AVOID PROTECTIONISM

“It's a question of the degree of debt that you're carrying there. If if it was a pretty chunky amount of debt and losing your job would really put you in a difficult situation. I mean, it feels like playing a bit of a game of chicken. But if you've got a fairly sizable buffer that's there, you know, you're one of these property investors that actually makes a net positive return on your rental income.”

“No. God, no. For god's sake, do not give these people more power. Like, no hard no strong, the most emphatic no that I can go. For god's sake, it's like giving a machine gun to a monkey. They they do enough damage as it is with the tools that they've got. And to give them another one, you know, nah. It just comes back to the the Hayekian face or conceit, you know, which is is just the the the height of hubris to think that a board of 12 very, very rich people can make decisions for the whole nations by meeting once every six weeks.”

“Stockpiles is my answer. And the reason is that stockpiles, you pay effectively just the carrying cost. If we had ninety days or a hundred and twenty days worth of fuel rather than twenty eight, we'd have a a storage cost, which would be the infrastructure cost to create, build tanks, and whatever else. If we are invaded by Indonesia or China, if we'd had hundred days of fuel, we might be able to last behind the barricades for another month or two. And then the tanks rolls straight over the top.”

“When you say you want more Aussie babies, you're not saying I want people who wanna be able to have kids to have kids. A decent, but thankfully very small minority of people will talk to me about the great replacement theory and how people are coming from around the rest of the world to replace Australians. The dog whistle is well known, which is you say a thing knowing full well how people will take it so you don't have to say the thing out loud. That's that's the very nature of the dog whistle.”

“Try and try and do some scenario analysis and just ask yourself if if I did lose my job tomorrow, not saying you would, but just do do it. What if? What if? How do things look like and and they say it takes six twelve months, twenty four months, thirty six months to get another job. There's a lot of people who think that they're the world's, you know, greatest investor. They're God's gift to investing because they did some very, very reckless things, and it just happened to go well for them.”

“The government should massively reduce the government deficit so they're not adding demand to the economy, making things worse. That that's easy. We are collecting more tax revenue than ever before. There there is no there is no deficit. And the treasurer could say, I'm gonna remove stimulus from the economy so that I'm not working cross purposes with the reserve bank so that they don't have to deal with higher inflation, put rates up.”

“Auckland's seen house prices drop 26% in the last few years. Toronto's seen about a 23% drop. Now and this isn't the, oh, here we go again with the the property doomerism. It's just I sometimes feel as though we see it in Australia as sort of like, that's an impossibility. You know? And, you know, you you see the headlines when prices are down 2% quarter on quarter. Woah. People freak out.”

“Galls Law. It comes from 1975. His law says a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make work. You must start over again to with a simple working system and build outwards. Complexity is your enemy. It is always your enemy. It's in it's your enemy in investing. It's your enemy in policy making.”

“What Matt is arguing for, Tom, is a lower standard of living sort of because it's literally more Australian. Let's shut off. You're not allowed to buy any car that isn't made in Australia. Right? And let's play the record forward for ten years. The cars aren't that good. They're really expensive because it's a tiny market. No one else in the world is buying them. With the structural disadvantages in a thousand different ways, it's just not going to make that viable.”