Government Policy, seems it gives big Banks all the power.

There is no doubt that when politicians get elected they start meeting people outside their circle, outside the bigwigs in the Party and branch and those with real influence, and you can't blame them for listening to what the movers and shakers have to say.

These big business CEO's and others also like the symbiotic relationship they can get by taking a green politician to extravagant dinners, parties and showing them how insignificant their income really is, and how in the scheme of things they really don't matter much because big business controls the economy and the economy controls the mood of the electorate.

Recently, well over the last 12 months we have seen , since the GFC and some real investment fiasco's one thing emerge as a result, and that is the big banks widening their market share over the financial services sector, shoring up their position with cross sell opportunities, buying outright and becoming the major shareholder in other financial services businesses reducing competition and widening the gap between the cash rate and the retail rate and continuing to make record profits.

I have the opinion that the banks should serve the people first and the shareholders second, but since they lobbied governments to implement enforced banking (you must have an account to get you pay, cannot get paid cash,) which then attracted fees and charges and guaranteed the banks a share of our pay every week for doing nothing at all, free money, they have had an arrogant expectation that we are their to fulfil their record book on profit, nothing more.

I am also of the opinion that the regulations across the financial service sectors that are under the control of ASIC are the work of lobbying by the same big banks to reduce competition further , increase their cross sell (worth potentially millions) and force customers to spend longer in the decision making process with independent brokers than they do in the bank. A mortgage broker will have to collect many more pages of data and file notes to satisfy ASIC that the product they recommend is suitable where a bank has about maybe 3 extra questions.

With the commissions from home loans, chattel mortgages, business loans, and personal finance along with superannuation and other insurance products making huge profit for the big banks, unseen profit, the disclosure rules for brokers , financial planners and others who sell any finance products at all has increased so that consumers can see where income is generated for them and how and even how much it is to the cent.

Financial Advisers now have a new pay structure where commissions are a thing of the past and they must charge the client up front for service, making it difficult and posing a hard ship on clients to come up with money out of pocket to purchase financial services products.

So who benefits from all these changes?

Government departments get bigger and the ratio of government workers to private workers gets bigger, and of course the big banks will get a bigger share of the cross sell of all financial services because it will be far less time and effort required for the client.

What is interesting, is that our Labor federal treasurer has refused to make a super profits tax apply to the banks and yet they are the single biggest earner in the country, rich times or poor (they are still getting a cut of your wages for nothing)

You see when a politician is wined and dined with the champagne set , . . they start to think they are the champagne set,. . . until the election hey loose and see how quickly they are dumped from the A list.

Save Greenbank , The ULDA are coming.

It's probably been noticable that I don't get around locally much these days, since moving house, I have had so much to do it's been impossible to cover the area like I used to.

Ok, so I recieved this from a mate, not the organisers but it seems like the satrt of the rot we all expected when Our last Mayor and the littlest councillor went and handed our area over for consideration to the then Offic of Urban Management OUM back in 04/05 when the Mount Lindesay North Beaudesert Study Area became the hot topic and it was with a prelude to massive development of high density and enterprise and with hindsight the Amalgamations.

Two things, the little one now claims not to have participated as Chair of Planning and development in the handing over of information that allowed focus of development to be on areas like North Maclean, and further claims that her dumping, unceremoniuosly from that chair was because of her oposition to it. The facts of course do not lie.

OK, so I recieved an Email wich invites distribution so I imagine it's ok to publish the details of it here;

From: Admin@savegreenbank.com.au
Date: Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 1:17 AM
Subject: FW: MEETING VENUE CONFIRMED
To: admin@savegreenbank.com.au



Hello everyone, thank you for your patience. We have been FLAT OUT this end are heavily under resourced at the moment.



If ANYONE is able to assist us tomorrow to help us prepare it would be greatly appreciated. I really need a strong administrator in the office with me who is good with computers, printers, etc... We have a heap of info to prepare, print and collate for you all.



We want to EMPOWER YOU ALL to assist with this cause because we are a UNITED community and it is the ONLY way we have a chance of having a win.





