In a story that was retold to me by a young English woman on a trip to the Philippines left me shocked and outraged, I have read about this type of incident happening before but I never really believed it. I thought these stories were more urban myth than reality; this really goes on go with young solo travelers targeted.

She arrived in Manila and headed out to Intramuros, an area just south of Manila central with a wonderful Spanish influence courtesy of their rich colonial history. According to her she was befriended by a couple of women who invited her out to lunch, she duly accepted their kind offer. Apparently a male also came to lunch and was introduced as the husband of one of the females. She is where her story becomes somewhat hazy as she was drugged at lunch and loaded into the back of a taxi where she was driven around Manila and her bank account emptied via her credit card.

She recalls being in and out of consciousness where she was being kissed by a male accomplice but doesn’t speak of any sexually explicit activities going on. I did ask her if she felt sore or had and injuries, she replied that she did not. I did point out that there may have been photographs taken as she only remembers a small part of being kissed. I did unfortunately advise her to go and get some tests done for sexually transmitted diseases as she had established some form of inappropriate activity occurring in her description of events.

Upon being dumped and slowly regaining consciousness she made her way to a police station where she reported the incident when she was still affected by the drugs. The police took a short statement but were anything but enthusiastic about pursuing the matter further. She was shown a photograph where she was able to identify the male offender where the police stated that this individual was known to them but they wouldn’t be taking the matter further. The police cited the reason as being that she will be out of the country when the trial would be expected to occur; she replied that she would be in attendance when a trial is set.

All she required was sufficient notice to organise flights and accommodation. The answer was still a resounding NO. One suspects the police are in on the scam taking a share of the profits in exchange for not investigating this crime. Keeping in mind that this is the same police force given special permission to execute drug dealers, this is somewhat perplexing that they should not be keen to investigate a known criminal group using drugs as a way to incapacitate vulnerable women.

So here we go again, homegrown thug and genuine loser Dylan Robert Thomas has been sent a clear message by the justice system – your actions are condoned. In June, Thomas punched, without warning, seventeen year-old Sam Ortiz with so much force that Ortiz, already unconscious, fell backwards striking his head on the pavement risking life threatening injuries.

We have a serious societal problem where young people go out and get drunk before punching people whilst they aren’t even looking. We also have a justice system not only supporting such behaviour, this decision endorses one punch attacks – this is why we are where we are right now. Thomas avoided prison and was instead warned by the magistrate about the mindset of young thugs and one-punch attacks. Ortiz has been left with headaches and memory loss no doubt other injuries.

Thomas then went and assaulted another person in a one-punch attack twenty minutes later in the same area. If the magistrate wanted to send Dylan a message then he would have enforced prison time, that would make thugs think about actions and consequences. In a pathetic turn of events, Dylan and his family left the court smiling away taking selfies as if this is a big joke, unfortunately these fools are correct. This is the justice system, they walk free and mock the people they assaulted. 

Paul McCartney last played in Perth in 1993 so it’s been a while, so when Paul wandered out on NIB Stadium in Perth on Saturday night we knew we were in for a treat – Paul really knows how to entertain a crowd.

We were not disappointed, three hours of top class entertainment on a balmy Perth Saturday night. It might have been 36°C during the day but the evening really cooled off making for a wonderful evening. The moon hanging over the stadium really set the tone, Paul stepped back to enjoy the atmosphere and we did too.

Paul casually wandered on to the stage to a rapturous applause with his left-handed Hofner violin bass slung across his shoulder facing downwards opening with A Hard Day’s Night, Junior’s Farm and Can’t Buy Me Love. Paul played some old Beatles songs, some Wings material and newer songs including the Rihanna and Kayne West FourFiveSeconds song he collaborated on.

What I learned was that some of the old Beatles songs sound great live, much better than the studio recorded material we are used to hearing on the radio. Paul has an absolute on-stage personality, he is a humble guy and despite all his adulation over the decades, he is a great bloke. You knew there was going to be some Wings material and Band on the Run as well as Live and Let Die were going to light the crowd up. There was some Helter Skelter, Sergeant Pepper as well as Blackbird and a tribute to George Harrison with Something that began on George’s old ukulele.

I’m not going to list all the songs as we were entertained with a 40 song setlist; he had the WA Police Pipe Band on stage for Mull of Kintyre with bagpipes as part of the 8 song encore. We had an on-stage proposal and a whole bunch of fabulous stories between songs, this was a fantastic Saturday night and I am glad I was a part of it.

The strategy of issue avoidance and stalling in the misplaced hope that I just give up has proved to be a failed strategy. If anything, this has just strengthened my resolve; I will not only continue to pursue this issue, but I will increase my pressure on senior management until they address this issue. This failure of strategy will be constantly brought up until the issues is resolved.

