I visited Perth recently and paid homage to the statue of ACDC singer Bon Scott, which is near the Fish Markets in Freo. Also, Kings Park for lunch and a visit to the War Memorial.
Govt-wise, Perth is the only State with Liberals (conservatives) in power, and they have all the top former-Howard people there (all top guns, I’ve heard).
Also, chit chat about the UK and how that’s going. Apparently when Lehman collapsed last year, for six weeks the HM Treasury peeps spent 24/7 at the office, sleeping under their desks and sending people out to buy underwear.
The Queen was FURIOUS and called in the Governor of the Bank of England (first time she’d ever had an audience with him) for a “please explain” meeting on why the ‘brightest minds in the country” had stuffed everything up.
Then she visited the London School of Economics and they showed her diagrams of how everything had gone bad. Theories of “herd” behaviour and “irrational” behaviour had been ignored. Instead, finance people had gone for their own “incentives” and ignored the bigger, global picture. Just looking out for themselves. Also, with derivatives maturing in 5, 10, 15 years, more shocks could be ahead.
The Budget was also three months late coming out. Why? Cause the govt had run out of ideas. So it’s expected to be flat in the UK for the next five years at least. The main problem is that finance was the biggest industry in the UK, so now they’ll have to look for something else and that could take several years.
When the crisis hit, the UK checked out what regulations worldwide were “best practice” and could have prevented this happening in the UK. Canada, Australia and Sweden were best — “cause they’d been hit in the 1990s and did regulation back then”.
Bon Scott trivia: When the Freo Dockers footy team wins, they play ACDC song TNT, as homage to ACDC’s Freo origins. This cheeses some fans off, as they expect to hear the club’s brilliant theme song.
Lyrics:
Freo, heave ho!
Freo, heave hol
Give ‘em all the old
Freo, heave ho!
Freo, way to go!
Hit ‘em real hard, send ‘em down below
Oh Freo, give ‘em the old heave ho
We are the Freo Dockers!
We’re the rollers
We’re the rockers
We’re the mighty Freo Dockers!
We’re gonna roll ‘em and we’ll rock ‘em
We’re gonna send ‘em to the bottom
And if they get up, we’ll do again
The Dockers stop at nothing – nothing
Dock dock Dockers
Show ‘em how we rock
(Freo heave ho)
Dock dock Dockers
Show ‘em how we roll
Go Dockers, Go Go Go!
*written by Ken Walther based in part on The Song of the Volga Boatmen, traditional arrangement Stravinsky.
Cotton Ward 