Here are the MEETING details:



WHEN:

Every WED in February

TIME:

7PM

WHERE:

GREENBANK COMMUNITY CENTER

145 Teviot Road

GREENBANK.



On Wednesday we’ll only have 19 days left to have our submission lodged. They have had years to plan it, we have 19 days left to fight it. Good job we’re all made of the right stuff hey!!!!



This can’t be won by a few working extremely hard and a lot saying they’ll support it. THIS NEEDS ACTION, ACTION, ACTION taken by EVERYONE of US.



I’ve also attached some promo fliers so you can get the word out to your neighbours.



Print them out then:

· STICK THEM ON THE SIDE OF YOUR CAR WINDOWS

· Put them on your fences,

· Put them on EVERY post in the street.

· Put them in every shop

· Put them in all the schools,

· Do flier drops at Woolies

· Stick them in public toilets

· Use your imagination



TAKE MASSIVE ACTION to get EVERYBODY to this IMPORTANT MEETING.



HOWEVER, PLEASE NOTE:

Our Greenbank is an ABSOLUTELY beautiful part of the world. Let’s give this a MASSIVE push at the start to get the word out, BUT once the submission period is over, let’s all dig in and make our neighbourhood beautiful again by picking up ANY and ALL left over fliers or promo materials. IF we do lose, our cherished lifestyle may have a limited time to run so let’s enjoy it as long as possible.



BUT WHEN WE WIN, let’s get in and pick it all up as a UNITED community again to get the neighbourhood ship shape again.



PLEASE PEOPLE, NO damage to Teviot Downs Estate Pty Ltd property and leave Gary and his vehicles alone. Please let’s be pro-active, without being offensive.



Here is the proposed format for the meetings:

1st Meeting on Wed 9th is to get as MANY people to this meeting as possible. CAN EVERYONE PLEASE CALL every radio station, TV reporter, ACA, Today Tonight, EVERY newspaper, EVERY politician, EVERY conservationist they know in the area to get them too this meeting.

Jimboomba Times has kindly accepted our invitation and will come. If we get ENOUGH people here at this first meeting, we MIGHT BE ABLE TO MAKE THE FRONT PAGE OF THE JIMBOOMBA TIMES the next week. Let’s make this our FIRST goal.

Ian RICKUSS is our State Member for Lockyer. He has accepted our invitation and has committed to being here on this first meeting, then is trying to adjust his commitments to ALSO attend the following Wednesday as well.

Hajnal Ban/Black is meeting with us this week and we have her passionate support. I’m hoping she’ll be a real GUN for our area.

We NEED YOUR SUPPORT TO GET EVERY POLITICIAN HERE.

We’ll be inviting Pam Parker on Tuesday 8th to attend.

I am attending a meeting at 5pm Tuesday at Council where the ULDA are presenting to the Flagstone Community Stakeholder Group. I’d like to meet them face to face so we can invite them to our meetings. They are wanting SOLUTIONS for the area, THIS IS OUR OPPORTUNITY to work WITH them to get reasonable outcomes that work for EVERYBODY, not just the developers and govt parties.

A SIGNIFICANT FOCUS of this first meeting is to get passionate and capable volunteers to form project groups to break the job down a bit. We ALL need to give our ABSOLUTE BEST EFFORT for the couple of weeks we have. No period in our life is more important than NOW.

We really need to identify and select some team leaders who can co-ordinate the following (ideally we’ll get GROUPS that form to “smash it out of the park” with their chosen task force:

· A core Stategy group (we have a core steering committee that is AWESOME at the moment and we simply couldn’t be getting this info out without some tireless work of a few great locals)

· Legal readers to scour over the Acts, codes, guiding documents, relevant legislation

· Legal “heads” to help us consider the compliance side of raising money to fund it, how we protect ourselves, writing of submissions and proposals etc...

· Any Town Planners who can assist with “global concept” SOLUTION PROPOSALS for ULDA

· Someone with strong admin skills to organise mail outs etc...

