Citizen Journalism Archives - Page 5 of 40 - Clover Hill Diaries

The science of how the watch dog ends up working for the dog.

Here is the trick nobody runs an ad campaign about. The watchdog ends up working for the dog. And once you see how, you cannot unsee it.

Are you as baffled as I am? One Nation has almost no policies to speak of. It lurches from one embarrassing headline to the next, a fresh gaffe from a candidate every other week, and then, like clockwork, climbs again in the polls. In a couple of the big national surveys it now sits ahead of Labor. None of the usual rules seem to apply, and for the life of me I could not work out why.

This is the point where, as my best work usually does, it turned into me getting cranky. I do not think a third of the country has fallen for Pauline Hanson. I think it is anger, the kind that builds when people feel nobody in charge is listening. So instead of yelling at the television like a sensible person, I went looking to see whether anyone had studied why people end up feeling that way. A great many clever people have, for the best part of sixty years, and they have given it a pile of important-sounding names. I have left most of the jargon at the door.

I am sharing it because I have been trying to make sense of this country, and I figured somebody must have worked it out already. They had. And it is not really a story about One Nation at all. It is a story about who gets listened to, and who does not. Here is what I found.

It comes down to one rule. A small group that cares enormously about one thing will almost always beat a big group that cares only a little about a lot of things. Once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Getting organised is hard work and it costs money. A handful of gambling companies, each with millions riding on the outcome, will happily pay for lobbyists, lawyers and ad campaigns, because the payoff to each of them is huge. The rest of us each lose a little, spread thin across the whole country, so not one of us has much reason to down tools and fight. The organised few beat the unorganised many, even though the many are far bigger. An economist named Mancur Olson set this out in 1965, and nobody has knocked it over since.

The red flag to watch for is a policy that hands a big win to a small group and spreads the cost thinly across everyone else. The small group fights like mad, because the stakes for each of them are enormous. Gambling advertising is the perfect example. The broadcasters and betting firms make a fortune, and the cost is paid in small, scattered harms across thousands of kitchen tables.

Noticing is not the same as power. The gap between what we can see and what we can change is where the anger lives.

The textbooks say we do not notice costs spread that thin. They are wrong. We notice. We notice the betting ad in every break of the footy. We notice when a friend cannot stop, when the pay disappears before the bills are paid, when a marriage falls apart over hidden debt, when someone we know loses the house or worse. Noticing is exactly why people are angry. The trouble is that noticing is not the same thing as power. Anger spread across millions who each lose a little is no match for a handful of companies with millions each on the line and the minister’s mobile number. We can see it perfectly well. We just do not have the machine to do anything about it.

None of this is because people are switched off. We notice. The harder question is why noticing so rarely turns into the organised pushback that actually shifts a policy. Fighting a lobby head on is a second job. It means turning up to every review, reading every draft, funding someone to sit in the room year after year. Your one vote, or your one furious afternoon, is almost never the thing that tips it. So the organised, funded few turn up to every fight, and the angry, busy many cannot. The lobby lives in that gap.

Once a group is that organised, something predictable happens to whoever is meant to keep it honest. Slowly the watchdog starts working for the dog. It is rarely brown envelopes. The minister spends all day talking to the industry, leans on it for the facts, and starts to see the whole question through its eyes. The posh name is regulatory capture, and a Nobel went to the man who described it.

What keeps it oiled is the revolving door. People move from government into industry and back, until both sides are the same faces. Nobody has to be corrupt for this to bend things. The simple prospect of a comfortable job later makes people friendlier now. You have seen it with resources ministers who end up at the gas companies they used to oversee.

A lobby does not need to kill a reform outright. That looks bad and invites a fight. Delay is not a failure for them, it is the weapon. Slow the thing down, send it off for another review, shave bits off until almost nothing is left. You do not lose the argument. You run out the clock.

That is the gambling ad ban exactly. A parliamentary inquiry handed the government a clear plan years ago. It sat in a drawer, came back a watered-down half version the government’s own experts say will not work, and it does not even start until 2027. We know the big television and betting companies kept getting their meetings in Canberra the whole time, because freedom of information requests dragged the records into the open. None of that is a feeling. It is on paper.

The cleverest power of all is quieter still. It is not winning the fight out in the open, it is making sure the fight never reaches the table. The decisions that shape a country most are often the ones that quietly never happen.

A royal commission watered down afterwards is one version. A royal commission never called, because someone powerful does not want the lights switched on, is the better trick, because there is nothing to point at. The banking royal commission is the watered-down kind. After a year of damning evidence, key recommendations were quietly trimmed or reversed once the industry went to work, which the commissioner said he expected. The clearest tell of all: bank share prices went up the day the report came out. The market decided the banks had got off lightly.

Any group that is well organised, well funded and focused on one issue gets the same advantage, and that includes foreign policy. Australia has a well-resourced pro-Israel lobby, including groups such as the Australia, Israel and Jewish Affairs Council and the Zionist Federation of Australia, that presses government hard in exactly the way the gambling industry presses on its own. How a government responds to that pressure is a fair thing to examine.

It is an organised, well-funded operation, not a stand-in for a whole community. Jewish Australians do not all think the same way, and plenty are among the toughest critics of the Israeli government. What I am looking at is organised advocacy and how power responds to it.

If that sounds like a theory, two American researchers put numbers on it. They checked nearly two thousand policy questions against what ordinary people wanted, and against what the wealthy and organised interest groups wanted. What the organised and the wealthy wanted predicted what became law. What the average person wanted made almost no difference on its own. American data, so treat it as American data, but it is the cold-numbers version of everything above.

There is a cheerful counter-theory. It says that with so many groups pushing against each other, no single one ever dominates, and it balances out. The catch is that the groups are not evenly matched. The organised and well-funded turn up to every fight, and the rest of us are the busy, distracted, powerless majority. Whether you think the contest is fair or rigged is the real argument, and you can make up your own mind.

