A real photograph of a Masters Store. On an exceptional day there were observed cars “other” than staff members in the carpark.

Dear reader, if any of you own shares, or are even remotely interested in the stock-market, you may have taken a breather over the very busy christmas holiday period to watch the unfolding of the Master’s Big Box store saga. Ill be straight up with you, I know nothing about shares, and have next to no experience in matters of fiducial jurisprudence, and hazard to wager that if ever given custody of the chook raffle funds, there’d be a minor case of fraud or misappropriation. The fact is that ‘big business like to tell us they are in charge and they know what’s good for us. Because of this they like to think that unlike public enterprises like government, ‘theirs’ is reliable, and works efficiently. To paraphrase Mussolini, ‘the trains always run on time’.

The story goes that Woolworth’s, which is quite a big company thought they’d take on Bunnings, a very successful hardware chain run by Westfarmers. I don’t know much about hardware, but if you go to your corner hardware, sure enough you’ll find it closed, and a recent inductee to the dole office directing you to visit Bunnings. Bunnings is full of stuff that people want, and then curiously throw away. It’s a hyper, super cargo cult, we import rubbish from China, and then reconfigure it as rubbish after a year or two. Well the upshot is that this very successful business model has really worked, and Woolworth’s exec’s filled with the prospect of bigger bonuses eyed off this tasty morsel and decided they’d do one better, establish super-dooper stores all over the place, and quash the Bunnings giant.

It all went wrong. The executives at Woollies probably still got HUGE payouts and bonuses and all the poor people who worked there are all unemployed, discarded, effluvium, junk, rubbish. They have become the material personification of what they sold. There’s poetry and irony in that. But that’s not the end of the story, cos a lot of people have been saying, “See, this is where capitalism eats itself”, but I think it’s less capital eating, but bludgeoning bullet headed stupidity, AND I would hasten to add, has it been all that bad?

Woolies recently trialled the ” Wooly-Train” concept in order to attract punters to their Masters Stores. The idea has been scrapped but taken up by the Minister for Innovation The Rt. Hon. Christopher Pyne as a possible rapid transit link between Adelaide and ‘anywhere else’.

The answer is most assuredly ‘NOT’. As Woolworth’s expanded on their quixotic quest the cunning Goths at Aldi saw their opportunity and expanded right into the market Woolies thought it had stitched up, and in the meantime, Coles was fined for treating their suppliers like serfs and it all gets very confusing. That’s why there weren’t any Coles or Woollies exec’s getting Australia Day honours gongs. But you know that once the dust dies down it’ll be chock a block full of the deserving MBA’s and senior exec’s. It restores the natural order of things. So you may think i’m trying to suggest that unbridled laissez fair capitalism is a bad thing. You couldn’t be wronger. In the 90’s when we were told that Victoria was an economic basket case, Jeff sold off everything.

Mussolini who made the ‘trains run on time’, being congratulated by another Private Public Partnership expert.

Our rail system is quaintly Victorian. Recently the train system has just about collapsed. The regional trains are defunct and everywhere you look it’s a domino effect of spiralling incompetence. The trains, they just wont go. Exasperated the regional carrier, VLINE have granted us an ENTIRE WEEK of FREE TRAIN TRAVEL. This is how private enterprise should be. I’ve been to town three times in as many days. Hadn’t had to worry about the ticket Gestapo (Myki Inspectors) and the Gauleiters, (PSO’s), and today, whilst we all laugh that this week is a one off for bad service, it took me only three and a half hours to get to Castlemaine, some 120 k’s away. And as a consequence I had an opportunity of seeing familiar scenery up close, and marvelled. Not a Woolworth’s scale disaster, but we, the citizenry are now re- engaged with the world around us thanks to the beneficence of PRIVATE ENTERPRISE and their promise, that in the end, they’ll get it right. And occasionally the old adage runs true, ‘the trains WILL run on time’. More or less.