described as ‘extreme’ because he advocates returning basic public services to public hands, and taxing the well-off to fund those services. You can see just how deep the opposing conservative stories…

Conservatives like to paint the ‘we’ as bureaucratic nanny state interference. The Left likes to paint the ‘we’ as the greater good. Both of them are arguing inside the same framework of ideas, separating ‘I’ and ‘we’.…

If you work in a frontline public service position, it’s scarily obvious that Australians are now flipping from the easygoing, unthinking ‘she’ll be right’ attitude, to explosive rage in the face of emergencies, like…

ScoMo and BoJo are both implementing populist programs right now, following Trump. Populism isn’t Left or Right, it isn’t even politics. It’s society eating itself. The damage these people do, fuelled by the public’s…

The second a Tory has the election over, all the ‘governing for all of us’ disappears and we’re back to the standard script. Sell off public assets, sack public servants, tax cuts for the rich. ScoMo followed exactly…

How to be stress-free and anxiety-free in 2018. Something I’ve researched for many years, so in case it’s of any use. (There are other dimensions to it as well.) Nearly all the approaches that work with stress and…

What does this meter read, in kWh? Winners will be offered jobs as meter readers, to replace the innumerates currently employed.

One of the things that isn’t widely known about China is how innovative it is with governance. The outside world thinks of China as a big communist totalitarian State, but within China there’s more experimentation with…

Margaret Atwood, I think making the important point that many social movements like #metoo end up as squabbles between people within the movement, and the real issue gets lost. (I don’t agree with her that moderates are…

It’s time to de-privatise banking and return it to being a public service. Since the earliest days of all cultures money-lending has been seen as a social and moral evil. We think we’re too clever for that ancient…

The Mad Monk has escaped again, this time calling for cuts to immigration. One of the things not many know is that the only thing that keeps economies like Australia's running, is immigrants. Immigration actually fuels…

Rather than get rid of Facebook, we should recognise that it’s now a public service, like water or electricity. It should be regulated, as Cook says. That’s how these corporate giants make such enormous sums of money,…

Think yourself fit. Much cheaper and easier than a gym. We each of us have a fair chunk of mass we carry around with us all day, every day. That mass generates lots of sometimes huge forces, doing everyday things that…

I love politics. Lithgow is the only place in the entire region, and the neighbouring Riverina, that doesn't have NBN yet. And it's just been delayed another year. I looked at the Australian Electoral Commission records…

It is a bit scary, the Nazi storm trooper type zealotry coming through the ranks. "Today, a publicly funded national broadcaster crowds out its private competitors and is an indulgence we can no longer afford." We need…

Were you taught to hate bureaucrats? And politicians? Did you stop to wonder why that narrative was rammed home again and again in news and other places? I did. Always follow the money, as the saying goes. Without…

Utilities markings can vary from one local Council area to another, anybody know what this one signifies, on my front path? Blue is often water, or sewer, but apparently it can be other things too.

I find that IT experts will generally tell you IT systems aren’t safe, particularly ones they didn’t build themselves, because it keeps them in a job and the centre of attention. A lot of the modern data hysteria seems…

If thinking and language is mostly metaphors, here’s one that I think might matter. Knots versus boxes. We tend to think in box ways, we separate things and our ideas about things into boxes, with an inside and an…

Watching Malcolm Turnbull on energy bills. How long will it be until we decide again that essential public services should never be privatised? Not energy, not education, not housing, not superannuation, not roads, not…

Canberra right now is Shakespearean. Shakespeare based quite a lot of his work on politics. It still frustrates me that people think politicians should all be nice to each other, should stop arguing and fighting. Our…

The (F)law of Averages! We misread climbing average life expectancy as meaning ‘everybody is living longer’ (we aren’t). You can see the same flaw in superannuation, how we’re told we need a lot of super because we’re…

It’s a difficult time to be an administrator. Both politicians, and senior managers in organisations, are running roughshod over due process, due processes set up often over generations. Sports stars do the same with…

Walter Lippmann was skeptical about democracy. He thought the idea of a ‘public’ was a myth, that there is no such thing as some collective entity called the public. So he called it ‘The Phantom Public’. John Dewey then…

Some classic examples of political framing - feel free to suggest more. This is how smart politicians shape how people feel, and therefore vote. Use the frame enough and it shapes how people think. Tax cut = "tax…

I'm loving playing in a mixed netball comp. But I've discovered that it's a brutal game on the body, and coming to it at 50, cold, was a bit of a shock to the system. It's my favourite sport to watch on TV now too, most…

It's slaying them at the Box Office, number one film in every country it's opened. And it's worth reading this self-serving, delusional piece to see inside the mind of critics, who can't accept that the masses might be…

I think there’s a broader message to come out of the banking Royal commission. Management and governance, of every organisation, is broken. The ideas we use to manage and govern organisations are absolutely bloody…

Are you an Andre? Senior managers appoint more senior managers to offload the shit parts of their own jobs they don't want to deal with. (Wave to Lithgow Council.) Job ads are a good guide here, most senior jobs will…

Is the problem really size? I don’t think so, size brings great advantages. Governance maybe, who owns organisations as they get larger, and whether they should become public at that size.

To the driver of the Council street sweeping truck who’s been driving and beep-reversing up and down the street for the past 20 minutes, before 7am, Merry Christmas to you too.