And here is the bitter twist.

The party so many angry, powerless people are turning to, the one that says it stands for the forgotten, is bankrolled by Gina Rinehart, one of the richest and most powerful people in the country. One Nation is not the outsiders’ revolt it sells itself as. It is the best-funded lobby in the land wearing a battler’s hat. The unorganised many, looking for someone to fight the organised few, have been handed a megaphone owned by the organised few.

So where does this leave One Nation? Right back where this piece started. A party can have almost no policies and a fresh embarrassment every week and still keep climbing, because it is not selling policies. It is selling the feeling of being on the side of people who have worked out, correctly, that the system is not built to listen to them. You do not take the wind out of that by being louder, or by borrowing its worst lines. You take it out by changing who gets listened to, by fixing the obvious thing for once, so an ordinary person can point at it and say, look, they heard us.

I have stopped taking the excuses at face value. When something obvious does not get fixed, the easy explanation is that politicians are useless. Sometimes they are. But there is a better question.

Who is making money out of this not being fixed, and who in office is helping them?

Ask it out loud, and ask it often, and by name, and you drag the whole game into the light. One voice is easy to ignore. A few million asking the same question, by name, is the one thing money cannot buy its way past.

Sources

Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965), on why small groups organise and large ones do not
James Q. Wilson, on concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, sometimes called client politics
Anthony Downs, on rational ignorance, why it is sensible for voters not to study everything
George Stigler, The Theory of Economic Regulation (1971), on regulatory capture
E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People (1960), and Bachrach and Baratz, on the power to keep issues off the agenda
Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014), Testing Theories of American Politics, the United States study on whose preferences become law
Robert Dahl, on pluralism, the more hopeful counter-view
The Conversation, on the banking royal commission and the industry lobbying to water down its recommendations
Michael West Media and Crikey, on the delayed gambling advertising ban and the freedom of information records of industry meetings

About this post

These notes are put together by Betty in Blacktown, mostly so she and her brother Kevin in Kiama always have something that keeps them thinking it through long after phone call has ended. If it helps you stay in the loop too, even better.

The Paddock That Grew Nothing

On why “save our farmland” is the wrong fight for the right reason.

Wollongong Railway Station, 1900.

Take a good look at that old photo of the railway station. Timber and tin, a scatter of weatherboard cottages, and open paddock rolling away in every direction. Now go and stand where the photographer stood. There isn’t a vacant block for miles. Every one of those paddocks filled in, one approval at a time, and nobody felt the loss on the day it happened. That’s how it always goes. The green doesn’t vanish in a single bad decision. It goes in slices, each one too small to argue about, until one day you look up and the hills have a rash.

The same station, 1920. Twenty years on

And it didn’t stop in 1920. Local residents Lesley East and Annette Young and their now husbands still remember driving into Wollongong in the early 1960s to see Psycho at the Regent Theatre on Keira Street, then a grand Art Deco picture palace only a few years old. They parked in a paddock right near the cinema. A paddock, in the middle of town. Today Wollongong is a city of more than 200,000 people, the Regent has been a church since 2005, Crown Street is a pedestrian mall, and the idea of an open field to leave your car in near the main street sounds like a tall tale. But that’s the whole point. Every one of those paddocks was “just one block” once.

Nobody stood in it the day it was lost.

So I have a lot of sympathy for the worry behind Graham Pike’s comment on one of my Catch-Up posts. He was referring to a development application on Minnamurra Lane, Jamberoo, a house and a farm shed on a vacant block, the one Cr Lawton sensibly sent off for a second look and independent legal advice at the May Council meeting. Here’s part of what he said:

“We might not be using the vacant lands or the land in question for food production right now. but most of these lands have been used for farming within the past century or less and, most importantly, we’ll need them for food production again as the human population, even in our area, increases uncontrollably and unsustainably and the resulting suburbanisation sprawls across and fragments this same agricultural/food producing land. The zoning of the land as RU1 or RU2 is a human construct and immaterial. It is still land that we have used and will in future need to use, if any is left uncovered by concrete and asphalt, for food production.” Graham Pike, Jamberoo

I’ve turned that over for days, because there’s a lot in it I agree with. The slow creep of houses and sheds across those hills is real. I’ve watched it happen. And his bigger worry, that we keep paving over the very ground we’ll need to feed ourselves one day, is a serious one.

In a later note, Graham went further and put his finger on what he sees as the root of it all: too many people. Human overpopulation, driving an economy that chews through the natural world. It’s a heartfelt view and plenty of thoughtful people share it.

That’s too big for me to sort out. What I’d say is simpler: whatever any of us thinks about how many people there ought to be, they’re already here. They were born, they need a roof, and saying “there are too many of them” doesn’t put one over a single head. So my mind goes to the thing we can actually do something about, which isn’t the number of people, but where they’re going to live.

The thing is, all that green didn’t go in one big decision anyone could point to. It went in slices, a block here, a shed there, each one too small to worry over on the day. Nobody ever stood up and voted to lose it. It just happened while we weren’t looking.

So maybe the better thing isn’t to fight every single house, but to decide on purpose where the houses should go, instead of letting them turn up one at a time until the hills are full again and we’re left wondering how.

And there’s a part of these “save our farmland” conversations that almost never gets said out loud. Farming is a business. For most farmers, the land isn’t only where they work. It’s the biggest thing they own, the nest egg meant to see them through old age after a lifetime of hard years and thin margins.

So when we say a paddock must stay green forever, I think we should stop and hear what we’re really asking. We’re asking that farmer, and only that farmer, to lock away the worth of their own land so the rest of us can enjoy the view on the drive past. A person in town can sell their house for whatever it’ll fetch. The farmer gets told their paddock is a community treasure and they ought to keep it green for a fraction of what it’s worth. I’m not sure that’s protecting farming. It feels more like asking one family to foot the bill for everyone else’s nice outlook.

