Michael Sanderson

See my unique, critical videos on Australia’s money system, superannuation, bank power, energy, public policy, and the odd bit of satire. No culture war distractions, just facts and accountability. Subscribe here @just-imagine" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@just-imagine

THE HAMBURGLAR LEFT McDONALD’S @LPOGroup says former McDonald’s executive Josh Bannister planned to cut the hard fought carded parcel payment received by 2,800 Licensed Post Offices because $2 was supposedly excessive. Two dollars to accept, scan, store and hand over a parcel while paying rent, wages, insurance and electricity. That is not excessive, Josh. That is barely loose change. It's reported Josh's remuneration is $1,635,813 Now that is excessive.

J. Bannister, EGM Retail Operations @auspost . He planned to cut hard fought for @LPOGroup carded parcel payments for 2800 Licensed Post Offices, he thinks they're excessive? $2 to accept, store & deliver a parcel, isn't excessive! Ever heard of RENT & WAGES, JOSH? #auspol

RENT-SEEKERS AND GRIFTERS THE LOT OF THEM During Christine Holgate’s two complete financial years as Australia Post CEO, it made a combined $83.5 million profit after tax: 2018–19: $40.6 million 2019–20: $42.9 million Australia Post’s four complete financial years following Christine Holgate produced: 2021–22: $49.5 million profit (A Legacy of Holgate?) 2022–23: $134.6 million loss 2023–24: $68.1 million loss 2024–25: $13.5 million profit They reward themselves more than the value of a watch for correcting their own mismanagement. Is the shareholder @AnikaWells blind?

FY 24/25, Smoke & Mirrors @auspost ! Executives @auspost post eye-watering pay, as salaries increase 34% & bonuses 95% ! How? They forecast a $42 MILLION LOSS, then make a meagre $18 million profit. The outcome, a $60 million turnaround that ticks KPIs.... Happy days!

youtu.be/zr5W_Y_RY14 Rennick is right to call this out. Barnaby Joyce’s proposal to give the RBA a bigger role in directing government spending is not economic reform. It is government by central bankers. One Nation claims to stand against globalist power, but handing more influence to an unelected central bank that sits inside the global central banking network points in the opposite direction. If the problem is lack of democratic accountability, the answer is not to move more economic power away from Parliament. The RBA is not independent of Parliament in any sovereign sense. It was created by Parliament under the Reserve Bank Act 1959. Whatever operational independence it has exists only because Parliament allows it. Parliament created it. Parliament can amend it. Parliament can limit it. Parliament can direct it. Its independence is not above democracy. It is at the pleasure of Parliament. The deeper problem is that Joyce and One Nation are still stuck inside the household budget frame. The Commonwealth is not a household. It does not need to collect taxpayer dollars before it can spend. As the issuer of the Australian dollar, federal spending creates dollars into the economy. Federal taxes remove dollars from the economy. Bonds are not the source of Commonwealth spending. They are an interest bearing savings vehicle for the private sector. That does not mean spending is unlimited in any practical sense. The real limits are labour, skills, materials, energy, supply chains, productive capacity and inflation risk. The question is not whether the Commonwealth can “find the money”. The question is whether public spending builds real capacity or feeds speculation, imports, asset inflation and private profit. The other missing issue is private debt. Australia does not run only on Commonwealth spending. It also runs on bank credit. Banks create new purchasing power when they lend. When that credit flows into productive investment, it can expand capacity. When it flows into land, housing speculation and asset markets, it drives private debt, asset inflation and financial fragility. That is what mainstream economics keeps missing. Steve Keen’s point is critical. In a credit economy, aggregate demand is GDP plus the change in debt. When private debt expands, demand is boosted. When private credit slows or households and businesses start deleveraging, demand falls and unemployment rises. That is why private debt and bank credit drive booms and busts. So the answer is not to give the RBA more power to squeeze households with interest rates or lecture elected governments on fiscal policy. That attacks symptoms while leaving the private debt machine largely intact. Inflation should be fought by building capacity and reducing structural costs. Build power. Build water. Build housing. Build transport. Build productive industry. Rebuild public ownership where monopoly infrastructure has been flogged off. Stop letting private finance milk public necessity. Joyce and One Nation are right to talk about inflation and cost of living, but wrong if their answer is more power for the RBA. Put fiscal responsibility back where it belongs, with Parliament, and judge spending by whether it serves a good public purpose, expands Australia’s real productive capacity and reduces our dependence on private debt driven speculation.

