Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Thanks for downloading the show. This is better than Yesterday. Welcome,
glad you're here. This is a podcast that is full
of useful tools and useful conversations. They help make your
day to day better than yesterday. And it's been here
every week since twenty thirteen. Min Ams Rosha Ginsburg. Thanks
to downloading the show. Thanks for being here. It's summer.
The team and I take a bit of a break. However,
we're grabbing some episodes out of the storage and throwing
(00:24):
them back up the flag pole. Hoist them up into
the air, get them flapping around of the ear in
the breeze for a little bit. Because these conversations are fantastic.
They're the most popular, best received episodes we've done all year,
and we're going to play them because they're well worthed.
Listen or a second listen. So I'm going to open
this one with a question for you, what does the
future of Australia hold for your money? Because if you
(00:49):
are anything like me and our good friend Snoop Dogg,
we have our minds on our money and our money
on our minds. But unlike Snoop Dogg, you and me
we're not laid back about it bring some clarity to this.
My guest today, Chris Kohler is here. He's a TV presenter.
He's the National Finance editor of nine News. He's the
author of the new book How They Get You, Sneaky
(01:11):
Everyday Economics and Smart Ways to Hold Onto Your Money.
And he's an absolute delight, a wonderful thinker, a lovely communicator,
devilishly handsome and has some excellent insights into the cost
of living crisis, to changing economy of Australia and what
we can all do to save a little bit where
it counts.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Enjoy the show. Thanks for coming in, Curiz, Thanks for
having me. I'm really good.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
The state of origin is Rugby League Christmas. When the
federal budget drops? Is that like economy Christmas? Are you
all like super excited?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
It kind of is. It's really embarrassing to say that
we all just nerd out, and it's really cool because God,
listen to me. Really cool. You get to put your
phone away, get handed a big stack of documents and
just sit there and just read through what the government's
up to. And it's kind of fun. It doesn't sound
like fun when I say it, now.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Well it kind of does. Why should we give a
shit about the budget?
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Well, all of our money, right, so it's all we
open our wallets to the tune of tens of thousands
of dollars every year, and it's kind of interesting to
know where they're going to put all that money. So
you know the sort of the changes are often you know,
little tweaks, but you know, depending on who you are
and where you work, it can make a big difference,
I reckon.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
So I'm the product of someone that is most definitely
the son of Both of my parents are both doctors,
all right, and they're both very interested in culture at
the same time as being interested in science and stuff
like this. So I learned a lot about music. I
learned a lot about art. I learned a lot about
performance from both of my parents. And just yesterday on
the plane, I was helping Wolfgang learn how to draw.
(02:41):
He's really interested in transformers right now and he wants
to draw one of them. Elita one, the lady one,
And I said, mate, everything's just circles, rectangles and triangles,
And we went through a picture and I showed him
there's a circle, there, there's a rectangle, and he's like
he created He's five at what age did you start
to understand and what deficits and surplus has started to be.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
There are circles in the triangles of my household.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
We are you sitting there eating cornflakes, and Dad's like, okay,
so there's a surplus of milk here, son, You've gone
into a corn flake deficit. The balance is all out
way too milky.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yeah. A bit like that. Wasting your money had a
very serious chat behind it in my house. You came
home and you bought something stupid. It was like, did
you really need to buy that? What's that going to
do for you? But I'm actually just scrolling away the
circles and triangles because I got to use that. That's
a ripper.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
It's real good.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
But look for me. So my dad taught me how
to drive, and a memory that I firmly have is
we used to get in the car. I was on
a learner's permit, and he would just answer the phone
the whole morning on our way to wherever, and it
was him talking to his producer at the ABC, whose
name was Marco at the time Marco, and it was
just launched off into long chats and all I wanted
(03:54):
to do was understand what was going on in those chats,
and so I kind of without deliberately doing so, I
just wanted to learn the language to speak with him.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
So he didn't infuse it upon you.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Or absolutely not. His biggest piece of advice coming up
was don't be a journalist. If you are insistent on
being a journalist, don't be a financial journalist. Strikes one
or two right there, Woos.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
So, at what point did you start to realize that
you understood the way that money worked and therefore how
the country worked a bit better than your friends.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Look, I started working as a financial markets reporter straight
out of UNI in my early twenties, and it was
just sort of this immersive thing of now you're learning
about how to read a market update from Woolworths or
BHP or whatever. And it's a very kind of daunting
thing at first, and then over time you find out
you're observing something that is very big and the wheels
are always turning, and then after a while you can
(04:50):
kind of start to see the light and shade in it,
and you can kind of start to see the humor
in it. You can kind of become, you know, someone
who is able to watch the play and the dance
as it unfolds. And I'm by no means a financial
expert in that I'm not sitting on top of a
huge property portfolio or a pile of gold or equities
that would make anybody sweat. But I just I love
(05:11):
the kind of the dance of it all, you know,
all these people putting on their suits and kind of
being very serious, even though in many ways it's kind
of absurd.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Sometimes I understood property portfolio. The other two things you
said I did not understand, which is probably where I am.
Where I am and my super looks like it does
though I've spent I've spent a lot of time in
America and have makes it the big you know, big firms,
the big, big big ones and their partners and stuff
like that. They're all as tall as you, they're all
(05:40):
as good looking as you. How did you avoid becoming
the banker anchor?
Speaker 2 (05:45):
There weren't the invitations? Yeah, I know, I look, look, No,
I never really thought about going into the actual making
of the money rather than just the looking at it.
You know, I don't know, it's it's a funny thing.