I’ve stood on that side of the fence. I dairy farmed for decades, and I know what it is to look at a paddock and see both a lifetime’s work and the only retirement you’ve got. So I find myself asking the question that doesn’t get asked much: is that fair?

And it’s a slippery word, fair. Everyone in this thinks they’re on its side. The people in town feel it’s only fair the hills stay green, they get the view and lose nothing. The farmer feels it’s only fair they get to realise the worth of the land they’ve worked their whole life, the same as anyone else can with what they own. Both are sincere. Both are “fair.” They just can’t both have their way.

And it tends to be the farmer’s fairness that gets left out, because the farmer’s usually not in the room when the rest of us decide their paddock is too precious to touch.

So where does that leave me? Not where you might think. I’m not saying build everywhere. And I’m not saying the green hills don’t count, they’re a good part of why people love this place, and why the visitors come. The slow spread of sheds and houses across those ridgelines is real, and worth watching very closely.

But if we want our farmers to keep the hills green for the rest of us, the least we can do is be honest that we’re asking them to give something up, and decent enough to talk about who carries that cost rather than pretending it’s free.

Lock the gate on a farmer’s land and we haven’t saved farming. We’ve decided their retirement is a fair price for our view.

Good on Cr Lawton for asking for a proper look before anyone signs anything. That’s the kind of careful, eyes-open thinking this deserves, on this block and the next one. The conversation I’d like us to have isn’t “green or houses.” It’s “if we want the green, who pays for it, and is that fair on them?”

I don’t have a tidy answer. I’m not sure there is one. But I think we owe the farmers at least the courtesy of asking.

A note on the photos: I came across these two images on Facebook, where they were dated 1900 and 1920 and identified as Wollongong Railway Station. I haven’t been able to independently verify the dates or the photographer, so if anyone can confirm the details or knows the original source, I’d love to hear from you, please get in touch.

The Building Is the Thing

Sixteen years, one very narrow road, and several quietly skeptical dinner parties later: Michael aboard Archimedes.

There’s a question that creeps up on people somewhere in their sixties and seventies. It arrives quietly and starts sitting in the room. What do you want this stretch of life to be for? Some people decide the answer is rest. Some chase the places they never got to. Some pour themselves into grandchildren, or a garden, or finally restoring the car that’s been under a tarp for twenty years. And a stubborn, wonderful few decide that what they want is to build something enormous and improbable with their own two hands, just to prove it can be done.

Michael is one of those few.

On the side of Saddleback Mountain, at Jamberoo, he set out to build an ocean-going catamaran. A self-designed, eighteen-and-a-half-metre boat, built in his own backyard. He’d talk about it with this great, infectious enthusiasm: the big idea, the plan, the vision of it finished and on the water. And beside him, as she always is, his gorgeous wife Susie would sit and smile. What a woman she is.

He’d bring it up at dinner parties, the way other people mention a renovation or a recent trip, and around the table you’d see the same look settle on every face. We were all thinking something. We were each, I suspect, thinking something completely different. Somewhere in that circle was jealousy, and amazement, and flat incredulity, quietly calculating the boat’s chances against a road that accommodates cows and precisely one car at a time. We’d nod warmly and pass the wine. Then we’d go home to our perfectly normal backyards, containing no catamaran whatsoever.

How on earth are you ever going to get it out of here?

When he started, I doubt Michael imagined it would take sixteen years. The big idea rarely comes with the small print attached. Somewhere along the way there was even talk that the ABC might make a documentary of it, that the grand finale would see the boat lifted out by helicopter, surely the only sensible way to get a thing that size off a mountain. Anyone who knew the narrow road he lived on was asking the same question we all were: how on earth are you ever going to get it out of here?

Photo credit

The helicopter stayed on the ground and the documentary went unmade. What happened instead was better: the boat was cut into pieces and crawled down a narrow road, metre by metre, over the better part of a week. The polished launch footage you can find online skips all of that and shows the dream going into the water, clean and triumphant, with the difficult and stubborn and real parts left on the cutting-room floor. Watching it, knowing what it actually took, I find myself quietly amused. That’s a long way from how it looked coming down the hill.

The building is the thing. Some people garden. Some people restore cars. Michael and Susie built an ocean-going boat by hand, for sixteen years.

Where they take it, and whether they take it anywhere at all, almost feels secondary to having proved it could be done.

Michael built something else, long before the boat, and I have carried it for twenty years.

When I started out in agricultural advocacy, I was wrestling with the question the whole industry wrestles with. How do you get people to value farmers when most of them will never set foot on a farm? The standard answer then, and the standard answer now, is to teach people how food is produced, on the theory that understanding leads to appreciation.

Michael, over the side fence, put it differently. You don’t need to know how it works to appreciate it. He pointed at the mobile phone. Almost nobody can explain what happens inside one, and almost nobody would give theirs up. Appreciation grows from knowing the people, admiring what they made, and feeling some tie to the place it came from. The mechanism barely comes into it.

You don’t need to know how it works to appreciate it.

That sentence changed how I built every project after it. I stopped explaining the supply chain and started introducing people to the makers. A child who meets the man who turned a tiny valley factory into a national champion, or spends a day on a farm with a young dairy farmer who loves the life, comes away admiring them. The admiration is the appreciation. How the milk gets processed can come later, or never, and it holds either way.

It is the same thing I felt watching Archimedes come down the mountain. I could not tell you how Michael engineered an eighteen-and-a-half-metre catamaran in a backyard, and I do not need to. I appreciate the sixteen years and the four hands. The building is the thing, and the builder is who you come to admire.

That is what I want for farmers: a nation that admires the people who feed it. Whether they can explain how it is done matters far less. Michael handed me the key to that twenty years ago, over the fence, and then he spent sixteen years on the side of a mountain proving it.

