Comments (23)

By Les Scammell, May 19, 2009 11:03 am

The Australian government has recently announced the budget for the 2009-2010 financial year – as a budget, it wasn’t too bad. Raising the old age pension has been on the cards for ten years now – I am surprised it has taken this long to implement it.

Infrastructure spending was always going to be the center piece and I guess you can thank the Howard/Costello era – they ran infrastructure spending into the ground so there are plenty of areas to spend big dollars.

Australia has been called the lucky country and to an extent we are. We have ridden on the back of a resources boom for the last decade and it will be resources again that take us out of the recession. China is one country that will be hit hard but it will bounce back faster than most countries – and they are one of our biggest customers when it comes to resources.

So the budget was a ho-hum affair really. The biggest issue to come out of it has been the mean testing of the private health insurance subsidy. I don’t quite follow the argument. I cannot for the life of me see why someone on $75,000 a year or more, would drop their health insurance because they lose a couple of dollars a week in a subsidy. In fact, I don’t know why we are subsidizing families on $150,000 plus with a seven dollar a week subsidy (and that is all it is really). It seems to be a storm in tea cup used to try and knock the budget.

No-No Mal, leader of the Liberal Party and supposedly our alternative Prime Minister, has been on a negative track since taking on the role. In Australian political history, no opposition leader has ever won office with a negative campaign. In fact, they have often lost ground.

His latest suggestion actually has me wondering what economic credentials he has – but of course, he was a banker before entering politics – and who got the world economy into its present state? Bankers!

The Liberal Party has suggested a return to the old days where beer and cigarette taxes are used to fund government spending. There is are number of problems with this approach – first, beer and cigarette taxes tend to hit those on lower incomes the hardest. Their suggestion to increase the tax on cigarettes by three cents per stick sounds harmless. However, the effect is an increase of around $1 per packet. With about 1.5 million smokers, that is effectively 1.5 million dollars taken out of the economy – each day.

Can our economy afford that at present? I think not. The 1.5 million would be better off going through the cash registers of local businesses, keeping people in jobs and keeping the economy moving.

Once we start to come out of the recession, and once we need to start cutting the federal governments budget deficits, that will be the time to increase these taxes.

My question is – when will we get a federal opposition that really is thinking of Australia’s future rather than their own? Right now, Turnbull and his team of negative pollies are doing neither!

Comments (10)

By Les Scammell, May 15, 2009 4:09 pm

It is hard to put Aldi stores into a category. Whilst they are predominantly a grocery chain, they do also sell a wide range of non grocery items.

It is also hard to determine if they are low quality, medium quality or high quality. I have always placed them in the medium to good quality range – however recent purchases leave me wondering.

Aldi Stores are a European setup that have established themselves in Australia with a wide network of stores. Their products in the main have been good – some products very good. Apart from a narrow range of grocery items, they have weekly sales items which are only stocked until sold out. These items range from televisions to computers to dishwashers amongst other big ticket items to smaller items like clothing, toys, electrical goods and million and one other items.

I recently purchased one of their electric kettles – one which is along the lines of the old fashioned kettles. It works well – in fact it actually boils water, it doesn’t switch itself off at the first sign of steam.
Unfortunately, for a kettle that isn’t exactly cheap; looks and works well; it has a simple design fault that makes it almost

unusable and decidedly dangerous. The kettle is built using a tiny little screw to hold the handle in place – two screws actually, one at the spout and one opposite where traditional handles sit. Within weeks one screw works itself loose and, like most things in life, if they are going to break they will do it when you least expect it – like pouring boiling water into a cup.

I was fortunate – I felt it giving way and stopped before wearing the contents. I wonder how long it will be before someone does wear a pot full of boiling water.

This is not the first product. We recently purchased a salt and pepper mill. Again – they look great and the price was okay – not dirt cheap but not expensive. They only problem is – there were no instructions on how to open the darn things to put the salt and pepper in – I still haven’t worked that one out!

Simple issues like these will eventually turn people away from products. Trust is an important issue so if you cannot trust a business to provide value for money – they will shop elsewhere. For a supermarket chain that is still trying to establish itself in the Australian market, I am surprised they have allowed these products through their quality inspections – if that is, they have a quality inspection team to start with. I wonder – is Aldi now sacrificing quality for profits? Long term they may be sacrificing profits by losing reputation.

Comments (7)

By Les Scammell, May 2, 2009 9:41 pm

It seems that as businesses grow, one of the first areas of business to get left behind is ’service’.  If you have noticed my extended absence it is for one simple reason – moving house. What does that have to do with service – don’t get me started.

We recently moved to a new home. The move went surprisingly well. I wouldn’t say we were well prepared but the removalist were good and, whilst we had budgeted for four or five hours – they had the job done in three.

That was a great start to the move. The electricity had been connected, no drama. We even had the telephone connected with little drama. However, when it came to getting our ADSL internet connection working – forget it. Talk about a run around.

Once the telephone connection was up and running, we called the internet service provider (the same company as the telephone) and requested the move.  No problems, once the line was tested it would take around 12-24 hours. That was okay – we had planned for that delay.

Day two – still no internet. Rang to find out why and got the push button option merry-go-round. After following prompts and answering questions we finally arrive at the help desk. No problems they said the internet should be up and running by noon the following day.

Day three – you guessed it. Still no internet. Back to the telephone for another dance with computer generated prompts. This time I had to reboot the modem, reboot the computer, reboot them simultaneously, nothing of course worked. So we end up with yet another help desk person who takes us through the exact same routine.

Now it gets tricky. “Your computer is at fault – get a new computer” was the first response. Hello – I have three computers that I have tried, two of them brand new – not only that, everything was working fine until the move.

“Okay, it’s the modem then, it must be failing. Get a new modem.” My response, it is six months old and you supplied it.  “Okay – we will escalate this to a major fault – someone will get back to you within two working days”.

A week later and still no joy – we are a total of ten days without the net, the so called ‘two days’ was a joke. I finally managed to talk my way through to someone who actually new their job. Fifteen minutes later and the problems were solved and we were back on line.

What I want to know is – WHY COULDN’T I ACCESS THIS PERSON FROM DAY ONE – sorry to shout – but why the runaround? Why all the drama and why the wait?

For Australia’s major communication company to stuff up a simple house move, and we are only talking a short distance – a long walk at most – is beyond me. More importantly, why I couldn’t access a help desk that new what they were doing is also beyond me. As I said in my heading – big business generally couldn’t care about service. Add to that a limited number of competitors and you can see why service is no longer important.

I can tell you now – I still want SERVICE – I don’t care about the smile – but I still want SERVICE.