Failed Policies Continue Down Under

Townhall.com ^ | January 29, 2013 | Mike Shedlock

[Kaslin]

It's time once again to take a look at happenings down under. Restaurants are closing en masse rather than pay double time and a half to stay open on holidays.

Please consider Penalties blamed for taking high-end dining off menu.

The annual survey of the 7500- member Restaurant and Catering Australia reveals a 33 per cent jump since 2011 in the numbers of restaurateurs saying they cannot afford to open on public holidays.

Public holiday penalty rates require employers to pay double time and a half, equating to pay rates of at least $40 an hour.

Robert Marchetti, executive chef of Sydney's Icebergs Dining Room and Bar and North Bondi Italian Food and owner of highly acclaimed restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne, said some of his businesses - including Neild Avenue - would be closed today, while those that opened would be providing a "public service".

"The government are a bunch of monkeys who don't understand business," he said.

"We're not living in the 1960s anymore. Australia has its head stuck up its arse on IR.

Following ACTU Secretary Dave Oliver's Christmas Eve call for the Fair Work Act to be changed to enshrine penalty rates as a minimum entitlement, United Voice liquor and hospitality division Secretary Tara Moriarty said the issue was one the industry raised every public holiday.

"Penalty rates haven't made the sky fall in yet, despite them constantly making suggestions to the contrary," she said.

Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association national secretary Joe De Bruyn said the closure of some businesses on public holidays would simply mean more business for the restaurants that stayed open.

"Penalty rates have been part of workers' entitlements for decades," he said.

Unions were awaiting the outcome of a Fair Work Australia hearing on penalty rates. "While the unions put up a very strong case for preserving penalty rates, the employers' case was a pathetic performance," Mr De Bruyn said.Double-Time and a Half Insanity

You have to love the mentality "the sky is not falling yet" mantra, especially when it clearly is.

Who pays for this absurdity? Consumers in general of course. Business owners and employees of businesses who cannot afford to pay double-time and a half, also get hit hard.

House and Land Incentives

Property Observer notes House-and-land incentive and discounts from $5,000 to $126,000

New housing finance and building approval figures suggest there will be no swift rebound in demand for new housing.

There was a 10.3% fall in home loan commitments for new dwellings and a 0.3% drop in building approvals for new houses in November, according to seasonally adjusted ABS figures.

New home buyers can secure discounts in the thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars on select blocks of lands and new homes in Melbourne, the Gold Coast and Sydney.

There are also generous first-home buyer incentives on offer from NSW, Queensland, Tasmanian and South Australian state governments for those buying or building new homes.

$30,000

Listed residential developer Peet is offering savings of up to $30,000 on “certain lots” in residential communities on the outskirts of Melbourne.

$22,000

Listed developer Devine is offering to pay mortgage repayments for up to a year on behalf of approved purchasers who sign an unconditional contract to purchase a new Devine house and land package before February 28 2013 under its Devine Mortgage Break promotion.

Melbourne builder Carlisle Homes is offering a $30,000 discount off the retail price of double-storey homes and $22,000 off the retail price of single-storey homes in its luxury Affinity and T Range collections. There is currently no end date to this promotion.

$10,000

Up until February 25 2013, Stockland is offering approved purchasers a $10,000 VISA gift card to spend as they wish.

$76,000 - $126,000

Discounts of up to $126,000 are on offer for residential lots in The Highlands community in the Ecovillage, Currumbin Valley on the Gold Coast. Massive Housing Incentive, Still No Buyers

Macrobusiness reports Developers Go Completely Mad.

Today, Property Observer has provided a comprehensive list of incentives being offered by developers in a bid to lift sales, which are in addition to generous incentives on offer in New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and South Australia.

Clearly, such developer incentives are failing to stimulate demand and could actually be precluding the new home market from functioning properly.

Australia’s property development industry appears to be caught in a pincer. If they don’t abandon incentives in favour of transparent land price deductions, financing of new house and land packages will remain problematic and sales will likely continue to struggle. At the same time, reducing the listed price by the same value as the bonuses and incentives being offered could lower their collateral value, potentially triggering the banks to call in more equity from bank-financed developers to bring their loans back to agreed conditions and/or loan terms. Straight price cuts are also more likely to aggrieve recent purchasers that paid higher prices.How Fast the Collapse?

The housing bubble in Australia has clearly burst. All that remains to be seen is how fast things collapse.

Meanwhile, Australia's unions still cling to an already dead model, oblivious to the fact the boom is over.

[cuban leaf]

Regarding the restaurant issue:

If this plays out like Atlas Shrugged, the next step will be to REQUIRE the restaurants to be open on holidays. And I wouldn’t put it past ‘em.

