A number of local students, either starting or returning to classes this year, represent the second, third and even fourth generation of their families to attend Cloverdale schools.One of them is 5-year old Coby Haug. When he begins Kindergarten at Jefferson School next Wednesday, he will be following in the footsteps of his great grandfather, grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
Presently, he has nine cousins in the district, from Kindergarten to high school, two others who have already graduated, and three more like his baby brother who are still too young to attend.Coby’s mom, Danielle Bird Huag, 30, and her mom, Patty Santana Bird, 56, were reminiscing recently about how things have changed for school children over the years.
For instance, when Coby’s great grandfather, John Santana, graduated from Cloverdale High School in 1934, manual typewriters were considered standard office equipment. Students didn’t learn to use electric typewriters until the 1960’s, and computers in classrooms didn’t come along until the 1980’s.Unlike her grandfather, and even her mother, Haug, never knew school without access to computers.
When Santana was growing up, the land next to his family home was a prune orchard. Like other children of that era, he was expected to help out during harvest regardless of Regular Residential Cleaning Services , which probably meant he got up even earlier during the week to get his chores done.Today, the prunes are long gone, and in their place is a baseball field. Family members, including Santana himself, have all been avid ball players. Bird was a Hall of Famer at Santa Rosa Junior College, and both of her sons were Hall of Famers at Mendocino College.
Currently, several family members coach local softball and little league teams so the field is often used for many of their practices, as well as by other family members just for fun.Haug, who played volleyball, basketball and softball, fears school sports might die out with this generation, a pretty sobering thought for anyone in this sports-minded family.
Bird met her husband, Dexter, while both were students at Cloverdale High. Their three children, Damien, T.J. and Danielle, all went to local schools, and each one is now sending their own children through the school system.Bird recalls, “When I was in school, teachers were also bus drivers, after school activity advisors and coaches.”
She says there were a lot more activities then, too, such as pep rallies, pep bands and concert bands, as well as classes like wood shop, auto shop, metal shop and agriculture.Bird rode the school bus until she got into high school, then her dad drove her.
”I alternated between taking the school bus and riding with grandpa,” says Haug. “Now we have no school buses so mom does it.”Bird lauds the schools for getting kids involved in community service projects, pointing to school groups like the Interact Club and Key Club and events like Community Unity Day, where students help clean up the cemetery, work in the History Center garden and at other locations around town.
“There is a lot more interaction like this between boys and girls now than when I was in school.”At the same time, she notes she and her classmates had a lot more freedom than kids today. “We were able to leave campus for lunch and Offering Office cleaning Services, if we had a permission slip, even go downtown.”An elementary school teacher in Ukiah, Haug credits her career choice to her second grade teacher, Claudia Plumley-Frandsen, who went on to become Superintendent of Cloverdale Unified before retiring in 2011.
“She really inspired me. She made learning fun in a way that made me to want to emulate her.”Sadly, one of the things that has changed over the years is the physical interaction between students and teachers. No longer is it acceptable for a teacher to hug a student or give them a pat of encouragement on the back or arm.
“If a child hugs me, I hesitate to hug them back,” says Haug, “and that’s really kind of a shame.”During Bird’s high school years, classes for girls were geared more towards home economics and learning how to care for a family.“Boys were encouraged to go to college, but for us, having a high school diploma back then was sufficient.”
Haug believes schools are now going to be focusing more and more on technology and college readiness at an earlier literacy age.“By the time Coby graduates from high school, he’ll probably need to pursue a Masters or beyond just to fit into the workplace.”
However, as someone who remembers the emotional rollercoaster of results day, I want to wish pupils and parents the very best of luck for tomorrow. However the cards may fall, there are always options which can lead you down highly rewarding paths.The good news is that forecasts for UK employment show demand to fill jobs in more highly skilled occupations are still growing.
Of the 13.5 million jobs that will need to be filled by 2017 over half will be for managers, professionals, and technical occupations. Almost all of the employment growth in the recent decade of prosperity was for people with degree-level qualifications.
While there will always be a persistent number of low-skilled jobs in the economy, overall numbers have declined.The demand for people to fill elementary roles such as cleaning or security services is to replace those retiring or leaving the workforce - it is often not the creation of new jobs.
Traditionally lower skilled jobs have served as labour market entry points for many moving out of unemployment, and their decline emphasises the need for everyone to have a strong platform of basic skills. Failure to grasp these basics when young will affect future life-chances and increase the likelihood of disengagement from the workforce.
So, as a result of the changing nature of our workforce, A-levels are likely to remain one of life’s major milestones for many years to come; marking the end of one journey and the beginning of the next.It seems appropriate therefore to pause and stake stock; to consider what employers need from our schools system but also look forward at the impact the changing economy is having on workforce needs.
Wales, of course, has its own educational system, devolved from its English neighbour’s. While we have many challenges we also have much to be proud of in Wales, particularly the emphasis that successive Welsh governments since devolution have placed on education.
Read the full products at http://www.mvpcleaning.com.au/.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
New approach to home air maintenance
Michelle Doty has had to get her hands dirty many times during her 14-year marriage to husband Jeremiah Doty, but she wasn’t expecting to do so on the job of the home maintenance service they have operated together since 2008.“I went out on one of our air duct cleaning jobs in Battle Ground and one of our guys called in sick so Michelle filled in for the day as my helper,” Jeremiah said. “She tore me apart the whole day, asking me why I wasn’t hand-washing the registers or cleaning the back of the dryer when I pulled it out to access the duct. Was I going to clean the lint trap and vaccuum the carpet afterwards?”
At the time, Michelle was only working part-time for their home-based company, but her husband challenged her to take over the Air Duct cleaning portion of the business. A few months later, she’d quit her day job and took Jeremiah up on his challenge.“It wasn’t the first time I’d gone out with him on jobs so I knew I’d picked up enough of how to do it from him that I could manage it well,” Doty said.
J&M Services provides gas piping and ventilation maintenance to homeowners throughout Clark County and Doty’s detail-oriented approach has been paying dividends.“It’s not that what we did before didn’t work, but I think what happened is I found a more efficient way to do it so our customers know we’ve done a thorough cleaning,” said Doty.
What sets J&M’s service apart from their competition is their insistence that a home’s air system isn’t clean until it meets their standards, which as Jeremiah explained, means not scrimping or Best Carpet Cleaning Services.“Most companies set time limits or quotas for their cleanings. They may make one or two passes with a roto-brush in a duct and they might call it good,” Doty said. “I’ve read some bad press recently on Air Duct Cleaning and what people may not know is the majority of those companies do primarily carpet cleaning and might not know the best way to clean a heating and vent system out.”
For Michelle, the attention to detail is not just practical, but it goes to helping homeowners who deal with health issues triggered by the buildup of particulates in the air.
“When you have someone who has allergies triggered by pollen and dust, those things collect in heat registers and the air vents, so cleaning them out can be beneficial,” Michelle said. “Because of that, we’re not happy until we can fully clean out the systems and we also hand wash and sanitize the registers to be as clean as we can make them.”
