1. The last time I thought about PK it was to refer him to the ACCC for his SMH opinion piece (6 May 08) leaving out $10B in valuation of assets (analysis of Dr John Kaye Green MP). PK was caught out talking his own book for power privatisation in NSW for his consutlancy Lazard Carnegie Wylie. Misleading and deceptive in breach of the TPAct? Certainly embarrassing for ‘the world’s greatest treasurer’. How indeed do you forget $10B in value - back to accounting school PK.

2. PK is famous for saying ‘back self interest, you know it’s always trying’. How true in PK’s own case - refer 1 above.

3. Now he is pushing for 15% ramp up in super in his famous ‘bog Irish’ facility with words - more akin to a poet than a Prime Minister. Is this self interest talking again in another guise? What are his financial interests in this agenda - refer 1 above. If it looks like, quacks like, paddles like - then probably is a duck.

4. Here for argument sake is a contrary view - super is a con. Why can’t people have their own money when they are young and can enjoy it most? Doesn’t enforced saving just make big investor funds and govt life easier and attack the democratic freedoms of people with their own hard earned income? Is this just another form of the nanny state encroachment?

I don’t fully believe this rhetoric above in point 4 myself but I do think PK’s motives do very much bare serious scrutiny. ‘Always back self interest because ….’ One can but only take PK at his word.

I had to check myself as I blogged him last Sunday as ‘Chris Warren’ (who is the MEAA guy) requiring a correction. These damn Chris’s - Senator ….Chris Evans is in fact Minister for Immigration and Citizenship.

And what makes this small glitch more amusing is that today Aug 7 Christian writes of “In politics, [apostrophe man where are you?] words are bullets. You use them well. You pick your target carefully, then squeeze the trigger.”

All your usual press hyperbole there, and stereotypical right wing violence fantasy - It was CK who lauded Mal Turnbull’s capacity for “wet work” while still with Crikey. Erk! Scary. Onya CK, just remember to get a Minister’s name right next time in your low circulation broadsheet - that’s what they pay yer for!

So did the inquiry look at why the retailers ‘willingly’ jam into the high rent big malls? My research on Bondi Junction Westfield 10 years ago goes like this - a big box mall isolated from street and natural light ‘traps’ more consumers into that phase of shopping behaviour. It’s the retail version of a pokies parlour with no clocks and no window or sky. So the big mall increasingly beats the strip shops down the road as a matter of human psychology.

So how do competing retail real estate moguls/super funds etc compete with the first ever mall way back when? They build a bigger box mall to out do the one beating up the strip shops. Then it’s an escalating race of over engineered mall versus mall, and greedier and greedier retail mall owners in a spiral. The Big Supermarkets move to the biggest malls with the highest rents to follow this human rats caught in a maze model and doh … their grocery prices ramp up accordingly.

The real issue is that malls that are supposed to be proportionate to serve say a SUB REGIONAL area like Bondi Junction are over engineered, with over sized car parks proportionate to a REGIONAL complex. As long as the latest big mall is bigger and newer it creates it’s own force of retail gravity. Due to variety and centralisation and host of Phd researched ways to mind f*ck the dumb consumer in the latest shopping cathedral it trumps the previous biggest mall. And who’s fault is this super size? The major political parties who live off the donations of the big developers to get the public airspace rights, the higher floor space, the extra levels for a demonstrably excessive construction.

Have a look at Westfields profit after only a year or two of Westfield Bondi Junction opening. They screwed every small strip retailer (and indeed other smaller malls) in the Eastern Suburbs from Pagewood to the CBD. It’s not the supermarkets that worry me - it’s the landlords of the super size malls, and the craven big political parties who sold out decades ago on public space, access to sunlight, street level amenity. In short donation bribery.

Nor do I think Alan Fels has got it right - it’s not that planning laws are too strict on alternative sites usually. God knows there are alot of empty shops around. It’s that the super size malls bulldozed political decency and development limits that should have spread the retail dollar alot more equitably in society. And the horse has bolted. I have no idea how you climb down from those air conditioned capitalist freak shows now.