[JRandomFreeper]

In the first week of culinary school, they told us we would likely wind up divorced, and would work every holiday when everyone else was off, and that we'd have weird days and hours off that didn't match anything in the wider world.

We were strongly encouraged to find other employment if that was a problem.

They were correct.

But there was never a better day for me, than deployed with a bunch of kids that were homesick and working their butts off, and to prepare them a great Thanksgiving or Christmas meal.

Let the market handle it. Keep government out of it.

/johnny

[Obadiah]

Well, at least they don’t have to worry about those pesky guns anymore now that the Aussies surrendered all of them to their government overlords.

[YHAOS]

Oh, but think of all the political contributions than rolled in and of all the votes bought.

[Buckeye McFrog]

It will eventually happen here. Big box retailers create a constituency for it every time they insist on opening Thanksgiving Day or Christmas. Sooner or later the Dems will throw this bone to their base.

[Spirochete]

Well, at least they don’t have to worry about those pesky guns anymore now that the Aussies surrendered all of them to their government overlords.

Official estimates are that only 1/3 of the guns were surrendered.

[VRW Conspirator]

Political stupidity was the first thing that was ever re-distributed, I am certain.

[The Great RJ]

My Aussi brother-in-law tells me that Julia Galliard’s Labour government will take a shellacking in the next general election largely over the carbon tax that is skyrocketing electric rates. Galliard assured voters that she would not enact the carbon tax but lmplemented it anyway (sound familiar?).

[Parmy]

I am here in the Northwest corner of the U.S. From this vantage point, it looks as if we, worldwide, have elected the least intelligent. I have observed that there is more common sense exhibited by a gerbil than brought forth by elected and unelected officials, bar none.

[Fred Nerks]

Ignorant, unsubstantiated comments like that don’t make you sound clever. There are as many guns in Austrlia now as there were before the buy-back scheme was put in place. Aussies didn’t ‘surrender’ their guns, they sold what they shouldn’t and didn’t want to keep to the government for very generous sums.
And we appreciate the new safety regulations. The majority of fire-arms death in Australia have always been through accident and suicide.
We are an entirely different culture with entirely different demographics.
Our emergency facilities at the city hospitals aren’t filled nightly with the bodies of gunshot victims.

HERE ARE THE NUMBERS:

http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/tandi/261-280/tandi269/view%20paper.html

In total there were 5083 registered deaths attributable to firearms in Australia between 1991 and 2001. Suicides committed with firearms accounted for the majority of these deaths (77%), followed by firearms homicide (15%), firearms accidents (5%), firearms deaths resulting from legal intervention and undetermined deaths (2%). Over the 11 year period the number and rate of firearm related deaths has decreased (Figure 1 and Table 1). In comparison, there has been little change in the trend for deaths caused by sharp instruments. In 1991 there were 629 firearm related deaths in Australia compared to 333 in 2001. This represents a 47 per cent decrease in firearms deaths between 1991 and 2001. The incidence of both firearms suicides and firearms homicides almost halved over the 11 year period. While the number of firearms homicides has continued to decline, with 2001 recording the lowest number of firearms homicides during this period (n=47), the number of firearms suicides declined consistently from 1991 to 1998, but has since fluctuated. The number of firearm related accidents also fluctuated over the same period, from 29 firearms accidents in 1991 to 18 in 2001, but ranging between 15 and 45 over this time. While the numbers are quite small, the year 2000 recorded the highest number of firearms accidents (45 accidents) during the 11 year period.

[Obadiah]

Just going off this video someone posted yesterday. Looked pretty bad. I am happy to be wrong here as I certainly have always had very high esteem for my brethren down under whom I have thought of as rugged, hardy souls.

I was shocked and quite depressed believing that maybe you guys just gave up your firearms like the Brits. In any case, I think there is a certain impression here that you guys gave up your guns to the government, but I'm sure our corrupt media have much to gain to float this idea in their effort to try and get us to surrender ours.

NEVER.

Having said all that, I am not persuaded by the number of murders and suicides. Obviously we have them here too, but this is a matter of the darkness growing in the hearts of men. It is not the fault of an inanimate object, i.e., a gun. Of course now in Britain there is a move afoot to ban knives!

In my opinion, governments are becoming fascist. As I believe de Tocqueville said: "A strong people do not need a strong government."

[Fred Nerks]

Time to get real and say it like it is in Australia, and stop using our country as some kind of example, which doesn’t fit. If you take the time to read the link I provided and look at the numbers, you’ll find that in the last year the figures are shown for, we had something like 330 gun deaths in TOTAL for that year, out of a population of over 20 million.
And in that 330 odd, is every sorry dickhead who blew his head off with a shotgun climbing over a fence during duck-hunting season, every suicide, every ‘accident’ - we might call negligence, and every time law enforcement was regretfully forced to use lethal force to protect themselves or the public from some maniac...