Another area Doty says their approach pays off is in the cleaning of exhaust ducts connected to clothes dryers, which can not only affect the efficiency of the machine, but can also become a fire hazard if left unchecked.“The main issue is that the lint that comes off the clothes as it goes through the dryer can stick to the side of the duct and build up over time until it blocks it off entirely, and it can make it harder to get your clothes dry,” Doty said. “It also can become very flammable, which obviously can be very dangerous to the home, so we go through and remove every piece of ducting and scrub them out before reinstalling them.”
J&M’s Air Duct cleaning service is available starting at $150, with heat vent cleanings at $18 per vent and $26 per vent return, which is responsible for cold air circulation.“We also double check the system to make sure we’ve cleared out as much dust and material as possible,” said Doty. “It’s a good idea for homeowners to get their systems cleaned out every 1-3 years depending on the age and size of the home. For dryer systems, depending on the amount of use, it’s a good idea to do it once or even twice a year.”
While Michelle doesn’t do as much field work as she used to over the last few years, she’s brought in other women to be part of her four work crews and has noticed it’s made a difference on their customers.“I can’t say why exactly, but when we’re out on a job and a client may need to step out to the store or pick up their kids and they just tend to trust us a bit more with their home because we’re women,” Doty said. “It’s also helped us build our reputation as a credible company, which always helps us.”
Jeremiah added that even though Michelle didn’t have a business background prior to taking over her side of J&M, her impact on the company has been noticable.“I just can’t believe how strong a person she’s become,” Jeremiah said. “We are truly 50/50 partners and she even dreams about work now, which she used to get irritated at me about all the time.”
“It is good that they took our word seriously and decided not to involve students in this,” he said, noting that they would stick to their demand until the money was found – even if it needed waiting for a month.
“We started this campaign in 2011 and a committee was established by management which concluded that we should be given 800 per cent salary increment. It beats our understanding if they have, Offering Stream Carpet cleaning Services, failed to give us a mere 100 per cent salary increment,” Kakinda tells The Observer.
He argues that the staff action should not be taken in bad faith because they are also parents and students who deserve better.“We want very to teach but we just ask our employer to give us a salary worth our energy,” he says, adding that Makerere teaching staff are the poorest paid in East Africa.
His claim however, flies in the face of arguments by former Vice Chancellor Venansius Baryamureeba – that some Makerere academic staff are overpaid. Kakinda is, however, scared that Makerere’s lecturer turnover is likely to increase because more people are getting frustrated despite their excellent works.
Read the full products at http://www.mvpcleaning.com.au/.
At the time, Michelle was only working part-time for their home-based company, but her husband challenged her to take over the Air Duct cleaning portion of the business. A few months later, she’d quit her day job and took Jeremiah up on his challenge.“It wasn’t the first time I’d gone out with him on jobs so I knew I’d picked up enough of how to do it from him that I could manage it well,” Doty said.
J&M Services provides gas piping and ventilation maintenance to homeowners throughout Clark County and Doty’s detail-oriented approach has been paying dividends.“It’s not that what we did before didn’t work, but I think what happened is I found a more efficient way to do it so our customers know we’ve done a thorough cleaning,” said Doty.
What sets J&M’s service apart from their competition is their insistence that a home’s air system isn’t clean until it meets their standards, which as Jeremiah explained, means not scrimping or Best Carpet Cleaning Services.“Most companies set time limits or quotas for their cleanings. They may make one or two passes with a roto-brush in a duct and they might call it good,” Doty said. “I’ve read some bad press recently on Air Duct Cleaning and what people may not know is the majority of those companies do primarily carpet cleaning and might not know the best way to clean a heating and vent system out.”
For Michelle, the attention to detail is not just practical, but it goes to helping homeowners who deal with health issues triggered by the buildup of particulates in the air.
“When you have someone who has allergies triggered by pollen and dust, those things collect in heat registers and the air vents, so cleaning them out can be beneficial,” Michelle said. “Because of that, we’re not happy until we can fully clean out the systems and we also hand wash and sanitize the registers to be as clean as we can make them.”
Another area Doty says their approach pays off is in the cleaning of exhaust ducts connected to clothes dryers, which can not only affect the efficiency of the machine, but can also become a fire hazard if left unchecked.“The main issue is that the lint that comes off the clothes as it goes through the dryer can stick to the side of the duct and build up over time until it blocks it off entirely, and it can make it harder to get your clothes dry,” Doty said. “It also can become very flammable, which obviously can be very dangerous to the home, so we go through and remove every piece of ducting and scrub them out before reinstalling them.”
J&M’s Air Duct cleaning service is available starting at $150, with heat vent cleanings at $18 per vent and $26 per vent return, which is responsible for cold air circulation.“We also double check the system to make sure we’ve cleared out as much dust and material as possible,” said Doty. “It’s a good idea for homeowners to get their systems cleaned out every 1-3 years depending on the age and size of the home. For dryer systems, depending on the amount of use, it’s a good idea to do it once or even twice a year.”
While Michelle doesn’t do as much field work as she used to over the last few years, she’s brought in other women to be part of her four work crews and has noticed it’s made a difference on their customers.“I can’t say why exactly, but when we’re out on a job and a client may need to step out to the store or pick up their kids and they just tend to trust us a bit more with their home because we’re women,” Doty said. “It’s also helped us build our reputation as a credible company, which always helps us.”
Jeremiah added that even though Michelle didn’t have a business background prior to taking over her side of J&M, her impact on the company has been noticable.“I just can’t believe how strong a person she’s become,” Jeremiah said. “We are truly 50/50 partners and she even dreams about work now, which she used to get irritated at me about all the time.”
“It is good that they took our word seriously and decided not to involve students in this,” he said, noting that they would stick to their demand until the money was found – even if it needed waiting for a month.
“We started this campaign in 2011 and a committee was established by management which concluded that we should be given 800 per cent salary increment. It beats our understanding if they have, Offering Stream Carpet cleaning Services, failed to give us a mere 100 per cent salary increment,” Kakinda tells The Observer.
He argues that the staff action should not be taken in bad faith because they are also parents and students who deserve better.“We want very to teach but we just ask our employer to give us a salary worth our energy,” he says, adding that Makerere teaching staff are the poorest paid in East Africa.
His claim however, flies in the face of arguments by former Vice Chancellor Venansius Baryamureeba – that some Makerere academic staff are overpaid. Kakinda is, however, scared that Makerere’s lecturer turnover is likely to increase because more people are getting frustrated despite their excellent works.
Read the full products at http://www.mvpcleaning.com.au/.
Monday, August 12, 2013
Chinese take up navel grazing
They endured years of drought that posed challenges to production. And when the drought ended, came the floods and hail storms.In more recent years, the nation's orange producers also faced a declining market for their fruit in the United States, a market that had been a cornerstone of the industry for about 20 years.
But after years of trying big investment and careful negotiations, orange growers have apparently peeled open a new market with Offering High Rug cleaning Services - China.This year, the citrus industry is on track to export about 500 shipping containers of oranges direct to China, a massive five-fold increase on last year. Two years ago just five containers were exported direct to China, and three years ago none.
Advertisement
However, before direct exports to China commenced in 2011, it is likely that some oranges shipped to Hong Kong made it to mainland China via the so-called ''grey trade''.Citrus grower Tania Chapman, chairwoman of Citrus Australia, described the rise in exports to China as ''monumental growth''
'At the moment, we cannot keep up with the demand,'' she said. Aside from taste, other factors have helped drive the growth.