I kind of you know, I came out of Union,
I just sort of thought, yeah, I'm going to be
a journalist. I didn't really pursue much else, right, you know,
(06:10):
And and like there's been opportunities along the way to
get out of journalism, of course, but I never really
thought too long and hard about it. There was always
too many interesting things going on.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
What is it that you think is the appeal of
that path? I mean, you didn't try it, but I'm
sure you've got mates that did go that way.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Oh look, I mean, yeah, I've got made to you
all these lawyers heading for partner and you know, I
interview and deal with people in the finance space all
the time who are killing it, but they don't have
much of a work life balance. I mean, the appeal
of it is money, you know, frankly, like it's very
hard to live in a big house in Sydney or
in Melbourne, or in Queensland anywhere really unless you have
(06:46):
family wealth, or unless you're in one of those types
of jobs. And so I think there is absolutely an
understandable drive to want to get there. And so I'll
kind of I never sort of disparage people for wanting
to do that, but it's I mean, it seems a
little bit sol destroying to be grinding away at that
sort of pursuit all the time. They have to make
millions while they're there, and they have to fend off
(07:08):
people all the time. It's kind of it's simpler to
just report on that.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
At one point, speaking of the reporting, if there's one
thing that I just love about your work, and it's
something that I really align with, because this is the
first year I haven't done the Comedy Festival in a
couple years, I was doing a fake news show down there,
and to avoid getting suits for defamation because we're reporting
on real people doing actual things, we decided to make
the moral question the joke every time. It wasn't a
(07:37):
failure of this politician or that politician, it was the
failure of the policy as far as like a general
moral value, widely well collectively held value. And I see
a lot of that in your work, and I'm wondering
how that first started to appear to you, Like, hang
on a fucking second, Like this is not okay that
these companies are making this much money. And at the
(07:59):
core of it is this moral choice, clear moral choice
to just wrought and gouge and sometimes destroy people.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, thank you, it's really it's really nice of you
to say. Look, it's been something that's developed slowly. I
was reporting these stories and think about journalism, all kinds
of journalism really is that there's structures to it. You
play within the boundaries that have been set over decades
of this business being made. You know, you interview these
types of people, You put together the story in these
types of ways. If you watch the news or read
(08:28):
a newspaper, you can see the structures because they're taught.
And I was coming home a lot and I was
talking to my wife Susanna about the stories that I
was covering and about what had bothered me about them,
you know, whether or not there was something that I
wasn't really able to get across that I wanted to.
And invariably we'd end up chuckling between us about the
type of silliness. And you know, what would it be
(08:51):
like to be in those boardrooms where they come up
with those decisions? I mean, could it be as ridiculous
as well? How else can we make money out of
these people? You know, can we squeeze them anymore? Is
there anywhere we're not squeezing it? And you know, we
kind of ended up, just sort of having this little laugh,
you know, a bit. It is like that they're just
people like, yeah, they've gone a UNI and they're smart,
but sometimes they're a pack of idiots as well. You know.
(09:15):
Surely so you can do the swearing for you.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
It's okay, is it okay?
Speaker 2 (09:19):
I saw you can swear all your life, Thank you
very much. We go up to crap in my world,
no further, Oh okay, sometimes not even crap.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Oh what if you're reporting on a one for one
toilet paper company.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
I think we I think we're allowed to say shit
in certain certain circumstances. Or if you said it, if
I interviewed you and you said shit, then that's going up. Yeah,
that's fine.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
That's why I said Archadel was swearing for you. What
I love about it's essentially what you're doing is satire,
but rather political Saturds's come as my financial satire, which
I really really love. There's something about satire which is
super super powerful, and then it can change public opinion
way more than any editorial or any big front page
or anything like that, because if the moral question is
(10:00):
the thing that is the joke, Like particularly you did
one on Tap and Go fees and it was just
like if fucking hell man, my mind knew they made money,
but I know they made billions.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Yeah, that is just and these things develop relatively quickly.
Like the problem with me and everybody is that our
notions of things are kind of caught five years ago.
Things change faster than we kind of catch up to them.
I mean, a lot of people still feel like two
thousand was a couple of years ago, Like you know,
you know what I mean, Like we have this anchoring
thing that we do, and I think with things like tapping,
(10:37):
a new innovation comes along and it's really great and
it's really accessible and bang bang bang, away you go.
And then before you know it, you kind of oh,
what is this extra ten cents I'm paying every time?
And how much does that add up to? And you're
so deep in it by the time you catch up
to what's happening that you know, you're a bit lost.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
So let's use that as a bit of an example.
What does that ten cents add.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Up to four billion dollars a year nationally? I mean,
internationally is much bigger than that, Like it's and the
thing is, it's all like, so there's a little radio frequent.
This is amazing stuff to me, and apology is an advantage.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
You don't worry, you don't let the don't let the
T shirt and the motorcycle force.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
I know, I know. Like so the radio frequency stuff
goes back to you know, World War two planes, how
do we identify our planes as opposed to others? And
it kind of, you know, it started getting used. I've
got you know, I've got a swipe card that works
on a security pass. These sorts of things have been
used for decades and then around early two thousands, Visa
and MasterCard popped it into their cards and they introduced
(11:33):
this payWave idea. It took a little while to take
off because none of the merchant terminals could really do it.
So after a little while the merchant terminals catch up.
Everybody starts putting the payWave stuff on their phone and
instead of having to insert your card or swipe your card,
which is a little bit of a hurdle to the
payment thing, it became seamless. And that is what payments
have to be. If a business is getting your money,
(11:55):
they want it to be like that. But if you
want to kind of communicate with them or maybe ask
a question or make it plant. No, no, no, it
can be much longer and harder. But getting your money
has to be so fast and so easy. And so
when it started becoming a matter of tapping your card
and then tapping your phone, I mean you're often racing
like people. There's no more mental arithmetic that needs to happen.
(12:16):
Somebody says, tap your phone here and you go bang,
and then you're away. You're gone.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
I've got my thing, you know I've left. It's down
the street.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Deep in our brains, there's this thing that's been written
quite a lot about by academics called the pain of paying.
