The plane, the plane

Let me open this post on a positive note by congratulating the catering staff of this afternoon's Qantas flight from Coffs Harbour to Sydney. You have won,  hands down,  this month's wasted effort award. Absolutely no one ate anything that you put in the light refreshment box.  The par-frozen capsicum and fetta muffin was insulted perfectly by the dried cranberries that were,  mysteriously only 55% cranberry and the whole thing was bottomed out with a cup of coffee whose "best before" date was exactly a week before Neil Armstrong's famous stroll on the lunar surface. You have done your profession proud. In the best traditions of airline catering everywhere you have put hours of planning and work into a red cardboard box the contents of which will remain untouched by human hands.

But it was a great team effort right from the start this afternoon. The security guys at the airport were diligent in ensuring that my belt buckle didn't contain explosives and that I wasn't going to hijack the aircraft with a spring loaded blade concealed - a la James Bond - in my mobile phone.

As I boarded the aircraft the stewardess - who had a face that said "just try to read your magazine during the safety demonstration and we'll see how well the ejector seats work" - helpfully solved my illiteracy problems by reading both my name and seat number to me from my boarding pass. It's a service you don't get on budget airlines and, in some places,  there are departure lounges full of bemused travelers, unsure of their destination,  their seat number or even their own names;  stuck forever in the luminescent hell of an airport terminal. 

Even once I'd find my seat - 6A- deceptively sandwiched between rows 5 and 7 - the service didn't stop.  I was reminded by the helpful staff that my luggage should,  in fact,  be in the luggage rack - not balanced precariously on the windowsill, the only other available space on a plane that size - and what the sign above my head showing a fastened seat belt actually meant. 

A light refreshment was served - but I've gone into that fine moment already.

As we landed in Sydney - and pleased I and my fellow passengers were to be told that the Sydney flight had in fact gone to a location of the same name - I was reminded of the local time  (which was the same as the local time at home), informed that the weather was fine (a fact I couldn't discern for myself due to being dazzled by the sunlight streaming in through the windows) and abjured to hold onto the handrails while descending the steps, not to blow myself to kingdom come by lighting up next to the refueling truck and to breathe in and out at regular intervals throughout my journey across the tarmac and at all times while in the terminal building.

The whole customer service experience was topped off by being reminded that my baggage would be available from the baggage claim area,  that taxis departed from the taxi rank in front of the terminal and that Avis is in the business of renting cars to unsuspecting passers-by. 

All in all, a superb waste of time,  food, packaging and oxygen; a model of domestic airline service.

How not to pay anyone - a primer for conservatives

If you are a conservative in government, then you probably believe that character leads to hard work leads to financial success and that the opposite logic flow applies (that lack of financial success is due to a lack of hard work due to an absence of moral fibre in the diet). Never mind that this is somewhat like arguing that if you're injured in a car accident it must be because of your bad driving which was a consequence of your lack of intelligence; you're in government now - the people have spoken - and you have a mandate to make real anything you want to believe should be so.

It follows then that you don't want to pay welfare to anyone. Far too much of the public money is being given out to hussy single mothers - who only got pregnant to get welfare in the first place - and old people who were so financially reckless that they either retired too soon or lived too long for the small amount of money that was all that, due to their moral turpitude, they saved for their old age. These people have to learn the consequences of their poor judgment (as do their children).

But the modern political world is not one in which you can be honest about these issues. Your hard core of firm moral values has to be padded in a coat of concern and pathos. You just can't come out and tell these people the harsh home truths that they need to hear - that their kids will be working down the coal mine before they're 7, mum will be on the game and the elderly will be begging on the streets  - which is what God intended for such slackers. You have to make it look like you care without actually paying any money to them. So how do you achieve such a task?

It's all in the detail. Let's illustrate with an example. Say you want to take away childcare benefits from families. Follow these steps.

1. First of all, keep the rebate rate the same (say 50%) but adjust the baseline. You don't want to pay 50% of actual costs but 50% of the average cost of childcare. What if the average is too high? The trick then is to play statistics. Most people are afraid of maths - even other politicians - and so if you can get some good, complicated looking stats presented by a bespectacled freaknoid who is - and is keen to remain - on the government payroll, you're home and hosed. Firstly, treat any amount more than say 10% above the average you want as an "outlier" which you're quite entitled to remove for statistical purposes. That knocks out all the expensive stuff. Then take the average over ten years which means that you're looking the cost of childcare for the last cohort of parents, not the current ones. That should knock the average from $90 down to say $67 then you're only out of pocket $33.50 not $45 a day. This trick has worked for years in Medicare. If anyone whinges that this isn't anywhere close to the real cost of childcare - your response needs to be "Well maybe not in your latte-sipping, middle class, entitlement-mentality suburb but it is for real battlers!" - wedge politics is your friend here.

2. Reduce the number of hours you'll pay for. Say parents want 10 hours a day - 8 for their actual work and 1 hour each for the commute from childcare to work and back. You don't want to pay for that. They should consider themselves lucky to have a job at all - not expect the government to be shelling out to help them get to and from it as well. Reduce the rebatable hours to 8. Then recalculate the average. That should take another $3 to $4 a day off the amount you need to pay.

3. Taper early and often. You can always sell the line that welfare is only to help people get back on their feet. As they get more income, they need less help. It only stands to reason (great line that, use it often). Only offer the top rate of rebate to the very poorest and then take away $1 for every 50c someone earns above the poverty line. Almost no-one will get the top rate but it's still there in theory (and makes a great headline) and, by the time someone gets to the stage where they can actually pay the rent, they'll be getting a McDonald's coffee worth of rebate a week - if they're lucky. That should shave another 30% off the total bill.

