Canberrans, according to the statistics, we are living in Nirvana, and Switzerland is our major goods export partner... ..

What do companies do when they need more liquidity?

They have a call on shareholders.

You raise some good questions – where is our opposition party on these critical issues?

Reportedly the Chief Minstrel admitted he shares my view about solvency and land sales during his regular segment on ABC radio on Friday morning. Seems he thinks 2030 is the tipping point. So why wasn’t this mentioned in his speech. Also why hasn’t the opposition raised this?

The “opposition” is 100 miles offshore and still drifting.

Sort of my point really. Statistics can be used used to argue almost any position of a argument. I think it’s far more important to try and understand what is behind the stats …

Stats can be used to drive certain arguments. The post above being a good example of how the person feels they have been done wrong and now corellating them all to something totally different.

Did you actually read this article?

The question at the end of your article asks about using “other measurables” to gauge prosperity but you don’t really suggest any. You just put a negative spin on everything and use vague rhetoric about poor “general amenity”, “strained infrastructure” and the need for “major policy changes” without much detail. There’s strong economic and employment growth and you just list off a bunch of downsides. Tourism increases significantly and your response is to complain about how terrible Canberra tourism is.

So much of the media in Canberra just taps into vague grievances without providing any real solutions. It’d be nice to occasionally read an article that properly acknowledges the positives and suggests actual solutions to the negatives.

Hi there, my point is that politicians and the media rattle of figures such as an increase of 10 per cent here, or in the case of service exports, a 25 per cent increase, without any context. This is a staggering figure … but is it from a low base? Was there something that was a one off or an anomaly … or a mistake??? My question is whether growth is always good. Don’t get me wrong, perception is almost everything – and we should talk Canberra up – but do it from a position of understanding the current economic situation. In relation to providing solutions – not my job – I’ll leave that to the elected politicians, their parties, advisers, consultants and Government departments …

It’s not about talking up Canberra, it’s about actually acknowledging good things, and also offering practical suggestions for improvement when critcising bad things – that’s how things are actually going to get better. I don’t agree that only politicians can do that. Your article suggests these stats are not telling the whole story, what measures can we use to tell the whole story? “Looking out the window” as you suggest just sounds like anecdotal evidence, which is subject to a huge amount of bias.

In relation to ‘looking out the window’, I was being ‘metaphoric’. I was saying that rather than take meaningless statistics at face value we should use a dialectical method to investigate them and discover what they really mean.

Tim you rattled off a heap of things with no context too.

Such as strained infrastructure, is it really strained? I don’t think it is personally. I think in the past (roads being the primary example) were underutilised and now we are seeing them getting busier, but still well within their design limits. So hardly strained. Sewerage and power grids much the same.

We need policy change, in what area? The way I read that is you don’t like the government and want a change. Why not just say that? Not that the opposition would do much different in power because there is little discretionary spending anyway.

I’m sure the fine apparatchiks in the regime would attribute all statistical tourism increases to the CBR ‘campaign’. I’d probably attribute it to increases in tertiary education exports and international flights into Canberra – parents and relatives coming to visit them in Canberra. My belief is that if we spend absolutely nothing on the CBR campaign and the millions of dollar in government media, communications and public relations people and the millions of dollars in advertising – that the tourism figures would still have gone up. It’s all smoke and mirrors, Capital Metro, smoke and mirrors …

International flights into Canberra is actually part of the CBR campaign. Remember the government has offered incentives to bring the airlines here via this program.

And what exactly are those incentives JC? (apart from a rainbow CBR lapel badge to wear).