nahum.com.au

This site will be updated in the coming weeks. The blog will remain, but with a new front page and a new look.

I have been living without internet for the past three months, but I’m assured the internet will be delivered to St Kilda in the next few days! The wonders of modern technology.

Recently I took out a mortgage with one of the big four banks, only to discover that their mortgage business is a subsidiary which operates almost entirely independently of the bank. So when the bank announces interest rate reductions,  the mortgage writing subsidiary then takes its sweet time to pass on the cuts. So I began a letter to the bank in question.

Dear Big 4 Bank,

When we took out our mortgage with your home loan subsidiary, we were very happy to be siding with Big4. We saw the ads and immediately began singing along to your catchy, but rather inane slogan.

But then we found out that you b*st*rds are dudding us, and we stopped singing. Allow me to explain the roots of our discontent.

When RBA Governor Extraordinaire, Glenn Stevens reduced interest rates by 1%, we got our guns out and started firing them into the air. We could barely contain our excitement, but then the police came, and we had to.

But then the banks came out and said, “Lo, we will be reducing our interest rates to the tune of 0.8%, not the full whack, because alas, our lending costs have increased.” And we put on our sad faces. But you see, 0.8 percent is much better than a 0.0% reduction, so we quickly got our guns out again. But the police were watching, so we simply waved our firearms, and their appropriate licenses, whilst playing our banjos with our third and fourth hands.

We thought everything would be well in the world, until we discovered that your home-lending business is a subsidiary of Big4 Bank Limited, and does not reduce its rates in line with you, its parent company. No, those b*st*rds were holding the cut for an extra week or so, costing us the grand sum of $66.66 repeating. And being particularly sullen about it all. So we got sullen also, took out pictures of Big4’s CEO, which came with our mortgage documents, then we shoved some thumbtacks into him in a rudimentary voodoo ceremony. And we got our guns out again, and made some angry faces at his thumbtacked face.

Your subsidiary’s greedy creaming of $66.66 repeating off the interest rate reduction is bloody outrageous, and we want it to stop. We have to go now to feed the cattle and kill some foxes.

Regards,

John and Jane Citizen

Needless to say, the letter was not sent.

One of the minefields that comes with buying a house is the myriad of seemingly innocuous decisions that are made in the process of furnishing, insuring and consuming your way into the house.

For me, the first problem I encountered was in purchasing furniture. The cheapest way to furnish a house with new furniture of an ‘acceptable quality’ (if there is a cheap option), is to buy imported goods. Or so I discovered. To buy a new Aussie table, it was ridiculous money. Most ‘Australian timber’ tables sold at your mid level furniture stores, is Australian hardwood, felled in Victoria or Tasmania, shipped to China, milled and transformed into a table, which is then shipped back to Australia for sale to schmucks like me.

Ethically, there are significant issues here: To buy the table could be supporting the logging of old growth forests in Tasmania and Victoria. Which I don’t want to do. Then there are the carbon costs, albeit minimised through the economies of scale, of shipping the timber to China and back during the production process. Again, I don’t want to be a carbon vandal. Finally, another issue emerged in that buying new encourages overconsumption and waste.

On a plane recently, the passenger next to me asked just how many plastic cups we could expect to be given during the flight. Ok, I was on a plane burning up jet fuel, so hardly the best example of minimising the impact of my existence on the world.

Like I said, it’s a minefield. Then comes the option of choosing an insurance company. Should I take out a policy with an agency which prides itself on being the largest motor vehicle lobby group in Australia, aggressively encouraging the funding of roads ahead of public transport, as well as the reduction in the price of fuel, encouraging the use of cars. The irony is that an Ethical Investment Fund has listed the same Insurance company very highly due to the company policy to move the entire business towards carbon neutrality by 2012.

But the question still remains, as a cyclist and public transport user, should I not be a little more conscious of where I’m spending my hard earned pennies, that I’m not actively supporting a company that acts so publicly to encourage the use of motor vehicles?

Then I guess it all comes down to where you pull your pennies from in the first place. I work for an NGO, where I help them to raise money to help people less fortunate than me. Yeah, makes me feel good about myself. But NGO’s like mine have been known to manipulate the stories of the people they help to tug the heartstrings of people whose pursestrings they are hoping to loosen.

Which is worse? Exploiting and reinforcing racial and class-based stereotypes in order to fund projects which are benefiting the same people we are denigrating; or raising less money because you want to do the right thing, but in the end raising much less money and helping less people. It’s an ends versus means argument.