''This year particularly, the US has been kicked out of China because of protocol issues, so that is one thing in our favour. But two, in China there's been a massive increase in middle-class income and it's that middle-class income that can afford to buy the imported citrus,'' Ms Chapman said.
In the Murray Valley, 45 growers are certified to grow fruit for China, but Ms Chapman, who farms at Colignan, south of Mildura, tips that number to ''double easily''.The falling Australian dollar, which is now trading at about US90￠ , has helped lift returns for growers. ''Last year with the high dollar and all of the other increased costs, sometimes growers struggled to cover the cost of picking in their returns. This year the falling dollar itself has covered those costs,'' Ms Chapman said.
''We've got a point of difference. The quality that we send there is what they're after. And for us it should always be - maintain the quality, maintain the standard, keep the point of difference because that's where the returns are going to be,'' he said.
BlackBerry, which pioneered mobile email with its first smartphones and email pagers, said on Monday it had set up a committee to review its options, sparking a debate over whether Canada's one-time crown jewel is more valuable as a whole or snapped up piece by piece by competitors or private investors.
The company said Prem Watsa, whose Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd is BlackBerry's biggest shareholder, was leaving the board as BlackBerry determines its next steps.Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper said Fairfax was talking to industry and private equity players about possibility taking BlackBerry private. Fairfax did not respond to requests for comment.
Other potential buyers of BlackBerry assets, if not the company itself, could include deep-pocketed Canadian pension funds, as well as some of its rivals.BlackBerry, once a stock market darling, has bled market share to Apple Inc and phones using Google Inc's Android operating system, and its new BlackBerry 10 smartphones have failed to gain traction with Mattress Cleaning Services.
Three of Canada's big pension funds declined to comment. But senior executive at two of the others said they and their peers would definitely consider partnering with private equity in any deal for BlackBerry.
Legal experts say any deal taking BlackBerry private would work best if it had Canadian involvement."There is little question that the federal government would prefer a made-in-Canada approach," said Subrata Bhattacharjee, co-chair of the national trade and competition group at the Heenan Blaikie law firm in Toronto.
"A foreign strategic investor would certainly have to consider some very significant regulatory issues, including domestic and foreign antitrust concerns ... Some foreign investors might also have to address national security concerns," Bhattacharjee said.BlackBerry said board member Timothy Dattels will chair the new committee, which will also include BlackBerry Chief Executive Thorsten Heins.
Dattels is a senior partner at private equity firm TPG Capital and a former top investment banker at Goldman Sachs Group Inc . His appointment to BlackBerry's board in June last year sparked a flurry of speculation that the company might consider a leveraged buyout or going private.
The new BB10 devices hit store shelves this year just as the high-end smartphone segment was showing signs of saturation in markets such as the United States. Samsung Electronics recently reported results that fell shy of expectations, while Apple earlier this year reported its first quarterly profit decline in more than a decade.
But after years of trying big investment and careful negotiations, orange growers have apparently peeled open a new market with Offering High Rug cleaning Services - China.This year, the citrus industry is on track to export about 500 shipping containers of oranges direct to China, a massive five-fold increase on last year. Two years ago just five containers were exported direct to China, and three years ago none.
Advertisement
However, before direct exports to China commenced in 2011, it is likely that some oranges shipped to Hong Kong made it to mainland China via the so-called ''grey trade''.Citrus grower Tania Chapman, chairwoman of Citrus Australia, described the rise in exports to China as ''monumental growth''
'At the moment, we cannot keep up with the demand,'' she said. Aside from taste, other factors have helped drive the growth.
''This year particularly, the US has been kicked out of China because of protocol issues, so that is one thing in our favour. But two, in China there's been a massive increase in middle-class income and it's that middle-class income that can afford to buy the imported citrus,'' Ms Chapman said.
In the Murray Valley, 45 growers are certified to grow fruit for China, but Ms Chapman, who farms at Colignan, south of Mildura, tips that number to ''double easily''.The falling Australian dollar, which is now trading at about US90￠ , has helped lift returns for growers. ''Last year with the high dollar and all of the other increased costs, sometimes growers struggled to cover the cost of picking in their returns. This year the falling dollar itself has covered those costs,'' Ms Chapman said.
''We've got a point of difference. The quality that we send there is what they're after. And for us it should always be - maintain the quality, maintain the standard, keep the point of difference because that's where the returns are going to be,'' he said.
BlackBerry, which pioneered mobile email with its first smartphones and email pagers, said on Monday it had set up a committee to review its options, sparking a debate over whether Canada's one-time crown jewel is more valuable as a whole or snapped up piece by piece by competitors or private investors.
The company said Prem Watsa, whose Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd is BlackBerry's biggest shareholder, was leaving the board as BlackBerry determines its next steps.Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper said Fairfax was talking to industry and private equity players about possibility taking BlackBerry private. Fairfax did not respond to requests for comment.
Other potential buyers of BlackBerry assets, if not the company itself, could include deep-pocketed Canadian pension funds, as well as some of its rivals.BlackBerry, once a stock market darling, has bled market share to Apple Inc and phones using Google Inc's Android operating system, and its new BlackBerry 10 smartphones have failed to gain traction with Mattress Cleaning Services.
Three of Canada's big pension funds declined to comment. But senior executive at two of the others said they and their peers would definitely consider partnering with private equity in any deal for BlackBerry.
Legal experts say any deal taking BlackBerry private would work best if it had Canadian involvement."There is little question that the federal government would prefer a made-in-Canada approach," said Subrata Bhattacharjee, co-chair of the national trade and competition group at the Heenan Blaikie law firm in Toronto.
"A foreign strategic investor would certainly have to consider some very significant regulatory issues, including domestic and foreign antitrust concerns ... Some foreign investors might also have to address national security concerns," Bhattacharjee said.BlackBerry said board member Timothy Dattels will chair the new committee, which will also include BlackBerry Chief Executive Thorsten Heins.
Dattels is a senior partner at private equity firm TPG Capital and a former top investment banker at Goldman Sachs Group Inc . His appointment to BlackBerry's board in June last year sparked a flurry of speculation that the company might consider a leveraged buyout or going private.
The new BB10 devices hit store shelves this year just as the high-end smartphone segment was showing signs of saturation in markets such as the United States. Samsung Electronics recently reported results that fell shy of expectations, while Apple earlier this year reported its first quarterly profit decline in more than a decade.
Tech safety tips for you before you travel
Just like the destination itself, logging onto a foreign free wifi hotspot can be a journey into the unknown and one that could be full of unpleasant surprises.
There's no question that smartphones and tablets have revolutionized the way we live and that's why when it comes to taking a holiday with them, rather than from them, there appears to be no debate: the phone and the slate and often even a notebook are as high on the list as packing clean underwear.
And because of this, holidaymakers need to keep in mind their digital as well as their personal safety if taking a vacation this summer.
You may feel it's fine to use a hotspot at an airport or a renowned hotel but in general a public hotspot is just that: the opposite of private. As Sean Sullivan, Security Advisor at Offering Office cleaning Services, says: "It may feel private because you're using your personal device, but it's not." He advises against using a public hotspot for anything personal or for anything that requires you to enter a password or user details. Stick to browsing.