If I hand over a twenty dollar note, it hurts.
There's a part of my brain that just doesn't like
it because I've accumulated, I've worked hard for it, I'm
tapping my phone. None of that bypasses it entirely.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
It's the same reason that you have a chip at
a casino you trade your cash besides this thing, because
you're not seeing your hundred bucks one hundred dollar note.
It's just a little green piece of plastic.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Off it goes perfect example, loops it easy. Yeah, And
that's kind of how it feels. Is in very businesses
like casinos. Other people see that that is a good
that has some depth to it. A supermarket, you know,
you put the good stuff at the back. You don't
have clocks, you don't have windows. You know, These sorts
of things like the casino aification of other sorts of business.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
I guess, just taking a moment away from Crystal, let
you know that Story Club, the monthly live storytelling show
that I put on here in Sydney, is up on YouTube.
Every week a new story goes up, and their live
shows returned in February. Tickets are on sale for the
next show in February right now. The linkers and the
show notes for both the YouTube channel and to get
the tickets. And while you're in those show notes, you
(13:36):
can also grab a copy of So What Now What,
which is a brand new book that I've written with
Cam Walker, and of course the memoir Back After the Break,
which is exactly where we will be in a moment.
It is playing at the core of it is playing
on our psychology.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
So look, there's a lot of ways that you can
kind of justify these sorts of changes. It is convenient
if I lose my debit card, someone can tap it.
If I lose my wallet, someone can just take my cash.
But if I'm tapping my phone, I have to have
the facial recognition or maybe the thumb print software that
is secure. That's a fair point. I think you don't
have a lot of risk anymore that somebody else is
(14:15):
going to pickpocket you and run around town. You have
a lot of other risks. Scammers are just loving the
digital economy that we've gotten ourselves into. Anything where there's
a conversation to be had, these people are very good
at arguing their points. You're not going to sit them
down and change their mind, and they're not going to
unring the bell of digital payments and that sort of stuff.
We're there now. But I think broadly, the problem that
(14:38):
I have is that the tactics of confusion are so
lucrative now and they're so widely used. One of the
ones I like to talk about is telecommunications. I mean,
what is a gigabyte actually supposed to cost? Who knows.
They tell you the numbers that they want you to think,
but what is kind of riddled throughout that sect is
(15:00):
good old fashioned behavioral psychology. They want you to pick
this number and not those numbers. And so they'll give
you three options where one of them stands out to
you quite nicely, and that's the one they want you
to pick. But you know, the idea that a gigabyte
should cost you ten bucks or twenty bucks, nobody knows,
(15:21):
and so people just go along with it. In India,
a gigabyte costs basically nothing because in twenty sixteen, this
company called Geo came along and built their whole new
infrastructure and just decided to disrupt it themselves. There's issues
with that idea, but the problem is the structures that
we are really relying on are only one or two
steps away from getting the ass blown out of them
(15:43):
by a disruptor. And the confusion is kind of just
passed around, and it's frustrating, I think, to see as
it happens. I mean, we've all been there. You kind
of just go what is this charge? Like? Why is
there some sort of service fee and a handling fee?
Why if I wanted to buy a ticket to go
to a show, though I have to have a ticket
processing fee if it's a digital one on my phone.
(16:05):
What's going on here? And you can't have no recourse,
no where to turn, no where to share you for frustration,
and unfortunately the cynic in me and the kind of
the grim sort of underlying tone of these videos is
that it is inescapable and all you can try to
do is laugh about it.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
For someone like me who has a hard time with
all this kind of stuff and is just complete prey
to this tactics of this what do you call it,
the tactic of confusion?
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah, yeah, that's how it feels.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Yeah, yeah, How can I avoid getting stuck in this
kind of thing? What's the thing that I can start
to look for if I'm trying to change my dow
and to provide a role trying to get a different
phone plan.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Look, the unfortunate thing is they just keep saying shop around,
which is fine, but it puts the onus on you,
Like how much time do you have to shop around
for insurance? Your telecommunications provider, your phone plan, like all
of these things one after the other. Mortgage, you know,
five different types of insurance you. I kind of talk
to people about it as like the darkest day of
(17:03):
your half year. You have to sit down and think
about all this stuff. But if you just sort of say, okay,
that's my bad day, where I'm going to have to
do all that. Then you'll probably end up saving quite
a bit of money by doing it. It's just it's
the loyalty. I hate loyalty in our economy. Anything where
a business is trying to get you to not look
at the competitor for pricing and for service, I really
(17:24):
don't like that. So loyalty programs I don't think are
worth it. Pretty much blanket rule there. I mean, I
know a lot of people are going to be listening
to this and saying, well, mine is though, because you
know it's a credit card that gives me points, or
because it's an airline that gives me points, and you know,
the agabill see last week said look, you know, for
one of the big supermarkets, we're talking half a cent
(17:45):
discount for every dollar. You're giving them a lot of data.
You're getting giving them everything about you on a platter,
which then you know, I don't know anybody who reads
the terms and conditions, but they can usually package and
on sell that. And the person that's calling you from
a call center trying to pussele you for whatever it is,
You've probably given your information to somebody who's then sold
(18:06):
it to that person. But the cost is there. It's
a bad exchange rate. You know, here's all my information.
What am I getting in return some vague notion of
reward points somewhere. So I don't like that. I think
if it were me and I was sitting down with somebody,
I'd say, interrogate your loyalty programs and whether or not
they're worth it, and try to shop around as best
as you can and be as disloyal as possible to businesses.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
There's a point in my life where I was just
being is the reason why I've got financially fucked, because
I've spent a lot of money when I was still
drinking and using. But the after effect of one of
them has I've got lifetime gold status at Corners.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
That's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
It was pretty good.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
That's the exception.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
It's fucking close to plantum lifetime. Stop drinking and stop
doing all kinds of dumbshit business class flights for the
first time ever because and for what that means is
that when you're traveling with the kids, you're board first
and you get to the lounge for the first time ever. Yesterday,
coming back from Brisbane, they made the first board boarding court.
