When will we run into our own demise?

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[Syklone]

When will we run into our own demise?

Guys this is just a ramble (big fucking ramble) open discussion. Please dont get into a heated arguement over who is right as it can cover open markets and econimics and businesses.

In a previous thread, it was mentioned that buying cheap and outsourcing and other evils will bring us down. I would like to admit, I strongly believe their is truth that the world still has time to fuck itself inside and out over debts / money and wages. But at the same time, I am part of the problem not the solution.

For example, I am on the lookout to get the most pay/wage I can, yet when I go shopping, I dont give a rats arse about the AUS market and will buy the cheapest I can get. Now I am not talking about computer gear (Dicksmith Sales) or furniture or jet skis. I am talking about the general local food and essentials to get through today.

I have a cost of living, that is going up, and come June/July, a carbon tax is going to make it worse. I am sorry but from where I sit in my cubicle, the management team are not going to wear the cost of it. LNG/CSG is going to be taxed, yet its classed as green alternatives. And I am going to generalise that other businesses will follow suit as they have a profit that they want to maintain and not loose on and will fuck anyoen else by some how masking it and passing it on. Or worse, just shutting down and sacking the staff and moving offshore.

So, with my cost of living going up, I am forced to take action to ensure I have money to go towards essentials, here is an example;

- turn off all appliances at home at the wall as electricity is constantly increasing.
- have the boys share bath as rates / water useage is almost double what is was a couple of years ago (My wife keeps an excel sheet on costs)
- I even turn the electric garage off when we go away on weekends as that thing sits their idly chewing power
- dont buy luxuries - ie Rum/coke/lollies
- dont run the dryer / hang clothes
- etc etc you prbably get the idea.

So, with me trying to earn $$ to pay for a roof over my head, my cost of living and supporting a family also makes me play the hand of, get anything I can as cheap as possible. IE food n essentials. So I will not buy AUS $5 a kilo oranges over USA $2 a kilo while out shopping and this is not the start, my cupboard/larder and fridge some days looks like Aldi and other countires moved into my house.

Now, here is where my train of thought goes, if people are all doing the same or similar things, how long till the country shifts and breaks. Because if I and others continue to buy overseas, then the retail sector and other areas will collapse. Whats worse is that those sectors have staff who are looking for higher wages to cope with the increases in cost of living.

So I spend my dollars overseas, a business here in AUS misses out, that business then runs at a loss, the staff ask for a pay rise but the business is not pulling in a profit like it use to and cannot pay staff higer wages. Those staff, then have to shop around for cheaper goods n services as they are not being paid a high enough wage to cover essentials thus creating a full circle. This circle cannot continue and should break as the money is flowing out in one direction and its not in these borders.

AUS Business, no names named, are then killing themselves to make a general buck by undercutting eachother just to get a dollar. The owners are working themselves into the ground with increased rents, running costs and overheads. And that single dollar extra profit is being stretched even thinner and with the competition they gave to their fellow businesses has resulted in that other business closing, yet at what cost? For a dollar? the next round of percentage increases in rent, running costs etc will wipe that business out as well, thus dumping the staff to the unemployment queue and leaving little to no chocuie for a consumer but to continue shopping overseas as competition here is killing itself.

We as a country seem to be doing a great job of turning it into a cuntry. And the only thing that has me perplexed is why we havent had another Eureka Stockade and revolted against the government, unions or corporations.

This may sound harsh, but I think Australia needs to abandon a minimum wage and dump a shitload of red tape OR do SOMETHING - ANYTHING but stay on this current course. My thinking - Because if some one can make a XYZ toothbrush for 5c overseas (and that includes paying staff) and another person can make the same XYZ toothbrush for $5 here, why the fuck would I buy the $5 model. I know I will kill the AUS retail and trading market, but I need that other $4 to go towards other living expenses.

Unsure, but at this rate, AUS should imploded in a year as we have already hit the dual speed economy. Now all we need is the gape to shift and we will not have two classes but two countries in AUS due to the two speeds of economy, and they will be haves and have nots, and the have nots will be unemployed and worse, doing more ram raids and crime to just survive (another thought piece in my mind.)

