The assets are loans. Customer deposits are liabilities.

It helps if you know a bit about what you are talking about before criticising.

Retail lending is only a small part of the business. And the cash rate targets set by the RBA don't reflect the capital costs of raising money internationally (where a fairly large amount of Australian debt is financed from).

Of particular note is that that the record profit made by Westpac of ~AU$6billion was on assets of ~AU$700billion. Which is a fairly terrible margin. Also Westpac has the worst debt to deposit ratio of any of the big 4 (aka it is most at risk). Maybe they'll keep some of that cash on hand to lower the risk or something?

I'm no expert but there is a hell of a lot of completely uninformed nonsense out there in the Australian public's mind.

"I think the labour party is doing this because of the rise of the christian right in Australia. Labour will never will votes from family first, and pandering to moral authoritarianism (a conservative platform) will alienate the labour base."

Who will vote for Labor regardless.

Another which is most obvious with small cars now days is the hood (bonnet for Australians and other colonies) is not flush with the top of the engine. The engine is recessed somewhat to allow for a crumple on impact.

Being hit by a Toyota Yaris is like flopping backwards onto a down pillow.

This is BP. They don't hire the best people to drill their wells, what makes you think they'd hire the best photographers.

It was probably just someone in PR with a camera they picked up from BestBuy the day before.

The photo is clearly of the same operation that's ongoing.
The operating system used for the mainscreens is clearly windows post XP. There is one screen which is XP (default theme). XP was released in August 2001 (the blogger claimed the photos were taken in June 2001).
There are blurry timestamps in the photo that say 16/07/10.

This is a complete non-story.

You must be new here.

Didn't one of the founding father's once describe the name of the office of president to be dreadfully dull? Like the president of a lawn bowls club or some such?

The atheist part isn't such a big deal in Australia, I don't think. Australians are very much secularists when it comes to politics. I suspect that the only PM in recent history to say the words "Jesus Christ" said it when their fucking hair drier went fucking missing.

We've had an anglican archbishop as a governor-general, but the guy a few before him was an avowed atheist (Bill Hayden).

"The NBN is a 100Mbps open access fiber network that will be rolled out to 94% of the Australian population"

Currently, the plan is only 90% coverage with fibre, although the recent report by KPMS suggested they increase that to 92%. I believe the 94% is the current (claimed) Telstra ADSL coverage.

Since when is a government consulting the community before doing something a bad thing?

Absolute rubbish.

For a start this was not a survey. Numbers never mattered.

Secondly, if it was a survey, then yes it would have been rigged by this process. If churches had been handing out submission forms during mass, then there would be outrage.

It was a chance for gamers to present themselves to a government as intelligent, informed individuals with a reasoned basis for the introduction of an R18+ rating. Instead, they've ruined the process they fought to create. The governments are not at fault here.

Game stores (like EB, as well as anti-censorship lobby groups) had forms available in store and were actively encouraging people to complete them, the game stores would then handle the posting, etc.

It was a fairly cynical manipulation to generate nothing but numbers of responses in favour, rather than actually arguing for the R18+ rating. It was a submission process, not a survey.

Gamers should have used the process in the way it was intended and the outcomes for them would have been better. Before the submission process was announced there simply was no debate, rather than get involved in the debate process that they asked for, they've ruined it by flooding it with worthless submissions.

This was supposed to be a fact finding process, gathering evidence for and against an R18+ rating for games. There are plenty of good arguements for it, and few against. I suspect very few of those for the rating were in the ~60,000 responses pumped out. This is a missed opportunity.

Coal fired steam!

The roundings were deposited in Gwyneth Paltrows' 1998 Oscar nomination account.