I was like, oh, that's us, we get up. Oop,
You're in the next group, sir, Hang on what they've
(19:06):
put another fucking tier on top I was previously top tier,
and now there's an even special tier.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Change the rules of the game halfway through on you
hate that has lifetime, lifetime so annoyed.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
When it comes to an election campaign, you can get
away with a lot, like if you and I are
running against each other, I can say, if you vote
for Chris, your taxes are going through the roof. I
don't even have to show proof. I could just say
they are.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
He's got a plan. He wants you just he wants
you to never go on holiday again. He wants you
to always board last. A vote for Crius is a
board for vote for boarding last. I don't have to
prove that, but you can just say all kinds of
wild shit, particularly when it comes to very complicated, complicated
economic problems like cost of living has got to be
a three hundred headed beast. There's no one reason, but
(20:01):
you can say in two sentences, I'm going to fix that.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
Yeah, can anyone fix it? The cost living thing? Ah? Jeez,
I mean no, Look, no, it's a big issue that
I think one of the most interesting things to me
about this whole election campaign is what they're not talking about.
So you're right, they're they're throwing haymakers at each other,
as every political campaign has always done. But what they're
(20:26):
really trying to do is get out of the way
of probably the Reserve Bank, which has the biggest cards,
you know, in its hand right now, because the market's
expecting three more rate cuts this year, which would probably
if you've got a six hundred thousand dollars mortgage, let's say,
probably puts two hundred and two hundred and forty bucks
in your two hundred and seventy actually in your pocket.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
You just did that in your mind. You fucking did
that in your brain.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
It's well, no, I mean, I can't of know you.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Health quite as far as I'm concerned right now you are.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
It's all a trick, Gosha. So let's say two a
month in your pocket. The government is talking about potential
twenty bucks a month from midnext year onwards. The Coalition
is talking about dropping fuel taxes and maybe saving you
fourteen bucks a week. This is helpful, but the reserve
banks to one that's going to be really making a
play here. And you know, while they were hiking rates
(21:19):
all the time, all the political bodies wanted to do
is say, got nothing to do with us, guys. And
so now when rate's probably going to start coming down,
it's interesting to see whether or not they're going to
start taking credit or whether or not they're going to say,
you know, this is this is the economy writing itself.
So I think that's a big one to watch.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
What are some of the other things that they're not
kind of deliberately not talking about.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
I'm glad you asked that, because the one thing that's
been bothering me lately and no one seems to be
talking about it is home insurance.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
It's such a big issue.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
And they don't have anything in the.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Budget, particularly if you're north of the Tropic of Capricorn.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yeah, yeah, so this is huge, right. We talk about,
you know, energy rebates, we talk about fuel taxes, all
these sorts of things, tax cuts in general, but there
are large parts of the population now in very hazardous
areas who cannot get insured at all. That's going to
be an issue. You've got a population about thirty percent
can't afford the insurance they've got and almost all of
(22:14):
them are under insured because the cost of building a
house has gone up through the roof. So I think
there's a big problem there. And I think, you know,
if cyclone Alfred had a touchdown in southern Queensland and
northern New South Wales, category two wins would have been
a huge problem because if I'm not mistaken, anything below
Bunderberg doesn't really have to be built to withstand category
(22:36):
two wins. So I think insurance is a really big one,
and I think we're going to have to have that
conversation pretty soon because more and more houses, more and
more homes, and viable building land is going to be
seen to be unusable.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Had the CEO of the Climate Council land here the
other day, Amna mckencier, and we were talking about this
because i' alwas thought for a long time it's going
to be the insurance companies that drive climate policy, because
if we can't ensure our homes, or if a big
disaster comes through and empties an insurance company out, what
does that do for our ability to do business in Australia.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Yeah, well it's a massive problem. I mean we all
need insurance, just to kind of get by. I think
the housing markets, a lot of real estate agents are
now starting to see a lot more people do their
due diligence, including is this a flood risk, what's it
going to? What am I going to have to be
coughing up here in terms of insurance costs. Whereas rewind
a couple even a couple of years, that wasn't so
much of a consideration. I think it's becoming much much
(23:34):
more front of mind. It's affecting where people can and
want to live, which affects where people can set up
big businesses. And you know, we've decided as a country
for the most part, that we want people in the
office as opposed to working from home. That makes it
difficult to just head wherever you want ahead and set
up your life. So I think, you know, places like
Melbourne is sprawling right out. I mean, Melbourne's an enormous city,
(23:57):
as is Sydney. I mean, if you put a Melbourne
or a Sydney in the USA, it would be the
third biggest city in the country over there by population.
And yet over there those big cities they all kind
of go up. We're going out, So it affects everything.
I think insurance is a massive one.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Because without if the insurance companies go under. That was
a big part of it was in two thousand and
eight when everything fell apart, was aig I think, because
if an insurance company goes under, how does that affect
the economy.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yeah, well, all the insurance companies get their reinsurance from
bigger global insurers. So all of a sudden, if the
maths aren't mathsing, people start pulling out, and all of
a sudden you're left with one or two insurance companies
that start jacking out their prices. I mean, insurance is
a price on risk. If we're deciding that these sorts
of things are more risky, then the price goes up.
(24:44):
We can't afford it. All of a sudden, only a
few people can have the luxury of being insured. Yeah,
the flow on effect are enormous.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
It's so interesting that the moral question of climate action
or social policy even isn't the one that gets the
thing done. It's it's the money, and it's sad, but
a part of it had to come to grips with
that going. Look, if it's money, it's money. Okay, if
you've decided that helping this twelve year old boy by
(25:14):
providing in some social services now, so don't have to
pay hundreds of thousands dollars a year to keep him
castrated once he's eighteen until he's fifty. Great. Yeah, not
because it's the right thing to do, because it saves
your money.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Later on, having unconscious costs you a lot of money.
