Burning off, . . might be burning money.

A friend was doing a bit of work at home on the weekend and that meant cutting down a heap of unsightly dead palm fronds from the palms that everyone told him he'd regret putting in when he moved in over 10 years ago, and the normal spring tidy up including some heavy pruning.

He'd piled up the stuff he'd cut and later on Sunday put a match to it to get rid of it like we all have done at some time or another and it an hour or two there was little to show except a pile of very hot ash and coals when he had an unannounced visitor.

It wasn't a brown snake, it was actually the local fire warden who had seen the smoke and had come over to let him know that things relating to fires have changed, and there could be serious consequences , a $500 fine for burning off without a permit.

My friend had thought that with the continual local rain, still conditions and plentiful water supply at hand that a quick burn would be the simple way to dispose of his garden waste, what he didn't know is that things have changed.

Of course my friend thought he was allowed to burn a fire that was around the two meters by two meters without a permit, as did everyone else I have asked but apparently things have changed and it seems although it has been advertised in the local papers and other media, we have not got the message.

Apparently, it is ok to burn the two by two without a permit, but only when there is no declaration of a "Fire danger period" and it seems that's been declared already so it means we need to get a permit for every fire we light.

The Commissioner of the Qld Fire and Rescue Service has declared the period from midnight on August 29th until midnight on thew 2nd January as a Fire Danger Period.


Ok, so it's not all bad news, a little inconvenience maybe but a permit is free, it's for your own and everyone else's safety, and it lets the rural fire service and the local fire services know that there is a fire taking place so that firstly the do not need to respond for a cal about it if someone sees your smoke and they know exactly where it is if things do go wrong ( yeah we know that never happens , right?)

To get a permit is a simple matter, contact your local fire warden.
Don't know who it is? simple get on the net and go to www.ruralfire.qld.gov.au
An application can also be downloaded from the website.

Things you need to know to get a permit, a) your real property description e.g lot no. and RL no. (e.g. lot 10 RP 234567) the information should be on your rates notice. b) you need to drop your neighbours a note to let them know about it too.

probably be a good idea to get to know your fire warden, they are volunteers who can risk their lives if fires do get out of control, and they're there to help.


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Sell, sell, sell, . . . Queensland up for auction.

While many of us are hearing about the QR float, which exists because no one except a consortium of Miners want to negotiate with the Queensland Government or even offer a price, the sell off of Queensland's asset base or collateral continues and is for sale to the highest bidder.

The genius Queensland Treasurer who has lost our triple A credit rating already with mounting debt and inability to do anything more than service it, has come up with the plan to sucker mums and dads into forking out hard earned cash for a share buy up that will quite probably be worth half of the buying price soon after it is listed.

The predictions are so terminal that it seems subscriptions have not filled and worse there is money being paid hand over fist for very expensive prime time television advertising and the genius (not) treasurer wont reveal how badly subscribed it is to the public fearing existing subscribers will also pull out.

So, can it get worse? to quote the latest US President, "Yes it can"

It also seems the Port of Brisbane is up for auction with offers, once again secret, by at least one potential bargain hunter (I'm guessing Patrick) looking to get a cheap deal.

The Port of Brisbane is still going through changes to streamline the through put of freight, but it is continuous in use and has room for expansion.

On the issue of the sale, apart from using a press release to bag the opposition for not supporting the asset sales ( which is exactly what the people of Queensland also want) Premier Bligh is quoted as saying "Our priority is getting a good outcome for taxpayers."

A good outcome for taxpayers would be to have kept our AAA credit rating which would have reduced the price of borrowings and the repayments on them quite considerably.

A good outcome for taxpayers would be to cancel all asset sales and consider holding an election to remove the cause of the problem at the root.

A good outcome for taxpayers would be to honestly inform them about our financial situation instead of hiding how poorly the government is performing

A good outcome for taxpayers would be to halt population growth in Queensland until infrastructure has caught up at least and until quality of lifestyle can be assured before continuing.

I have never been a fan of bigger government, but, the arrogance of the Queensland Government without any body (a lower house) to ensure that both the peoples wishes are adhered to and that there is greater transparency in government in general, is beginning to demand that reform of Queensland's State Government is imperative.

Think about it, is the cost of a lower house, a senate if you will, greater than what we are about to lose in the assets of Queensland? And about just who can protect the assets , effectively owned by the people of Queensland from a financially and morally bankrupt government with no answers and no solutions.

We need to stop the sales, now.



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Not buying into the arguement.

Today's Paper had a local article in it about some kind of feud between a couple of councillors and either the mayor or the rest of the councillors or both.