The last thing anyone should do is give more powers to the RBA. 👇 Yet that is exactly what One Nation is proposing. If making the RBA independent was the solution to our problems then why has Australia's economy gone backwards since it was granted full independence in 1996. There are numerous examples where the RBA has recklessly inflated spending such as Covid only to then impose a credit crunch to rein in their own stupidity. Furthermore we do not need to give more powers to unelected officials, especially central bankers. Don't get me wrong, you can't trust politicians when it comes to spending your money either but at least you get to vote them out. As seen in estimates the RBA is heavily influenced by the International Bank of Settlements, the most insidious globalist organisation on the planet. Not to mention the unwillingness of the RBA to repatriate our gold bars from the Bank of England. The idea that One Nation wants to give the RBA more powers goes to show when it comes to economic management, they have no idea as to what they are doing. It also makes a mockery of their claim to be standing up to globalist organisations. This is just another reason to vote for People First. We will control inflation by building infrastructure and cut government waste without the RBA holding our hands. If you want the real solution to our problems sign up today at Peoplefirstparty.au ••••••••• "One Nation treasury spokesman Barnaby Joyce has signalled a radical reshaping of the Reserve Bank of Australia as one of the party’s top priorities, arguing that the institution should have powers to pressure governments to reduce inflation. The government has moved to making a Reserve Bank less independent. I believe it’s got to go in the completely opposite direction – more independent. And I think, in that discussion, the bank must clearly state: this is the target money the government should be putting into the economy."

You got to love pommy politics Count Binface takes on Farage youtu.be/Z-hUOlP7-l8

WHO IS ANIKA WELLS REALLY SERVING? @AnikaWells is one of the shareholder ministers responsible for Australia Post. That means she is not just another politician with a media line. She is one of the public stewards of a national asset that belongs to the Australian people. So here is the question. What in her real life or professional background qualifies her to understand the lived reality of the Australia Post retail network? Has she run a small business? Has she operated a licensed post office? Has she managed a logistics network? Has she depended on a local post office as the last face to face service in town? Has she lived in a rural or remote community where the post office is not a convenience, but a lifeline? Has she relied on Bank@Post because the banks walked away? Has she depended on cash because digital banking, apps and call centres do not work for everyone? Has she had to navigate government systems as an older person, a disabled person, a poor person, or someone excluded by paperwork, distance and digital design? Her public background shows law, politics, ministerial office and Parliament. That may qualify a person for Cabinet. It does not automatically qualify a person to understand postal workers, licensed post office operators, cash dependent communities, regional small businesses, older Australians, disabled Australians, or people left behind by the withdrawal of banks and public service counters. This matters because Australia Post is not a private retail chain. It is public infrastructure. It is postal access. It is parcel access. It is identity access. It is cash access. It is banking access. It is small business logistics. It is disaster resilience. It is often the last human counter left in a community hollowed out by banks, government withdrawal, outsourcing, privatisation and digital exclusion. I have written directly to Minister Wells about the direction of Australia Post and her responsibilities as shareholder minister. The issues are not minor. They go to closures, downgrades, pressure on licensed post offices, Bank@Post, cash distribution, public ownership, the role of the board, and whether Australia Post is being quietly managed down under the language of modernisation and financial sustainability. If a shareholder minister will not seriously engage with those concerns, what conclusion are Australians meant to draw? Is she actively governing Australia Post in the public interest? Or is she simply accepting the line from the board, the bureaucracy, the banks and the commercial consultants? Is she standing up for regional communities, older Australians, disabled Australians, cash users, licensed post office operators and small businesses? Or is she acting as a political shield for an industry friendly model that lets banks withdraw, lets private interests profit, and leaves Australia Post and its licensees carrying the public burden? I am not interested in personal abuse. I am interested in accountability. But when a minister with no obvious postal, logistics, small business, regional, cash access or lived hardship experience refuses to meaningfully engage with the people raising these issues, the question becomes unavoidable. WHO IS SHE SERVING? The Australian people who own Australia Post? Or the corporate logic that is hollowing it out?

FY 24/25 Executives @auspost post eye-watering pay, as bonuses increase 95% ! CEO Paul Graham @auspost $3.2 MILLION & now THE HIGHEST PAID PUBLIC SERVANT! The old adage still rings true, "You only get one Australia Post in your life, don't waste it". Acceptable @AnikaWells ?

