Darwin: hot, late storms, 34 degrees

More tales of the bleeding obvious.

POLITICIANS ACTUALLY ARE SCUM
There used to be a $40 fee to get an e-toll transponder. They dropped the $40 fee, so now the first, say, $50 gets you $50 worth of tolls and not $10 worth of tolls and a transponder. (The lowest amount you can get is $25)

It's been revealed, however, that if you don't use $10 worth of tolls each quarter, they deduct $10 from your account anyway...

(You pay the difference between your use and $10, so they always get $40 a year from each transponder.)

I've been avoiding getting an e-toll tag. Why voluntarily put a tracking device on your car? The toll plaza I go through most is the Gateway bridge; but 8 out of 10 times, I'm in a taxi with a cabcharge voucher, so where's the need? But if I had a transponder, and could just put $20 on the account every now and then -- using internet banking where I never see any actual cash, so of course it isn't real money, just like credit cards -- I might use the Logan motorway more often. So might other people and motorway use would increase.

With the fee, I was never tempted. Once I started to read signs saying they'd taken it off, I started to think more about getting a tag. But now that I know I will have committed to spending $40 per year on toll roads, I don't think so.

I have nothing against minimum charges, so long as they are announced loudly up-front. I just think they sometimes defeat the purpose.

We have solar hot water. If it is too cloudy to heat the water, there is a switch to heat the water up the usual way using electricity on the standard off-peak tariff 33. Our hot water "booster" is the only thing on tariff 33. Every quarter, whether we've boosted our water or not, we get charged about $12 just for having tariff 33 power available.

But here's the defeated purpose. With solar, the water temperature each day varies; if it's been really sunny, it's really hot; if it's been cloudy, it's cooler. You know to turn the booster on when you can have a warm shower without turning the cold tap on at all. So you turn the booster on, because you know there's a minimum charge, you're paying for some electricity each quarter whether you use it or not. But if there wasn't a charge, maybe you'd be more likely to not turn the booster on; maybe you'd wait to see how the water temperature was the next time you wanted hot water.

But people have no incentive to do that, so electricity is used [and greenhouse gases, etc., generated] just for the heck of it because we're paying for it.

How to use the e-toll lane without a transponder
Obviously, you can just use the lane and wait for the fine to arrive in the mail. But, if you have a mobile phone and a credit card, just go through the lane, then ring Qld Motorways on the 1-300 number and pay the toll (with no added fees) on your card.

DEVELOPERS ACTUALLY ARE LEPERS
When a developer gives money to a political candidate, exactly why are they doing it? If the developer is a company, they must believe there will be some benefit for them, otherwise it is an unacceptable use of company funds. So what do they think they'll get out of it?

Are they trying to make people believe it's just a matter of 'we support what the person stands for; if they got elected we think they would (with no prompting from us) support legislation that we support'? Ha! The benefit there all seems a little too undefined to be justified if, let's say the company was sued by its shareholders.

I read with interest the various reports into the Tweed Shire Council. Some of the councillors there wanted it to be the next Gold Coast. They were found to be corrupt and all got fired by the NSW local government minister. If I recall correctly, some people got enough money from just one contribution by developers to triple the amount of ad-spending their non-pro-development competitor could afford.

Now it's the turn of the Gold Coast council itself. The elections are higher-stakes (it's the Gold Coast, after all) so just one contribution wouldn't make much of a difference. But it's still pretty much the same. If you win and you know I gave you $50,000 how are you going to think of me in future? Better, or worse?

In Logan, our mayor is an independent. But since he was previously the president of the local chamber of commerce, we kind of knew where his loyalties lay. But Logan doesn't have a beach or even reach the Bay, and it doesn't have a whole lot of pristine, undeveloped land to protect (although I wish all riverfront land was public property. Or my property; but that isn't likely to happen) and, let's face it, we're really little more than a dormitory for Brisbane. So a little bit of pro-business bias in the development application area wouldn't be too much of an issue, especially when there also seems to be the appropriate focus on providing services like sewerage and parks to go along with the extra residential 'units'.

[Buses are local but the routes are worked out by the state government; so we're not too happy with the most recent timetable change, but that isn't the local council's fault. Unless you count the fact that the councillors are nominally independents and so can't rely on party solidarity to get the state to do what it wants. But that sounds like an opportunity cost, and I don't consider them real.]