Economic Rigor

 Been looking at the NewsPolls to try and uncover what has led to the rise of One Nation support. Here is the graph As you can see, biggest surge in support was during December last year. Bondi shooting was on the 14th of December 2025. Do the math. This support is not going to vanish anytime soon.

 Kyle has always claimed he was the most successful broadcaster in Australia which made him think he was untouchable. That might have been the case when he was on the up, but for the last 2 years, his ratings, even in the Sydney fortress, have been on the decline Has been losing almost 8500 listeners every survey since 2023. Maybe young people dont wont to listen to two 50+ crusties talking about sex, drugs and woowoo anymore.

 ARN Media finally cancelled the Service Agreement with Kyle Sandilands. Why are they able to do this you ask? Bullying. Under Australian Law, even contractors must adhere to Company OH&S policies that generally cover bullying. Without seeing Kyle's Service Agreement, you can pretty much guarantee that there would be a clause in there that states as much and that a breach of that clause would constitute severe misconduct which would be grounds for termination of the agreement. So ARN Media must have concluded that the events of Feb 20 were in fact bullying and a breach of policy. That would explain the direction for Kyle not to contact Jackie O (which is standard in bullying allegations) The fact that Kyle claims that this behaviour was normal is beside the point. Bullying is not about intention. Its about whether a reasonable person would feel bullied by the behaviour. Its also different in that this time, Jackie is believed to have made a formal complaint, which she did not d...

 Atlassian has announced employee cuts to the tune of 1600 people. But is it about AI, or more about fixing bad management. In the last 3 years, the FE's have increased by 3113 workers, from 10,726 to the current level of 13813.  Atlassian now has a Revenue per Employee metric of $356953. Compare this to say other SaaS platforms like ServiceNow ($441,395) or Salesforce (472,652) and Atlassian is looking a bit employee fat. The cuts will bring back numbers to 2024 levele and make this important metric more reasonable compared to its peers (if it can keep subscription revenue growing) So once again, the specter of AI is really just a fig leaf to improve past mistakes of over hiring.

 Time to update the companies again (Revenue figures in AUD $ from the ATO) The major takeaways - IBM Revenue continues to fall off a cliff. Hard to believe that 10 years ago, they had revenues of over $4 billion a year - Accenture now the leading IT Service Provider in Australia - Fujitsu has improved

 

 Been looking at the whole Trans thing lately and I was wondering if there is a way to work out how many kids are on puberty blockers in Australia for Gender Dysphoria. Stats are few and far between so we might have to extrapolate a bit. Firstly, prior to 2013, a family court hearing was required to start children on Puberty blockers for under 18's. Post 2013 however, as long as parents and doctors agreed, it was permitted without court approval.  If we assume a transition period for the case to work its way through the medical community, we can estimate say that the use of Puberty blockers for Gender Dsyphoria started in Australia in 2015, that provides a a starting date. In regards to how many kids get prescribed puberty blockers in Australia, only WA and QLD provide info. WA  - 20 kids between Jan 1 and Oct 31 2025 (so that would be extrapolated to 24 for the full year). WA has approx. 194,789 kids between 10 and 14 in 2026 (extrapolated from 2016/2021 census growth), ...

 Just been looking through the budget on housing...some dodgy ass stuff happening The Labor government has raided the National Housing Infrastructure Fund (which was set up in 2017) to help pay for its housing initiative. However the fund was set up for infrastructure funding to local governments, not to create housing itself. Over $1 billion over the 4 years forward estimates. Its all smoke and mirrors with Labor...  