The launch video carries a line as its title: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. It’s the closing line of Tennyson’s Ulysses, a poem about old age and the refusal to stop. Whoever chose it understood exactly what this was: a way of answering that quiet question that arrives in your sixties and never quite leaves.

What do you want to do with the years you’ve got left?

Michael and Susie answered it on the side of a mountain, one piece of fibreglass at a time. And the boat is finally on the water.

Want to hear more from Michael and learn what does it take to pull off an incredible Project like ” Archimedes” ?

A Little Shout-Out to Kiama Library

Something caught my eye on Facebook the other day and it put a smile on my dial.

Whoever runs the socials at our local Kiama Library is very clever, and they deserve a shout-out.

The first one was a brilliant bit of bookface, the art of holding a book cover up so it lines up with a real person behind it, and the cover seems to finish the picture. It turns out this has a name and a bit of history. It grew out of an older idea called “sleeveface” from 2007, where people posed with vinyl record covers. The book version really took off when the New York Public Library started sharing theirs in 2015, and France’s famous Librairie Mollat bookshop turned it into a global craze a couple of years later. These days libraries everywhere join in, usually tagged #BookFaceFriday.

But Kiama hasn’t just copied the trend. They’ve put their own cheeky stamp on it. Here are a few that made me grin:

They’ve also got a running gag about AI coming for library jobs, which had me laughing too

What I love is that it’s not just clever photography. It’s a warm, funny way to show off the books on their shelves and remind us what a gem we have on our doorstep. So this is just a small thank you to the team at Kiama Library. You’ve brightened up my feed and reminded me to pop in and borrow something. How clever are they?

Why GDP Gets So Much Attention

Same money, two doors. Most of it went to the houses.

Last time we cracked open GDP and found the weird bit: your house can double in value without the country making one extra thing. We worked out why. You buy a house that’s already there, you’re richer, but nothing new got built. That’s just savings in a nicer jacket. Money goes into a business instead and it buys gear, takes people on, makes stuff. That’s productivity, and that’s the thing that lifts everyone, not just the bloke who spent the money.

So your house doesn’t count. Fine. But here’s the bit you’d be right to ask about: so what? Why does that matter for the whole country, not just for you?

Because the country’s only got so much money to put to work. And where it goes decides what kind of country you end up living in.

Picture all the nation’s savings as one big pool. Every year money flows in, and it has to go somewhere. It can go into businesses that make things and hire people. Or roads and trains. Or it can go into buying houses that are already standing and bidding the price up. Same pool, different doors. And for years now we’ve shoved a massive chunk of it through the housing door.

Money through the productive door, the country can make more next year than it did this year. More stuff, more services, more done per hour. That’s the pie getting bigger. Money through the housing door, the pie doesn’t grow. The same house just changes hands for more. You feel richer because the number on the place went up. But the country can’t actually do or make a single thing more than it could before.

Do that for thirty years and you get exactly what we’ve got. A country that looks loaded on paper and can’t work out why it feels stuck. The money’s real. It’s just locked up in land that makes nothing. And the things that would grow the pie, the businesses, the new industries, got starved of the money that went into property instead. That’s the bit people miss. The boom in one is the drought in the other. Same pool.

Here’s what that looks like on a normal Thursday. The jobs figures came out this week and they were grim. Unemployment up to 4.5%, worst since late 2021. Thirty-three thousand more people out of work, nearly 19,000 jobs gone in the month. Hit young people hardest, youth unemployment’s over 11% now, and this month the losses fell mostly on women. That’s work getting harder to find, which worries a household long before it worries anyone in Canberra. And on the very same day, the share market had one of its best days in weeks. Two numbers, one morning, pointing opposite ways. What’s good for the big end of town and what’s good for your kitchen table just aren’t always the same story.

That gap right there is the whole thing in small. A country can post lovely-looking numbers while the ground under ordinary households gets wobblier, because the wealth and the work have come unstuck from each other. And part of why they came unstuck is where the money went. Money sitting in land that just gets dearer isn’t money building the businesses that’d hire those 33,000.

You see it everywhere once you’ve spotted it. Wages that don’t climb like they used to, because there’s no productivity growth underneath pushing them up. A tax system that rewards buying the thing that makes nothing and punishes building the thing that does, so even more money goes through the wrong door. Smart people and big money chasing the next property deal instead of the next business, because that’s where the easy money’s been. None of these are separate problems. It’s the one problem wearing different hats.

Lets not make it too neat. Housing isn’t all dead weight. Building new homes is good, very good. It employs a lot of people, and having a roof over your head is worth something no GDP number ever captures. And plenty of countries with dear housing still get along fine. One bad month of jobs figures doesn’t prove any of this on its own either, the economy has its own ups and downs that have nothing to do with houses.

So it’s not that houses are the baddie, and it’s not that one bad month of jobs figures proves the whole thing on its own. It’s that when a whole country leans this hard on the one thing that doesn’t grow the pie, year after year, the pie stops growing. And when the pie stops growing, you’ve got less to go round for everything else.

That’s why it’s a big deal. The GDP in not some magic number on the telly. The GDP is the scoreboard for one choice the country keeps making without quite meaning to: do we build the thing, or just sell each other the thing we already built for more. We’ve spent a long time doing the second. And the bill for that isn’t a number. It’s a country that could’ve been doing more, and isn’t.

Your house doesn’t count. Turns out that’s not some quirk of the accounting. It’s the whole story in one line.

The Cleverest Bit of Marketing in Australia Right Now

Two founders in work aprons concentrate on detailed work at a cluttered workbench, while a relaxed man in a pale linen suit leans in the open doorway with one hand extended, palm up, doing none of the work but waiting for his share. — Never done a stocktake. Still wants his share.

