King Island Dairy is coming back into Australian hands! 🇦🇺🤝

Great to see this happen.

Right with you Steve....hopefully we support them when we can.

The free piss was flowing in the pub the other night, I wasn't there but they reckon it was a good night.

Lets hope that goes on to bumper sales as well...great outcome for the island and the wider community.

The one competitive advantage Australia should have is supplying food to ourselves and the rest of world. But man, we make it hard and expensive for ourselves to do that. 

And top of the list for expense is cost of labour.

Price you pay for living in a first world country, pretty sure that's why most manufacturers fucked of to Asia once tariffs came down, cheap labour, bigger profits, higher chance of survival, no easy answers but fucking the working class over ain't gunna fly, Jesus I know plenty of people with more than one job now.

Not sure its about fucking the working class over its just that we now have the crazy non merit basis where a unskilled person can make more money being a stop go person under the CFMEU than a surgeon saving lives in a hospital. We used to have a skills/qualification system that would pay you based on those skills and unskilled people where paid less. The incentive was to upskill for bigger pay but some either couldn't or wouldn't.  Here on the coast concreters are paying labourers anywhere from $50-$80 per hour.

I don't see what the wage of a brickies labourer or a stop go girl has got to do with Rossi and Blundstone taking their boot manufacturing facilities overseas? Manufacturing, with all the overheads, not just wages, was too expensive here to compete against imports once the tariffs came down, despite the 1975 Lima Deceleration we still had a manufacturing industry here in the 80's, businesses in a great many cases moved manufacturing offshore to reduce the overheads, including wages to actually stay in business, many of them still employ hundreds of Australians in their warehouses, distribution centres and systems, there were some that no doubt moved to maximise corporate profits that maybe could of survived here but I've not got an example handy, I know you know all this, saying that wages are the biggest "problem" is slight of hand, they may be the most expensive part of the equation in some cases but many things come into play. 

Hilly not saying that cutting wages is the answer as we have gone way beyond that point in Australia. The single biggest expense to business is the cost of the team, was always and will be into the future. All the other expenses have also added burden to businesses along the way with this power debacle ramming it right into costs. You mentioned Blunderstone who now manufacture in India and other countries. Aussie factory worker $24.10 +$2.77 super plus holidays plus sick days...just call it $27 per hr vs Indian worker $4.50 and in most cases the employer deducts their Super from the wage not adds it like ours. Its a no brainer for a company heavily reliant on labour to move offshore. Think you and i will be waiting a very long time before before we see a polly doing what they are paid for.

It's often forgotten these days that when 3% compulsory superannuation was introduced in Australia, back when the country had a far more centralised wage setting system that took into account such forgotten values as fairness, the union movement traded off a 3% wage increase for super. They're called employer contributions, but workers helped pay for them with foregone pay.

Well its going to be total chaos if we end up with a minority government regardless of the persuasion. If i was in opposition taking on this current mess i would ask to see the books first before saying i can do better....Crisafulli has found a fair few vacant piggy boxes and petty cash floats that should have had money in them. If you have a rainy boring day try watching a senate estimates hearing to see how government is structured so that its impossible to find a individual whos accountable for a fuck up...will make you sick. You or i make a legit mistake on a tax return and see what happens....gov department blows their budget by 10 million and it gets ticked off as ok. 

Jesus! watching that is the very definition of self flagellation.

Steve, its Mongrels and an old pair of RM's here.

G'day,

Dunno, I was using their zip side mid ankle steel caps for bike boots.....well they were my work boots but bloody comfortable, some say steel caps are bad on a bike, in a crash like, I wonder though are they speaking from experience or something they were told or read?

G'day,

Fair point on the cold, I didn't have that issue in Townsville haha.

I had that conversation about the steel toe caps  with a young fella who rode a Jap bike.