What was interesting about it was it's claimed to be ongoing over social media like Face book or Twitter and I have to say it's well outside of my comfort zone and I have heard that people can come unstuck for what they write on these kinds of networking sites.

Blogs are bad enough, if I could have a dollar for each time I have been accused of bias, castigated for allowing comments (or commenter's for having an opinion) or even threatened for not removing comments (with legal action) I'd probably have quite a few dollars in the kitty by now, it happens quite regularly on local issues, particularly involving council.

I personally always question the motives of people who go to the media with stories about how they are being persecuted over social media networks and then the same people are on it themselves it seems, making disparaging comments about others, it makes me think their original complaint that they are victims is just made up for publicity.

The Sunday paper article was brief, but told a story and it is a story that many of our commenter's have been telling for quite a few years and that is that some people are just not in council to serve the community of Logan and certainly not the vast majority of the voters or anyone else in the division they were elected in.

The article in my opinion, also brushed over a very unsavoury piece of real life which had an unacceptable conclusion for some parties with a trifling line which did little to reflect the actual misdeed or the consequential eventuations which somehow may have seen real issues not even looked into by the relevant authorities.

The article points to each of the sides drumming up support for candidates to take on the other at the next election, and that is perhaps the best result we could hope for, a real live representative who will actually be available to the community without other agenda's being the reason they are, if at all.

Bring on the next election, we are all ready for change.

BTW if you are intending to run, why don't you lets us know, always happy to spread information to the public no matter how small the audience.

How many will fall into the land tax trap?

During the last ten years more so than ever before ordinary people have began to utilise wealth creation in the form of investment property and to be quite blunt the various marketers of investment property have rammed them down our throat for years now.

There has been various incentives to own investment property offered by the government as well, negative gearing which everyone would have heard of by now and yet still most people have very little idea of exactly how it applies, depreciation which requires very complex calculations for each item involved, tax relief for renting to low income tenants and deductions from personal income tax.

What it all means is that once you've signed on the dotted line and got a tenant insitue, you can hold an investment property for less than $100 a week in most cases even today after the huge boom and then the Global Financial Crisis.

And that means someone with quite a bit of disposable income in a household can end up holding several properties which are growing in capital value quite well and yet are not really causing hardship to hold , own and profit from.

Property has become one of the tools used by many who own small business and have their own DIY super funds because the benefits of buying the property from which you work and become your own tenant means you know exactly where your money is going and can mitigate any and all costs both ways.

However, there is one problem that most people have not been made aware of who may have bought up properties when they were relatively inexpensive, and accumulated a few of them, and that is with the increases we've all seen in unimproved values of properties, those investors may be up for a little thing called "Land Tax"

Land tax applies in Queensland to any one who owns property to the value (in unimproved terms)greater than $599,999 which means an ordinary couple with a home and a couple of quality investment properties may have to start thinking about that extra tax bill.

The tax is on a scale and the first part is $500 plus 1 cent for each $ more than $600,000.

So for example a North Beaudesert couple have a beautiful acreage property with a nice home on it with an unimproved value of around $450,000 and they have a couple of investment properties in quality locations valued at $300,000 each ; you can see that they are ok as far as land tax goes for now, but assume that they also have a commercial property that they run a business from, a small shop or shed with an unimproved value of $200,000 then they are going to cop an assessment for land tax.

A lot of people may be on the cusp of being assessable for this State Government Tax without even knowing but rest assured the government knows and will be issuing assessments at the end of the financial year.

here are the details for Land Tax in Queensland. forewarned is forearmed.

Logan Village Hig School, . . . hi-jacked by the ULDA and Delfin.

There have been a lot of dedicated locals over the years who have tried to get some progressive thinking and action going in Logan Village, they have had some basic requirements sorely lacking for many year almost as if there was no representation there from any level of government at all for at least the 20 years or so I've known the place.

A lot of locals have put this down to having a councillor who they say has been so self interested and megalomaniacal that nothing could be done in Logan Village unless he was seen to be doing it, and that has resulted in most of the community stuff, like neighbourhood watch etc disbanding and it seems the only groups left were those that he was in control of and gifting council money to.

Lets face it. under the watch of this bloke upgrades for the two shopping centers were continually knocked back, road works to get bitumen on the dirt only happened just before the last election, and it was only this year, yes 2010, that the Logan Village State School got connected to town water, and that's just scratching the surface.

Since that councillor lost his plush, almost decade and a half, shiny seat in council things has improved only slightly as the councillor for the actual township struggles with absolutely zero support from the councillor who has the rural adjacent area.

