John Linton
Tomorrow our compliance manager will go to Sri Lanka for several weeks to ensure that the sales and support personnel are fully trained in the Australian government's requirements of what can and can't be said to a current or prospective customer and how they must deal with a variety of situations. A few days later Steve will go to Sri Lanka to run a two day course next weekend to add to the same people's skills in terms of better understanding Exetel's Australian network and how to use some new diagnostic tools.
The two visits starkly contrast the difference between the attitudes and practices of the government of Australia and that of Sri Lanka. On the one hand the Australian government is forcing us to export 'red tape' and worthless bureaucracy (and making us pay a heavy price to do so). On the other hand the Sri Lankan government is making it as easy as possible for Exetel to provide additional, and highly skilled, technical and engineering training that will benefit both Exetel and Sri Lanka.
While the 4 - 6 weeks training Larry will provide to some 20 or so Sri Lankan personnel will be of use to them (marginally) in their current jobs, but will be useless in any future job outside Exetel, the training Steve will provide will be another essential building block in better understanding network topology and how to manage a network and trouble shoot problems with networks generally which will be useful to them in their ongoing career whoever employs them.
Following the two day training course Steve will attend a 'ceremony' to endow Colombo's best engineering university with two 'perpetual' scholarships ('perpetual' = provided each year for two students in each year of their studies) on an ongoing basis together with two internships that are an essential part of assisting Sri Lankan university students get through a university degree with the best results and with the least financial strain (providing them guaranteed paid employment in their vacations). He will also further the discussions involving Exetel providing the endowment of either a professorship or funding two, ongoing, PhD programs to further the knowledge/use of artificial intelligence in commerce.
It's no wonder that so many start up businesses in Australia fail within their first 18 months and all but 1 or 2% fail to make it to 5 years. In this instance you have the Australian government placing significant burdens and quite large costs on Exetel to ensure that its personnel waste time on issues that can't possibly benefit the business in contrast to the Sri Lankan government who do everything possible to make it as easy as possible to operate a business and 'reward' you for doing that by giving you tax holidays, exemption to VAT (GST) and waiving all import duties. I wonder how many more companies would succeed in starting up in Australia if those burdens were removed?
This current Australian government, and almost certainly many other governments around the world both currently and in past "difficult financial times" seem unable to grasp the fact that when income drops you have to adjust your previous expenditures to meet your now available income and while you can borrow to ensure you can continue to meet essential expenditures (mortgage for example) you will pay a hefty price for doing that and it really is better to now review the bad expenditure habits you (and previous governments if you're currently in government) have got you into. In the current worldwide fashion of "we've learned from past recessions that government should spend more to shorten the length of a recession and ameliorate the damage to people" the fact remains that even if you believe that the government should maintain or increase expenditure as current fashion dictates you should only borrow to spend on assets that will (eventually) generate enough return to pay the loans and interest back).
Apparently Krudd not only doesn't understand that he believes in the reverse which leads me to why I wrote the heading to this meandering that I did. I came across the following article earlier this morning in USA Today (not on the girlie pages but my eye fell on it on the front page as I was going to check the baseball scores):
http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2009-07-07-recession-weddings_N.htm
Not being a young female of marriageable age I have no idea of what angst would be caused by cutting your wedding budget by up to 70% but I think it would be a very, very tough call. (My one association with the details of a wedding showed me that the list was long and extensive and surprisingly expensive). However, clearly these young women have a much better grasp of financial management than the current prime minister of Australia. They obviously can see what would be really great to do (their previous planned expenditure arrangements that as legend has it so many young girls start planning from kindergarten) and what now should now be done. They obviously see the 'big picture' so much more clearly than Krudd - get married on schedule and get on with your life without putting yourself (or your parents - or both) into a whole heap of debt.
Krudd's version - "I will continue to trip around the world making my nonsense non-contributions to groups of people who think I'm a trivial fool and borrow as much money as I can lay my hands on to buy as much time as I can screw out of the dummies I lavish it on to allow me to keep doing this". Par for the course for Krudd? Australians elected the phony flake so what else do you expect - common sense and a realistic view of economic management??
Oh well......I'm finally too old and worn out to give a damn. Perhaps one day we will have political leaders who actually understand that with election to Federal Parliament goes the responsibility to manage the economy in the best interests of the Australian people rather than to feather their own nests at the expense of the Australian electorate.
Clearly that's not going to happen as long as Krudds are elected.
Suggestions to prevent complete morons being elected to parliament in Australia:
- Change the voting age to 25
- Ban Political parties
- Put in place a 'candidate suitability' test that includes IQ (larger than their shoe size), literacy (able to spell 6 letter words correctly), numeracy (able to correctly add three 6 digit figures together in their head) and......
but what's the point? A TV presenter is more suitable than a lawyer with 30 years parliamentary knowledge in the Australian electorate's mind.