@PeterDClack Second opinion youtu.be/V3Fhm_ZDhsY

@PeterDClack Yes an inconvenient and ideologically ignored truth youtu.be/MjEbPocJQP0

Building grid-scale battery systems capable of backing up a nation for times of low wind or sunlight (known as a Dunkelflaute) face massive physical constraints. (2/2) This specifically occurs in mining for lithium, cobalt and copper, plus the soaring production costs. You cannot mine the quartz, smelt the silicon, forge the steel or transport the massive blades of a wind turbine without high-density heat and power. This is only provided by coal, oil and gas. Because wind and solar are intermittent, they require rapid-start gas peaker plants or spinning coal reserves to idle in the background, ready to jump in the second the weather shifts. The grid struggles to handle this thermodynamic mismatch. The world needs to plug intermittent, weather-dependent sources into an industrial grid that demands absolute, second-by-second equilibrium. We have had more than a century to refine grid efficiency. Rebuilding the world's power grids to handle this incompatible energy isn't just difficult—it is a fresh financial black hole. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, achieving net zero will require $275 trillions in cumulative capital spending by 2050—a massive portion of which must be diverted just to overhaul and rebuild these incompatible power grids and storage systems. The renewable supply chain won't rescue us either. It's firmly anchored in the fossil fuel economy. After 40 years of guilt and more subsidies, amid fading political belief, fossil fuels still carry the cross of sustaining human civilisation. IMAGE: Aerial shot of an open-cut mine, which drives home the massive physical constraints of extraction.

@KellyAlspals @FT She makes a lot of noise but at the end of the day nothing meaningful changes. I don't know if that is Party or Personal, or maybe a bit of both?

‘The brakes failed and they’ve crashed the car’: how the Big Four’s wheels fell off Down Under - ft.com/content/f0f852… via @FT

@fuwap15 @LPOGroup Here's a new one 'Cash Distribution Framework Bill 2026 and Cash Distribution Framework (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2026' Submissions close on the 17th aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_…

@ecoproducer @LPOGroup Well put, mate! 👏👏

Please help to save our Community Licensed Post Offices @LPOGroup ! THEY ARE VITAL FOR RURAL, REGIONAL & REMOTE AUSTRALIA. Make a submission! aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_… Ross Cadell, Nats.

No, the dishonest frame is both ways. The Commonwealth does not need to “make money” from HECS repayments. It issues the currency. HECS is a political choice to load the cost of national skill formation onto students, then claw back their future income through the tax system. That is not honesty. That is neoliberal debt discipline dressed up as fiscal responsibility.

Grifters at the anti-Australian Institute spreading their lies and disinformation. Again. The government does not "make money" from the repayment of loans - which is what HECS repayments are. Why can’t these people just be honest ?

player.captivate.fm/episode/2374bc… Disturbing but well worth a listen. Macro N Cheese, featuring Bill Mitchell discussing MMT, neoliberalism, capitalism and state power. Mitchell’s core point is that MMT is a lens, not a political program. It shows that currency issuing governments are not financially constrained like households. But knowing that is not enough. The harder question is why governments choose war, corporate support and austerity instead of housing, health care, jobs and public services. His answer is class power. He argues that the neoliberal era was not an accident or a policy mistake. It was a deliberate capture of the state by capital. Government did not become weak. It was redirected. Its legislative, regulatory and spending powers were increasingly used to serve capital rather than workers. Mitchell says progressives often misunderstand this. They think the system is broken and can be fixed by electing better people. He argues the system is working as designed for those who captured it. The economy is failing ordinary people, but succeeding for the wealthy, corporations, finance and the military industrial sector. The discussion also covers debt, consumerism, media control, AI, propaganda and climate breakdown. Mitchell presents a bleak view. Ordinary people are trapped by debt, work pressure and survival needs, while elite power becomes more concentrated. His final message is not cheerful, but it is practical. People should stay informed, help those around them, fight injustice where they can, and be ready to challenge the system when instability forces deeper change.

youtu.be/KX1jasLGYA4 The Anachronism of Treasury Bonds: Phasing Out the Illusion of Government Debt Sovereign governments that issue their own fiat currency do not need to issue Treasury bonds in order to spend. Bond issuance is not a financing necessity. It is a policy choice inherited from earlier monetary arrangements, including the gold standard era, when public finance was explained through a borrowing framework that no longer fits a modern currency issuing state. Treasury bonds may still serve financial market functions. They provide safe assets, collateral and benchmark interest rates. But those functions should not be confused with funding the Commonwealth. A government that issues its own currency does not need to borrow back the currency it alone can create. The traditional bond market now carries a heavy public cost. It helps sustain the false household metaphor. It encourages the public to believe that the national government must first borrow before it can invest, and that public purpose is limited by a stock of debt rather than by real productive capacity. Modern central banks can manage interest rates directly by paying interest on reserve balances. There is no functional need to maintain a large bond issuance system merely to preserve the appearance that the Commonwealth is financially dependent on private markets. Phasing out routine Treasury bond issuance would help expose the real limits on public investment. Those limits are not the availability of dollars. They are labour, skills, materials, energy, technology, supply chains, ecological capacity and inflation risk. Australia needs a new economic narrative. Public investment should be judged by whether it serves public purpose and whether the real economy can absorb it, not by whether it adds to an accounting fiction called government debt.

