While the trip appears to be  under aegis of the greatest rort ever foisted on ratepayers … the Sister City free holiday program for councillors’ … it was very timely for Kim Il Jen, sloping off just as that ratepayers learn they’ve copped another financial kick in the cods courtesy of this financially illiterate simkin.

The Townsville Council’s empty grandstanding on housing market intervention is exposed for the cheap political stunt that it is. Well, perhaps cheap is the wrong word. A major player in the market detailed why the mayor’s interventionist plans into the housing market is a case of a fuckwit in financial fantasyland.

Fighting Fran O’Callaghan’s dogged calls for transparency force the council into admitting – and the Bulletin into reporting -that  it had basically lied to hide a costly purchase from ratepayers.

Saintly Sinners:  While The Astonisher makes a front page celebration of the city’s most prominent bit of public vandalism, The ‘Pie asks, isn’t it time this fucking town grew up? Or will we remain known as yogans … yokels cross bred with bogans?

And a story from the ratbag file … this time  not about the nanny state, more about the ninny state.

And why Alan Kohler is much more than a financial commentator … his latest article is a thought provoking analysis of why this world has gone so bonkers at very level.

Also, lotsa laughs, plus our regular pictorial round up from the home of the rave and the land of the twee … and Bentley’s back!

A big birthday next week ….  The Magpie entity popped out the Bulletin egg 20 years ago about now. It’s been fun but the blog has often been a bit of a personal whack to the wallet, so any help to meet the recurring costs of this alternative voice for Townsville will be a great help. The donate button is at the end of the blog. Thanks.

Now, onwards.

The Day The Bulletin Became The Mulletin.

Last Tuesday, it may as have been called the Townsville Daily Mulletin … it was a complete dog’s dinner of unquestioning campaign tripe from our mayor, masquerading as news. The front page couldn’t be more contrived.

Just for the record, it wasn’t a new plan, it was a rehash of Mayor Mullet’s witterings a month or so ago about converting office buildings to low cost housing for low and medium income earners. And for the Bulletin to bless this utter bullshit with the suggestion of rapid council action (an obvious oxymoron) to meet a so-called rental emergency is chuckle-headed nonsense at best, grossly misleading and irresponsible at worst.

Then we get to the full story inside on page 6,  where the most notable fact was that the mayor gave her favourite purple doona dress it’s 85 outing for the year (or so it seemed).

It was as usual just buzz word bullshit – what the hell does she mean when she says ‘More than 7000 Townsville households or 10 per cent of the housing market are experiencing housing stress.’  What the hell does housing stress mean? This is just parroting twaddle along with some highly questionable statistics.

But more frightening is the four key aims TCC’s Affordable Housing Action Plan  – to offer council-owned land for development, but ‘not necessarily’ significant cash for development, quoth Mayor Mullet) (’… not necessarily significant’?!? FFS, that outrageous in itself)’, to partner with government and private industry to deliver affordable housing (just what the hell does ‘affordable ‘mean in this context of a volatile market that has absolutely zero to do with local government), to promote developments with incentives and b y advocating to reduce insurance costs (like the insurance companies would listen to the likes of you, Madam – get over yourself) and the real giveaway doozie of brain farts – investigate converting vacant office buildings to residential use.

All this is totally meaningless, a lame and obvious attempt to gain some sort of relevance against a national issue which many property people here in Townsville say does not exist to major extent here. If any of it is attempted, the council will piss more ratepayers money up against the wall (get that image of team action out of your heads now)

But never one to be negative, let The ‘Pie make life easy for you, Walker Street wankers with a dose of reality on that last issue of office space. This from a prominent property player in Townsville.

Once you start making major structural changes to an old property, you have to update it to current Queensland Fire and Building Code – which is why the Dimmeys redevelopment is over a year behind schedule and rumoured to cost the developer an extra million dollars.

The other miscalculation from the Mayor and her councillors who think they can be developers is finance . Even when unit developers seek finance they have to have presold over 50% with contracts . Commercial leases with yearly increases and guarantees are normally accepted as income by the banks .

I don’t believe any bank will loan a vacant CBD office owner any $ to upgrade to residential unless they have other assets to provide as further guarantees because there is no chance residential is guaranteed. And on top of all this, what incentive or threat does the mayor imagine she can put forward to make investors even consider conversions? Current owners of CBD offices think the Mayors idea is simply yet another folly from a Mayor with little financial / development knowledge.

Then there is the class thing, isn’t there, when Deputy Mayor Mark Molachino butts in with ‘Affordable housing is open to a broader range of incomes than social housing. This is about helping to attract and retain critical workers like police officers, nurses and child care workers to our city.’

Always nice to know where folks are on your social pecking order, Frothy.

But Did You Notice ….

… on the same page as Mayor Mullet’s free campaign ad … sorry, story … this was this beautifully placed yarn right next door.

