Entries Tagged 'Australia' ↓

On the way home from work I was chatting to a colleague about money, and remembered a phrase I heard a while ago: “Don’t put money in the bank, own the bank!”

While I can’t recall the exact place I heard it (although I’ve found at least one site that looks at the concept), I thought it was at least quickly looking into it. I compared putting money in a ING Direct “Savings Maximiser” account to buying stocks in four major Australian Banks: Commonwealth, Westpac, Suncorp, and Bank of Queensland.

The amount invested was $1000; I’ve taken into account capital growth and dividends; and the time frame of the comparison was 1 year ending today. The current interest rate of the ING Direct account is 6% pa.

It should be noted that in the time period shown, Commonwealth and Westpac paid two dividends whereas Suncorp and Bank of Queensland only paid one.

The comparison shows that even the poorest performing investment, Suncorp-Metway, still earnt $38 more than a cash account - that’s an effective interest rate of 10%!

Now, I’m not a financial adviser, nor am I any sort of economist or analyst, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I also didn’t take into account brokerage fees, nor did I account for the tax benefits of the dividends being fully-franked. Investing is also carries a higher risk, so you could possibly lose every cent you invest.

Nonetheless, What does this mean?

It’s more effective to own the bank!

The Oz Politics Blog has a fascinating post highlighting data gathered by Dr Roger Stimson about the Australian Political Landscape. The bit that interested me was the map showing the voting distribution of Australia.

This is the overall picture:

This is a close-up of Sydney:

What struck me is the similarity between the Australian distribution and the voting distribution of the United States. Both countries have large regions of right-wing voters, with the exceptions of the more densely populated areas that vote left-wing.

The linked post contains these points of analysis by Stimson:

The government Coalition parties have captured most of the settled rural and regional areas, and it is not just the Nationals but also the Liberals that have widespread ‘heartlands’ of political dominance. Within the big cities the, dominance of the Liberal Party is not only across wedges of the higher socio-economic areas of the mostly middle suburbs, but it has also extend across the large belts of the outer suburbs and even more widely across the outer fringe areas to capture many areas in what used to be Labor’s ‘heartland’ as transform them into Liberal ‘heartlands.’

The Labor ‘heartlands’ are predominantly found in the central city and inner suburbs of the big cities, and in suburbia the now more restricted belts of Labor dominance are clearly associated with populations characterised by immigration and multiculturalism as well as the traditional areas of disadvantage.

Interesting stuff.

It’s interesting to see the difference in the way that News Corporation and Fairfax Media reported on the PS3 launch last week.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

The launch of Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console got off to a feeble start last night with officials, media and security outnumbering customers for most of the evening.

The Australian IT section, in contrast, makes no mention of a poor turnout - simply saying that:

GAMERS queued outside retail stores across Australia to buy Sony’s PlayStation 3 (PS3) from the stroke of midnight.

Telstra has, in part, responded to Fairfax CEO David Kirk’s comments yesterday.

 “If David Kirk thinks we have a broadband drought because there is too little competition, he has played too much football without a helmet,” he said.

They’ve also threatened a class action lawsuit if the government forces Telstra to allow access to a new high-speed network by competitors .

Heaven forbid that a monopoly created in part by Australian tax-payer’s money be leveraged to help benefit those Australians!

Continuing on with the Fairfax news, according to an SMH article Fairfax Chief Executive David Kirk doesn’t seem to like Telstra very much. After labeling Australian broadband as “fraudband”, the article goes on to quote:

“All around the world you do see where there is a very incumbent telecommunications provider and not a lot of competition … that broadband take-up is slow, broadband pricing is high,” Mr Kirk said.

“I think it’s usually about market structure and regulation rather than technology or government policy.”

In other words: “Telstra, you’re the incumbent here - stop whinging about regulation and get the job done.”

His metric for if broadband is fast enough is if you can download a movie in less than 24 hours. Sounds like a good “ballpark” metric - x kilobits per second doesn’t really mean much to the average user, but telling someone that this week’s episode of Lost would take 12 hours to download and use a quarter of their monthly downloads on their “broadband” connection might get the message across.

Let’s face it - News Limited newspapers are awful. Which is unfortunate, seeing as The Courier Mail is the only daily paper servicing Queensland*. I personally find the Fairfax papers The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age to be better written and contain less bias.

I’ve been hoping for a Fairfax alternative for Brisbane for a while now (I was even close to writing about it), and it seems like my hopes have been answered.

Brisbane Times

While it’s not a daily paper, it is Fairfax and it does focus on Brisbane. Definitely a step in the right direction.

*Unless you count tabloids like the Gold Coast Bulletin. Which I don’t.

Just after I cite Channel 10’s showing of Jericho straight after the US airing as an example of a network doing things right for once, I find out they’ve decided not to pick up the second half of the season. Gee, thanks for showing half a season of another show, 10.

There’s also a bit of discussion about yesterday’s article over at SMH’s “Mashup” blog. Check it out here.

Alex Malick, the researcher previously interviewed on Triple J’s Hack program, has a new study showing the average broadcast delay for new TV shows in Australia has increased from 7.6 to 16.7 months over the past two years.

Malik also studied comments by TV viewers on various internet forums, and concluded: “These delays are one of the major factors driving Australians to use BitTorrent and other internet-based peer-to-peer programs to download programs illegally from overseas, prior to their local broadcast.”

I completely agree. When shows like Heroes debut in the US (25 September 2006) then take over 4 months to air in Australia (31 January 2007), it has to be expected that people are going to download it. Lost isn’t much better either, with the show being up to episode 8 in the US (including a two month hiatus) but only just starting in Australia.

There are exceptions, however. 24 is being aired on Channel 7 with only a few weeks delay, and Jericho was airing within a DAY of the US.

From SMH, source here.

Once again, Telstra has proved that they just don’t “get it.” Apparently, because Apple has never made a mobile phone before they obviously don’t know what they’re doing. Therefore, they should just let the likes of Nokia and Sony Ericsson do it and not even try.

I seem to remember they’d never made an MP3 player before either, nor had they ever sold music online. Guess they should’ve stuck to making computers, huh?

From SMH, article here.