How to keep the shareholders quiet, but not necessarily happy

CBD, a column in The Sydney Morning Herald's BusinessDay, reported on Friday:

Mirvac Group has come up with what appears to be a cunning plan to silence debate at its annual meeting.

The property group dispatched its invitation for the meeting yesterday, which will be held in Brisbane at 10am on November 11.

One wonders if the shareholders should be able to start discussing the third resolution, the remuneration report, about the one-hour mark, when the nation has a moment's silence for Remembrance Day.

and

The copper explorer Cudeco has found another way, whether intentional or not, to dampen debate at its annual meeting.

Cudeco announced yesterday that it planned to hold its meeting in the easily accessible Cloncurry Shire Hall on November 30.

The company headed by Wayne McCrae usually holds its annual meeting on the Gold Coast. Cudeco has been feeling the heat recently for its tardy release of a hugely disappointing resource update on its Rocklands tenement and decision to buy back a swag of shares before its share plunge.

Unlike the last time it held its annual meeting in Cloncurry, Cudeco is yet to provide a list of local car hire companies, and hotels in Cloncurry and Mount Isa. It previously listed its preferred hotels in Cloncurry as the Wagon Wheel Motel and The Coyote Inn.

However, CBD failed to mention the ever-so clever strategy employed by NRMA and its "step-sister" IAG to keep some of their folk quiet.

By some magic stroke of coincidence, NRMA and IAG managed to convene their annual meetings at exactly the same time. Yes, NRMA is calling its members together at 10.00am on Wednesday 27th October and IAG is having its annual get-together at precisely the same time. How convenient!

NRMA's event, which has a big program that's dominated by an item of special business that will see its current constitution thrown out and replaced lock-stock-n-barrel by a new one, is being held in down-town Wollongong while the ugly step-sister, IAG, is having its shindig in Sydney.

Those arrangements obviously suit the teams running the shows but overlook the shareholders and members of the organisations who want to attend both events and voice their views about what's going on.

What does ASIC have to say about this?

Public relations Telstra-style falls flat with customer

A NSW North Coast reader sent this letter on to me with a wry observation about "a caring and compassionate Telstra".

I am astounded at what can only be described as the arrogance of this national telecommunications giant asserting in the letter that "we will look at what we can do to support our Grafton staff to find alternative jobs" - when around 180 local people will be looking for work in a region where unemployment runs well above the national and state average and an individual is likely to be out of work for at least a year before finding regular employment (usually on a casual or part-time basis).

This is a recent Keep Australia Working Regional Employment Plan assessment of prospects in the Richmond-Tweed and Clarence Valley:

In April 2010, the unemployment rate for the priority employment area was 8.1 per cent, higher than the April seasonally adjusted national unemployment rate of 5.4 per cent. Moreover, the youth unemployment rate for the same period was 12.7 per cent, compared with the national average of 11.7 per cent.
The participation rate in the region has decreased to 51.1 per cent as of April 2010, well below the national average of 65.4 per cent.
The average unemployment duration for job seekers in this region is longer than the national average (43 weeks compared with 34 weeks nationally). This represents a significant barrier to employment given factors such as loss of skills and motivation. The region is also characterised by well‐below‐average levels of educational attainment.

Transcript of the TELSTRA letter:

7th October 2010

Telstra Country Wide
North Coast NSW

[Name and address redacted for privacy reasons]

Thank you for your letter regarding Telstra's call centre consolidation and the potential impacts in Grafton and the Clarence Valley. I appreciate your concern for our staff and the community.

There is never a good time for such decisions and they are never easy. Please be assured that Telstra has taken into consideration feedback from affected employees and acknowledges the representations made by the community.

Like any organisation, Telstra must continue to make changes to remain competitive in a fast-changing market. Nonetheless, Telstra will continue to maintain a local presence in Grafton and the wider North Coast region in Telstra Country Wide, through our field workforce, and in our business and retail stores.

Over coming weeks, we will look at what we can do to support our Grafton staff to find alternative jobs. We will also support our people throughout the process with access to our employee assistance program and relocation assistance. Redundancy packages are also available and are among the most generous offered in Australia.

I hope that this explanation will go some way to reassuring you that we have explored every option in looking to continue our business call centre presence in Grafton before making a final decision.

Sincerely,

Michael Sharpe

General Manager

Telstra Country Wide

Michael.Sharpe@team.telstra.com

TELSTA CORPORATION LIMITED (ABN 33 OSI 775 556) I P.O. Box 1123 Lismore NSW 2480 P 1800 687 8291

Don't know what to get Dad for Christmas?

For Dads who have just about every imaginable thing and are real pains in the a**e to buy for, here's just the thing.

It's Wenger's Giant Knife - it weighs 2 pounds (about 5.5kg) and is 8.75 inches (about 22cm) long.

Priced at just $1400, the knife features 87 implements that at last count could accomplish 141 functions, including toothpick, fish scaler, special self-centering screwdriver for gunsights, tweezers and flat Phillips head screwdriver.

Don't diss the mayor and his deputy or the editor will censor?

Having a quick read of 'The Egg Timer' yesterday I noticed a letter to the editor which had an odd segue, so on a hunch I got in touch with the writer.
Seems this letter was published 18 days after it was emailed and 10 days after this year's Clarence Valley Council mayoral election.
Yesterday's belated version in the newspaper has been snipped and shaped, with the red highlighted section now missing. Hmmm..........