You know, you want to get rid of that consciences.
Come on, man, you're right though, it's a calculation. You've
got to figure all that sort of stuff out, like
business is always evolving and changing and the pricing of
risk is constant.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
We just need to take a quick break from Chris
Kohler back in a moment in the election campaign that
we're in right now. What I love is that for
all the where's the details of Peter Dunton, I've got
to admire a man who's so less than a year
later is bold facingly go, oh, the details will come
(26:04):
on the nuclear THN thing. Yeah, the details will come.
What the because the money is a coward If anybody
wants to know what's happening, and look at what massive
black rock and shit like that, what are they doing
with their cash? Where are they pulling it? From and
we're now putting it to Money does not like uncertainty.
Money doesn't like long term risk. When someone like the
coalition here in Australia is pitching nuclear as a long
(26:28):
term energy option, how do we even assess that? How
do we get our brains around Is this a good idea?
What the price of energy will do for Australia manufacturing
in forty years when it's ready.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
It's so hard to put that onto people without any
realistic pricing strategy. I mean, how can you assess it.
We're talking so much money over such a long period
of time, and I think they've kind of gotten the
hang of the fact that that's too far in the distance.
Now they're talking about redirecting gas and keeping twenty percent
of it here in Australia, all that sort of stuff,
(26:59):
and they're talking about fuel and they're sort of the
here and now. I mean, I think that was a
very interesting moment of policy. Everybody sort of knew that
energy prices are a big deal, and the Dutton shadow
Cabinet clearly decided we need something big here, something eye catching. Look,
it was just too light on the details, where we
don't know how much it's going to cost and that's
(27:20):
such a big part of it. Look, I think the
real stuff to look for when you're looking at a
campaign an election campaign is not the big stuff, because
as you say, where's the detail, I think the small
stuff is where you should be looking things. Like when
I was in the budget, one of the things that
caught my eye and I thought was very interesting was
the banning of these bogus non compete clauses that are
(27:42):
in apparently three million Australians contracts. You know, if you're
a hairdresser, it might say you're not allowed to work
for a competitor for six months after you leave here,
regardless of the circumstances within five kilometers. Or if you're
a tradee or if you.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Mate, if you're a fitness instructor, if you're working as
a PTT precise you know the watching MC call it
twenty four right down the road. You can't then go
and work at the other. If you work at the
red one, you can't go work at the blue one.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Yes, So this sort of stuff has led into every
part of the economy, it would seem for no good reason.
We're talking cleaners who are not allowed to go and
clean a building across the road for fear of some
vague notion of legal action. Of course, it's not really
able to be pursued. But the problem is people don't
have the resources to take it to an employment lawyer.
They just look at it and go, okay, I'm not
(28:25):
allowed to do it. So Jim Charmers came through and
he does a tour of the press gallery and we
kind of when he came to us, we said, so,
what's the deal with this noncompete thing? And he says, well,
we got the Productivity Commission to look into this, and
they said that the highest yield, lowest impact way to
get wages moving is to get rid of all this
crap that is stopping people from getting a five percent
pay increase by going across the road. It's awful because
(28:47):
it stops you from having to like somebody goes, hey,
I can get a better job. I can get more
money at this other place, and then you, if you
have this non compete, can go no, you can't. Aha,
instead of stay here, I'll make your life better, I'll
pay you more, which is supposed to be if you're
a desirable employee for the other person, you should be
getting as much money as you can. These are the
little things I think that make a lot of sense.
(29:09):
And I mean, obviously the Coalition has some smaller pieces
of policy that are interesting and worth looking at as well,
whether it's housing policies or if it's the fuel tax
X side stuff. But I reckon, if possible, people should
be looking at the lower level, you know, stop halfway
and look at what they've actually laid out on the table.
As for other pieces of policy, I like that the
(29:31):
Coalition is going to put aside a few billion dollars
for urgent infrastructure lower to the ground stuff water sewage.
That's going to hopefully help some of these new places
that we want to live be more habitable. I suppose I.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Love that you said habitable rather than habitable. I put
the embasis on a different salaval there. It's perfect. If
a suit didn't show you, this is how you become
a professional professional journalist. There is an addiction I discovered yesterday.
(30:05):
I say the word I say the word drawing with
two hours.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
I think that's it was like it's a w ring.
I was drawing. No, that's okay, though. The thing is
when I said a bitable just then I knew it
was coming in my sentence and I was like, oh shit,
we can't stop.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Stop it's already.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
And then I tried to cruise past and you saw it.
It was beautiful. It was beautiful.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
But I know the feeling because having been a broadcaster
for a long time. Yeah, your brain has to be
twenty seconds ahead and the mouth stuff. Those messages have
already been sent. You can't stop. You can't stop them
once they're going.
