Pokies:

Clubs NSW CEO David Costello writes: Re. “NSW pokies venues looking out for POOPs (Pets of Older Persons)” (12 February, item 13). Margot Saville’s beef with clubs seems to be that in her humble opinion clubs don’t donate enough of their income to charity/sporting groups.

Margot’s first mistake was to calculate Tigers donations as a percentage of their gaming revenue. She states that Tigers made a “$10.2 million profit on its pokies”. Not quite true, Margot. There is the rather large burden around clubs’ necks of gaming machine tax as well as GST that first have to be paid on this profit figure you quoted, not including other likely expenses such as leasing costs.

So let’s deduct one third of that $10.2 million for starters to cover off the tax bill. Then let’s deduct another $1.3 million from what’s left because that is how much money the club donated to rugby league last year. Locals might have lost interest in rugby league in your opinion but the kids sure haven’t, neither has the rapidly growing live and TV audiences.

Thousands of kids play the sport every weekend and it is the Tigers that pay to make it happen. Let’s not forget to deduct several million dollars more to pay the wages of the staff who work at the club, as well as the interest on the bank loan, the cost of the food, the cost of the drink, the cost of the entertainers, etc.

As Margot herself stated, the club is losing $100,000 a month. The club in fact posted a loss of $1.7 million last year, and yet still donated more than double the 1.5 per cent required under the CDSE program. Suddenly the club’s $389,569 to local community groups is looking better. To suggest otherwise is mean-spirited.

As for the damage done by problem gambling, perhaps you forgot that the NSW IPART recently calculated the annual social contribution of registered clubs across the state at $811 million. IPART found after considering the downside of gambling that “on balance clubs make a positive contribution to the community that is sufficient to justify the level of support they receive from government”. That means the people of NSW are in fact the best part of $1 billion better off each and every year courtesy of registered clubs.

The report is a great read, I suggest you, and the anti-gambling lobby download it from the IPART website.

Mike Rann:

Grahame Dudley writes: Re. “Take it on trust: Rann still has questions to answer” (yesterday, item 3). Mike Rann’s government is  doing a lot  of things I am not happy about and I may not vote for him this time but I am totally disinterested in his private life much  less so  in the absolutely pathetic moral self-righteous press reaction you too are now becoming part of.

Please stick to the  standards of journalism you have set until now by sticking to the real issues. God knows there are enough of them.

The housing market:

Matthew Auger writes: Re. “Property boom could get ugly for buyers … and the government” (yesterday, item 24). A point Adam continually overlooks in his criticisms of our bank’s lending propping up the housing market is the fact that for loans above 80% loan-to-valuation (LVR) ratio, mortgage insurance is required and it is the mortgage insurer who picks up the risk, not so much the banks.

Obviously this reduces the risk to the banks however it does depend on the state of the mortgage insurers, if they get into trouble then that could flow back to the banks. The two main mortgage insurers in Australia are Genworth (spun out of America’s GE) and PMI (owned by Australia’s QBE).

If you apply for a home loan for an LVR of 80% or lower then you be assessed against the bank’s lending criteria.  If you go for a loan above 80% (say 90% as Adam notes in his article) you will require mortgage insurance and you loan application will be assessed against the mortgage insurer’s lending criteria which is far stricter than the bank’s.  The reason for this strictness is that the mortgage insurer is taking on higher risk as there is less equity in the loan. The mortgage insurer’s main protection, apart from the insurance premium, is strict lending standards. If the loan defaults then the risk falls on the mortgage insurer not the bank.

As an aside, if you apply for a loan at say 90% LVR and you are knocked back you may well find you have fallen foul of the mortgage insurer’s lending criteria and that if you were to stump a 20% deposit and apply for a 80% LVR loan instead, you could skip mortgage insurance and be approved for the loan under the bank’s lower lending standards.