Betty’s brother Kevin rang from Kiama last week, properly worked up. His daughter’s got a startup, a real one, the kind with late nights and not much sleep, and Kevin had just seen something online about the government coming after people exactly like her. “They’re punishing the ones having a crack,” he told Betty. “Did you see what they’re calling it? An aspiration ambush.” Betty hadn’t seen it. But she could hear that Kevin had already made up his mind, and that whatever he’d watched had done a very good job of helping him.

So she went and had a look. And what she found wasn’t really a tax story at all. It was one of the sharpest bits of marketing you’ll see all year.

We’ve spent two posts on GDP (See here and here). Your house doesn’t count, and the country keeps shoving its money through the housing door instead of the door where things actually get built. If you missed those, the short version is: money put into a business grows the country, money put into an existing house just makes the house dearer.

Well, this week a bunch of young business owners turned that exact argument into one of the sharpest marketing campaigns you’ll see all year. And whatever you think of the politics, the craft is worth a look, because it’s a masterclass in how to win an argument before anyone’s checked the facts.

Here’s the setup. The budget proposed changing capital gains tax, the tax you pay on the profit when you sell something for more than you bought it. The change makes sense for the housing door, taxing property investors harder so houses stop being such a one-way bet. The founders even say they’re fine with that bit. The trouble is the same change also hits people who sell a business they’ve built. Same swing of the door, and it caught the workshop along with the houses.

Now watch what they did with it.

First, the name. They didn’t call it “proposed CGT discount reform.”

They called it an aspiration ambush. Two words, and you already know whose side you’re meant to be on. “Aspiration” is the good thing, having a crack, building something. “Ambush” is the sneaky thing done to you from behind. Stick them together and you’ve got the whole grievance in a phrase a headline writer can’t resist. That’s not an accident, that’s branding.

Second, the line. The letter says, near enough, we work the hours, we carry the risk. You can’t argue with it. It doesn’t mention tax rates or indexation or any of the stuff that makes your eyes glaze. It just plants a flag: we’re the ones doing the hard yards. Try writing a reply that starts “well, actually” to we work the hours, we carry the risk and see how you sound.

Third, and this is the bit I’d frame and hang on the wall, the silent partner meme. Some of them made fake ads casting the Prime Minister as a 47% shareholder in their business. One posted that he’s a bloke who has never done a stocktake and somehow still gets 47 per cent of the business and takes zero risk. That’s the silent partner gag, and it’s perfect, because it takes an invisible, boring thing, a tax on a sale that might happen years from now, and turns it into a freeloading mate who turns up at payday having done nothing. Everyone’s had a version of that bloke. You feel it before you’ve thought about it. Region Canberra

No wonder Kevin shared it. That’s the gag working exactly as designed, it travels from a screen in Kiama to a phone call with his sister before anyone’s checked a single number.

Fourth, the messenger. They didn’t wheel out grey men from a lobby group. They badged it founders under 40. Young, building things, the future. It’s much harder to paint a 35-year-old who started a company as a greedy fat cat, so the campaign chose faces that don’t fit the villain costume.

Put it together and you’ve got a textbook job: a sticky name, a line you can’t argue with, a meme that does the thinking for you, and the right faces out front. It went everywhere. Sky, the papers, an open letter straight to the PM. That’s what good marketing looks like, it makes its point feel like common sense before the other side has finished clearing its throat.

Now, here’s where Betty keeps her wits about her, because clever marketing is exactly the thing you should be most careful around. Being well-sold isn’t the same as being right.

Albanese’s comeback is, frankly, not bad either, it’s just nowhere near as catchy. He says the campaign is being run by right-wing parties and their allies, and that the meme misses how the tax actually works: it’s only paid when a business is sold, not every year, and most small businesses pay little or no capital gains tax when they sell. If he’s right, the “47% silent partner” doesn’t apply to most of the people sharing it. But “it’s only realised on disposal and most SMEs fall under the threshold” will never, ever beat a funny picture of the PM stealing half your business. The truer claim is losing because the catchier claim is winning. That happens a lot, and it’s worth noticing when it’s happening to you. Western Advocate Region Canberra

So two things are true at the same time. The founders have a real point, the tax change really does seem to clip the productive door as well as the housing one, and that’s the exact problem these posts have been about. And they’ve dressed that point in such good marketing that you should slow down and check it rather than just nod along. Both can be true. Usually are.

That’s the lesson, and it’s a bigger one than capital gains tax. The side with the better slogan isn’t automatically the side that’s right. They’re just the side that hired the better wordsmith. Your job, Betty, is to enjoy the craft, and then go and find out whether the thing it’s selling you is actually true.

Funny old world. We started by working out why your house doesn’t count, and we’ve ended up watching the country’s smartest marketers fight over the door it should’ve been going through all along.

Net zero, explained the way I’d explain it to Betty from Blacktown.

This is part of my Betty from Blacktown series. Betty isn’t a real person. She’s most of us. She’s spent her life getting good at one thing, and outside that one thing she’s a beginner like everyone else. I was a pharmacist, then I ran an organisation that trained young people to be confident communicators and trusted voices, and when I needed expertise I brought in specialists. So I’m Betty too, on every subject that isn’t mine.

This series is for people who aren’t specialists but want to understand the things that matter to them, including the things they never thought were important until someone a long way above them made a decision that turned up in their lives.

Net zero is one of those. It gets thrown around like everyone already agrees what it means, and most of us don’t. I didn’t either.

The only reason I’ve got enough confidence to write this post is that I’ve had the room in my life lately to think about it, turn it over, lose a bit of sleep on it. Betty hasn’t, because she’s flat out with everything else. That’s the only difference between us. I’m on the same learning curve she is, I just got a head start. And once you’ve worked something out, the decent thing is to share it. So here’s my go.

Think of a bath

Picture a bath with the tap running and the plug half out.