This is moving to a case of challenge accepted, not can I also negate your stalling tactics, the roadblocks placed in my path can be navigated around. I am more than happy for the spotlight to be turned on our strategic business unit and our practices be placed in the public spotlight. When you have engaged in corruption the spotlight is not really want you want, the Public Interest Disclosure Act 2003 is designed to prevent acts of revenge against a whistleblower.

I will highlight not only poor public sector practices in a public forum, I will highlight governance failures at the highest levels. This can be a real career killer for the ambitious managers within the organisation. This is a strategy I am more than happy to engage in. Why not have some personal ambition at stake? This is very much a strong motivating factor. You have a requirement to prevent misappropriation of government funding and report abuses of position.

In what must still be a branding nightmare for Toyota, the prevalence of ISIL to wantonly parade around in Toyota branded vehicles must have been more than a little disconcerting. The Hilux was so popular with Daesh fighters that it has become a central fixture of the ISIS brand strategy. Whilst ISIL is all but defeated in Syria and Iraq, the splintering of terrorists to other areas especially in the Asia-Pacific region impacts us all.

The utility vehicle is fast and maneuverable packing plenty of firepower with a 50-calibre weapon mounted on the rear easily defeating soldier\’s body armour and penetrating lightly armoured vehicles such as the American built Humvee. The United States authorised a probe into Toyota to determine its sales strategy to terrorist organisations, a serious international business like Toyota wouldn’t jeopardise its international reputation for what is relatively minor sales; however, they could be doing more to track the third party sales though.

It is fair to ask, how is ISIL getting its hands on new Toyota vehicles? One expects brokers are buying vehicles and forwarding them to the fighters; however, as every component is stamped with a serial number, it isn’t difficult to trace the distribution channel and then shut down the broker/buyer. Toyota has a very strict policy preventing buyers purchasing their vehicles with the intention of para-military use or for terrorism. This supply chain is no doubt sophisticated and new vehicles are getting through; combined with the durability of the product and the availability of spare parts – this vehicle is perfect for their activities. This needs to be shut down and shut down quickly.

Heading up to Padang Bai on the west coast of Bali is a pleasant drive from Seminyak once breaking free from the hectic Legian and Denpasar traffic. Padang Bai is the ferry staging point for Lombok’s Gili islands and is also a pretty good muck diving location – I like the place. 

The cruise ship jetty was constructed to attract cruise ships further up the coast from the usual port of Benoa and around to the eastern side of the island. Unfortunately in an almost laughable case of poor design and mismanagement, the jetty was designed too short not extending into deep enough water for the draft of cruise ships.

Instead, on the one occasion a cruise ship did arrive, the tender transported the passengers to the jetty but as the jetty was constructed for cruise ships, it required passengers to climb up from the tender. After their day out and passing through immigration, the passengers were left on the unprotected jetty in a tropical downpour, no more cruise ships docked at Padang Bai jetty instead providing an expensive fishing and diving structure.

I was lucky enough to be once again be invited out on the boat of a sailing colleague for a weekend at Rottnest Island during what is the sailing season. We were at the beginning of the season with summer approaching, it is time for a little fun and relaxation combined with a few drinks, some really decent red wine ranging from Fermoy Estate to Vasse Felix.

We were skipping a sailing weekend, this was the Governor’s Cup with all classes sailing together in in race with a handicapped start. The yacht owner hates this race as the start is confusing, we are all bunched up and fighting for space, rounding buoys are a fight with collisions and damage galore. We sail in a restricted class with identical yachts, the racing is close and competitive.

While I was there, I began to reflect on what Rottnest Island means to the locals. What gives me some hope is successive state governments have not buggered up the island for the common people. Rottnest Island is not an exclusive enclave for the movers and shakers of the business world or Perth high society – Rottnest Island is truly for the people.

Naturally, an invitation on board a Riviera 48 is a pretty exclusive ride. The owner usually moors in Thompson Bay on a permanent mooring he owns. Thompson Bay is the main bay on Rottnest Island with only a short trip on a tender to the main settlement. The Perth weather in November should be consistent, so some time spent on a reasonably sized boat on the water in an idyllic location can’t be beaten.

On calm winter days, Rottnest Island is marvelous, what makes this experience even better is the lack of crowds in the off-season. The Christmas to New Year break is the period when the majority of businesses are closed for summer holidays and Rottnest Island is flat out with activity, this is our summer holidays. Mid November, Rottnest is still busy but not over the top so I was happy about this invite, it would be fun without the crowds.