 We have the following in trouble and who need to win convincing in their final games to have a chance to get through. Belgium - (2nd Ranked Team) - 39% chance of going through Argentina (3rd Ranked Team) - 44% chance of going through Denmark (10th Ranked Team) - 28% chance of getting through to the next round. Is playing Australia though Germany (11th Ranked Team) - 22% chance of getting through Mexico (13th Ranked Team) - 22% chance of getting through USA (16th Ranked Team) - 33% chance of getting through Senegal (18th Ranked Team) - 39% chance of getting through Wales (19th Ranked Team) - 15% chance of getting through

 Doing my standard calculations of the Groups of Death. Based on my methodology of finding the variance of the top 3 in each group added to the variance of the 2nd and 3rd ranked teams we have the following in order of deadliest to safest Group B (England, USA, Wales, Iran) Group E (Spain, Germany, Japan, Costa Rica) Group G (Brazil, Switzerland, Serbia, Cameroon) Group F (Belgium, Croatia, Morocco, Canada) Group H (Portugal, Uruguay, South Korea, Ghana) Group C (Argentina, Mexico, Poland, Saudi Arabia) Group D (France, Denmark, Tunisia, Australia) Group A (Netherlands, Senegal, Ecuador, Qatar) So no real surprise that Germany was beaten by Japan (Germany is ranked 11th, Japan, 24th...but Argentina (3) losing to Saudi Arabia(51) was a real shock. But England (5) have some real danger games against Wales (19) and USA (16)

 Read with interest that Albanese wants to increase the minimum wage by 5.1% if he becomes PM. So many things wrong with this. 1. Its not up to the Prime Minister. Minimum wage decisions are decided by Fair Work Commission which is supposed to be apolitical 2. If 5.1% got up, it would be the 6th highest increase since 1980, and the highest since 2006. 3. Inflation is already starting to climb. If you add a 5.1% increase to the minimum wage, you are basically guaranteeing increased inflation. 4. The largest increases in the minimum wage correlate to recessions a few years later. The increases in 1988 (9.1% across the year), 1989 (7.6% across the year) resulted in the Recession in 1991. The increase in 2004 (7.9%) and 2006 (5.6%) resulted in the GFC in 2008. Lets hope this never gest up. Because if it does, Albo will be steering the ship with another "Recession we had to have" arrives.

 Interesting times in the election. From all accounts Labor is in the box seat to win, Albos gaffs withstanding. So just going to compare contrast the 2 contenders for Treasury. The reigning champion,  Josh Frydenberg Age : 50 State : Melbourne, Victoria Religion : Jewish Sexuality : Hetero University Degrees: BEc(Hons) (Monash University). LLB (Monash University). MPhil (University of Oxford). MPA (Harvard University). Awards: Fulbright Scholarship (to attend Yale) Commonwealth Scholarship (to attend Oxford) Jobs: Articled Clerk at Mallesons Stephen Jacques from 1996 to 1999. Assistant Adviser to the Attorney-General, the Hon. D Williams, AM, QC, 1999. Adviser to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Hon. A Downer, MP from 1999 to 2001. Senior Adviser to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, the Hon. A Downer, MP from 2002 to 2003. Senior Adviser to the Prime Minister, the Hon. J Howard, MP from 2003 to 2004. Director at Deutsche Bank AG from 2005 to 2009. Consultant at Deutsche ...

 Today the Reserve Bank put Interest rates up to 0.35%. To be fair, probably overdue when Inflation in Australia is at 5.1% But in reality, compared to other countries, our interest rates are still pretty low, because our inflation is still pretty low compared to the rest of the world. Lets look at the G20.. Australia is still a good place to park your money.

 I read with interest about Labor's new shared Home ownership scheme it is promoting. Basically it is saying that it will provide a portion of the Home loan for an equity stake in the home that will be redeemable on the sale of the property. It is similar to schemes in other states, like WA's Key Start program. Have a couple of questions based on that type of scheme however. 1. By providing a portion of the mortgage, effectively the Government is providing housing finance and loans and indeed, a second mortgage over the property, similar to what commercial banks do. Will that mortgage be subject to an interest rate? One of the key criticisms of the WA keystart scheme is that the interest rate is higher than commercial lenders to encourage people off the scheme when they are able to. 2. The other issue is choice of property. Keystart in WA does not allow any property to come under the scheme. The government will actual purchase property for use for the program and only those hou...