From hotel lobbies to cafes and bars, a number of places offer free computer access. Unless you can 100 percent guarantee that they're not brimming with malware or keystroke-registering viruses, use them for checking the weather, following sports or reading the headlines, but nothing else.
Sullivan suggests setting up a special one-off email address specifically for use during a vacation so that if it's an emergency and you have to use a public wifi hotspot or communal PC to get in touch with someone, the damage is minimized. "That way if someone hacks your vacation email account, they might see emails with your mom and the cat sitter, but they won't have access to the other sensitive data that would be in your main email account," he says. Setting up a one-off account will also somewhat minimize the impact of losing or of having a phone or tablet stolen.
Sullivan suggests setting up a special one-off email address specifically for use during a vacation so that if it's an emergency and you have to use a public wifi hotspot or communal PC to get in touch with someone, the damage is minimized. "That way if someone hacks your vacation email account, they might see emails with your mom and the cat sitter, but they won't have access to the other sensitive data that would be in your main email account," he says. Setting up a one-off account will also somewhat minimize the impact of losing or of having a phone or tablet stolen.
For most people the content on their devices is just as important as the devices themselves. So make sure they are totally backed up before the holidays start and if the smartphone is serving as a camera too consider using some form of cloud storage for preserving images -- such as Apple's iCloud if you have an iPhone -- or, for Android users, think about swapping out and storing the SD cards.
If you're using a real, high specification camera, rather than a smartphone for capturing memories, think about the professional photographer's trick of covering the device in duct tape and stickers so that the camera looks like it's falling apart rather than a state-of-the-art imaging unit and therefore avoiding unwanted attention.
For a number of years, Apple has offered a free ' Find My Phone' service and app that enables iPhone and iPad owners to track and locate a missing device and, in the case of theft, remotely erase its contents. Make sure it is set up before you go. For Sony Xperia users, there is a similar Sony-specific service that is currently rolling out globally, while at the beginning of End Of Lease Cleaning on mvpcleaning, Google announced that it will be launching the same type of find-my-phone service currently available to iPhone users to the larger Android device-owning community before the end of the month.
About 2.5 million tons of the Brazilian output would be earmarked for processing at the Alabama rolling mill for as long as six years, while the remaining 500,000 tons would be shipped to CSN's Brazil-based operations, the people said. Timing for the deal was unclear, but one of the people said a deal wasn't likely to happen this week.
The two plants, part of an ambitious plan begun last decade to conquer the American steel market, have already cost ThyssenKrupp more than $15 billion without delivering a profit. Book value for the two mills is $4.5 billion. Since the plants opened in 2010, ThyssenKrupp has written down their value by $10.7 billion.
Cleaning up the Steel Americas portion of its balance sheet tops ThyssenKrupp's to-do list. Credit-rating service Standard & Poor's late last year said the sale is crucial for ThyssenKrupp to reduce debt and protect its credit ratings. ThyssenKrupp is expected to report a slight quarterly profit on Tuesday.
There's no question that smartphones and tablets have revolutionized the way we live and that's why when it comes to taking a holiday with them, rather than from them, there appears to be no debate: the phone and the slate and often even a notebook are as high on the list as packing clean underwear.
And because of this, holidaymakers need to keep in mind their digital as well as their personal safety if taking a vacation this summer.
You may feel it's fine to use a hotspot at an airport or a renowned hotel but in general a public hotspot is just that: the opposite of private. As Sean Sullivan, Security Advisor at Offering Office cleaning Services, says: "It may feel private because you're using your personal device, but it's not." He advises against using a public hotspot for anything personal or for anything that requires you to enter a password or user details. Stick to browsing.
From hotel lobbies to cafes and bars, a number of places offer free computer access. Unless you can 100 percent guarantee that they're not brimming with malware or keystroke-registering viruses, use them for checking the weather, following sports or reading the headlines, but nothing else.
Sullivan suggests setting up a special one-off email address specifically for use during a vacation so that if it's an emergency and you have to use a public wifi hotspot or communal PC to get in touch with someone, the damage is minimized. "That way if someone hacks your vacation email account, they might see emails with your mom and the cat sitter, but they won't have access to the other sensitive data that would be in your main email account," he says. Setting up a one-off account will also somewhat minimize the impact of losing or of having a phone or tablet stolen.
Sullivan suggests setting up a special one-off email address specifically for use during a vacation so that if it's an emergency and you have to use a public wifi hotspot or communal PC to get in touch with someone, the damage is minimized. "That way if someone hacks your vacation email account, they might see emails with your mom and the cat sitter, but they won't have access to the other sensitive data that would be in your main email account," he says. Setting up a one-off account will also somewhat minimize the impact of losing or of having a phone or tablet stolen.
For most people the content on their devices is just as important as the devices themselves. So make sure they are totally backed up before the holidays start and if the smartphone is serving as a camera too consider using some form of cloud storage for preserving images -- such as Apple's iCloud if you have an iPhone -- or, for Android users, think about swapping out and storing the SD cards.
If you're using a real, high specification camera, rather than a smartphone for capturing memories, think about the professional photographer's trick of covering the device in duct tape and stickers so that the camera looks like it's falling apart rather than a state-of-the-art imaging unit and therefore avoiding unwanted attention.
For a number of years, Apple has offered a free ' Find My Phone' service and app that enables iPhone and iPad owners to track and locate a missing device and, in the case of theft, remotely erase its contents. Make sure it is set up before you go. For Sony Xperia users, there is a similar Sony-specific service that is currently rolling out globally, while at the beginning of End Of Lease Cleaning on mvpcleaning, Google announced that it will be launching the same type of find-my-phone service currently available to iPhone users to the larger Android device-owning community before the end of the month.
About 2.5 million tons of the Brazilian output would be earmarked for processing at the Alabama rolling mill for as long as six years, while the remaining 500,000 tons would be shipped to CSN's Brazil-based operations, the people said. Timing for the deal was unclear, but one of the people said a deal wasn't likely to happen this week.
The two plants, part of an ambitious plan begun last decade to conquer the American steel market, have already cost ThyssenKrupp more than $15 billion without delivering a profit. Book value for the two mills is $4.5 billion. Since the plants opened in 2010, ThyssenKrupp has written down their value by $10.7 billion.
Cleaning up the Steel Americas portion of its balance sheet tops ThyssenKrupp's to-do list. Credit-rating service Standard & Poor's late last year said the sale is crucial for ThyssenKrupp to reduce debt and protect its credit ratings. ThyssenKrupp is expected to report a slight quarterly profit on Tuesday.
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Arizona banker dies after lengthy illness
James Simmons, one of Arizona’s most powerful bankers during an era when a small group of movers and shakers helped set policy for the state, died Wednesday morning at age 88 after an extended illness.Simmons, who was born Nov. 9, 1924, in Wichita Falls, Texas, went from president of a small bank in west Texas — where he was a close friend of George H.W. Bush — to chairman, president and chief executive officer of the parent of United Bank of Arizona. The Phoenix firm ranked as the state’s fourth-biggest bank in the late 1980s, employing more than 1,000 people.