A completely different ethical perspective was once successfully argued by a friend of my father’s. The man behind the argument was an investment banker, and he basically suggested that the economic theory behind most ethical investment was all bunk. Basically, he thought that it was what he did with the money that was most important. He would make money off anyone that he could, but would use the profits to fund community projects, and help NGOs that he liked.

All very well, but what happens when you’re profiting from social diseases like cigarettes, alcohol or gambling. You make money from other people’s self-destruction.

But perhaps he had a point. Even the most ethical institutions, even those most respected by the community, are capable of failing their own standards. How do you know that the school principal at the local college isn’t a …? How do you know that the supermarket that supposedly gives back 2% of it’s profits to the local community doesn’t just pocket the change? How do you know that the green power company isn’t just using the cash from your green power account to fatten their profits and pay for the cost of mailing you on recycled paper?

Well, I guess I don’t, but if you’ve got any ideas, I’d love to hear them.

Today my partner and I have finally jumped every hurdle in the hellish struggle of buying a house in Melbourne’s inner suburbs. We have finally submitted the final bit of evidence to satisfy the bank’s increasingly finicky criteria.

Despite the fact that we both earn a reasonable salary, and we have 20 percent of the purchase price, our bank, which according to its advertising, is quite friendly and warm and fuzzy and helpful and all that, has made very sure that every t is crossed and every ‘i’ dotted, at least once.

Today, the final bit of paperwork was proving that we had the remaining $5000 to cover our share of the settlement. Between us, we have credit card limits well in excess of $5000, so if push came to shove, and the money wasn’t there, and neither of our families would lend us the $5000, we could take the money out of a credit card (which is not a course of action I would advocate, nor really consider).

The $5000 question emerged because I’m in the middle of a transaction selling my second car, a lovely little MG Midget, to a family friend. And because the transaction will not take place until next Monday, the bank wanted to see proof that we could pay the full deposit at settlement, which is 2 weeks away.

I had given the bank a letter of guarantee from my sister and a contract of sale for the car between my friend and myself, but somehow the bank was still convinced that we would not be able to provide the full amount of our deposit for the settlement of the property. And they won’t send the paperwork for the loan until we can satisfy their concerns, which I finally did today.

So, thanks very much, we’re getting very close to seeing the loan paperwork and handing over cheques, and all that rubbish.

The question that remains is, if it is so difficult for two relatively well-heeled people to buy a flat in Melbourne that they can quite comfortably afford, how does a bank like this one lose hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign currency speculation by a rogue trader, or lend ridiculous amounts of money to fund dodgy businesses and low-doc loans in the US. Perhaps it’s easier to steal from a bank than it is to borrow from them. I knew I should have studied Finance at uni…

Earlier this year, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who blogs. She wouldn’t give me the location of her blog, because she is an ‘anonymous blogger.’

When I started this blog, I was working in a small church, and blogging mainly on political and social issues. It was also the graveyard for good ideas and a reference point for any of my writing that had been published.

Nowadays, I’m working for a development organization, quite a lot of my writing is published… sorta… but I don’t get to take any of the credit for it. And to be honest, I’m not sure that I’m overly disappointed about that. Whenever I receive a fundraising letter from an organization asking for money, I’m usually motivated to swear at John Citizen, who has kindly written the letter to me. Only sometimes now I sit down and critique the letter.

There are things I’d like to blog about, but I don’t want current and future employers trolling through my blogs because it exposes me to a level of scrutiny that is not extended to employees that don’t blog. So once again, the temptation is to disappear into anonymity. But it takes a lot of hard work to disappear…

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It’s not long before I’m going to be forking out more of my hard earned cash to buy a lovely flat in the vicinity of the above map. And from the end of this month, you’ll probably find me eating out at all the cheap nooks in and around Fitzroy st. I know Bamff is pretty cheap for pizzas and cheap wine. And the markets will be getting my patronage.

The approaching settlement date has brought on a new level of tension. I’ve sold my car, and I’m working on my MG, which I’ve also sold to a friend, to get it ready to transfer ownership prior to settlement. I recently got my bicycle serviced, because I’m hoping to use the bike as the primary means of transport, thereby saving a bit of money.

Having just returned from Europe and the UK, my impression is that Australia is still doing pretty well. Houses are selling and people are still buying stuff, and there’s not the same level of apprehension that is common in Europe. There, it’s not uncommon to hear people talking about downturns and R-words. Outside of NSW, I’m not hearing a barrage of this kind of talk yet.