Anyone else think the same or have some other ideas ?

[YosimeteSam]

Wow, you have a lot of time on ur hands. Besides dude, we have been ripped and fucked in the arse for years by the retailers! Global buying for the consumer is here to stay. Why we get charged double or more is fucken beyond me. We as a country SELL THE FUCK OUT OF IT! Anything that makes a profit here is now in the hands of foreign owners.
All our great food producing farms, be it cattle, sheep, or the likes is in the hands of other countries.

Also the government is fucken hopeless! No matter what side you look at. It's all about the individual in politics , nothing more nothing less. They are incompetent at best. If they were business owners they would be bankrupt ass hats.

Now let's look at Woolworths and Coles. Those fuckers have destroyed our dairy producers and this is still a continuing issue. They killed the bread makers, meat producers. They also have killed the corner store, all the great pubs in Qld. They own all the bottle shops. Now they both have fucked us royally with the fuel!

Again with their home brand shit they sell to us and take away our choices, we get food from 3rd world country's,  grown in human shit, chemicals that have been banned for years are being used as well.

Here is a fact, if you want to supply Coles or Woolworths, you have to pay a fee to have it in stock, the more prominent the product placing the more you pay. 

All the Mobil servos are gone. I see at least one servo a day closing and temporary fences put up. Our incompetent government has allowed these 2,  to become fucken monopoly's and destroy every bit of competition around them. Fuck em I say.

The Qld labour government fucked our state, oh I know, let's sell our assets! FFS.

A block of dirt the size of a one car space is now considered a housing block, 480 sq metres oh and BTW $250K for that. Fucken robbing ass hats. Then the government decides to privatise our essential services, water, power and telecommunications omfg..it will be cheaper! Fuck off you idiots! As if!!!!!! 

So in a nutshell you sit in ur cubicle and ponder why..

That my friend is why our country is FUCKED and no longer the lucky country. Good luck with saving that 4 bucks! Live you life and stop worrying about money...if you don't have it stiff shit...Work around it. If you wife does not work and i will not assume..maybe she too should get a job Even casual will help pay the grocery bill. It all helps.

Life is too fucken short to worry about it  If it implodes,  it implodes...If there is another Eureka Stockade,  I hope you will be standing beside me and fighting the ass hats who have fucked our wonderful country.

Sammy

[DirtyHarry]

So, with my cost of living going up, I am forced to take action to ensure I have money to go towards essentials, here is an example;

- dont buy luxuries - ie Rum

Not the rum...

Now let's look at Woolworths and Coles.

Woolworths and Coles are fucked. When a supermarket can offer 20c a litre off of petrol if you buy their stuff, how the hell is an independent aussie grocer supposed to compete? Discout fuel dockets are actually ilelgal for this very reason, however woolworths and coles have a FUCKING EXEMPTION!!! WTF!?!?

[Syklone]

But to add, we are all told to buy Aussie made but I don't see many doing it. Therefore to me, we are all fucking ourselves just to survive.

To survive we should IMHO just close our borders to imports and force us to buy local. Followed by shooting any boat down that tries to come in with stuff illegal or not.

Too
Late now though.

[mandatory05]

But to add, we are all told to buy Aussie made but I don't see many doing it. Therefore to me, we are all fucking ourselves just to survive.

To survive we should IMHO just close our borders to imports and force us to buy local. Followed by shooting any boat down that tries to come in with stuff illegal or not.

Too
Late now though.

The whole 'made in Australia' is an example of your first point, attaching a specific emotional value or reaction to buying a product is one of the most vital things about marketing. If someone thinks that buying a 5$ product over a $1 one is making an actual difference to social-economical gaps and lives, they will be more inclined to do so.

Its all a sham, most of the products are either made here and packed elsewhere (food like dried fruits, nuts, canned products), or grown elsewhere and had added in an Australian made product and packed someplace.

One of the most ridiculous stories my dad told me about his line of work is that the Jim Beam sauce range, im sure youve probably seen them, are made in Asia, packed here, sent back to Asia to SEAL THEM. The fact that the company is sending a pretty much finished product back to a foreign country to SEAL IT to save substantial costs is ludicrous (move bitch get out the way).