Speaker 2 (30:39):
It's a perfect way.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
It's true though, You're like, it's going to come out
and I'm going to have to come. Then I've got
thirty more seconds before the news. Okay, I'm an handle this.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
It's such an awful feeling, a grim feeling, and then
it comes out and there's this pause where you got Yep,
it did it, It happened, Okay, keeping it on going now.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
Yeah, humanizes you. I think it humanizes you. What's something
that we really need to understand going into the selection
about how our economy works.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
I think our economy is changing faster than we give
it credit for. We have been an economy that has
gotten a lot of prosperity out of digging stuff out
of the ground and selling it to China more specifically
than anywhere else in the world. BHP is no longer
our biggest company.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
CBA is the one that was a mining company. The
other one was probably their bank, but is a bank
exactly right.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
So you know, the business of selling rocks to China
is now not necessarily as big as the business is
selling debt to all of us in Australia.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
So it's tapping go fees man, yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
Man, yeah. But also like it's interest we pay on
our debts, it's the fees that they charge us, which god,
there's a long list of fees. Like when we rock
up to get a mortgage, we're so happy that they're
going to give us one what we ignore the fact
that we've just paid six hundred bucks for them to
look at the mortgage application, four hundred bucks a year
to have the mortgage, another few bucks here and there
just to have an offset account. They hit you every
(31:56):
single time. I mean not just CBA, of course, this
is banking in Australia. But the business of banking is
incredibly rich now. I mean as far as a sector,
it's huge and growing all the time. Our banks are
some of the most valuable according to their market capitalization
in the world. So Australian economy is about financial services
(32:17):
to Australians because we're not really like our bank service
Australians for the most part, and they're getting huge, like
their share prices have gone berserk in the last couple
of years.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
If a bank is more valuable than our previously most
valuable company, which was selling raw materials and commodities by
the trainload to other countries, that is a lot of fees.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
It is. It's a lot of It is an intimidate.
Well yeah, I mean you know.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
Sorry, it's because you use your own eyebrow to put
the punchlines on your videos and then when I see
it live, it destroys Like I see the guy, he's
in there, the horrible easel man, and affably get a
couple extra things out of them.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Guys, is there a way? Is there maybe just an
extra ten bucks a month? They're not going to notice.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
It comes back to the conversation you're having, what's the
price of a gigabyte on the mobile phone? Surely it's
just what is the price of having one formula on
this selling a spreadsheet calculate with another formula on that
selling a spreadsheet apparently six hundred dollars a year.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Yeah, I don't give it back to you if your
application is not successful. By the way, that's theirs now
keeps these mine six hundred dollars.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
It's not like someone's hour of the day. They're running
it through a machine that spits out the top two percent. Yeah,
these no problem. It's probably the next ten percent. I'm
probably gonna have someone look over this, but they won't
look very long and then the rest is just sorry,
you get a formula, that's right.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
I mean. And we've got big four banks, four big
banks in Australia. They all charge basically the same like
it's it's you know, conspicuous.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
If you're going to disrupt the banking sector, how would
you do it.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
I would try to get as many people as possible
to bank elsewhere, smaller banks. We've got ninety eight ish
lenders in Australia and yet three quarters of the market
used four of them. I like that. We have lots
of lenders and they are really scrappy at times. They
try to offer lower interest rates and be free periods.
(34:24):
I don't know, I think there should be there should
be a lot more due diligence encouraged out there for
people to sit down and kind of have a go
at it, because you know, we're kind of at sea here,
like we get told, yeah, here are your bank options.
But in reality we've got a wide world of banking.
This is a very interconnected world. You could have a
(34:46):
bank off shore if you wanted to. You could have
any number of smaller lenders that you may never have
heard of until you sit down and start researching some
of the better fees and some of the lower interest
rates for deposits. Yeah. I mean that to me would
be a big one. We all were kind of semi
risk averse in Australias. We tend to keep our money
in the bank as well. I mean, if there was
(35:07):
an opportunity for people to start getting a bit more
okay with the idea of index funds and low risk
stock investments, I think that'd be probably for the best too.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Your half yearly hard day, hard day. Put in your
half yearly hard day, and it's all.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Day, by the way, like morning till night. You're sitting
there looking at it, but it pays your money, Like
that might be a solid amount of money if you
can just sit there and do it.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
You talked about the a triple C. There was a
report handed down about what supermarkets are doing with their pricing. Yeah,
Labor going to the election saying they're going to bring
in some sort of UK style law. I don't know, man,
These supermarket's pretty powerful. Like if someone going to end
up with a cabbage in their bed, Like, what's going
to happen? Sorry, half a cobage, half a cabbage and
(35:52):
a bed.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Its might a source all over it. Ye, I don't that.
It was a really good report. It was four hundred
and forty one pages and read the whole thing. But
I look through a lot of it and it did
a beautiful job of detailing the problems that we have
in Australia when it comes to our two big supermarkets.
They just don't compete that much. It had a lot
(36:13):
of solutions. The big solution though, is to try to
get another aldi in the mix. You know, we've had
little calf Land from overseas coming in and sniffing around
in Australia, but they've decided not to hang around. If
you're asking the government, how are we really going to
fix this supermarket issue? The question really is what kind
of Carriac. Are we dangling to get more big supermarkets
(36:35):
to sort of come in and break it up, because
it's got to be a market lead solution. You can't
just come down hard on anyone who's trying to do
what two big companies at the top do, which is
dominate the market. I mean they're sharing somewhere around sixty
eight seventy percent of the whole grocery market share between them.
You know, they've done it. They've kind of done it.
You know, like we're going to have to come in
(36:57):
and break them up. I don't really want to do that.
Just need somebody who's going to steal their market share
away from them the way that good businesses do.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Have we ever broken up stuff in Australia, We have not.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
We don't have those laws. They have them in the US.
They brought them in to break up Standard Oil, which
was the Rockefeller you know, own ninety percent of the
oil market and they came in and said we don't
like this anymore, and they broke it up. And so
they've got those laws in their books. They would never
use them now.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
They did the same with the Telcoe. They did it
with AT and t H do they yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yeah, right, Okay, there you go broke it apart. Yeah, so,
once you get too big in the US, there is
that big stick. In Australia. There's been a few people
who've talked about bringing it in. There's not much political
will to do that. I mean, I think you probably
don't need to in Australia. You just need to encourage
more competition.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
Because the flow on effect to the pante but also
to the farmer and the providers and the transport sector.
Speaking of fees, well, yeah, listen to how some of
these providers are being charged, Like they bought one hundred
thousand kilos of beetroots off me. But you know, now
I'm getting stung for this fee to get it. It's
like bananas. They can't get out of.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
It, that's right. It's kind of heartbreaking. Look, I think
the supermarkets defense is always that this isn't that good
of a business. You guys, our profit margins a right
like two and a half two point three percent, and
we're like, oh okay, what.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Are their profits?
