nyonyamansor09

Time is beautiful. Given enough time you can get fat, bald and start to sprout hair from your ears. Suffering those indignities is worth it because time also builds something else - an artillery. As Sun Tzu said, "while you sweat an imprint into your couch, your enemies sow the seeds of their destruction." Predictions have been made and forgotten by most. Those without shame and something to sell can forever make those predictions without fear of second guessing. Welcome to Tasmania, where the print media is a contemptible landscape of irrelevant whiskey-nosed boozers and their fresh faced, empty headed underlings. You know the type, tweeting while watching Q&A on Monday night allows them to believe they're the state's intelligentsia. Luckily there's me. Thoroughly lazy, yet occasionally motivated by the chance any of Tasmania's lamentable journalistic stock will rip me off and highlight something original. The odds aren't good. The Mercury's pumpe...

When a newspaper croaks, a loyal and important servant to its community is lost. Or that's what the obituaries say. The truth is, a dead newspaper scarcely bears any resemblance to the mythical beast that will be lionised when the printing presses shut down and the plastic bag full of paper and ink stops landing on lawns each morning.  The Advocate, its death assured as a marsupial on a Tasmanian road at dusk, will be one of those lionised newspapers. It shouldn't be. The Advocate's turf is one of Australia's most economically disadvantaged electorates, something that goes hand in hand with low education levels. It's almost assured when The Advocate recycles a press release or culls stats to craft a story, the readership won't find themselves digging any deeper. Forget them trawling ABS spreadsheets for reality.  Sean Ford, senior journalist amongst a bunch of 12 year olds, knows this. He's The Advocate's "resident numbers man" (yep, that's...

Rotten. That would be the only way to describe the latest ABS housing finance statistics for Tasmania. Sure they're up on last month and you can make statistics dance anyway you choose, if you're so inclined. Yet for the whole of 2010, Tasmanian housing finance commitments have not cracked 1000 in any month. Well what does that mean? August and September of 2008, in the midst of the global financial crisis, was the last time figures hit this mark and looked like staying there. And we know what happened next, Rudd and Swan tossed money out into the battlefield and their doe-eyed saleswoman, Tanya Plibersek, sold the cash bribes to the naive and inexperienced first home buyers. Thanks to that intervention, the figures climbed above 1000 and stayed there until January this year, when the bribe was withdrawn. Since that point Tasmanian housing finance commitments have continued in a bottom bumping trend, under 1000 per month. To put this in perspective, sub-1000 is a figure not con...

Some worrying stats regarding family violence were released this week, these could be linked to any cause - if you were so inclined to draw long bows. So like any blogger worth his salt, I'll interpret them on behalf of the barrow I'm pushing. Overpriced housing. Reports of family violence in Tasmania are up 500% in the past decade. Scary statistics, but thankfully Ruth Forrest MLC was on hand to interpret the reasons for the rise. Predictably, unemployment and drug use got a run, along with the vague and redundant term 'life pressures'. If you can't be more specific, why bother giving throw away quotes to the media? Considering Forrest sat on the Housing Affordability Select Committee, you'd expect she may be able to offer a little more insight as to what 'life pressures' consist of. During those hearings, in 2007, the HIA acknowledged that: ...Tasmania is now sitting around seven times the household income so we are actually rated as one of the least a...