Before we get into the three big news stories (start of F1, start of season 4: Drive to Survive, first appearance of the driver formerly known as Hamo but now known as Larbalestier) of this week or any other, let’s ask why the upper middle-class illuminati in this country still believe that “the poorest people either don’t have cars or actually don’t drive very far in many cases”. A former Liberal treasurer who said this eight years ago was telling ABC radio that the government’s planned fuel tax increase wouldn’t hurt poorer Australians.
How very prescient of him. For turning up in federal parliament now and then a (very) average politician gets over $230k with others earning up to $400k and the PM trousering $550k or $1505 a day. The average weekly wage is $69k or $189 a day. So, while a jump in the petrol price isn’t a big deal for the persons in Canberra, it and the 44c a litre plus GST is actually a tax on low-income earners and the poor. Of course, they could always get public transport.
Except they can’t.
As Sydney’s Daily Telegraph revealed this week: “Commuters in western Sydney have the worst access to public transport and the least number of services after decades of neglect on infrastructure spending.”
But wait, there’s more. As a study from the research firm Illion showed us: a slew of new infrastructure (ie toll roads) has turned western Sydney into “toll town, burdening residents with a significant financial burden – tolls on the daily commute.
For instance, if you live in Wollondilly, a suburb on the south-western fringe of Sydney, in 2020 you spent 112 per cent more on tolls than persons in the inner city, and if you drove too much you paid $6k a year to the toll takers. Hold on. So, you’re paying a tax to build roads but then you have to pay a tax to a private company to drive on those roads.
An ABC/RMIT fact check showed that a tax on petrol is anything but progressive, as then treasurer Joe Hockey claimed. “In proportion to income, it falls three times as heavily on the poor as on the rich, which makes it regressive”, the study said.
Of course, the illuminati argue that fiddling with any part of petrol prices would create a great disturbance in the economy … as if millions of voices suddenly cry out in terror and no more roads are built and the Australian budget sinks into an even worse deficit. So, the petrol tax raises $20bn a year. In the major capital cities, toll road costs in the last year or so have blown out by about $7bn. Looking at it this way, not only do Sydneysiders alone pay $2bn in tolls to private companies, nearly half of the petrol tax also goes to them to pay for government incompetence in drawing up the contracts. Anyway, it’s all good. Business gets a tax credit on the excise.
Now moving to the races formerly known as F1 but now known as a reality TV show, let’s bring you up to date on what’s happened since the last series. Hamo has decided to expose the patriarchy and change his name to his mother’s maiden name, Larbalestier. So, Lou is now Larbo. Dano, who had Covid, is now post-Covid and is racing this weekend. He has joined Georgie Russell, Lando Norris, Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon in the vanity mag Vanity Fair to answer the same seven questions about F1 racing while dressed in what could only be described as fashionable clobber best left on the runways of Milan. So Dano is pretty in pink Gucci, Georgie in a Vinnies dressing gown by Valentino, Esteban in a pair of prison PJs by Armani, Lando in a fetching sailor’s outfit by Saint Laurent and Pierre in a campier version of Lando’s matelot uniform. Just so you don’t have to listen to the whole video or read the article, the five lads said they raced because they like speed and dressing up in somewhat suspect clothes. Weirdly the US mag didn’t ask Larbo or Mad Max to dress up like idiots and answer banal questions.
As VF journo Dan Adler wrote: “F1 and Drive to Survive have intertwined themselves enough that the packaging of the sport became an immediate topic of intrigue after the unravelling in Abu Dhabi. A chorus of observers and journalists saw the ending as evidence that F1 had traded integrity for entertainment. Norris, among the several drivers to express their bewilderment after the race, described the ending as “for the TV of course”. When asked about Netflix a few days after his win, Verstappen said, “For them, of course, I guess it was perfect.”
Of course, the most interesting things to come out of Drive to Survive are: 1. Red Bull boss Christian Horner is married to Ginger Spice; 2. No one liked Russian fertiliser heir Nikita Mazepin anyway, he’s a crook driver and there was cheering when he got the flick for invading Ukraine; and 3. Larbo is nicer than Maxie. Anyway, you can see the reality show and Drive to Survive on Foxtel today.
In other news the Canadian website Driving (the British Medical Journal of the used car caper) has published the results of a length study that presents irrefutable evidence that BMW and EV drivers are more likely to display psychopathic traits. Psychopaths typically display antisocial behaviour, have strong egotistical characteristics, lack empathy, are terrible drivers, wouldn’t know a camshaft if it hit them in the face and often go “vroom vroom” in electric cars to make up for the deafening silence. Anyway, ‘‘the most morally depraved subset (in the study) were EV owners and those owners with personalised licence plates’’. As writer Cameron Molnar warns, if you have a workmate who drives an electric BMW with a personalised number plate, you should probably run.
Finally, the VW-owned Bentley company has made its highest ever profit of $700m on sales of $5bn. Most of the German Brit lux car sales are in China showing that the country’s boss, 68-year-old Xi Jinping, is probably ready to trade in his V8 twin turbo Hongqi L5 ($1m) for a W12 Bentley Continental GT Speed (a snip at $422k).
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