I was feeling quite pleased with myself when I sat down to pay some bills. My bill paying a/c was up to $8400, against $1000 a year ago after paying last years bills. It was quickly apparent why.

There's the rates, $3600, up from $680 the original rates bill here.
An electricity bill $890, up from $320 the first bill here.
A couple of car rego $590, down from $1700 last year after a change to club rego for my classic Triumphs. Still $5000 going to do nothing much more than support bureaucrats, & boy hasn't their cost escalated.

Then there are a couple of car insurances, well down after the change to restricted use. But the shopping trolley rego & insurance is due any day, so it is fairly obvious why the bill paying account looked so good.

The one I really resent is the rates. My neighbor assures me that the only thing the council has done in 32 years to the road built by the developer is once dropping some blue metal, & spraying a veneer of bitumen over it, finished in half a day. The only thing the 60 residents here get other than that is a library truck for 3 hours 48 times a year. Pretty poor return for the couple of million dollars a decade they gather from us.

A bit of quick math shows that it costs $111.50 just to own my home, add another $50 to gather & supply water, & treat & remove waste water, before counting maintenance, & it becomes pretty obvious why rents have climbed so high.

God we need to trim the numbers & the wings of our bureaucrats.

we need to trim the numbers & the wings of our bureaucrats.
Hasbeen,
Labor would never allow that & if the Coalition even just hinted at doing so a civil war would break out.
Remember Campbell Newman when he purged the Qld Public service ? He did go in too hard & too fast but still, the whole of the Public Service would have crucified him backed by the people who always waffle on about equal rights.
Vehicle registration in Qld is nothing short of stealing.

Ops, that is $890 a quarter, $3560 a year for power, & $111.5 a week to own the place.

Good point Hasbeen. Councils in particular seem to have their rises out of control. Unfortunately government spending never goes down they always find a way to gouge more out of people for things that they don't need. Someone said to me that they pay $150 per year for the garbage truck to go past their vacant property. I remember at one council they were talking about a billion dollar plan. I was surprised and appalled they could lay their grubby hands on a billion dollars collected presumably significantly from rates. It seems that they are able to do this because many are sleeping- sadly in many cases their own money is seemingly being used against themselves.

Reagan said 'big government is bad'

PS- I think you need thicker walls in your house.

Oh, how I love to hear the 'Old Farts' whinge. They whinge about everything, it's too hot, it's too cold, it's too dry, it's too wet. Blame the Labor Party for everything.

When Labor established the car industry in Australia in 1949, your folk hero and founder of the Liberal Party, the cowardly 'Pig Iron' Bob Menzies said: "No worker should own a car." So you blokes should be on shank's pony!

"no worker should own a car".

Paul demonstrates for the umpteenth time that there simply isn't any anti-Menzies claptrap that he won't fall for. Never happened.

Elsewhere Paul claimed British capitalists wanted to continue WW1 until 1922 but when challenged for evidence, meekly claims that someone somewhere made some profit on something during the war. You'd think he'd be embarrassed by his idiocy...but apparently not.