4. Now make it impossible to get. Only people with work need childcare - if they don't have work they can't get childcare. Of course, they can't take a job if they don't have a guarantee of childcare but that's hardly your problem; life wasn't meant to be easy. Are they complaining that they're casual or piece-working? Well, don't make their lives easier; it would only provide a disincentive for these losers to get real jobs. At the same time, under the guide of 'fairness', wrap the whole thing in bureaucracy so Byzantine that most people will give up in despair before they actually get a penny. Make them prove they're working, make them do it every month and make them do it in writing. Try this: get their employer to have to fill in a form - handwritten for every employee - and make the lodgement have to be in person at a welfare office. Then strip the staffing from those offices and hire a few smelly, mumbling, shoeless nutters from the local asylum to clog up the queues and take up the waiting chairs all day. That should take another 10 - 20% off the total bill because that percentage of people won't have time to complete the process - they'll be too busy commuting to or actually being at their jobs.

5. Wedge the middle class. You don't want a middle class - they are always the one causing problems, abusing the education they've been given by asking awkward questions or thinking about things they weren't asked to think about. The natural order of things is you and your mates at the top and everyone else in the serving classes. Remember too that revolutions always come from the middle classes; you need to turn them against themselves so they are too busy fighting each other to unite against you. The trick here is to redefine "rich". Rich people shouldn't expect handouts ("handouts" not "support" or "assistance' - the pejorative is important). If too many people are getting welfare, just move the "rich line" until the top half of the middle class has become the despised "rich" and, by virtue of their new social position, you have elevated and castrated them all in one go. They no longer have a leg, let alone a soap-box, to stand on to complain about welfare reform. You can move the line as low as you like. If two newly graduated teachers are bringing in $120K gross between them, move the wealthy-line of family income to $100K. Now they're not battlers - almost as good as diggers (soldiers for my international readers) or farmers in the national consciousness - they're wealthy; privileged, chardonnay drinking, Mercedes driving wealthy. They've just been cut out of the national debate very neatly indeed.

And that's how it's done. By this time, your total bill should have come down to something like 20% of what it used to to be almost no-one is getting a brass razoo.

And, as an afterthought, make the whole thing more palatable by putting a fraction of the total savings into a fund for disadvantaged kids - after all, they're a growing percentage of the population now - and blame the opposition for taking food from the mouths of the disabled if they don't support your policies. That screws them over and gives you a small window through which to show your true colours

There is a season

For everything there is a season.

The end of financial year* - celebrated with newly coined atrocity "Happy EOFYS" - starts in May with the acronymically mentioned end of financial year sales and ends sometime after March the year following when the tax office starts to send mildly impolite letters to rich people that haven't yet paid the distressingly modest amount of tax they have been assessed as owing; if it's not too much trouble.

Father's Day follows fairly rapidly as the joy of new car ownership - at runout prices - starts to fade and tis the season to bring out socks, mildly amusing t-shirts, stubby coolers, and endless amounts of hardware because there's nothing your father would rather do than spend his weekend fixing stuff while looking longingly at the beer cooler and wishing that there was something in it rather earlier than 7pm - after we've gotten all the kids bathed and in bed.

There used to be a tragic lull here but research marketeers have discovered a new season witch is Halloween. It's a bit of a dwarf-planet of a season still here in Australia but as the need of our children to pronounce 'tomato' to rhyme with 'potato' and eat cookies takes stronger hold, I think that this new starter will mature and fill the gap nicely between Father's Day and Christmas and ensure that there is no real opportunity to put stores of cash away responsibly for the oncoming season of cost and credit card spending.

Christmas, as is well known kicks off in September and finishes in late December just in time for the advent of Back to School which, starting some five weeks before actual classes, is designed to ruin the holidays of children everywhere while slowly building the anticipation of relief for parents to such a pitch of intensity that it's a wonder teachers aren't called up for National Service - at double time and a half - four weeks into their holidays by parents who are more than happy to foot the bill.

Long before school is back and the national blood pressure goes down by a few points, two overlapping seasons are in with Valentine's Day cards and $25,000 diamond rings - the only way to show you really love her - competing for catalogue and shelf real estate with bunnies, eggs, hens, Humpty Dumpty, otherwise unshaped chocolate that was in special Christmas gift box not three months ago now repackaged with a suspiciously relieved looking rabbit on it - and bloody hot cross buns.

BTW - why is the expensive stuff only for 'her' on Valentine's Day? Show your man you really love him with $25,000 worth of ocean going yacht. Put a ribbon and a heart shaped card on it if you must. There's more fun to be had on the deck of a sloop than you're going to get from sparkly carbon cut into peculiar geometric shapes.

In any event, as Easter slowly fades onto the discount shelves, Mother's Day is icumen in, which is a chance to trot out the pink, the ribbons and the ludicrously expensive bling for another outing. At this point, you can indicate your level of love from "early courting" @ $25K, "early marriage" at a house-deposit wary $5K or a "we've got three kids now" at $5 a go at the school Mother's Day stall.

Which brings us very nicely around the great cycle of the seasons to EOFYS again.

The only season that isn't a real season is Anzac Day. It is quite OK to turn the birth and brutal torture and death of God himself into heavily commercialised circuses in the calendar but the pointless and tragic death of mere mortals is far more sacred and any mention of the word Anzac on anything other than biscuit packets is, prime facie, sedition - punishable by immediate ostracism with an extraordinarily sharp ostrace.

*The Australian financial year runs from 1 July to 30 June.