The tap is what we put into the air. The water draining away is what the planet pulls back out, the oceans and the forests soaking it up. Right now the tap is on full and the plug is barely letting anything through, so the level keeps rising and the bath is heading for the floor.

Net zero is the point where the level stops climbing. What’s going in matches what’s draining out.

Notice what that does and doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean we stop everything. It doesn’t mean we scrub the bath clean and undo the past. It means we stop making it worse. The level stops climbing. That’s a more honest and more reachable thing than people think when they hear the word “zero.”

It’s something we try for

I think of net zero the way I think of saving for a holiday. It’s an aspiration. Something you work towards knowing the date might move, the amount might change, life might get in the way. You don’t abandon the holiday because you might not get there by July.

The trying counts even when we don’t hit the number.

I know this one from the inside. I farmed dairy for years, and I worked with the beef industry too. So when the red meat industry announced in 2017 they’d be carbon neutral by 2030, I shook my head.

Not because the goal was wrong. Because the number wasn’t real. A target only counts for something if it’s within your power to pull off, and that one leaned on thousands of farmers choosing to come along, plus a stack of things nobody controlled. The one real lever they had was whether they could explain to their farmers why it was worth doing, and they reached for the headline instead. By 2025 they admitted they couldn’t make the date and pulled it back.

Dairy did the opposite. We set ourselves something we could actually reach and got on with it. On our own farm we lifted milk production and brought our methane down at the same time, both moving the right way for years. I used to say it in percentages on the radio and watch it slide straight off people. Nobody ever quoted the numbers back to me. But the day I said our family farm puts breakfast on the table for 50,000 Australians every day, people repeated that one back to me for years.

That’s the difference between a number and a picture. And it’s the difference between a target that’s a fantasy and a target that’s real. The fantasy one got abandoned. The realistic goal kept going.

So why isn’t it just happening?

The lazy answer is that people don’t care enough. I don’t buy it.

I bought some ham the other day. It had a fancy new strip on it, tear here, reseal there. I couldn’t open the thing. Ended up using the scissors like always. And I’d have paid extra for that packaging, the clever packaging that doesn’t work, when all I actually wanted was packaging I could recycle. That option wasn’t even on the shelf.

I didn’t fail there. The packaging failed. The easy thing, the recyclable one, was never offered, and then if I give up and bin it the story becomes that I’m the one who didn’t care.

People care plenty. What’s missing is the easy. The right thing is too often the hard thing, the thing with scissors and a surcharge, while the wrong thing is sitting there ready to go. Change that, put the easy option on the shelf, and watch how fast people “start caring.”

What about China? What about everyone else?

This is the one that comes up every time. Why should we bother when China won’t, when the bloke next door won’t, when half the world is heading the other way.

It’s a fair feeling. Nobody wants to be the mug who does the right thing while everyone else free-rides. But notice it’s a feeling about fairness, not about carbon. And the answer isn’t to argue about China. It’s this: you’re not a mug, and you’re not the problem. We built a whole world that rewards looking after number one and treats chipping in for everyone as the sucker’s move. Of course “us” feels like being taken for a ride. That feeling is honest. It’s just aimed at the wrong target.

The same goes for people in poorer countries starting to eat more meat, wanting the things we’ve had for generations. We’re in no position to tell them not to. But we are in a position to share what we’ve worked out, how to produce each kilo with less cost to the planet. Not “go without.” Here’s how. That’s a gift you can offer without being a hypocrite.

A word about how this gets explained

A huge shoutout to Les Robinson, who’s spent a career on how people actually change. His website is worth a coffee and a good long read. The kind of wisdom you find yourself using every day. Les speaks to Betty from Blacktown. He sees her as an equal, a fellow human being trying to do the right thing with the knowledge she has.

Outside your own narrow patch, you’re a non-specialist in nearly everything, same as me. Speaking language everyone can understand is the key. It’s recognising where the room actually is, and treating people as equals. The opposite, hiding good knowledge behind language you know the other person can’t follow, isn’t clever. It’s a wall.

So that’s net zero. A bath that needs to stop rising. A holiday worth saving for even if the date moves. A thing we try for, because the trying changes where we end up, and the alternative is standing back while the bath water goes over the floor.

I’ll be proud of us for trying. Give it a go.

With thanks to four people who’ve built their careers on being understood by Betty from Blacktown: Les Robinson, Dr Jenni Metcalfe, Gaye Steel and Greg Mills.

☕ Enjoyed Betty’s take? She’s not done yet. Read all of Betty from Blacktown’s catch-ups here

Your House Doesn’t Count (And Other GDP Surprises)

A whole house, and the scale reads zero. That’s the thing about GDP nobody explains: a home going up in value adds nothing to what the country actually produces.

A couple of weeks ago I drove seven hours to hand out how-to-vote cards, then wrote the whole thing up. Quite a few of you read it. This week my big adventure was reading about capital gains tax for forty minutes on a perfectly good weekday because a Michael West Media piece landed in my inbox and I couldn’t help myself.

Every time the New York Times, Michael West Media or The Conversation turns up, I do a deep dive. A very deep dive. So between the seven days at a polling booth and the forty-minute tax binge, I think we can all agree: I need to get a life.

The good news is I’m going out with friends this weekend. Nice wine, good food, great company. Long overdue.

Before I go and remember what conversation with non-economists feels like, here’s the thing that piece explained that finally made GDP make sense to me after years of nodding along and understanding nothing.

The two kinds of “investing”

There are two ways to put your money to work. They look the same. They are not.

You can buy something that already exists, like an established house, and wait for it to go up in value. You end up richer. Good for you. But nothing new got made. The house was already standing. No extra jobs, no extra goods, nothing extra for the country. Your wealth went up and the nation’s output didn’t move an inch.

Or your money can go into a business. The business buys equipment, trains people, makes products, hires staff. That lifts what the country can actually produce. More gets made for every hour worked. That’s productivity, and productivity is the thing that makes wages rise over the years, for everyone, not just the person who put the money in.