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Oh billions? Yeah, well yeah, you know that's.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Done it again.
Speaker 2 (38:21):
Hey, follow up questions come on, come on, I mean,
like two and a bit percent I don't know. Look,
the problem with that is all their costs that they've
piled into their own plenty of businesses. They're all offer
you twenty eight like twenty five twenty eight thousand different
things you can buy at of Cole's or a woolies
(38:42):
at Aldi, there's eighteen hundred different things you can buy,
which is a cheaper way to run a business, and
so their prices are lower. So it doesn't really matter
what their margin is. It just that we've been kind
of these two have competed in this very specific way
about doing each other and maybe the way that we
didn't specifically ask for. Yeah, you really need eight different
types of raspberry jam. I don't know when I used to.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
When I lived in America, I did my groceries at
a place called Trader Joe's, which has I'm going to
get corn ships there they are. That's the one packet
in the one size. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, And that
was it. That was a whole shop. It was excellent.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
Yeah. I didn't fuck around in and out in five
minutes totally. I mean, that's it. The problem, of course,
is that having all those different types of options means
that we have this economy of small businesses that can
get their products into the supermarket, whereas they're not getting
anywhere near an Aldie or a Trader Joe's. So you
end up having this trade off situation. But if all
we're interested in is the cost of living and getting
our grocery shopping down, then choice is expensive. Having a big,
(39:41):
beautiful supermarket is expensive. Having a fresh sushi bar in
the corner that's expensive. Like you just look at the
way Aldi is halftime. It feels like they're not even
turning their lights on in half the shop, and you're like, yeah, sweet,
it's cheaper.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
And I got a chainsaw.
Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah, just so quietly, I'm walking out of here with
a chainsaw.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
You guys, hey, you never believe it. You know that
bump you know, you know the guest bed you wanted
to blow up? Yess, he's got an air compressing out.
This guy, didn't I send you for eggs? Yeah, I
can't find eggs. There are no eggs.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
There are air compresses though, Like you joke, I nearly
bought a Mita saw the other day at Aldi, and
I had to be pulled away from it by my wife.
Your handymoon, no use for it, but I was like,
look at this thing. Maybe I'll get into making decks
or something. Nah.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
She came over very hard on me. She was like,
well you back to business.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
When it comes to how we are. You know, as
you mentioned before, we're we're a nation of quarrymen and
house flippers. That's how we make our money. That's pretty
much what we do. And we buy a lot of
stuff from overseas. That's how we have this iPad, these
clothes that everything I'm wearing was made overseas. Everything in
this room was made overseas. So we have a trade
(40:56):
deficit with lots of countries. How does that play into
what's happening with America at the moment? And what can
either of our parties do anything, if at all, about
what's coming?
Speaker 2 (41:07):
They can't really. Either Peter Dutton or Anthony Albanezy has
the ability to call up Donald Trump and say hey, man,
don't do this, and he'll be like, yeah, sweet, okay,
it doesn't seem like that's likely. He's heading down this path.
He wanted to do it, probably during COVID, and then
COVID happened and then he couldn't. So now he's got
this second term, he's gone hard at tariff's. The Australian
government keeps saying, what's going to happen here is the
indirect hit to Australia because really we're talking about you know,
(41:31):
steel an aluminium as an exported item to the US. Well,
that's going to cover a hit and that sucks for
people who work in that industry. But relatively it's a
small part of our economy. Meat that's another painful one.
But you know, we're not Canada, We're not Mexico or China.
This is going to be small. So what's going to
happen really is that it's going to be tariff's at
twenty paces all over the world. The global trade is
(41:54):
going to slow down as a result. China's economy is
probably going to weaken a little. And as I said,
we do quite a lot of trade, which I think
they're right. It's the indirect impact. It's this thing where
Donald Trump, we now know what he meant by making
America great again is try to undo fifty to eighty
years worth of globalization. I didn't know it when he
(42:15):
first started saying it. I kind of am like, oh wow,
so that's what you meant you're going to magic up
the local manufacturing industry. Again, if we had have known,
I mean, the market is now and has this year
been pricing that in and it's all over the place.
But yeah, we just didn't quite know what it was
that he meant, and now we're kind of figuring it out,
I think.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
But is he also interested in letting those companies that
have offshore their manufacturing. Is he going to say, well,
you used to build televisions or washing machines here, and
your plant is now a housing estate. Yeah, here's four
billion dollars to build a new one.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Yeah, good question. I mean, the big car manufacturers in
the States have copped a huge hit lately because they're
basically assembling cars from parts that they're getting from overseas.
So for GM, they're getting smashed on the market. At
the moment, their valuations have tumbled. You would think that
Donald Trump knew that that was going to happen, and
these companies were probably briefed and they knew, and they
(43:15):
probably argued their case. It doesn't seem like there's much
that's going to slow this down anymore. I mean, maybe
some things. It seems like Donald Trump is focused on
getting the price of oil down. That might be a
calculation that he's making with Russia with Opek, you know
what I mean, Like so he's yeah, that could be
part of the offsetting factor. Because people a tariffs are
(43:37):
attack on people, your local people. You have to pay
the taxes if you want to buy something, they get
passed directly onto you. So people are going to turn
around and go, hey, this is shit. I don't like this,
And maybe down the track that the plan is to say, well,
I've brought down the barrel price of oil quite a lot.