· Political Action Group to email, write to, contact ALL of the politicians locally, State and Federally and invite, invite, invite

· Media Tarts to get the articles out to newspapers, TV, radio (maybe one group for TV, one for print)

· We need savvy advertising article writers

· A website manager for www.SaveGreenbank.com.au (I’ll be watching over you....<;o) ) only joking

· A Facebook and Twitter Campaign manager

· A Public Picketting Group

· People to hand out fliers at the fetes etc...

· Wobble Board holders

· Artists for sign making

· Sausage Sizzle group to try to get some fund raising going. This campaign is costing a bit of cash obviously

· Signage group to get the signs out into the greater community

· PETITION groups to hit the shopping centres around the WHOLE area

The list goes on, we want to engage these people this first week. Would YOU be good at ANY of the above and like to have a crack at it on behalf of every one.

2nd Meeting on Wed 16th will hopefully be a MONSTER meeting and we’ll have even MORE media and politicians. This should be a great petition drive(We’l do that at every meeting anyway)

3rd Meeting on 23rd will be left open so we can tend to ANYTHING that hasn’t been addressed as we present out submissions.

WE NEED EVERYBODY’S HELP. WE NEED TO GET EVERY SINGLE RESIDENT TO THESE MEETINGS.

The great saying is “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight that matters, it’s the size of the fight in the dog”.

Woof, Woof GREENBANK, Looks like we got ourselves a dog fight. PLEASE don’t hurt TEVVY the Teviot Downs mascot. We all loved him before this offensive proposal. We can still love him. It ain’t his fault he’s made of tin. <;o)

See you all at the meeting.

Disrespect, lacking credibility and disgustingly uncompassionate.

The media beat up on TV last night has left many Australians confused about what was said and around 70% of viewers and listeners believe that what Tony Abbott, leader of the opposition, said was deliberately taken out of context to ambush and attempt to hijack and embarrass the opposition to reduce impact of their disclosure of savings without real cuts in funding that would credibly replace a new tax put out by the Labor Party.

The Journalist (if that's what he actually is) claims to have organised the interview over two hours before It took place and that Mr Abbott should have been prepared for the questions, however it would be logical to assume since they had released their funding option to replace the flood levy, that that would be what an interview would be about.

The interview turned into a confrontation where the reporter played a short bit of film and claimed that Abbott made the comment on it about the death of one of our front line soldiers as a flippant retort, "shit happens" when in the full video it was clear he made the comment in context of a military operation, with the finest equipment and soldiers with the best preparation asking questions how it went wrong, and being agreed to by the commander of Australia's Middle East forces, Major-General John Cantwell, adding: "It certainly does, yeah.''

The reporter has made a ghastly error of judgement, but worse he has had the footage obtained after a protracted FOI process looking for film of Mr Abbott firing big machine guns or something similar, seemingly on behalf of Labor to besmirch his reputation, for a period of many months and could have got this right, easily.

Reporter Mark Riley is a grub, he is unAustralian, a coward and has no consideration for one of our bravest's family or widow, he should be sacked by Seven, he should know better but as a long time biased labor sympathiser it was completely typical and most likely a deliberate act as I said above to reduce impact of the opposition flood funding which shows Gillard's Big new tax, the flood levy, to be nothing more than lazy politics.

I'm appalled that Seven would allow this to go to air even, but worse that other stations would jump so quickly on the bandwagon to accuse Abbott without even seeing the full video first, Nine was on it with frumpy current affairs hack Grimshaw making comments along the lines of how soon would a leadership spill betaking place, and even Jabber the Hut(Oaks, also a Labor sympathiser who had a very young K Rudd as a "houseboy"), was on him like leech claiming it would be the end of him.

Are our Armed forces entitled to have their conversations with the leaders of our country kept discrete? Not to be used as a political football, and not to be used by one parties supporters to attack another party or member of it especially when it involves the death of a soldier?

Riley owes the people of Australia an apology , but more so he owes the family and widow for bringing back unnecessarily the horror and memory of their tragic loss. Riley you are nothing, you are a dog.