What we need is the substantial reduction of said minimum wages to reduce production and labour costs, but with a carbon tax, mining tax and probably future flood and fire levies, its not a financially sound solution.
 
So. Where does Australia get off. With China on the way in, and USA on the way out, probably a long time away, give it 20 years before the next great depression, probably 2x worse than the 1930's.

However, im just a yr12 student mouthing off about politics and economics. My apologies if my 100 words or so meant nothing.

[mandatory05]

The Qld labour government fucked our state, oh I know, let's sell our assets! FFS.

Ok, relax, privatisation is and was perfectly legitimate. It's very good for consumers like you and me because a private company is driven by profit. A two ended prong though im afraid. The private energy companies will provide excellent service (compared to public owned) and good stimulus, but charge a higher price as a consequence.

Cant blame the government for offloading their energy, telecomms and assets for this reason.

[YosimeteSam]

But to add, we are all told to buy Aussie made but I don't see many doing it. Therefore to me, we are all fucking ourselves just to survive.

To survive we should IMHO just close our borders to imports and force us to buy local. Followed by shooting any boat down that tries to come in with stuff illegal or not.

Too
Late now though.

The whole 'made in Australia' is an example of your first point, attaching a specific emotional value or reaction to buying a product is one of the most vital things about marketing. If someone thinks that buying a 5$ product over a $1 one is making an actual difference to social-economical gaps and lives, they will be more inclined to do so.

Its all a sham, most of the products are either made here and packed elsewhere (food like dried fruits, nuts, canned products), or grown elsewhere and had added in an Australian made product and packed someplace.

One of the most ridiculous stories my dad told me about his line of work is that the Jim Beam sauce range, im sure youve probably seen them, are made in Asia, packed here, sent back to Asia to SEAL THEM. The fact that the company is sending a pretty much finished product back to a foreign country to SEAL IT to save substantial costs is ludicrous (move bitch get out the way).

What we need is the substantial reduction of said minimum wages to reduce production and labour costs, but with a carbon tax, mining tax and probably future flood and fire levies, its not a financially sound solution.
 
So. Where does Australia get off. With China on the way in, and USA on the way out, probably a long time away, give it 20 years before the next great depression, probably 2x worse than the 1930's.

However, im just a yr12 student mouthing off about politics and economics. My apologies if my 100 words or so meant nothing.

Well done and your input is greatly appreciated. Keep up the good work  

The Qld labour government fucked our state, oh I know, let's sell our assets! FFS.

Ok, relax, privatisation is and was perfectly legitimate. It's very good for consumers like you and me because a private company is driven by profit. A two ended prong though im afraid. The private energy companies will provide excellent service (compared to public owned) and good stimulus, but charge a higher price as a consequence.

Cant blame the government for offloading their energy, telecomms and assets for this reason.

You have to be absolutely fucken kidding! Legitimate yes, better for the consumer..Put your crack pipe down and wake up my boy! Because what you just wrote is a load of horse shit!

No offence intended.

Sammy  

Shit like this also destroys any gain in kick starting the economy!!!!!

http://finance.ninemsn.com.au/newsbusiness/aap/8451113/anz-hikes-home-and-business-loan-rates


Also why in a BOOM time for our resources is BHP Billiton shutting coal mines..... Wake up kids..its your future and you are truly being right royally fucked 

[DonutKing]

Ok, relax, privatisation is and was perfectly legitimate. It's very good for consumers like you and me because a private company is driven by profit. A two ended prong though im afraid. The private energy companies will provide excellent service (compared to public owned) and good stimulus, but charge a higher price as a consequence.

lol if this is what you actually believe



Look at what happened to Telstra.
driven by profit = cut costs wherever they can = send jobs offshore = worse service

For a more recent example, look at Allconnex - Gold Coast City Council sold their water supplies, Allconnex did such an appalling job that the council basically bought it back off them at an exhorbitant cost to taxpayers.

Privatisation of government services is just a bad idea. 'Free Market' is supposed to get the best deal for consumers through the magic of supply and demand but it basically ends up that corporate fatcats screw everyone else to secure their golden handshake.