The excuse, even if true which is a question, means the council finance department doesn’t even know how much its paid for what. BUT the most significant aspect of this story isn’t mentioned at all. The fact is you wouldn’t have known that the council initially claimed only half the cost of buying the remaining parcel of land in the North rail Yards IF IT WERE NOT FOR THE DETERMINED EFFORTS FOR TRANSPARENCY DEMANDED BY CLR FRAN O’CALLAGHAN. She brought it to the attention of the council that the figure they supplied the Bulletin in the initial story was wrong by half, and in the end, the mayor and the council had no choice but to correct what they hope we believe to be ‘just an error’.

And Clr O’Callaghan did this, and all her other campaigning for transparency while being harassed and bullied personally by the mayor and the snivelling legal hole in the air Tony Bligh. Clr O’Callaghan is actively shunned by other councillors, according to a council insider who keeps The Magpie informed of matters in the Hermit Kingdom.

Whether she’s right or wrong, she’s got more guts than the rest put together … but that wouldn’t be all that hard.

Remember When, Way Back …

…. when three or four times a year, a four page colour brochure would land in the letter box from the council, extolling all they were doing to earn the considerable dollars we pay them. Well that idea was scrapped a while back, and why would they ever want to introduce it again — when the Daily Mulletin will do it for free. This page 3 from last Tuesday.

‘Cash Splash’?  This is hardly news and it’s no splash, it is just the council carry out its budget agenda. And what pray tell, Master Bates (you back here, old son? Ingham fathers run you out of town?) do you mean when you break from your stenography and have to write a headline – and suggest ordinary projects long announced and underway, are somehow ‘future proofing’ all of NQ? What does that even mean in this context? bit sloppy, too,  when you include a pic of the Haughton pipeline, but don’t make the smallest mention of it in the dictation you took down from the TCC media flak.

You Wouldn’t Read About … Well, Not At This Library Anyway

But hey, for old times sake, Cameron, here’s a scoop you can follow up on … ha ha, only joking … as if. you transcribed  this little gem in your round up.

Then there’s this.

Lack of external funding lifts library relocation cost to $8.5m

The cost to ratepayers to develop a new library in Townsville has blown out by more than 50 per cent as council reveals the reason why.

Tony Raggatt

The cost to ratepayers to develop a new library at Riverway has blown out to $8.5m.

But Townsville City Council says the main reason for the more than 50 per cent increase is a failure to secure grant funding that it had hoped to receive.

Construction costs have soared in Australia, up an overall 10 per cent in the past year.

“Council initially developed the Riverway library project design based on $5.5m capital funding from council’s 2021-22 budget and grant funding,” a council spokeswoman said.

“Council was unable to secure external funding towards the library but through reallocations in its 2022-23 budget was able to allocate a total of $8.5m towards the Riverway library project.

If there was ever a more damning statement of dereliction of fiscal probity, it is this sentence:  “But Townsville City Council says the main reason for the more than 50 per cent increase is a failure to secure grant funding that it had hoped to receive.”

‘Hoped to receive’!?! But they went ahead anyway?  With no guarantee that their hoped-for external funding would be granted. In plain language, council took a punt and now the ratepayers are lumbered with – yet again – an unfair debt because of the mayoral team’s hubris and lack of integrity. Add that to the unexpected and unnecessary $80million the ratepayers now have to stump up because of what was basically a political stoush. And while we’re in this obscure world, who footed the $50,000 payout to Fatty Palmer because the mayor slandered him?

But seems there’s another deeper side to this cockamamie saga of wasteful fuckwittery., and it points to a disgraceful lack of reasonable foresight, planning and priorities.This information from a Nest reader who has a track record of being right on the money about internal council ‘thinking’.

The library is not a relocation, it is a brand new facility. Just ask us.

It goes something like this. TCC sells the very popular Thuringowa library so there is no library service in the area. We then decide not to restore Pinnacles Art Gallery after the floods because frankly no one out past Bamford Lane is supposed to be interested in culture. Then we announce a brand new library to go where the drowned gallery was. The wash-up of all this: big public library with good parking and facilities – sold. Art gallery – closed. Pokey shitty little library with no decent parking close to it and subject to the same flooding problems the building has always had – new and shiny.

Well, seems it certainly is a lending library … reckon the councikl – and Master Bates – are having a lend of us.

Wonder How Transparent Jenny’s Jaunt To South Korea Will Be

Are we ratepayers in danger yet again?

The Sister City malarkey is a bigger con that Townsville Enterprise. If that sounds a touch harsh, there’s one simple question – the same one oft asked here of the Dudley Do Nothings –  that will put the statement to the proof?  What tangible benefit worth the effort and the considerable dollars has our sister city relationship with six Asian and Pacific nations afforded us? Or them? The answer is sweet fuck all, except for the councillors over the past 30 years pigging out with their counterparts. That would be tens of thousands of dollars, and maybe even adding a nought wouldn’t be off the mark.

This from the TCC website:

Over the past three decades, Townsville has signed Sister City agreements with six cities.

• National Capital District Commission of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
• Shunan – Japan
• Iwaki – Japan
• Changshu – China
• Suwon – Korea
• Foshan – China

The main aim of Sister City contact is to create friendship and understanding between peoples and to lay a foundation of goodwill and exchange for future generations. Each agreement focuses on the development of mutually beneficial trade and investment, the sharing of ideas, and the promotion of cultural understanding. Sister City relations are managed by the Townsville Sister City Committee, a group comprised of leaders in the areas of government, business, education, tourism, culture, community and sports.