So, if I was a US citizen looking for any country on the planet to use as a comparison for statistics that has ANYHTING to do with fire-arms, Australia is THE ONE COUNTRY I would immediately stay right away from.

[Moonman62]

Suicides committed with firearms accounted for the majority of these deaths (77%),

Have total suicides gone down, or have people found other ways to off themselves?

[Fred Nerks]

http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/tandi/261-280/tandi269/view%20paper.html

the numbers are all there in the link I posted

[naturalman1975]

Unfortunately the video is garbage. It's nonsense. It's lies.

I'm not going to go through the whole thing, but just the first few statements:

A gun buyback that forced law abiding citizens to surrender their firearms in a nationwide roundup and meltdown of all semi-automatic firearms and pump action rifles and shotguns. This is a mixture of truth and lies. Yes, there was a gun buyback where fair market values were paid for all guns that were handed in - whether voluntarily or otherwise. A minority of the weapons handed in were ones that the people who owned them were no longer able to own, so you could say those people were forced, but the majority of weapons handed in remained completely legal - people were just taking advantage of tax free fair value pay outs to get rid of surplus and unwanted guns.

It is completely untrue to say that all semi-automatic firearms or all pump action rifles and shotguns needed to be handed in. All of these were now subject to greater restrictions than previously but in most cases, that meant you just had to get a new licence rather than surrender the weapons. Some people could not get these new higher level licences - normally because of a criminal history.

640,000 ordinary conventional firearms confiscated and destroyed.

Again, untrue. Only a small minority of the weapons could be said to have been confiscated - that small minority that had now become more restricted and where the person who owned them, for some reason, could not get a new licence, and those that were already illegal (such as genuine machine guns and similar) which people handed in under the amnesty on illegal weapons that was in operation at the time.

The video is propaganda, pure and simple, and is not particularly accurate.

Speaking as an Australian gun owner, I don't like our gun laws, but they are nowhere near as bad as certain people have tried to paint them in the US.

I completely legally own of these:

and one of these:

and a few other basic rifles as well. I don't feel, in any way, shape or form, disarmed. It was not trivial to get the licences I needed for these weapons but it was quite possible to do it, and it matters to me, so I did.

Gun crime is down in Australia - but was already pretty low to begin with. Other crimes haven't changed much at all - cherry pick the right dates, and you can show an increase in some crimes - choose a different set of dates and you can show a decrease.

The facts are, there are millions of firearms in private hands in Australia - more than there were prior to the gun buyback, although it's taken fifteen years to get back to those levels. But the buyback never removed more than about one fifth of legally held firearms from the community (and nobody knows how many other guns there are) and most of what were removed were surrendered voluntarily for cold hard cash by people who knew the choice they were making. Some people didn't have a choice - and that is wrong, in my view, except in cases where criminal history was the reason, but while it's wrong, it doesn't need to be presented as worse than it was - but most people did make a choice and could have made a different one.

I took some guns in for an elderly neighbour - he no longer hunted and decided a nice chunk of cash was worth more to him than rifles and shotguns that were sitting on a shelf that he hadn't already sold, because of the complexities involved in transferring ownership (which is another whole kettle of fish with the laws).

[Moonman62]

http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/tandi/261-280/tandi269/view%20paper.html

the numbers are all there in the link I posted

Thanks for the link, but I saw no data on total suicides. I did notice that firearm fatalities were trending down even before control was implemented in 1997. After reading the paper it seems to me that the problems with firearms deaths are universal, mental illness and criminality, not the ownership of firearms by law abiding citizens.

[Fred Nerks]

... After reading the paper it seems to me that the problems with firearms deaths are universal, mental illness and criminality, not the ownership of firearms by law abiding citizens.

Sensible obvservation imo...and in Australia, where suicide, accidential death as the result of negligence is included in the total, and deaths as the result of law enforcement carrying out their duties...the number of 333 for the year 2001 in a population of over 20 million is rather small...seems to me.

I don't know, nor did I research the total number of suicides in that period, but apparently numbers for suicide by hanging have increased. Sad experience has shown me that when someone is that despressed, they'll find a way.

[Moonman62]

in Australia, where suicide, accidential death as the result of negligence is included in the total, and deaths as the result of law enforcement carrying out their duties...the number of 333 for the year 2001 in a population of over 20 million is rather small...seems to me.

Chicago had 431 homicides in 2011 with a population of 2.6 million, however that's still 200 less than in 1999.