Glass houses vulnerable to stones

With good reason Clarence Valley's Deputy Mayor Jim Simmons is feeling aggrieved [DEX, September 18].
It seems someone has been using the entrance to his business as a public urinal.
What is fascinating about Cr. Simmons complaint is that he attributes this activity to an unnamed person or persons who possibly oppose his stance in the matter of the proposed new supermarket in Maclean.
Does he mean a well-known local developer who would have benefited from this supermarket or one of the many local residents who have voiced their objections to any loss of public space? Surely not! The Lower Clarence doesn't usually stoop to such behaviour.
Perhaps Cr. Simmons should look both closer to home and also further away for his culprit.
The clue may be in the timing "Thursday through to Sunday evenings....10.30pm and about 4am".
Leaving aside consideration of a disgruntled client, his business is in the immediate vicinity of a curbside bus stop which caters for local, regional, intercity and interstate private buses and CountryLink services. Some of which pickup and put down within the hours Cr. Simmons has identified. The same hours which see both pubs and public toilets close in Maclean.
However, this is September - the mad month at Clarence Valley Council when councillors begin to jockey for position in the mayoral elections.
Much better to be seen as a beleaguered shire councillor bravely facing a hostile community. Rather than one who is deputy mayor in a highly dysfunctional council where good governance and transparency appear to be missing in action, the Mayor and Council in the Chamber have lost any semblance of control over local government bureaucracy, official record keeping can be highly misleading, trust funds are misused, cost over-runs are just shrugged off, developer contributions are not always collected, senior staff think it acceptable that an official response to a good faith budget submission can be "so what" [Clarence Valley Council, 21 June 2010], certain councillors and management give the distinct impression of being in the pocket of at least one large multinational company and the mayor of this supposedly non-aligned shire council uses his official title to formally endorse a candidate at the August 2010 federal election ["Why we're backing Janelle Saffin",August 2010].
Cr. Simmons should not be as quick to point a finger at the Lower Clarence community - glass houses are notoriously vulnerable to stones and at last count the rumour mill had complaints to the NSW Division of Local Government, Dept. of Lands and ICAC concerning Clarence Valley Council climbing steadily during the time that Williamson and he have been at the helm.

JUDITH M. MELVILLE

Coffee Club's image turns to water......

The Coffee Club, which tries to promote a sustainable image with its UTZ certified brews, gets a dressing down in this letter to the editor published in The Daily Examiner yesterday:

Water wasters

I was disappointed the theme for one of the Coffee Club's Franchise of the Year events was a "water fight", which asked customers to buy a bottle of water and encourage their friends, work colleagues and family to do the same.

Don't they know bottled water is one the most wasteful products sold in Australia, particularly in towns like Grafton which have an excellent water supply?

Bottled water is expensive and is not worth the cost, either to the consumer or to the planet.

It has a high environmental cost at all stages - during its production vast amounts of oil and water are used, during its transportation more fossil fuels are burned, and then there is the problem of disposing of the discarded bottles.

All up, the amount of oil required equals about 20 per cent of the bottle's volume.

Australia's annual use of bottled water generates more than 60,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases - the same amount as 13,000 cars.

Bundanoon became the first town in Australia to ban the sale of bottled water a year ago due to concerns about its environmental impact.

I presume there is no Coffee Club franchisee in that town.

A much better stunt for the Coffee Club would have been to ask its franchisees to sell reusable bottles, which could be filled for free from the tap.

JANET CAVANAUGH,
Secretary,

Climate Change Australia (Clarence)

Women with the most influence?

Forbes Magazine's top ten influential women in 2010

1. Michelle Obama, First Lady

2. Irene Rosenfeld, chief executive, Kraft Foods

3. Oprah Winfrey, media mogul

4. Angela Merkel, German chancellor

5. Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state

6. Indra Nooyi, chief executive, Pepsi

7. Lady Gaga, singer

8. Gail Kelly, chief executive, Westpac

9. Beyonce Knowles, singer and fashion designer

10. Ellen DeGeneres, talk show host

That's not a real list - my mum's not on it. She could wipe the floor with Michelle O. any old day.

Mum sprang fully formed into Oz outer suburbia armed with the secret knowledge of lamb roasts, light as air scones, how to remove blue bottle stings and the exact length my pants should be at each birthday. Good onya Mum!

Regional newspapers still battling for relevance in 2010

From the Australian Newspaper History Group October 2010 newsletter produced by Rod Kirkpatrick:

Four regional dailies had double-figure percentage declines in circulation for the three or six-month period to 30 June, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. They were: the Standard, Warrnambool, 16.45; the Gold Coast Bulletin, 15.31 per cent; the North West Star, Mount Isa, 12.98; and the Geelong Advertiser, 11.56. And the Townsville Bulletin, down 9.95 per cent, was only a whisker short of a double-figure dip. Three of these papers are big dailies, not based in areas where there is a population slump.

The table below from this same newsletter shows that newspapers on the NSW North Coast continue to lose circulation as they battle to retain relevance for local readers.

Diversity with regard to range and editorial stance is important for regional media - whether it is print or digital, produced by professional journalists or bloggers.

While local newspapers urgently need to break out of parent company moulds which often simply clone the news across their banners and apparently encourage journalists to go for cheap regurgitation of media releases; readers also need to keep purchasing these papers as a way of encouraging regional journalism and protecting their own ability to access all shades of opinion on regional, state and national issues.

Buy a local newspaper today.