After the company was purchased in 1987 by London’s Standard Chartered PLC, at the dawn of the interstate-banking era, Simmons briefly served as chairman and CEO of Valley National Bank of Arizona, the state’s biggest independent institution, which eventually was acquired by Banc One and then J.P. Morgan Chase. The United Bank operations eventually became part of Citibank when Standard Chartered sold less than two years later.
Simmons also was a key member of the Phoenix 40, a group of influential business and political leaders formed in 1975 to provide a plan for the Valley amid its brisk growth. Among other accomplishments, the group helped to curb fraudulent land sales, pushed to reorganize the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, reformed and strengthened the grand-jury system and advocated for a tax increase that facilitated construction of the Offering Office cleaning Services, Arizona 51, and Loops 101 and 202.“He was a very dynamic individual who cared so much for this community and loved his family,” said Patricia, his wife of 40 years.
Bill Shover, a Phoenix 40 founder and longtime executive with Central Newspapers Inc., the former parent of The Arizona Republic, described Simmons as highly personable, loyal and tenacious — a civic-minded executive willing to take risks to get things done and not willing to take no for an answer.
As one example, he credited Simmons with raising money, entirely from private donations, for Phoenix’s bicentennial celebrations in 1976 that included bringing the anchor of the USS Arizona here and building a memorial to the sunken warship at the state Capitol.
After attending college in New Mexico and serving as a Naval lieutenant during World War II, Simmons earned an MBA from Harvard. He worked briefly as a bank examiner with the Federal Reserve, became CEO of a small bank in Texas at age 26, then moved to Commercial Bank & Trust in Midland, Texas.
As president and CEO of that institution, Simmons began a lifelong friendship with future President George H.W. Bush, one of the bank’s directors, and his family.
“We met twice a week for five years,” Simmons once said of the relationship with Bush.
Their friendship included backyard barbeques where two future presidents — the elder Bush and his son, George W. Bush — swam in the same pool, said Clark Rorbach, a stepson of Simmons.
Decades later, Simmons served as co-chairman, with Tucson auto dealer Jim Click, of the George H.W. Bush presidential campaign in Arizona.
A photo that used to hang in Simmons’ Phoenix office in a Central Avenue high-rise showed Bush with his arm around Simmons. Bush signed the photo, “To my friend with lasting appreciation. George.”
Simmons moved to Phoenix in 1959 and became the first president of Guaranty Bank, which was consolidated with three other institutions into United Bank of Arizona. The latter eventually grew to nearly $3billion in assets at the time of its sale to London’s Standard Chartered.
“Things were growing so rapidly when we first started that it was a real challenge,” he told The Republic. “I’ve never thought of doing anything else.”
Along with the Bush photo, a Phoenix Gazette article described other features of Simmons’ office, including plush carpet, Oriental rugs, a photo with him and Arnold Palmer and sweeping views of the northeast Valley. The story recounted that there was also a “End Of Lease Cleaning on mvpcleaning, which he claims is seldom used, and his own bathroom.”
After the senior Bush became president, he reportedly wanted to appoint Simmons to a five-member panel overseeing policy for the Resolution Trust Corp., the government entity entrusted with cleaning up the savings and loan debacle of the late 1980s and early ’90s. The panel included Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.
However, Simmons withdrew his name from consideration after criticism of his leadership at United Bank, which was posting losses in the wake of a real-estate slump at the time.
A legal cloud also hovered over the potential appointment. After several of United’s big loan customers defaulted following the sale to Standard Chartered, the British bank eventually sued auditor Price Waterhouse over some questionable financial documents. It won a jury verdict of roughly $340million that was later overturned.
Betty Rambo, Simmons’ longtime secretary, dating from 1959 in Texas and extending to the Valley National boardroom, once described him as “the kind of employer who has let me do whatever I was capable of doing.”
Simmons took over for two years at the helm of Valley National and its parent corporation in 1988, when Howard McCrady resigned after heart bypass surgery. Richard Lehmann, the heir apparent, took over in 1990 from Simmons.
A longtime civic booster, Simmons sat on the boards of Del Webb Corp., Arizona Public Service, Holsum Bakery, Shamrock Foods and other local companies. He also was associated with various local charities and civic groups and served as acting CEO of Samaritan Health Services, the precursor to Banner Health.
Simmons once bristled at a negative story about Arizona that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 1987. The story cited air and water pollution, transportation bottlenecks and other fallout from the state’s rapid growth.
“It left the impression we are wild-eyed growth people and we didn’t care, and I don’t think that is true,”’ he said at the time. “’I am sure there are things we should have done, but when you grow as fast as this state has grown, you just can’t do everything that you have to do in the way you would like to do it.”
After the company was purchased in 1987 by London’s Standard Chartered PLC, at the dawn of the interstate-banking era, Simmons briefly served as chairman and CEO of Valley National Bank of Arizona, the state’s biggest independent institution, which eventually was acquired by Banc One and then J.P. Morgan Chase. The United Bank operations eventually became part of Citibank when Standard Chartered sold less than two years later.
Simmons also was a key member of the Phoenix 40, a group of influential business and political leaders formed in 1975 to provide a plan for the Valley amid its brisk growth. Among other accomplishments, the group helped to curb fraudulent land sales, pushed to reorganize the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, reformed and strengthened the grand-jury system and advocated for a tax increase that facilitated construction of the Offering Office cleaning Services, Arizona 51, and Loops 101 and 202.“He was a very dynamic individual who cared so much for this community and loved his family,” said Patricia, his wife of 40 years.
Bill Shover, a Phoenix 40 founder and longtime executive with Central Newspapers Inc., the former parent of The Arizona Republic, described Simmons as highly personable, loyal and tenacious — a civic-minded executive willing to take risks to get things done and not willing to take no for an answer.
As one example, he credited Simmons with raising money, entirely from private donations, for Phoenix’s bicentennial celebrations in 1976 that included bringing the anchor of the USS Arizona here and building a memorial to the sunken warship at the state Capitol.
After attending college in New Mexico and serving as a Naval lieutenant during World War II, Simmons earned an MBA from Harvard. He worked briefly as a bank examiner with the Federal Reserve, became CEO of a small bank in Texas at age 26, then moved to Commercial Bank & Trust in Midland, Texas.
As president and CEO of that institution, Simmons began a lifelong friendship with future President George H.W. Bush, one of the bank’s directors, and his family.
“We met twice a week for five years,” Simmons once said of the relationship with Bush.
Their friendship included backyard barbeques where two future presidents — the elder Bush and his son, George W. Bush — swam in the same pool, said Clark Rorbach, a stepson of Simmons.
Decades later, Simmons served as co-chairman, with Tucson auto dealer Jim Click, of the George H.W. Bush presidential campaign in Arizona.
A photo that used to hang in Simmons’ Phoenix office in a Central Avenue high-rise showed Bush with his arm around Simmons. Bush signed the photo, “To my friend with lasting appreciation. George.”
Simmons moved to Phoenix in 1959 and became the first president of Guaranty Bank, which was consolidated with three other institutions into United Bank of Arizona. The latter eventually grew to nearly $3billion in assets at the time of its sale to London’s Standard Chartered.