From personal experience my wife applied for a home loan when she started a new job, no mortgage insurer would touch her for an above 80% LVR loan because she was still in her probation period (even though income and assets were all fine). Happily Suncorp were able to approve an 80% LVR loan without mortgage insurance as long as we stumped up a 20% deposit.  The moral of the story is that 80% LVR is the magic hurdle. Go higher than 80% LVR, life is expensive and difficult. At or below 80% LVR, life is cheap and simple.

A quick Google search on “Australian mortgage insurance” found this page (I have no links with the company in question) which seems quite informative.

Afghanistan and Vietnam:

Guy Rundle writes:  Neil James (yesterday, comments), replying to both myself and Charles Richardson (yesterday, comments),  on Afghanistan and Vietnam, asks whether I would defend Stalin and Pol Pot?

Would that be the Stalin who was our ally in the war against fascism, the one whom Churchill remarked was clearly preferable to Hitler and Nazism? (or the ally of some of us – Bob Santamaria had a preference for Franco and Mussolini as I recall). Would that be the Pol Pot whose Khmer Rouge was recognised as the legitimate representative of Cambodia by the Fraser and Reagan governments, after its auto-genocide had been wound up by the Vietnamese invasion — for which they were punished with a decade of sanctions?

Funny old world. I guess, with the West/Pol Pot hook-up, even the Australian Defence Association found themselves, in the last analysis, wearing the black pyjamas.

In his reply to me, Charles simply repeats the same error he made in his initial assessment — magisterially deciding what is best for the South Vietnamese people from the perspective of your average white bloke in Melbourne. It’s the same attitude which lies at the base of all “humanitarian” interventions. It is clear beyond doubt that a unified and independent Vietnam was the overwhelming majority will of the Vietnamese. The US pushed Ho Chi Minh and the NLF firmly into the Soviet camp by the creation of South Vietnam, and the lethality of the war

Quite aside from the 1954 election, half a million US troops fought against North Vietnam and the NLF trying to crush it. No Soviet or Chinese soldier fought on the other side, and Soviet supplies to North Vietnam were pitiful. The defeat of both the US and the South by a purely nationally-based liberation force, was a clear expression of a national will. Charles may well prefer one aspect of freedom — individual liberty — to another, that of national independence.

But ultimately his judgement becomes circular. Amazingly, what is best for people might be best derived by observing what they fight and die for, not trying to evolve out of a philosophy seminar.

Breaker Morant:

Jackie French writes: Re. “War criminal to hero … a dangerous precedent” (yesterday, item 19). It is easy to mix historical fiction with historical fact. The movie Breaker Morant was fiction, inspired by  fact. Very few “facts” about the Breaker Morant case exist.

British records of both the trial and Kitchener’s orders were “lost”, and unable to be found even when the Australian government asked for them after Morant’s execution. It was this “loss” that rightly caused outrage in Australia at the time. Morant was charged with shooting Boer insurgents, disguised in British uniform, who had surrendered to him.

Morant  claimed that they hadn’t surrendered when he shot them, and that Kitchener’s orders were to execute all Boer insurgents who wore British uniform.

The critical questions were: had they surrendered? Did orders exist to execute all Boer prisoners who had disguised themselves in British uniform?

The charges that Morant killed  civilians were dropped. I agree: Morant appears to  have been a thug. But even thugs deserve justice. Or rather: justice deserves that we treat even thugs judiciously.

Dante’s Cove:

Alan Kennedy writes: Re. “Daily Proposition: see this pervy supernatural soap before it gets yanked off air” (yesterday, item 8). Dan Barrett’s piece on Dante’s Cove was highly amusing. The poor boy nods off  while watching a show late at night that most of us haven’t hear of and suddenly he wakes up to images of horizontal folk dancing between to “comely lasses.”

Hey Dan pull the other one. It is us you are talking to not your mother or Tony Abbot asking you to explain the magazines under your bed. If you want to watch soft p-rn on late night TV all power to you  but please spare us the excuses.  Next you will be asking for Stevie Conroy to come over to fit a filter to your TV so your late night couch potato activities are not disturbed by images of “comely lasses”.

PS using the word dirty in relation to Dante’s Cove is evidence of a repressed upbringing.