Last year another push to get a High School for Logan Village began with some very good people behind it and some progressive thinkers among them, and they have real support from community, businesses, and the local councillor and i think even the adjacent councillor is on board, but not resting on their laurels and waiting for council to get something done the organisers have gone to the State Government with some very good data and back up[ supporting a very logical push to put a High School in Logan Village, and it looks like it's going to be successful.

However, the State Government has looked at the idea and appears to have decided that once again Logan Village is not the place for a High School, and the departments that get things done have basically given a free ride once again to a particular developer by putting up a proposal to locate a future Logan Village High School at Yarrabilba, to serve future students of Yarrabilba, but paid for by you and I rather than the developer.

Of course that makes sense once you look at who is now the chairman of the Urban Land Development Authority, a State Government department set up by Beattie designed to fast track development, because he used to be at the top of Delfin and it seems worked on the yarrabilba stuff and is now in charge of making the Logan Village school a free school for Yarrabilba.

The Yarrabilba State High School, . . .has a nice ring to it.

It's yet to be finalised but I'd reckon we, the taxpayer will even have to buy the land for it, it just keeps getting better for Delfin who built nearby Woodlands and didn't supply one bit of infrastructure for it either that they didn't absolutely have to.

Logan Village will be better of in the short term, but with Yarrabilba set to be kicking off in 2011, it will only be a very short term benefit, as Logan Village becomes a thoroughfare of trucks and cars heading to Yarrabilba and anything built on Waterford/Tamborine Road will be almost impossible to get in or out of, including a High School.

Logan Council , meetings on the move.

Logan Council are saying they are bringing Council to the community, and I think that having them in the kind of facility that they are to held next, a school hall, gives students exposure to council as well as any other method.

Lets face it, the ordinary meetings are a rubber stamp over what has already been discussed and presumably agreed to (by most councillors) at the previous weeks committee meetings, and as such do not give an indication of how our departmentalised third level of government works by any shape or means but it does allow one to see a bit of what goes on when personalities and egos get around the table.

I urge people to go to these type of meeting, simply to show that we, the community, are still keeping an eye on our investment, that we still see what is going on despite the constant spin of your press releases and that we do have in our minds some requirements from our representatives that are definitely not being met.

Personally, I don't think a couple of councillors in the old Beaudesert and Gold Coast area are doing us much service other than trying to undermine other councillors and play at being bigger than Jesus, that's just me, and they have done nothing to dissuade me from that opinion including their recent attempts at geeing up animal owners around here and pushing to try to have all market gardens removed, possibly via a stooge.

So, if you want to see Council inaction, (in action) the next "community" Council Meeting is on 14th September, it will start at 10.30am and be in the New Hall at Canterbury College, Waterford.

Should be a whizzer.


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Bligh's big plans evaporating could be her final downfall.

When Anna Bligh put on the hard hat she inherited from Beattie with the Premier's job at a press conference to announce the declaration of a "Project of significance" in Queensland, she was beaming, she looked like the Cheshire cat and she thought that bypassing normal approval processes with the declaration would see income from the Galilee basin coal projects soon flowing into the coffers of a very broke State Government.

But how the plans of mice and men go sour, A court has just ruled in favour of another mining company who's lease is in between the Basin and the Port and which would have had a significant amount of land resumed for the project and which would have severely compromised their operation.

The declaration, initially made in July, gave Ms Reinhard's Hancock Coal a ''defined corridor'' within which it could continue to examine the feasibility of its $5.5 billion Alpha and $6.5 billion Kevin's Corner projects in the Galilee Basin.

Ruling on an application by QCoal, against Minister Hinchliffe, Justice Margaret Wilson yesterday ordered that the declaration of ''the Hancock Coal-Alpha Coal rail corridor as an infrastructure facility of significance to Queensland, the Galilee Basin and Abbot Point regions . . . be quashed''.

QCoal runs the Sonoma mine in the northern Bowen Basin

The ballsy miners took on the State Government's minister, questioned the declaration and have had it quashed and after negotiations between lawyers representing QCoal and Mr Hinchliffe with counsel for Mr Hinchliffe, in the end, not opposing the court's order in a tacit admission that the declaration had been mishandled.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall, because the reasons for the stuff up have not been released as yet, so we do not know the actual reasons for the judgement.

One thing you can be sure of, Ministers dined aboard Gina Reinhardt's luxury ship, the premier had intimate meetings with Ms Reinhardt herself, and the result was that the declaration was made and that we the Taxpayer would shell out for the acquiring of land and building a rail corridor to the Port for the transport of coal from at least the two main projects at Alpha and Kevin's Corner in the giant Galilee Basin.