“Things were growing so rapidly when we first started that it was a real challenge,” he told The Republic. “I’ve never thought of doing anything else.”
Along with the Bush photo, a Phoenix Gazette article described other features of Simmons’ office, including plush carpet, Oriental rugs, a photo with him and Arnold Palmer and sweeping views of the northeast Valley. The story recounted that there was also a “End Of Lease Cleaning on mvpcleaning, which he claims is seldom used, and his own bathroom.”
After the senior Bush became president, he reportedly wanted to appoint Simmons to a five-member panel overseeing policy for the Resolution Trust Corp., the government entity entrusted with cleaning up the savings and loan debacle of the late 1980s and early ’90s. The panel included Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.
However, Simmons withdrew his name from consideration after criticism of his leadership at United Bank, which was posting losses in the wake of a real-estate slump at the time.
A legal cloud also hovered over the potential appointment. After several of United’s big loan customers defaulted following the sale to Standard Chartered, the British bank eventually sued auditor Price Waterhouse over some questionable financial documents. It won a jury verdict of roughly $340million that was later overturned.
Betty Rambo, Simmons’ longtime secretary, dating from 1959 in Texas and extending to the Valley National boardroom, once described him as “the kind of employer who has let me do whatever I was capable of doing.”
Simmons took over for two years at the helm of Valley National and its parent corporation in 1988, when Howard McCrady resigned after heart bypass surgery. Richard Lehmann, the heir apparent, took over in 1990 from Simmons.
A longtime civic booster, Simmons sat on the boards of Del Webb Corp., Arizona Public Service, Holsum Bakery, Shamrock Foods and other local companies. He also was associated with various local charities and civic groups and served as acting CEO of Samaritan Health Services, the precursor to Banner Health.
Simmons once bristled at a negative story about Arizona that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 1987. The story cited air and water pollution, transportation bottlenecks and other fallout from the state’s rapid growth.
“It left the impression we are wild-eyed growth people and we didn’t care, and I don’t think that is true,”’ he said at the time. “’I am sure there are things we should have done, but when you grow as fast as this state has grown, you just can’t do everything that you have to do in the way you would like to do it.”
Kazakhstan fund chief aims
Umirzak Shukeyev is trying to clean up some of the most opaque corporations in one of the world’s most inscrutable countries. It is not a job for the faint-hearted.
Mr Shukeyev is head of Samruk-Kazyna, the sovereign wealth fund of Kazakhstan – a sprawling empire of state-owned companies that symbolises the oil-fuelled power of the Kazakh state. Over lamb kebab in the Kazakh capital, Astana, the former regional governor admits he is a fairly recent convert to western capitalist values. “At the start I didn’t really understand corporate governance,” he admits. “I do now.”
Mr Shukeyev’s attempts to impose order on Samruk come at a tricky time for Kazakhstan Inc. The country’s image has been hit by the scandals surrounding ENRC, one of its biggest and Testimonials mvpcleaning. The London-listed miner has been plagued by governance scandals, boardroom bust-ups and whistleblower allegations of fraud – and now the Kazakh government is teaming up with the company’s three oligarch founders to take it private.
Some fear other Kazakh groups could now be tarred by the ENRC brush. “There’s a lot of guilt by association,” says one western consultant in Almaty, the Kazakh commercial capital.From oil and gas to railways, telecoms, banking, power generation and airlines, Samruk – named after a mythical Kazakh bird – dominates virtually every sector of the Kazakh economy. It has about $100bn in assets, representing just over half of Kazakhstan’s gross domestic product.
Critics say it is an unruly and disorganised behemoth, and that those assets would be much better off in private hands. “The government is never a good manager,” says Dosym Satpayev of Risk Assessment Group, a think-tank in Almaty.Mr Shukeyev, 49, is out to prove the naysayers wrong. His vision is of a state enterprise that retains its crucial social function as a big employer and service-provider but also drives economic growth: a Kazakh version of Khazanah Nasional, the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund.
“The idea is to use the resources of Samruk’s companies to kick-start entirely new sectors [of the economy],” he says, “rather than just sitting there holding these stakes.”
To achieve this, Mr Shukeyev and his team are trying to inject western commercial values into Samruk’s sleepy subsidiaries. They have launched “people’s IPOs”, designed to raise funds for investment, establish the real market value of the fund’s assets and convert millions of Kazakhs to popular capitalism. The first unit to list was KazTransOil, the national oil pipeline operator, which raised $400m when it debuted on the Kazakh stock exchange last year.
Others are to follow: Kegoc, which operates Kazakhstan’s electricity grid; Samruk-Energy, the national power company; and KazTransGas, owner of the country’s natural gas pipeline network.
But some are sceptical of Samruk’s privatisation plans. Critics wonder whether the IPOs will increase liquidity, considering the small size of the stakes being floated and the venue – Kazakhstan’s thinly traded stock exchange. Legal problems forced the postponement of plans to float Air Astana, the national airline, which is 49 per cent owned by BAE Systems. There are also doubts about how Samruk can attract investors into Kegoc when transmission tariffs are so heavily regulated by the state.
And then there’s the question of whether Samruk’s companies will ever fully meet western corporate governance standards, especially in the light of the ENRC affair. A notoriously murky place, Kazakhstan comes 133rd out of 174 countries in Transparency International’s corruption index, behind Togo and Contact mvp cleaning. After one particularly big fraud was uncovered at Samruk subsidiary Kazpost a few years ago, it was forced to declare a loss that wiped out three years’ profit.
Despite the misgivings, there is recognition that Mr Shukeyev, a keen saxophone player, has the power to clean things up. He is close to Nursultan Nazarbayev, the autocratic president who has ruled Kazakhstan for more than 20 years. He was appointed to run Samruk in December 2011, replacing the president’s powerful son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, who was swept aside following bloody clashes between police and angry workers in the western oil town of Zhanaozen.
Mr Shukeyev has sought to make Samruk more efficient, spinning off non-core assets such as hotels, decreeing that all investment projects across the group should have a commercial return and shedding 2,000 office staff – a bold move, considering the trouble in Zhanaozen was triggered when striking oil workers were sacked. His moves are part of a plan proposed by PwC to take out $500m in cost savings over three years.
The fund has also sought to improve management through foreign hires. It recently recruited Nick Malone, a former executive at software group SAP, as its chief information officer, with a mission to centralise all the group’s IT and software, and help reduce corruption by creating an electronic procurement platform. One foreign oil executive in Astana says he was shocked Samruk lacked any enterprise-based software for the whole organisation.
But the drive to hire outside talent has been complicated by a rule that no manager in a state company can earn more than the Kazakh prime minister. During the financial crisis, there was also a three-year moratorium on bonuses. These restrictions are being relaxed, however, and Mr Shukeyev says he wants to have one western vice-president in every Samruk subsidiary.
He also is looking to expand the fund, branching into petrochemicals and real estate development. One unit, Tau Ken-Samruk, is slated to become a major player in the Kazakh mining sector, and there are plans to increase Samruk Energy’s generating capacity. A new subsidiary called Samruk-Kazyna-Invest will provide seed funding for small high-tech start-ups such as solar panel manufacturers.