Well, make hay before the settlement date, I’m off to the footy tonight, to watch the mighty Bloods take on Footscray. It will be an interesting match, with the result most probably rigged. The AFL is such a sophisticated marketing machine these days, it’s hard to imagine the game as it might have been played in the beginning.

Not much point to this blog, just a bit of a random rant…

Sorry to bring the mood down, but today I built a computer. A 2.2 Gig Pentium Dual Core Processor, with 1 Gig Ram, 160Gig Hard Drive, and some other stuff. I bought all the components from my local el-cheapo computer shop and put them all together for a total cost of just $289.

Then I’ve just installed Linux Ubuntu on the system and it’s running really, really well. I’m going to have to teach mum how to use Ubuntu because I don’t want to buy Windows now. This Operating System is just too good. I’m boring myself with this stuff, but I’ve always been scared of Linux because I figured one had to be pretty literate to use it. But you don’t, as evidenced by silly old me working away on Linux right as I type this.

I might even download Ubuntu to my Macintosh, and partition the hard drive. OK, now I’m boring myself. Apologies to anyone who reads this page…

Tomorrow I’m leaving Kosovo, having spent nearly 2 weeks over here. Well I’ve learnt a lot.

A few days ago I was really stoked that we had got a local politician to spout some horrible racist garbage about the ethnic minority on which our film is based. It gives us some tension and demonstrates the prejudice, but then it makes you think…

Yesterday one of our subjects got married against his will. We were asked not to film the wedding, and when he spoke with us he seemed quite depressed. At the end of the evening, he and his new wife had to consummate their marriage and present the sheet to her parents as proof that his bride’s chastity had not been previously compromised.

Today he said that he felt his marriage, and life, was some kind of experiment, and that he would tell me if the love came to his marriage. It’s hard to leave this kind of reality behind. Another girl was telling us how she wanted to go to university, and how marriage would end her chance to go to university. Yet in my mind, it’s hard to see how this girl, at 20, could hold out against her culture and overcome all the hardships to go to university. I think there is a very high possibility that she will not go to university, and be married before the year is out.

In terms of preserving their culture, this is quite positive, but in terms of overcoming prejudice and digging themselves out of poverty, this tradition of marriage and subservience is incredibly debilitating. F*ck it, let them eat cake. 

Well into week two of our documentary project in Kosovo, today we made our way out to Obilic, around 10km outside of the capital Pristina, to interview a local municipal officer. The weather has been hot, 30-40 degrees, and the car we are using is a Lada Niva, with no window winders, and a engine cooling problem. So it’s friggin hot inside this car…

Well, It has been quite a busy time over here, and whenever I’m not trying to figure out how not to look stupid while recording a Camera spot while walking through a crowd, I’ve been working on questions for each of the people we have interviewed in the film. And the weather isn’t really helping.

Last night was a party to celebrate one of our Roma subject’s last nights of freedom before his parents marry him (sort of) against his will this weekend. In this country, I’m not sure what this means. His parents want him to be married and to start popping out the babies. He is free to refuse, but it would publicly shame his parents if he were to do so. So he does what his parents want, and simply broods resentment the whole time…

So after a late night last night, and a few long, hot days in an only occasionally functional car, I’ve been getting a bit confused while talking. Apparently this morning whilst talking to our translator, I referred to Kosovo as Croatia, and then over coffee, I did it again, and referred to the country as Albania. In my defence we had just had a rather offensive conversation with an Albanian nationalist, which we brought to an abrupt halt before things soured to the point where we would have all been thrown out of the cafe.

Nonetheless, he got something right. He suggested that Kosovo was in the parlous economic state that it is in because people do not properly dispose of their litter. The things you learn…

Kosovo is a lovely place, the people here are beautiful, and apart from the extremes of heat and cold, the climate is quite habitable.

But when we suggested to go fishing with one of our hosts yesterday, the journey was not without some difficulties. First, there was the question of finding a time when he should go. When we finally agreed to go out yesterday afternoon, things went well for a while.

I dug up some worms. We drove for 1 hour to a Lake to the east of Pristina. When we were stopped at a roadblock and asked to pay a toll, our Roma guide pleaded with the attendant that as we were foreignors, we did not have any money. I’m not sure who was laughing more, us, him or the attendant. But we didn’t pay the 2 Euro toll.

Then his van broke a fan belt. No spare belt, and with no belt in town, we called for help. Around 7pm help arrived, after we’d been fishing for a few hours, and the new belt was fitted by a friendly local mechanic. But the car wasn’t fixed. So we were towed for 2 hours back to base… on the scenic route… We zig zagged all over the countryside, and finally we got home after 11.30. What a day!