 the least squeaky manner possible this was the shot I got - buck butts. Travis did his part by convincing the dogs that they didn't need to protect us from intruders. People can pull into our yard with big trucks, trailers, and a moving crew and the dogs don't say boo - a couple of deer and look out! I feel so safe at night...
Any way, they settled down and did some primping in the yard before disappearing into the trees.
I can only assume they headed down the ditch, cruising for chicks, telling crude jokes, making fun of moose - it's what young bucks do.
Great pictures of the two young lads!Analytics is a set of analytical tools and reports that show how you compare with your local market, and it’s free when you register on the site.
1. Log in to your account and click on Analytics.
2. On the Analytics tab, you’ll see four performance indicators through which we compare your performance with local competitors. All data that you can see on the Analytics page are based on the quotes you’ve sent through the site in the last 31 days and other businesses that quoted on the same jobs as you.
3. For Market Prices, we compare your average with the market average — are you more expensive or cheaper than your competitors?
Your Average Price is your median price for each price type*. The Market Average Price is the median price quoted by your competitors. The Market Price Range shows the low and high median prices for your competitors. Your quotes don’t get counted in the Market Average or Price Range. This stops heavy users from skewing the averages and lets you make a genuine comparison between your prices and theirs.
*For “Range” quotes, we calculate the mean price from the low and high prices in each range — e.g. (low + high) divided by 2 — then work out the median.
4. For Quote Speed, we show your rank as well as your average compared with the market average. This will easily tell you if you’re quoting on new leads faster or slower than your competitors.
Compared to Pricing, this is very straight forward. Quote Speed is the time between when a job was posted and when you quoted. We calculate the Quote Speed for every quote you submitted and do the same for your competitors.
Your Average Speed is your median time across all quotes, and the Market Average is the market median. For this measure we give you a ranking against everyone in your local market.
5. For Proximity, your rank as well as your average compared with the market average are shown. This gives you an idea on how close you are to the leads you quote on.
This follows the same method as Quote Speed, except we measure the distance in ‘km’ between you and the customer who posted the job to calculate the medians and ranking.
6. On the Reviews & Ratings tab, you’ll be able to know how many reviews you have compared to your competitors.
For these, we rank your competitors by their current Review count and feedback Rating %. Your Average scores are your current Review count and your current % Rating. The scores are the median Review count or current Rating for your competitors. We don’t work out what the Review count or rating was at the time each bid was submitted.Labor created a perception about wages to win the election. Now it must deal with the fallout.
It was Labor’s signature catchcry of the election campaign and one designed, intentionally, to assure voters that would no longer be the case if there were a change of government.
Labor’s pledge, fuelled by years of stagnant wage growth and a surge in the cost of living that began late last year, became the key issue of the election campaign over the final 10 days.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made wages a key part of Labor’s election campaign.
In a comment that appeared as unplanned as it was unscientific, Albanese replied “absolutely” when asked whether he would support a wage rise of 5.1 per cent “just to keep up with inflation”.
“People should be at least keeping up with the cost of living”.
A few days later, he had to clarify that he was talking only about minium wage recipients and that, if elected, Labor would submit to the Fair Work Commission that any such increase not automatically be granted to the 2.7 million award workers, as is usually the case. But such detail was lost in the mail.
To his detriment, Scott Morrison argued the nuance, warning of the inflationary effect of wages chasing headline inflation and that balance was required. Albanese, he said, was “a loose unit” on the economy, someone who was prone to “running off at the mouth”.
All it did was make Morrison look mean. Labor knew the balance between wages and inflation was a delicate one but, as one ALP strategist argued in defence of the simplistic proposition being put to voters, “it’s fear and loathing time”.
Labor’s immediate goal was to put the election result beyond doubt and worry about the details later. Albanese would simply hold up a $1 coin at his daily press conference and ask, generically, what sort of tightwad would deny the lowest paid an hourly increase of such an amount?
“The cost of everything that they buy is going up, but their wages aren’t. Scott Morrison says that that’s OK,” he said.
Labor won the election and, two weeks ago, was handed a housewarming present by the commission when it increased the minimum wage by 5.2 per cent and recommended a 4.6 per cent increase for the 2.7 million workers on awards.
But economists and business groups sounded a warning on inflation, fearing that the commission’s rate rise would become the template for other wage claims being lodged by unions renegotiating enterprise bargaining arrangements.
The lack of corporate knowledge is glaring. Bob Hawke and Paul Keating didn’t chase inflation in the 1980s; they accepted real wage cuts had to be part of a productivity agenda that led to longer term, sustainable wage growth.
Politically, the FWC decision enabled Labor to purport that it had delivered on its wage promise, but that’s when the narrative began to change.
It became time to “worry about the detail” – as the strategist forecast during the campaign – and dampen expectations that wage rises linked to inflation would become the norm.
In an interview a week ago with AFR Weekend, federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers clarified that the government’s submission to the Fair Work Commission for a headline inflation-linked pay rise was a “special circumstance”.
“One of the reasons why we welcome this decision from Fair Work so enthusiastically is because it made it clear that a minimum wage rise of this magnitude can be borne by the economy,” he said.
Before his interview, Chalmers had had several meetings with Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe, who had already upgraded his inflation forecast to 7 per cent from 6 per cent, by the end of the year.
Chalmers argued the best way to sustainably lift wages was through a broader productivity agenda to lift workforce participation by investing more in childcare subsidies and skills training.
On Tuesday this week, Lowe issued his own call for restraint, arguing that although pay rises above 3.5 per cent were possible “for a short period time”, anything beyond that risked a wage-price spiral that would inevitably result in aggressive interest rate increases.
“If wage increases become common in the 4-to-5 per cent range, then it is going to be harder to return inflation to 2.5 per cent,” he told a business lunch.
Amid this, Lowe’s own credibility to contain inflation is on the line. Money markets have lost some faith in the RBA’s interest rate guidance, pricing in, at the time, a 4 per cent cash rate rise by the end of the year.
Lowe said this would require the most aggressive interest rate rise path in Australia’s history. But he was forced to admit the bank had suffered some reputational damage from the messy exit from its yield curve target program that the market forced the RBA to abandon last year.
To contain inflation and restore credibility, Lowe will need to avoid a wage inflation spiral. Hence, his self-interest in the wage push by the government and unions.
Although Chalmers had already pre-empted Lowe’s views, they were not immediately embraced within Labor or the labour movement.
For example, ACTU secretary Sally McManus this week accused Lowe of being in “Boomer fantasy land” for raising the spectre of a 1970s wage price spiral.
That spiral, she said, was a product of now-obsolete provisions such as centralised wage fixing and pattern bargaining, which enabled wage increases to spread quickly across the entire workforce.
These days, with the low rate of unionisation and individual workplace agreements, McManus argued there was no such risk and, on that basis, individual unions should keep pushing for inflation-level wage rises.
After all, the wage price index was just 2.4 per cent in the year to March 31, well below the 3.5 per cent wage cap nominated by Lowe, she said.
“The RBA has said that pay rises cannot be 5 per cent every year. They are not even above 3 per cent at the moment. Working people have had their wages suppressed, this was a problem before inflation rises, and it will be after,” she said.
Business, unsurprisingly, was of a different view.
“I hate to say we told you so, but we told you so, that this would be the consequence of the Fair Work Commission’s decision to grant a 5.