 Time to update the companies again from the ATO figures Notes: The continual erosion of IBM and HP revenue in Australia. The rise of DXC into number 2 and TATA leapfrogging Fujitsu to take 6th sport. The small scale shops of kinetic and Brennan IT improving.

 And it is time to update the IT Managed Services list once again. (Haven't done this since 2017). So in 2 years, what have we seen (Data from ATO) Few points. - IBM still leads the market even though it is losing revenue - The rise of Kinetic, which was earning <100 M two years ago and now has over 200M -  Accenture, DXC and Data #3 all experiencing double digit growth - TATA gaining 74% in 2 years.

I was in a team meeting today and one of my co-workers said I shouldn't go to a conference in the city as there would be a chance I would get exposed to someone who had COV-19 and hence be put in quarantine. For me that sounds like a stretch, but lets do the math. At present there is 67 NSW confirmed cases of COV-19. This is after 50 days of exposure to the virus, so its not spreading rapidly for one.. But lets assume that 67 is not all the Coronavirus cases out there. As a benchmark, globally, South Korea seems the most aggressive country in regards to testing, so might be the true stat on how many cases out there. Based on a population of 51 million, after 50 days, they have 7513 cases. This means their infection daily rate is 2.94627E-06 Applying that daily rate to the NSW population (7.95 Million) and 50 days, and the NSW cases should be 1172 cases. Which means there are at least 1105 people out there who have Corona but have yet to be detected. So what are ...

There seems to be a bit of hysteria about the NSW Bushfires at the moment. People starting to blame climate change as always for this years intense fire season. Not sure why. The IPCC has been pretty clear that there is only medium confidence that fire weather is increasing as a result of climate change. When you think that bush fires are dependent on a whole host of factors (fire weather, humidity, precipitation, human activity, wind) and only one of those is really degraded by climate change, it doesn't make sense. So I figured I would go to the stats and see if NSW bush fire activity has increased as a result of the increased temperatures. Using areas burnt as a proxy, and getting my data from the NSW RFS annual reports and NSW Parliament ( https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2014/06/apo-nid40238-1132401.pdf ), I get the following data about bush fires since 1926. Just from the stats, it looks like the years fires are no unprecendented, and that the fi...

Every day in the newspapers and on talk back radio there are tales of suicide in rural Australia due to the drought. These claims seem to be accepted as facts, rather than being challenged. I would have thought that if drought was causing increased suicides we would see them in the ABS causes of death statistics in those drought years. So I pulled out my trusty stats, and, using Dubbo average rainfall from the BOM as a proxy for drought, looked for drought years. I have defined drought years as daily average rainfall that is 2 Standard Deviations from the 30 year average. This produced the following list of drought years, and the equivalent difference from the 30 year average suicide rate (which is 12 per 100,000 people). Suicide rate was from the ABS causes of death release So based on my analysis, I have drought years being 1982, 1997, 2002, 2006 and 2018. These years (googled) all appear to have been classified as drought. So if I run a regression on this to see what th...

Wise Tech has been in the news a bit after analysts have released some research saying it is overstating its income. Hard to really say that for mine. But there is no doubt there are some irregularities. Firstly, the capitalisation of R&D expenses...over the last 2 years Wise Tech has capitalised the R&D by around $80 million. If those expenses were expensed in the P&L instead, you would have reduced the NPAT over those 2 years from $101 million to $20 million. Meaning that the return on Equity would reduce from 9% to 1.8% with a dividend payout ration of around 15%, that means organic growth would only be around 1.5% Not much debt happening so the rest would be acquisition of businesses via share placements. And you do see that in the accounts. Share Capital has gone from $166 million in 2017 to $668 million in 2019. Then we also have the Goodwill impairment. Goodwill Balance at the moment is $600 million...basically 53% of total assets. That is high historically for I...