The closing observation of my submission to Australia Post retail network inquiry: The Committee should be careful not to repeat the false orthodoxy that has justified the hollowing out of other essential services. Australia has seen banking, energy, aviation, education, vocational training, health, aged care, housing, employment services, telecommunications, transport, social security, including the Age Pension, and core public service capability privatised, outsourced, marketised, digitised or commercialised on the promise of cheaper, better and more efficient service. The national result has been thinner service, higher costs, weaker resilience, less safe and less reliable systems, public subsidy without public control, private profit without universal obligation, and a transfer of wealth from those with the least to those who already have the most. It has also entrenched exploitative service models, weakened public capability, reduced productive and manufacturing capacity, increased dependence on private consultants, and undermined sovereign independence. The revolving door is part of that failure. When people move between government, regulators, consultants, corporate boards and contracted service providers, private style solutions can be normalised, institutional memory can be weakened, public and private interests can become blurred, and policy capture can be mistaken for expertise. The same mistake should not be made with Australia Post. The Commonwealth is not financially constrained like a household. Its real constraints are labour, skills, premises, technology, logistics, materials and inflation risk. But Australia also has roughly two million people unemployed or under employed. That is unused national capacity. It should be trained, paid and used for public purpose, not left idle while essential services decay. Fiscal and commercial dog whistles such as trillion-dollar debt, budget black hole, taxpayer dollars, commercial sustainability, modernisation, efficiency and flexibility should not be allowed to narrow this inquiry before the evidence is critically considered. Those words can sound responsible while concealing a policy choice to manage down public service. The question is not whether Australia can afford to maintain a national public service network. The question is whether Australia can afford the social, economic, administrative and sovereign cost of allowing it to decay. The question before this inquiry is whether this Committee will accept the false assumptions that hollowed out other essential services, or whether it will draw a line at Australia Post and recommend the public capacity needed to maintain, rebuild and expand a service network that serves all people, strengthens public purpose and gives every community, regardless of size or location, a public floor to stand on. youtu.be/cLd0MyoWzW4

@stugoo17 Yes, sadly.... The same old story, relevant Ministers failing to manage their portfolios, enables Executives to exploit Postal Licensees here, sub Postmasters there, to maximise obscene bonuses by rorting mum & dad, small businesses..... When will the cycle be stopped??

#PostOfficeScandal #NetworkTransformation Groundhog day down under 🇦🇺🪃📩🔻📩

🆘HAVE YOUR SAY🆘 A Senate inquiry is now open into the Australia Post retail network. If you care about local post offices, regional services, postal banking and the future of @auspost, make a submission 👇before the 7th of August: aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_…

Please stop framing this as though the Commonwealth needs tax revenue before it can act. It does not. The Federal Government can already spend in Australian dollars, constrained by real resources, not by a shortage of dollars. A gas tax is therefore not about funding federal spending. It is about curbing windfall extraction, enforcing a stronger public claim over gas, and ensuring more of the benefit flows to Australians instead of being captured at the top. That is also the real lesson from Norway. Norway treated oil and gas as strategic national wealth. It imposed a strong public claim, retained direct public ownership in fossil fuel extraction, and saved a large share of the return abroad in foreign assets rather than pretending it could meaningfully save in its own currency. We do not need the tax as much as we need the gas. The stronger demand is not a 25 per cent gas tax. It is that at least 25 per cent of the gas be reserved for Australian domestic use.

The Australian Government makes more money from HECS repayments than it does from the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax. Read more here: australiainstitute.org.au/post/in-2023-2…

@RobbieBarwick Boom boom

The married ones aren't so sure.

JUST ANNOUNCED New Senate inquiry now open into the Australia Post retail network. If you care about local post offices, regional services, postal banking and the future of @auspost, make a submission here: aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_…

JUST ANNOUNCED New Senate inquiry now open into the Australia Post retail network. If you care about local post offices, regional services, postal banking and the future of @auspost, make a submission here: aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_…

Minister @AnikaWells are you aware that CEO Paul Graham & his cronies @auspost , are planning to turn the Licensed Post Office Network into a Franchise modeled on "McDonald's" ? IT IS AN ESSENTIAL SERVICE!!! This & other current strategies are decimating the Network! #auspol

@fuwap15 Branxton PO could have been kept open with a fraction of CEO Paul Graham bonus, let alone his disproportional salary. youtu.be/cLd0MyoWzW4

Best wishes to John & Margaret Wilson, Licensees of Branxton LPO. After over 22 years of service to their community, they deserved better. 2nm.com.au/local-news/bra…