So one is a win for you. The other is a win for you that’s also a win for the whole country.

That was the click for me. I’d always heard “investment” and pictured someone buying a rental. Turns out economists barely count that as investment at all. If it isn’t increasing what the country can produce, it’s really just savings wearing a nicer jacket.

Why it matters for the budget

For 25 years Australia poured its money into the first kind. Existing houses. The tax system practically begged us to, with the 50% capital gains discount and negative gearing making an established property the smartest tax play going.

The result is a $12 trillion housing market, nearly four times the value of every company on the stock exchange combined. A mountain of money sitting in houses that just go up in price, instead of in businesses that build things and employ people.

As one financial writer, Harry Chemay, put it in Michael West Media last week, residential land “may appreciate over time, but it does not by itself generate any economic output.” A house going up in value makes the owner richer without the country producing a single thing extra. michaelwest

That’s what the 2026 budget is trying to shift. Nudge the money out of “buy an old house and wait” and into building new homes and backing businesses. Whether it works is a separate question, and the government has done a woeful job explaining any of it, which I got into elsewhere. But the idea underneath is sound, and it’s the first time I’ve properly understood why anyone bothers measuring productivity at all.

If you want the plain-English version of what the budget actually does to your tax, I wrote that for Betty from Blacktown here. The polling booth piece, if you missed it, is here . And the family farms and capital gains argument is here.

Right. Wine.

Daily News Round Up – 21 May 2026

Very local, state, national and the wider world, in everyday language, for people who haven’t got all day.

Forget the media releases and the big-picture pitches. It’s what ordinary residents stood up and asked the Premier that tells you what’s really worrying this town. Overdevelopment, a highway land grab, and petrol prices that reach all the way down to Kiama.

Not much happening today. Just the way we like it. Betty’s on the crossword, Kevin’s resting his eyes, and the world can wait till after the toast. (Image by AI. Betty awarded it a gold star for the kookaburra and a firm “see me” for the spelling.)

Why I’m doing this

Like a lot of you, I don’t have hours to sit and trawl through the news. Between work, family and everything else that lands on the to-do list, keeping across what’s actually going on falls to the bottom of the pile. So I’ve started doing the digging for you.

I’ll post these whenever I get the time – no set schedule, no promises. When life gives me a window, I’ll do the rounds and put one up. But the idea stays the same every time: a quick, no-jargon round-up of the stuff that actually touches your week, pulled from the papers worth reading so you don’t have to.

Grab a cuppa. This won’t take five minutes.

Very Local: what our community actually asked the Premier

The big one this fortnight was the NSW Community Cabinet at The Pavilion on May 19. More than 300 of us turned up to put questions straight to Premier Chris Minns and most of his cabinet. You’ll have read the Council’s media release about the projects it pitched (Spring Creek, the Bombo Waste Treatment Plant, the Kiama Sports Complex). That’s all worthwhile, but it’s the big-picture stuff. Here’s what ordinary residents got up and asked, because that’s the part that tells you what’s really worrying people around here.

Overdevelopment and our town’s character. This was the question that opened the night and drew applause. Locals asked why Kiama, a heritage town, is being pushed to take so much high-density development when there’s approved land elsewhere. One resident put it bluntly: South Kiama Drive already has around 400 approved lots and Jamberoo around 1,000, so why are luxury apartments worth millions being proposed in the middle of town where ordinary families can’t afford them, while we lose car parks and town space? Minns said he respected the concern about “character,” talked up a meeting with the Mayor about opening up new housing to the north of town, and pitched what he called “density done well.” Make of that what you will.

The Princes Highway land grab. A resident said the government is acquiring far more land than needed for the highway upgrade – in their case about 2,000 square metres – leaving a service road just 10 metres from their son’s bedroom instead of over 100 metres away. They also slammed being given only 14 days to wade through a 1,000-page environmental document. The Premier admitted it was “deeply regrettable” but said you can’t build infrastructure without sometimes taking private land.

Parkinson’s nurses. Lesley Errington from Parkinson Support Kiama pushed for funding for Parkinson’s specialist nurses in country regions, arguing they save the public hospital system money. Health Minister Ryan Park wouldn’t pre-empt the budget but said they’re “looking at that very, very closely.”

The South Coast rail line. A union rep asked when we’ll get a firm commitment to upgrade and electrify the line. Minns acknowledged a decade of underinvestment in heavy rail while Sydney got new metros, pointed to an emergency repair package, and said any commitment needs a fairer share of federal infrastructure money.

EV charging. A local who started a transport business using an electric vehicle said there are no fast chargers in the Kiama area at all, forcing him to leave the LGA to recharge. Minns pointed to statewide funding and, tellingly, linked the push to “dramatic rises in petrol and diesel prices as a result of the Middle East.” (Hold that thought for the international section.)

Other questions covered youth crime prevention, Indigenous housing funding, food waste, and staffing and plastic waste at the new Shellharbour Hospital.

Read more: Was the Kiama boycott brave, or an own goal? See bottom of post

Across NSW (State)

The cost of living is still the headache that won’t quit. Sydney remains the dearest city in the country, with house prices tipped to push past $1.88 million this year. There’s one small mercy for renters, though. After years of relentless rises, things have finally steadied, with Sydney house rents holding around $780 a week, the longest calm spell in nearly a decade. Groceries, mind you, are still pinching everyone.

Housing supply is the theme tying the state together, and as the Community Cabinet showed, it’s landing hard right here on the South Coast.

Across the Country (Federal)

Treasurer Jim Chalmers handed down a big-swing Federal Budget on May 12. The bits that matter for ordinary households:

Fuel relief. A $14.8 billion package to shore up fuel supplies and ease petrol prices, a direct response to trouble overseas (more on that in a tick).