Mr Shukeyev is head of Samruk-Kazyna, the sovereign wealth fund of Kazakhstan – a sprawling empire of state-owned companies that symbolises the oil-fuelled power of the Kazakh state. Over lamb kebab in the Kazakh capital, Astana, the former regional governor admits he is a fairly recent convert to western capitalist values. “At the start I didn’t really understand corporate governance,” he admits. “I do now.”
Mr Shukeyev’s attempts to impose order on Samruk come at a tricky time for Kazakhstan Inc. The country’s image has been hit by the scandals surrounding ENRC, one of its biggest and Testimonials mvpcleaning. The London-listed miner has been plagued by governance scandals, boardroom bust-ups and whistleblower allegations of fraud – and now the Kazakh government is teaming up with the company’s three oligarch founders to take it private.
Some fear other Kazakh groups could now be tarred by the ENRC brush. “There’s a lot of guilt by association,” says one western consultant in Almaty, the Kazakh commercial capital.From oil and gas to railways, telecoms, banking, power generation and airlines, Samruk – named after a mythical Kazakh bird – dominates virtually every sector of the Kazakh economy. It has about $100bn in assets, representing just over half of Kazakhstan’s gross domestic product.
Critics say it is an unruly and disorganised behemoth, and that those assets would be much better off in private hands. “The government is never a good manager,” says Dosym Satpayev of Risk Assessment Group, a think-tank in Almaty.Mr Shukeyev, 49, is out to prove the naysayers wrong. His vision is of a state enterprise that retains its crucial social function as a big employer and service-provider but also drives economic growth: a Kazakh version of Khazanah Nasional, the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund.
“The idea is to use the resources of Samruk’s companies to kick-start entirely new sectors [of the economy],” he says, “rather than just sitting there holding these stakes.”
To achieve this, Mr Shukeyev and his team are trying to inject western commercial values into Samruk’s sleepy subsidiaries. They have launched “people’s IPOs”, designed to raise funds for investment, establish the real market value of the fund’s assets and convert millions of Kazakhs to popular capitalism. The first unit to list was KazTransOil, the national oil pipeline operator, which raised $400m when it debuted on the Kazakh stock exchange last year.
Others are to follow: Kegoc, which operates Kazakhstan’s electricity grid; Samruk-Energy, the national power company; and KazTransGas, owner of the country’s natural gas pipeline network.
But some are sceptical of Samruk’s privatisation plans. Critics wonder whether the IPOs will increase liquidity, considering the small size of the stakes being floated and the venue – Kazakhstan’s thinly traded stock exchange. Legal problems forced the postponement of plans to float Air Astana, the national airline, which is 49 per cent owned by BAE Systems. There are also doubts about how Samruk can attract investors into Kegoc when transmission tariffs are so heavily regulated by the state.
And then there’s the question of whether Samruk’s companies will ever fully meet western corporate governance standards, especially in the light of the ENRC affair. A notoriously murky place, Kazakhstan comes 133rd out of 174 countries in Transparency International’s corruption index, behind Togo and Contact mvp cleaning. After one particularly big fraud was uncovered at Samruk subsidiary Kazpost a few years ago, it was forced to declare a loss that wiped out three years’ profit.
Despite the misgivings, there is recognition that Mr Shukeyev, a keen saxophone player, has the power to clean things up. He is close to Nursultan Nazarbayev, the autocratic president who has ruled Kazakhstan for more than 20 years. He was appointed to run Samruk in December 2011, replacing the president’s powerful son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, who was swept aside following bloody clashes between police and angry workers in the western oil town of Zhanaozen.
Mr Shukeyev has sought to make Samruk more efficient, spinning off non-core assets such as hotels, decreeing that all investment projects across the group should have a commercial return and shedding 2,000 office staff – a bold move, considering the trouble in Zhanaozen was triggered when striking oil workers were sacked. His moves are part of a plan proposed by PwC to take out $500m in cost savings over three years.
The fund has also sought to improve management through foreign hires. It recently recruited Nick Malone, a former executive at software group SAP, as its chief information officer, with a mission to centralise all the group’s IT and software, and help reduce corruption by creating an electronic procurement platform. One foreign oil executive in Astana says he was shocked Samruk lacked any enterprise-based software for the whole organisation.
But the drive to hire outside talent has been complicated by a rule that no manager in a state company can earn more than the Kazakh prime minister. During the financial crisis, there was also a three-year moratorium on bonuses. These restrictions are being relaxed, however, and Mr Shukeyev says he wants to have one western vice-president in every Samruk subsidiary.
He also is looking to expand the fund, branching into petrochemicals and real estate development. One unit, Tau Ken-Samruk, is slated to become a major player in the Kazakh mining sector, and there are plans to increase Samruk Energy’s generating capacity. A new subsidiary called Samruk-Kazyna-Invest will provide seed funding for small high-tech start-ups such as solar panel manufacturers.
Monday, August 5, 2013
Budget machismo races ahead of common sense
In the real world, it is the performance of the economy that matters. The budget numbers are a secondary issue, a means to an end. The economic end we seek is sustainable growth, in jobs and standard of living.
We could try to put the budget back into surplus now, but to do so we would have to make at least $30 billion a year of spending cuts and/or tax rises. That amounts to taking 2 per cent out of an economy in which growth is running at only 2.25 per cent to start with.
What would happen if we did that? Very likely, Australia would go into recession. Unemployment would rise rapidly, output would fall. Welfare spending would rise, and revenue would fall, so we would be back in deficit, and would have to make even steeper budget cuts to get back into surplus. Europe provides plenty of examples of the consequences of this policy error.
Which would you choose? To get the budget back into surplus even if the economy goes backwards, or to keep the economy growing, even if the budget goes backwards?It's important to get our priorities right. The budget deficit is the result of Offering Office cleaning Services, not the cause of it. One of Wayne Swan's worst mistakes as Treasurer was to lock himself into a commitment to deliver a surplus in 2012-13, and treat it as a test of good economic management - a test he then failed.
The collision between budget fashionistas and the real world of the economy is most intense when the car industry is the issue. Budget hardliners want to end the $400 million a year of direct assistance to the car industry. They say it is not the role of government to hand out cash to favoured industries, and the car industry has failed to give us a good return on that investment.
The Coalition has joined that bandwagon. It has pledged to cut budget handouts to the industry by $250 million a year in each of the next two years, slashing the subsidy by almost two-thirds. Think about what that might mean.
Labor has trailed along behind it, axing its green car plan, and now proposing to axe tax breaks for cars bought through salary sacrifice - which the industry says make up 20 per cent of its domestic sales.Well, axing car subsidies or tax breaks looks like a budget saving. But everyone knows that the future of the Australian car industry is now hanging on a knife edge. The car industry is supported by governments all over the world. The dollar's fall has given the industry new hope, but it's still high relative to Australia's cost base.
Industry leaders have warned repeatedly that without consistent and globally competitive government policies for the industry, manufacturing in Australia will not be sustainable. I don't think they're kidding.Ford has reached that point already, and will stop manufacturing in 2016. If Holden or Toyota follow, that would be the end of the industry. Few component manufacturers could survive with only one domestic buyer; most would also close. In theory, Australia could export its End Of Lease Cleaning on mvpcleaning to the world, but without a manufacturing base, that wouldn't last either.