Memes are great, but (always) a bit of thought and research don't hurt. Like this one, you see it a lot. Bees are NOT dying out, it doesn't take long to find the actual facts. Also shaming people to repost things just…

Seen the price of sending a package through OzPost lately? Makes your eyes water. And those awful loss-making letters. That's why it was a public service. Ain't the 'efficient' private sector grand, consumers paying…

John Lyons makes the argument here I was thinking about last night. If getting rid of Sunday penalty rates is about increasing jobs, let's test it. If the jobs don't come within a couple of years, put them back up…

Best quote on the Sunday penalty rates, from Crikey: "Today the Fair Work Commission, reflecting three years of Coalition government appointments to the industrial relations body, decided that Sunday penalty rates are…

People are constantly bombarded with requests for money and/or assistance for various causes, often through schools but also through workplaces and even via harassment in the street or on the phone or internet. It's now…

The petrochemical industry are basically self-interested arseholes. And the people smart enough in Canberra to negotiate with them, in the public service, were sacked by idiots who said we had too much bureaucracy.…

I wouldn't mind the AMA 'dabbling' in a little medical science too, occasionally. Plenty of what Evans says is backed by genuine cutting edge medical science, just not by doctors because they're not always connected to…

Listening to a ninny from the Business Council of Australia talking about their win on tax cuts. Bring back Dwight. Even dead he's smarter.

Gas companies are exactly like property developers. Disgusting vermin. Both use the same language, we need more 'supply'. Which just means they both want even more public land, having used up what they'd already been…

This is what you've been saying @[728961585:2048:Angela Gray]? Reading it described this way, it sounds like the same concerns most small businesses have. Small business is rarely very profitable, there aren't economies…

Facebook is struggling with this now. It's already at the point where it really could or should be a public service, regulated as a public institution.

This fella stood up on Q@A last night and questioned how it's fair that rich people would have almost half their income 'confiscated' if the top tax rate went back to around 50%. Firstly he doesn't understand marginal…

Germaine Greer was one of the only prominent boomers who saw through the emptiness of the 60s 'peace and love' movement. This looks a miserable quote, but it's not at all, and matches what Proust for example saw about…

To continue my highly popular defence of politicians ;) Remember these people run the country, you may think they don't do it well, but we all know a lot of other jobs we've come into contact with where people aren't…

Four Corners exposed some of what's going wrong in managing water resources in the Murray Darling. Elinor Ostrom (now deceased) is the only woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. She studied how groups of people can…

Unregulated doctors' fees and patient choice versus uncontrollable insurance costs. Insurers try to introduce 'managed care' to control costs, doctors push back because it restricts their capacity to treat. The answer?…

One commentator said we're rapidly becoming the US, with millions of working poor with little job security, poverty-level wages and no ability to keep up with everyday expenses. And public services becoming privatised…

Today’s collective noun. For hippopotamuses. There are actually a few. The best: - a bloat of hippopotamuses - a crash of hippopotamuses - a thunder of hippopotamuses. Hippos are considered the most dangerous of all…

This is a very common gripe doctors tend to have - administration. Academics are the same. And we’ve all been told to despise bureaucracy. It’s well known that the amount a charity spends on administration has almost no…

The local Nationals member seems to spend a lot of time publicising local Nationals politicians, I guess we should expect that. I guess we should also expect some of them to say things like “local Council should be…

This sign is most peoples’ wet dream writ large. But it’s bollocks. Here’s to the bureaucrats, society’s heroes. Why? It’s pretty simple. Every generation lives a certain time. It can’t reinvent history in every…

Might look like a bit of a dry topic, but fascinatingly horrifying. The Bush-Blair-Howard war. How they're not charged as criminals for it is amazing. And shows how much you should never trust somebody who thinks…

Prices going down. Lowest interest rates ever. Economic equivalent of the last rites.

Anybody else in Lithgow getting the push marketing from Simply Energy lately? The con where they knock on your door and make out as if they're just passing on the good news about a cut to the official electricity rate,…

It's outrageously stupid. 7-9 billion PER YEAR of public money to prop up insurance companies, all because the LibNats can't stand public provision of anything. The only people who benefit from private health insurance…

Mark Twain said history may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme. Modern companies and organisations have so much in common with much older organisational forms. I did a fantastic course on organisational forms and…

The ourworldindata.org site is a great place to play to sort the crap from the reality in what's happening in the world. Like this beauty, all the worry about overpopulation. Population growth rates stopped growing in…

Oh please please please. If you're watching Lithgow City Council. Not one of you useless boneheads even acknowledge an email about internet service in Lithgow. Probably can't use the internet.

Government revenue is already bankrupt after the last lot of tax cuts. So the only way this will be doable is by complete slashing and burning of public services. which they're admitting (funded by 'savings'). We don't…

The problem *is* extremism, worldwide. Extremists here, including people like Bolt and Jones and Hadlee in the media, don't even see how what they do generates so much of what happens overseas with extremists. These…

The myth is still out there. But the truth is as well: "The conservatives did not spend conservatively at all, it turns out. Howard and Costello engaged in net new spending of $133 billion, and net tax cuts of another…

Doesn't matter who you vote for, these trends in Australia should bother us. 1. People who get paid millions of dollars to mouth 'opinions' every day, like shock jocks and newspaper opinion columnists, are allowed to…