Housing tax shake-up. The government wants to limit negative gearing to new builds from July 2027 and change capital gains tax, aiming to give first-home buyers a fairer shot. The Opposition is dead against it.

The tightrope. The Reserve Bank is so worried about inflation that Governor Michele Bullock has signalled she’d rather risk a recession than let it run loose. So Chalmers is walking a fine line between giving people relief and making prices worse.

Around the World (International)

The big one is a US and Israel war with Iran, which has been running for weeks now, and it’s a big reason your petrol’s gone up. This week Trump warned of fresh attacks within “two or three days” if there’s no deal, while Iran says it’ll widen the war if it’s hit again. Much of the fighting centres on the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil shipping lane, which is squeezing fuel prices the world over. That’s the same petrol pain our EV bloke raised at the Community Cabinet, so it really does reach all the way down to Kiama.

In Gaza, a fragile ceasefire is wobbling, and there’s been global outrage after several countries, including Italy, France, Canada and the Netherlands, summoned Israeli ambassadors over the treatment of captured aid-flotilla activists.

The bottom line: trouble in the Middle East pushes up oil, oil pushes up petrol and prices here, and that’s why so much of the Budget was built around it. It’s all connected, even from the South Coast.

Albo the Silent Partner – a budget explainer for Betty from Blacktown

Somewhere in Blacktown, Betty is reading the budget papers. Her accountant isn’t answering. Her family’s at work. The Treasurer is on the telly saying “distortions. This post is for her.

G’day Betty.

You rang your accountant. He didn’t ring back. Your daughter’s working two jobs and your son-in-law’s on night shift, so the family WhatsApp is all emojis and no answers. Meanwhile every news bulletin has someone in a suit yelling about “indexation” and “distortions” and you’re left wondering whether the bloke on the telly just took something off you or gave you something, and whether you should be cross about it.

Let me have a crack. No jargon. Promise.

What actually changed on budget night

A week ago, on 12 May, Jim Chalmers handed down the budget. Three things matter for normal people:

One. From July 2027, when someone sells an investment, a rental, some shares, a business, the tax rules change. The old deal was simple: hold it more than a year, only pay tax on half the gain. The new deal: you only pay tax on the bit that beats inflation (the “real” gain), but with a minimum tax rate of 30% on whatever’s left.

Two. Negative gearing, where landlords offset rental losses against their wage, gets limited to new builds only, also from July 2027. If you’ve already got an investment property, nothing changes for you. You’re grandfathered in.

Three. Family trusts get a minimum 30% tax from July 2028. This is the bit that’s upsetting small business owners, because a lot of them run their butcher shop or tradie business through a trust.

What it means for you, Betty

Here’s the thing the government has been hopeless at saying out loud: if you’re a pensioner, the minimum 30% tax on capital gains doesn’t apply to you. Pensioners are exempt. That’s in the budget papers. Nobody’s said it on the 6 o’clock news because it doesn’t fit either side’s story.

If you own your home, your home is not touched. The main residence exemption is untouched. Sell the house, no tax. Same as it ever was.

If you’ve got a bit of super, your super is not touched. The CGT discount inside super funds stays.

If you’ve got a rental you bought years ago, nothing changes for you unless and until you sell, and even then the old rules apply to the gains you’ve already made.

So far, so boring. So why is everyone yelling?

Why everyone’s yelling

Because of the bit that isn’t about Betty. It’s about Betty’s nephew Luke who runs a life-coaching business, or your neighbour’s daughter who started a little software company in her garage. When they eventually sell, the government takes a minimum 30% slice. Small business owners have started making AI memes of Anthony Albanese photoshopped into their shop windows as the “silent partner” the bloke who didn’t do any of the work but turns up on settlement day with his hand out.

That’s the meme. And memes win arguments these days, Betty, whether we like it or not.

Now , the government will tell you there are small business CGT concessions that still let eligible owners halve or even wipe their CGT bill on sale. That’s true. They are real and they are generous. But Jim Chalmers spent a week not saying it loud enough, and Anthony Albanese spent a week saying “we’re returning to the pre-1999 system” as if anyone under 50 remembers what the pre-1999 system felt like.

The bit that should actually worry you

It’s not the policy. It’s the competence.

A week after budget night, Labor’s own backbenchers are telling journalists they can’t explain it. The Prime Minister himself admitted yesterday that the trust changes “will take longer to develop”, which is political code for we announced it before we’d finished designing it. He’s said he’ll bring the CGT legislation to Parliament “in a fortnight.” Everything’s in a fortnight. Nothing’s actually happened yet.

If your accountant won’t ring you back and the Treasurer can’t explain the policy on Insiders, that’s not your fault, Betty. That’s theirs.

What to actually do

Don’t panic-sell anything. The changes don’t start until July 2027. You’ve got over a year. Existing assets are mostly grandfathered.
If you’re a pensioner, breathe out. The minimum tax doesn’t apply to you.
Keep ringing the accountant. When he finally picks up, ask him two questions: does anything I own get caught by the new rules, and if so, when do I need to decide anything? That’s it. Don’t let him bill you for an hour of jargon.
Watch the trust stuff. It’s the bit most likely to change between now and when it’s legislated. If anyone tells you what the final rules are before about September, they’re guessing.

The bottom line

The budget isn’t the disaster the memes suggest, and it isn’t the masterstroke the press releases suggest. For most pensioners and most homeowners, very little changes. For people who own businesses they plan to sell, or who use family trusts, there’s real stuff to work through and the government hasn’t finished working it through itself.

Anthony Albanese has earned his new nickname. He is the silent partner, silent on the bits that would reassure you, silent on the bits that would honestly admit what’s still being figured out. Until he starts talking like a human being instead of a Treasury press release, Betty from Blacktown is going to keep being confused. And so will the rest of the country.

Hang in there. Ring the accountant on Monday. And if he still won’t pick up, ring me.