In reality things rarely pan out the way the textbook describes.

[Syklone]

Selling private assets works best when there is something to compete. For telstra no comp means they can fuck around and do what they want. Same with rail and water ect.

If we had true competition then maybe and this is a slim maybe things would be better. But due to greed for the shareholders. They don't give a rats about the end consumers just their bottom line.

[bageled]

A bit of food for thought on the comment that we charge to much for things. My wife works as an editor at one of the biggest educational publishing houses in Australia.

I asked her some rough figures on producing one text book for the Australian Market

It takes approximately 2 hours a day for 9 months to develop a book, so thats 360 man hours
Average salary in the indsutry is around 55k. General rule of thumb is an employee should generate triple their paid wage, so running cost is 150k, which is hourly $75. $75x360 hours = $27000
Website development to support the book is $20,000
Printing cost (in india I might add, these guys can produce the book for less than one of the biggest printers in Australia can buy the paper for, I know, I tried to grab the printing contract) is $60,000
For an initial print run of 3,000
For those that aren't familiar with printing, it works on economies of scale because there are fixed setup costs that are the same if you produce one print, or one thousand. So in this case $60,000 to produce qty:3,000, I'd guess that to produce  qty:30,000 would cost about $90,000. This also means subsequent runs will cost $60,000 again, though not the other development costs.

So total cost just to produce a single text book is $27,000(development)+$20,000(website)+$60,000(printing)=107,000 for qty:3,000 books, so $36 dollars per book.

This doesn't include sales and marketing, warehousing, distribution. Martina didn't know the figures for those departments but it seems plausible to me that all that could cost about $30,000 meaning a book could cost around $46 per unit to produce before you even start looking at profit.

The biggest market of university students studying a particular subject that may buy a given book is Marketing, and across Australia, New Zealand and Fiji is only 30,000. The biggest market in educational publishing avaiable to an Australian publisher is only 30,000 people.  You share that out amongst the various competitors, and it is fuck all.

The big absence you may have noticed is the mega bucks the authors get paid. When you look at the cost of text books, it seems ridiculous that the truth is that there is so little money in educational publishing that authors only get paid royalites. Royalties are around 5% of wholesale cost, not the retail cost. If there are multiple authors, that gets spread amongst them, they don't get 5% each.

When you consider the size of the market it is little wonder things cost so much per unit.

[Number One]

may i just add we need to remember that australia does not apply trade tariffs to any imported products anymore. ALL and i mean ALL of our trading partner countries use tariffs and subsidies to stay competitive (even the chinese) untill we realign our situation and insure our local industries are protected by the artificially supported economies of Asia, Europe and america. WE MUST NOT YIELD to the liberal and socialist despots that encourage the lies that deny our nation a FAIR GO. 

[DonutKing]

http://www.businessinsider.com/olafur-ragnur-grimsson-iceland-2012-4

Somewhat relevant to the topic at hand. Iceland let their banks fall and forgave the public debt rather than pumping money into the banks, rewarding them for failure

[Lentz]

I don't know if anyone has talked about the whole Free Trade Agreement that Australia seems to be falling over it's self to get with other countries. This is a large source of Australia's ever increasing Debt, basically if the Australian Government wanted to start pulling Australia out of a downward spiral all it would need to do is enforce High taxes of foreign imports, but that would be against the Free trade agreements it has with everyone. Australia is a Global powerhouse of primary production that seems to under sell to the global market and then buys all of it back as a processed form at a staggering profit to a foreign company. If the Australian gov supported primary and manufacturing industry with Australia we would have no need to buy foreign.    

[cowcar]

this thread would make adam smith cry

[Syklone]

this thread would make adam smith cry

Ok I just woke up..... Who?

Also the Today show on tv has someone who has released an iPhone iPads app that scans barcodes and tells you if it's aus or not. My wife thought its a great idea to support aus that way. Then I pointed out to her all the shit she buys based on dollars value. It's not aus made.

Thus locals are not supported again die to our own survival of the fittest mentality to save a dollar.