This is simply thieving codswallop, letting councillor’s get away with blue murder on the their expense sheets. And well beyond any remit the ratepayers would give this broken arse mob of outright tuggers. But Kim Il Jen sure ain’t gunna miss out, you can bet she knows her days are numbered on the mayoral plush.

But The Magpie became a little alarmed when he thought about this latest knees up to Korea. Be interested to know if she ventures far from the delights of Suwon’s canine canapes, kimchi cabbage and Soju booze, (distilled from sweet potatoes) – if in fact that’s what the trip is for, typically hard to find details. But will she try to get in the door of giant companies Hanwha and SK Group, who are teaming with Korea Zinc to have a hydrogen supply route between Collinsville and Townsville. ‘Hi, guys, name’s Jenny, I’ve got a public penny,  private airport, anyone? It’s on us!!’

Bentley’s Back And Is A Bothered Bloke

The energy future has been concerning Bentley lately, who believes it will not be chickens but ducks coming home to roost for Albo and his piecemeal energy policy. Our man is unimpressed.

Longevity Does NOT Equal Legitimacy

Memo Townsville Bulletin, Townsville City Council & elders of the Bindal Wulgurukaba indigenous mob.

Illegitimate longevity does not equal legitimacy.  By the above groups own separate rules and regulations, there can be no argument that the Saint daubed on the magnificent Castle Hill rocky edifice is nothing more than cheap, nasty and insulting graffiti. That it was executed by a group of adolescent fuckwits as a student jape dismisses any waffle about artistic, social or satirical merit … it is a re-creation of the named symbol of fictional English detective character Simon Templar, created by English writer Leslie Charteris about an English ponce who goes about solving crimes mainly in England and Europe, unless he’s called on to help out the hapless and amusingly baffled dusky authorities of some British protectorate. This makes the figure’s presence even the more reprehensible. The ‘Pie has often wondered why the ever-sensitive element of the local indigenous clan have meekly accepted it, let alone a council and a paper forever hypervirtulating about graffiti ‘vandals’ defacing man-made structure around the city. The Magpie has never heard them called ‘larrikins’, with the indulgent chuckle and the unspoken ‘lovable’ the word implies.

But even if there was some connection to a perceived social ill or even a popular sentiment (like graffiti saying ‘ Castle Hill is Townsville’s only worthwhile Hill’), it would still would be public despoliation of a towering and imposing natural landmark, one unique in its central city location.

Even the now-mature perpetrators seem a bit shame-faced that it has remained so long.  But the saddest part is that that piece of vandalism has remained because of public sentiment. So desperate to be the larrikin city doing their own thing, attempts to remove The Saint have met with outcry from the insecure denizens troubled about their identity and place in the world. Visitors who are aghast at the sight are curtly told to fuck off, you don’t live here, mind your own business. And many just do exactly that.

With this civic mind-set, it’s just as well Ivan Milat didn’t come from Townsville … he’d no doubt be defended by the yogans as being victimised ‘just because boys want to have fun’.

Speaking Of Artistic Merit, Or Lack Thereof …

 

The Magpie’s occasional award for cultural posturing has a hands down winner this week, Dr Lisa Slade. Slade was the chief judge of the $50,000 Brisbane Portrait prize. And this, the good doctor tells us, got her nod because it is a piece of ‘brave sophistication’.

But Dr Slade seemed to give the game away when she said ‘the artwork spoke to me immediately’. Yup, know the feeling, doc, inanimate objects often strike up conversations with you when you’ve dropped a tab too many.

She added, “Some may think this particular artwork looks easy but pulling something like this off is very sophisticated,”

If Dr Slade wasn’t a woman (as far as we know, she is) it would be reasonable to believe she’s pulling off something else entirely,

This Is Worth A Read – It Speaks To This Age And Beyond

Finance boffin Alan Kohler is proving to more than a grey numbers and graphs man, with an impish sense of humour. He occasionally brings us a thought-provoking  analysis well outside the economic spectrum. This is one such article.

The Boys At The Shovel Had Alternative Takes On The Week’s News

The Week In Whacky Land

Another week goes by and for the illustrators of America, it made one thing certain …. nothing is ever going to be certain again.

Even Legal Types Secretly Like Lawyer Jokes, So Here Ya Go, Folks

Sudden involuntary guffaws were hard to come by in the past week, but in Friday’s Australian, The Magpie had a whoopsie with a mouthful of coffee when reading this book review from the London Times. It was the breakout box to the right of the book’s image that caused the mop up of the Magpie’s desk.

‘Easy mistake ‘  … a classic example of brevity is the soul of wit.-

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We’ve all survived another week, and trust we’ll gather same place same time next week – but you don’t have to wait, comments are there 24/7, and are of course free. If you have a weak moment and have a sudden urge to help the Nest survive, the donate button is below.