I have to question the logic of heading over to Bali at Christmas time during the middle of the wet season dealing with the crowds and heavily increased prices. Rottnest Island is assessable to just about everyone, there are so many families spending their days in harmony with the island, I was amazed with the laid back approach of the floating residences from large to small, everyone was friends with everybody else. What a great place, maybe it is time for me to invest in my own floating holiday house.

As a young guy, I purchased Peter Lynch’s Beating the Street to assist with my share investing education. the lessons in this book are squarely aimed at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall St. 

I took some of the lessons learned and tried to apply them to the Australian Stock Exchange, whilst this was good advice to seek out value following smaller capitalised shares. I soon learned that the ASX at the time didn’t have the liquidity of the NYSE and the superannuation funds providing the liquidity for trading the leading 50 companies in the index and forget about it if the company wasn’t in the leading 100 companies.

Sure, there are some specialist funds trading in smaller capitalised shares but they are in the minority. Even the larger Australian mutual funds tend to invest 30% of their fund in international equities and 25% of the fund in Australian equities with international funds cashing out when exchange rate risks bite. I quickly learned Wall St strategies didn’t work out as well in the ASX as they did on the street – but then again, it might have been my execution. 

So the plebiscite has been decided with the yes camp winning the popular vote 59% to 41% The Parliament has been given the mandate to push the legislation through the lower house without any hindrance with the bill to then likely to pass through the Senate without any obstruction.

The people of Australia have returned their survey questionnaires, it wasn’t a vote apparently hence the Bureau of Statistics managing the process but it offered a pretty good indication of what people wanted. The survey asked a simple question leaving either a yes or no box to tick and a return postage envelope for the response. More than 80% of survey forms were returned offering a definitive answer – the yes vote wins. So we are going to have same sex marriage legislated in Australia probably before Christmas.

Back in 1989 as an apprentice I decided to look after my financial future and invest in a retirement security plan, a precursor to mandatory superannuation. I didn’t know much about investment back then and signed on the dotted line for the worst investment of my life.

Skip forward to 2017, for that 28 years of investment I am now the proud owner of exactly half a year’s current salary. So much for their claims of the magic of compounding interest and investment returns. If I had just waited a couple of years, I would have been able to invest directly though my personal self managed superannuation fund. Based on my personal investment returns, I could have grown that sum of money into a high quality investment stream for my retirement.

So where did my money go? Their high fee structure sapped all the investment returns, they didn’t post the investment returns and the fund was closed to new investors but wasn’t combined with other funds to gain a critical mass of funds. Running a self managed superannuation fund isn’t a cheap option but at least you have control of the investment criteria, returns and asset class selection. Why pay a manager to do what you do only to under-perform your actual returns for an outrageous fee?

Furthermore, they did not open an online account for this fund informing me that this is an old fund and they will not build an online portal. I would have to ring and make a personal appointment with their adviser during business hours to find out any information or wait until the annual report was mailed out. When I asked for details of how much I had contributed, the exact fees deducted and investment returns I was told I had been sent paper based copies annually and I should work it out myself. Now there is some excellent customer service for my outrageously high fees.

Pretty much all other funds have online access accounts including AXA and AMP accounts as the fund has been sold a number of times. It was pretty much this account that didn’t go online tending to indicate the importance of this fund, I was always told this was an old closed fund but wasn’t allowed to change funds within the group. Why would they?

They had a cash cow and I had signed on the dotted line all those years ago. I had always maintained my contributions, albeit these were minimum contributions for most of the period although I had made two large lump sum payments during the period. I had also allowed the monthly direct debit payments to be inflation adjusted but I knew these payments mostly went to management fees, this basically prevented a negative return.

So why didn’t I get out earlier? Well, there is a clause where they keep a percentage of the account and that percentage reduces every year. I waited until now as the US market has been on a fairly large bull run and I needed to lock in those profits to account for the percentage of the account they would keep. Also keeping in mind how difficult it is to actually withdraw your money, they placed every difficulty and road block in my path.

I have never tried to leave the Church of Scientology, an outlaw motorcycle gang or the NAZI party, but I can only imagine it wasn’t as difficult as getting out of the old National Mutual Retirement Security Plan and I have never felt the inclination to move to South America. Finally, I have cashed out now and combined the funds with a low fee industry superannuation fund and even losing a percentage of the fund I will still be ahead.

Fortunately, I opened an industry based fund so at least employer contributions were not profiteered into this account. With twelve years left to retirement, I have lost the advantage of compound interest but by combining these funds I may be able to salvage something of a reasonable retirement benefit after more than fourty years of employment.