This will be a blow for Bligh, she has once again come unstuck short cutting the processes to have her power demonstrated for all to see, there is no upper house to challenge her decisions, and that means no safety net to keep us taxpayers from forking out, but unfortunately for Bligh it also means no one else to blame.

There is no doubt that even though Labor Party members are very good at obeying and that we know there has been a gag order about the Queensland leadership, that the members and the rank and file are thinking and waiting for an opportunity to do to Bligh exactly what Gillard did to Rudd.

Bligh is a Lame Duck.

While Foolia promises anything and everything, Abbott won't play ball with ridicules demands of the independents

While it has right from the start looked like the Gillard labor Government would be able to win the hearts of the majority of the independents and thus form a minority government, it is disturbing that some of the strange demands of all the minority party members are actually being agreed upon by Labor.

In my previous post I told how the Greens have signed a deal to form government with Labor, effectively a coalition, however I did not elaborate on the price Bob Brown had asked for his support.

One of the things on his list is allowing Gay marriage, which it seems would be considered by Labor if they form government and more likely it would be left until the change of the senate half when the Greens would hold the balance of power there and have a bill on the issue passed.

That's politics right?

Well not exactly, you see no other party including Labor had this item on their agenda, and in fact both Parties had said they have no intention in changing the marriage act to include legitimising same sex unions, so in other words instead of being majority rules which is the basis of democracy we will see a minority being able to push through distasteful (to the vast majority) legislation due to an agreement with the government.

So Bob Brown may say they have just over ten percent of the vote including preferences but in reality that does not give him the power to speak on behalf of the majority, and it certainly does not give him any sort of mandate to invoke policy on behalf of all Australians

Now I've used the example of "equal marriage rights" but it could be any of the radical policies from the greens including charging us a carbon tax or hovering like vultures over the corpses of the recently deceased to collect death duties, all of which are only voted for (if people even knew they were Greens policy, I doubt many did) 10% of the voters, not even close to a democratic majority.

So how did it all go wrong, how do we get someone like Bob Katter demanding the ethanol level in auto fuel be increased to 22% when we do not have enough good quality agricultural land available right now to feed our projected population and growing more and more cane would make us like Brazil where Rain Forest is destroyed to grow for fuel and meanwhile the countries poor struggle to get food.

It seems, against all odds that the only one with any common sense is Tony Abbott who has so far refused to accommodate a lot of the wish list items of the half dozen, power soaked wanna be deal makers cum king makers, or should that be Queen?

Could it be that Liberalism has taken a bullet for the greater majority of Australians? That we really are just still so afraid of work choices that we couldn't vote for Abbott, and yet quite obviously we did not want to continue with Labor either so we went for the lesser evil and went Greens or independents?

As they say, be careful what you wish for , you just might get it.

Further to that make a decision and make your vote count.

While people are calling for another poll, there is one man who will be screaming the house down if that looks like a possibility and that's Bob Brown who is just revelling in his self appointment as the most powerful man in Australia right now and would more than likely lose more than half his votes if another vote had to be cast.

The Gillard Brown coalition; not a surprise.

It has come to pass, in the halls of power that what everyone has known and what has been denied by both for so long has now been ratified for the public to show that what we have all believed is now reality.

Labor and the Greens are now a coalition.

Bob Brown has tried in vain to have people believe that he has been bipartisan and would support either of the two major parties to form Government in this latest election where no clear majority has been evident in number of seats in the parliament, pretty much without success as Labor leader Gillard has continued to announce that she counts the Green member elect as a definite for Labor.

And to be brutal about it, Gillard was 100% correct to do so because the Greens have senators elected and due to enter the upper house in the next change over mostly due to Labor preferences, and the greens in a return deal owe Labor big time.

The question I ask is, since all the deals done with the Greens and Labor before the election were already done why all the BS from Brown and why all the outright lies?

Of course you were actually expecting another question, and here it is, why is Brown still the leader when it is most common for the Leader of a political party to come from the lower house, if in fact you have one in your party, but once you do does that not make them your leader?

The greens are very loathe to answer questions, real questions about why policy exists , about why they agree with some and reject other and so i don't expect anyone from the Greens to answer the above either.

To me it is cowardly of Bob Brown to have not signed this agreement of coalition with Labor before the election, and I just wonder how many of the faithful will remain that way and will we see future elections where Labor faithful will be handing out for both themselves and the greens when support declines.

I don't think it is healthy for the greens to be they way they were, biased in favour of Labor in so many states, but i reckon it's worse for them as part of a coalition because they have always tried to maintain a position of independence.

So what do you think, it was always obvious, but was this a good move?