At last count, Australia had 50,000 workers employed in car and component manufacturing, producing $5 billion of net output a year, and generating $3.7 billion of exports. The Cruze, Commodore and Camry are three of the top five passenger cars on the sales charts.
What would the loss of all that do to the economy? Or to the budget? It's good to be economically pure, but I'd rather see economic common sense. We're not seeing it from either side at present.The fringe-benefits tax break for cars is a rort that makes no economic sense; former treasurer Peter Costello says Treasury was constantly urging him to remove it. But it provides a crucial support to local manufacturing: the industry says 20 per cent of Australian-made vehicle sales come through the tax break, whereas they have less than 10 per cent of the total market. If you take the tax break away without risking the future of local manufacturing, you need to replace it with something substantial that is better-targeted.
Industry Minister Kim Carr has won a promise from his colleagues of another $200 million of unspecified assistance for the industry over an unspecified period, as well as a requirement that all cars in the Commonwealth's own vehicle fleets be Australian-made. At best, that is a bare minimum needed to offset the loss of sales through salary sacrifice.
Similarly, the Coalition's plan to cut industry support risks shutting down a $5 billion-a-year industry to save $500 million. It would dwarf the impact of the carbon tax, which Toyota estimates at $115 per vehicle, not the $400 the Coalition claims. It was a foolish pledge, and one hopes it too will be jettisoned during the campaign.
Whether the car industry survives in Australia will depend on three factors: where the dollar settles, whether consumers return to Australian cars, and whether our next government puts common sense ahead of budget machismo.
The polls suggest the Coalition will be the next government, yet it has told us nothing about how it would handle the serious economic challenges we now face with the end of the mining investment boom. Some of these were spelt out last week in a fine speech by Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens (see rba.gov.au), warning that we face a big fall in mining investment, with no certainty that other private investment will rise enough to offset it.
Stevens pointed out that it is not simply the mining investment boom that has passed, but also the credit boom. Double-digit growth in household debt was our dodgy high-performance supplement propping up economic growth in the Howard-Costello years. But now it is gone.
While the growth of mining exports will help offset the fall in mining investment, and the lower dollar and lower interest rates will help some areas - not least, car manufacturing - we face big risks ahead. Our next government must be ready to throw overboard any policies or debt obsessions that prevent it meeting the challenge head on. It is not encouraging when on the car industry, both parties are treating the budget as a higher priority than the economy.
Read the full products at http://www.mvpcleaning.com.au/Cleaning-service_c1.
We could try to put the budget back into surplus now, but to do so we would have to make at least $30 billion a year of spending cuts and/or tax rises. That amounts to taking 2 per cent out of an economy in which growth is running at only 2.25 per cent to start with.
What would happen if we did that? Very likely, Australia would go into recession. Unemployment would rise rapidly, output would fall. Welfare spending would rise, and revenue would fall, so we would be back in deficit, and would have to make even steeper budget cuts to get back into surplus. Europe provides plenty of examples of the consequences of this policy error.
Which would you choose? To get the budget back into surplus even if the economy goes backwards, or to keep the economy growing, even if the budget goes backwards?It's important to get our priorities right. The budget deficit is the result of Offering Office cleaning Services, not the cause of it. One of Wayne Swan's worst mistakes as Treasurer was to lock himself into a commitment to deliver a surplus in 2012-13, and treat it as a test of good economic management - a test he then failed.
The collision between budget fashionistas and the real world of the economy is most intense when the car industry is the issue. Budget hardliners want to end the $400 million a year of direct assistance to the car industry. They say it is not the role of government to hand out cash to favoured industries, and the car industry has failed to give us a good return on that investment.
The Coalition has joined that bandwagon. It has pledged to cut budget handouts to the industry by $250 million a year in each of the next two years, slashing the subsidy by almost two-thirds. Think about what that might mean.
Labor has trailed along behind it, axing its green car plan, and now proposing to axe tax breaks for cars bought through salary sacrifice - which the industry says make up 20 per cent of its domestic sales.Well, axing car subsidies or tax breaks looks like a budget saving. But everyone knows that the future of the Australian car industry is now hanging on a knife edge. The car industry is supported by governments all over the world. The dollar's fall has given the industry new hope, but it's still high relative to Australia's cost base.
Industry leaders have warned repeatedly that without consistent and globally competitive government policies for the industry, manufacturing in Australia will not be sustainable. I don't think they're kidding.Ford has reached that point already, and will stop manufacturing in 2016. If Holden or Toyota follow, that would be the end of the industry. Few component manufacturers could survive with only one domestic buyer; most would also close. In theory, Australia could export its End Of Lease Cleaning on mvpcleaning to the world, but without a manufacturing base, that wouldn't last either.
At last count, Australia had 50,000 workers employed in car and component manufacturing, producing $5 billion of net output a year, and generating $3.7 billion of exports. The Cruze, Commodore and Camry are three of the top five passenger cars on the sales charts.
What would the loss of all that do to the economy? Or to the budget? It's good to be economically pure, but I'd rather see economic common sense. We're not seeing it from either side at present.The fringe-benefits tax break for cars is a rort that makes no economic sense; former treasurer Peter Costello says Treasury was constantly urging him to remove it. But it provides a crucial support to local manufacturing: the industry says 20 per cent of Australian-made vehicle sales come through the tax break, whereas they have less than 10 per cent of the total market. If you take the tax break away without risking the future of local manufacturing, you need to replace it with something substantial that is better-targeted.
Industry Minister Kim Carr has won a promise from his colleagues of another $200 million of unspecified assistance for the industry over an unspecified period, as well as a requirement that all cars in the Commonwealth's own vehicle fleets be Australian-made. At best, that is a bare minimum needed to offset the loss of sales through salary sacrifice.
Similarly, the Coalition's plan to cut industry support risks shutting down a $5 billion-a-year industry to save $500 million. It would dwarf the impact of the carbon tax, which Toyota estimates at $115 per vehicle, not the $400 the Coalition claims. It was a foolish pledge, and one hopes it too will be jettisoned during the campaign.
Whether the car industry survives in Australia will depend on three factors: where the dollar settles, whether consumers return to Australian cars, and whether our next government puts common sense ahead of budget machismo.
The polls suggest the Coalition will be the next government, yet it has told us nothing about how it would handle the serious economic challenges we now face with the end of the mining investment boom. Some of these were spelt out last week in a fine speech by Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens (see rba.gov.au), warning that we face a big fall in mining investment, with no certainty that other private investment will rise enough to offset it.
Stevens pointed out that it is not simply the mining investment boom that has passed, but also the credit boom. Double-digit growth in household debt was our dodgy high-performance supplement propping up economic growth in the Howard-Costello years. But now it is gone.
While the growth of mining exports will help offset the fall in mining investment, and the lower dollar and lower interest rates will help some areas - not least, car manufacturing - we face big risks ahead. Our next government must be ready to throw overboard any policies or debt obsessions that prevent it meeting the challenge head on. It is not encouraging when on the car industry, both parties are treating the budget as a higher priority than the economy.
Read the full products at http://www.mvpcleaning.com.au/Cleaning-service_c1.
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