What price elegance

Global dressing down

Once upon a time , travellers dressed up to travel. If one went down in the North Atlantic at least one did it with clean underwear and properly attired bodies so the morgue would not be shocked at the state of your personal hygiene.
Today, it's the opposite. People dress down and differently. Yet everybody looks the same , as if  hordes of little scruffy upmarket models with jeans dirtied in Bengal, T shirts sweated over in China and Pakistan and expensive runners with more component parts than an aircraft, have been emptied into airport lounges. Keeps globalisation going, we can only assume.

Identity Crisis

Passport anyone?

Recently , at great expense and inconvenience for many citizens, countries have been going to extraordinary lengths to update our passport systems. Not only have prices skyrocketed but alternative arrangements have been made sometime forcing people to travel hundreds of miles to renew their passport.

Unfortunately it's a "must have" item but a visit to the passport office and one's confrontation with the faceless and cold stratosphere of officialdom is as welcome as an al fresco café in a hurricane. What do the citizens get for their money? At the moment it seems to be a theft of their identity.

What about the GST?

Putting it out there to see..

The Productivity Commission is the Australian Government's principal review and advisory body on microeconomic policy, regulation and a range of other social and environmental issues. Its role, expressed simply, is to help governments make better policies in the long term interest of the Australian community

The Productivity commission is  monkeying around with tax talk again...although the former Treasurer head is now a private citizen, he does like to be in the limelight. Talk of the "inevitability"of GST (VAT, in the UK, TVA in Europe) increases was swiftly shot down by the government as well as the opposition...Let's see??





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DA..DAH!

Be afraid

The Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has agreed to join in the pressure to be put on Russia.

Loonies running the asylum

Tea and ?

The ABC reported today that the Department of Immigration has been ordered no longer to use the word "sympathise" in ministerial correspondence. Cute!