You're welcome. Maybe that's it. I mean, that's speculation. Everything
speculation at the moment.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
But now if I want to get the medicine for
my kid seven hundred dollars because it comes from Switzerland.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
Yeah exactly. I mean, you know, he's certainly breaking a
lot of eggs to make these on once he wants
to make Hey.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
There's an egg shortage.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah, well there's that, I mean, which is a fascinating
thing because we're eating so many more eggs. I saw
this piece of data that showed that our egg consumption
has gone up, So this egg shortage hurts way more
than it used to. Usha but yeah, I don't know,
it's a killer like that, that thing that is the
big one. I mean, we're doing pretty well in our
Australian economy now as opposed to a year or two ago,
(44:30):
but that that's a big scary at the moment.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Kind of have one final question that's around. We were saying, like,
coming into this selection, there's a lot of stuff. These
two guys man leaders of these big parties aren't really
talking about that night that you're at the budget with
your big four hundred pages. They said they brought in
a deficit. Now, I saw some data the other day
that equated something twenty four billion dollars that if you
added up the tax not collected off, negative gearing, tax
(44:57):
breaks to the super duper duper wealthy, and the diesel
fuel ex pretty much around about twenty four billion. And
so we're in a deficit because we've decided to be.
And that makes my quite hurt.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Yeah, look, you can look a lot of people take
the numbers and then rearrange them in lots of ways.
You just got to think hoodwinked by No, No, No, I
don't think so. I think that's probably accurate. It's just
about is there any political will from either side. I mean,
we're going to vote them in either side if we
start mucking around with negative gearing. I mean, you could
argue that a massive thing to do in Australia would
(45:34):
be to introduce an inheritance tax of some description. We
don't have one in Australia and globally that's kind of unique,
especially considering how much wealth is about to be passed
from the boomer generation to either X or millennials. But
that money, whether it's super or housing, provided it's the
primary place of residence, is going to be going straight through,
(45:55):
which is sort of great for a lot of the
people whose parents have done well. It's not so great
your parents haven't done well, but you could be earning
a lot of tax like that. You could be coming
down hard on big businesses or billionaires, lots of different things.
But in the end, these parties have to win elections
and they have to court certain types of votes, and
they've clearly done the maths that ten years worth of
(46:17):
deficits is more palatable than mucking around too much with
the tax system.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
When it comes to the inheritance tax. Both my parents
are immigrants, my wife's parents are immigrants, and like a
lot of Australia most a lot of people have arrived
here in the last thirty forty years. There's going to
be a point where those people outnumber everybody else. And
it might be like, hey, you guys have had time
in the market. All you really did was buy a
(46:43):
house in Epping when it was a country town, and
then you just sold it for eight million dollars. I know,
I'm not saying redistribution, that's a kind of a bit
of a pinko word. But have we shared about it.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
Look, it's a it's a big area. That's a lot
of money. We're talking trillions. I mean the housing market,
the Australian residential housing. I could work about eleven trillion
dollars superannuation, four point two trillion dollars commercial real estate
roughly too. I mean, that is such a huge amount
of money to be not touching on the way through.
When I say that, I say people passing away and
there's an inheritance involved. Yeah, it just feels like that's
(47:16):
got to be a conversation at some point. Politically suicide
to bring it up rather before an election, you know,
twenty nineteen we were talking about negative gearing, and that
did not go well, and that was one tweak. Think
about something as huge as an inheritance.
Speaker 1 (47:29):
Tax, We're going to have to have that conversation sometimes
seems like it seems like it's coming at some point.
That and the insurance one. Yeah, one hard day every
half a year.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
Yeah, we'll sit down.
Speaker 1 (47:42):
So this one we'll talk about insurance, the next one
we'll talk about inherance tax, and then we'll get to
our home line.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Yeah, and maybe that's right. Maybe we could even have
This is going to sound weird, Maybe it could be fun,
like who's ripping me off?
Speaker 1 (47:52):
And?
Speaker 2 (47:52):
Who am I going to squash out of my life?
Speaker 1 (47:55):
You just invented a game shot? Who's ripping me off?
With Chris Color? With you?
Speaker 2 (48:00):
I'd only do it if you're on it?
Speaker 1 (48:01):
Are you fucking kidding? I will go upstairs and petch it.
We're in the building right now. Let's go upstairs and
pitch it. Our first concessant. Here is Adam. Here's his
phone bill. Let's have a look going through here. There's
a fee.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
Do everything you off? What do you want to do
about it? Ignorant? Or do something? I want to do something?
Bang all right, he's your half day.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
That's and you know what, and then then you get
the sponsors involved, because then you get the alternative. That's
when you get your super loopho show up instead of
your NBN to and then mate, it writes, it pays
for itself. No network will say no, it's on.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
We need to do this more more chats about this
because now we're getting all these great businesses.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
I don't understand. Get canon Brooks on the phone.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
I've got a thing for him. Only got his number,
Mike's number. That's Mike canon Brooks, one of the billionaires.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
I just dropped a name.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
You know. Lennard Cohen once told me, if you're going
to drop a name, drop a big one. No, it's
been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
That was Chris Kohler. His new book, How They Get
You Sneaky Everyday Economics and Smart Ways to Hold into
Your Money is out right now. If you haven't already
followed him on the Instagram and the TikTok, just get
on there with you. He's so good. He's very good.
Thanks so much for listening. I really appreciate you being here.
Please check the show notes. That's where you can get
(49:25):
the YouTube link for the story Club shows. There's new
stories going up. If you look for something interesting to
watch over the break, you know you can check these
out there twelve to fifteen minutes long, true Australian story
from a great Australian storyteller. You know these people there,
they our household names. We get big names of story Club.
It's pretty fun. You can get the link in the
show notes. That's where you can also grab a copy
(49:45):
of my first and second books, which are out right now.
If you like this episode, please share it and like
it and comment and follow and subscribe and rate and
do all those other things. And you know what, where
are you listening to this? Take my photo of where
you're listening right now? It to me. Send out her
email at gmail dot Calum'm.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
Always fascinated to see what you're listening.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
Thanks for being a part of it. I'll see it Monday.