The Blog of Hubbers

This is so true. Gordon Brown got into government in 1997 on the promise that he would bring an end to destructive booms and busts in the property market.

Eleven years as Chancellor (the money guy) and Prime Minister later he has presided over the biggest boom of them all. And now the evidence of his initial bold claims is starting to disappear from government websites. Shameful.

I am reading this book that explains it all:

Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010

Earlier this year Grant, Cam, Russ and I purchased tickets to the Ireland, Wales and England rugby tests against the All Black in the UK this November.

The purchase was made through Sports Tickets International Limited who are, according to their site, the Officially Licensed Match Ticket Company of the New Zealand Rugby Union (”NZRU”).

The total amount that my Visa was charged was 922.85 but when I picked up my tickets yesterday the face value of all 12 tickets came to a meagre £632. This means that STIL added on a whopping 46% to the price of the tickets!

That is one hell of a mark-up!

This table shows the breakdown.

Naturally I have emailed them to find out what is going on.

STIL have replied

STIL have added a handling fee to the face value of each ticket. This fee covers the cost of making this facility available (including website and software charges, travel, administration, wages and processing fees), and as a result the face value of the tickets will not equate with the amount charged. Any income, which remains at the end of this project, once all costs have been paid, will be returned to the NZRU to assist with the development of Rugby in New Zealand.

I have copied and pasted the below from the Terms & Conditions Page on the STIL website, hope this helps.

http://www.stilrugby.wb.gs/book-tickets.html

How much money do STIL make?

If we assume that our tickets are the average price then STIL is making roughly £25 per ticket. If we also assume that they have 5000 tickets per game to sell then they will have 25000 tickets which means that they will take £625,000 or 1,766,519 New Zealand Dollars (today’s exchange rate is 2.826) to perform the duties mentioned above.

I am pretty sure that I could do it all for less than that.

I have emailed them again and asked them how much money is returned to NZRU for the development of NZ rugby.

STIL have replied again. In answer to the preceding question they said:

The breakdown is about 50/50

So NZRU get nearly ONE MILLION NEW ZEALAND DOLLARS for the development of NZ rugby which is good. And it costs STIL nearly ONE MILLION NEW ZEALAND DOLLARS to sell Kiwis in the UK tickets to 5 games of rugby.

So I asked STIL

So you are saying that it costs nearly one million New Zealand dollars to provide tickets for New Zealand fans for 5 games of rugby?

And they threatened me with this email:

Carl

I am not sure where you are getting your figures from and where you are going with this, but we will not be following any further line of communication.

If you like, we will take you off our database, and recommend you purchase your tickets direct from the host unions in future.

Kind regards

Margaret Faisandier
Sports Tickets International Ltd
The Official match Ticket Licensee of the NZ Rugby Union

You know what I am getting at Margaret Faisandier, you are profiteering from loyal All Black fans!!!

My next question is: Is there an open and transparent tender process for the job of selling tickets to UK fans? I think I would like to apply.

This certainly explains why they nationalised rail, Air New Zealand, TVNZ etc.

Scrubone at Half Done has gone through years of Kiwiblog archives, and pulled out all the best posts about what the Government have done wrong. This is essential pre election reading.

Summary of 2003 and 2004.
Summary of January to May of 2005.

You can enrol to vote on this non-partisan site:

The credit crunch has taken it’s biggest victum yet and someone has put Iceland on eBay!.

Get in quick every second girl in Iceland is a supermodel.

In case it gets taken down, this is what it looked like.

I have set up an online petition stating that Amazon should stop circulating advertising material for VistaPrint. Hopefully if we get enough signatures Amazon will stop doing business with these scammers and we will get them where it hurts the most … their bank account!

http://www.petitiononline.com/stop1111/petition.html

I have submitted a new definition for the word ‘palin’ to Urban Dictionary, an online dictionary where people can submit their own slang definitions and other people can vote up or vote down different definitions. If my submission is accepted it will appear here: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=palin

Palin

To have enormous success at something that you are completely unqualified for.

As in “Wow I really did a palin landing that managers job straight out of school!”

[Note: 06 October 2008]
I have submitted this to Urban dictionary twice. Both times they have rejected it.

I saw this staggering statistic about English public spending in the latest issue of Money Week.

If public spending had only grown in line with inflation since 1997, we could have abolished income tax, corporation tax, capital-gains tax and inheritance tax, leaving the taxpayer £200bn better off.

Governments have gotten very rich in the ten years of financial boom prior to the onset of the credit crunch. In the UK the Labour government has managed to spend it all and nothing was put aside for leaner times like um a global credit crunch.

I suspect people will look back on the UK governments fiscal looseness during the boom and wonder whether they were mad, drunk, on crack or all of the above.

The Prime Minister’s photoshoppers have been slaving away day and night to make her look like everyone’s favourite auntie and not an angry socialist dictator who will do anything for another term in office.

Just after 9am yesterday morning I rode through the intersection of Southampton Row and High Holborn as I do on the way to work every day.

Yesterday the intersection was surrounded by police who had a white tent set up and were filming the intersection. Rather ominously a large white lorry parked half way around the corner of Southampton Row and High Holborn. I chatted with another cyclist about what the likely reason for the white tent was. He suggested it was probably another stabbing as the UK is having an epidemic of them at the moment.

I forgot about it until today when I saw this newspaper banner outside my office in Holborn.

This is the full article form the Evening Standard. Cyclist killed in lorry collision is the second victim in a week