Hobby farmer, love AFL, Cricket, Politics married with 3 Tin Lids, King of likes and retweet’s
Badgingarra, Western Australia
Joined June 2016
- Tweets3.4K
- Following1.5K
- Followers844
- Likes49K
Graham Lethlean retweeted
Forget all the huge supermarkets and their mawkish Christmas adverts, this was the best Christmas advert - Enniskillen pub Charlie's put out this advert back in 2023. It’s brilliant.
Graham Lethlean retweeted
Don’t touch it! Not a cent has been put in the future fund since Howard/Costello got booted to usher in the reign of Kevin07. The last 4 billion went in during the first few months of Kevin’s tenure but that was already set. The future fund has grown to 356 billion with only 64 billion in taxpayer money contributed and none since 2008. I celebrated KRudds election hard. We had a party that night. I was an idiot. What the future fund’s growth represents today is how rich Australia could be if we had kept on this prudent financial path, rather than got completely distracted by Labor’s bullshit. Again, I have only just realised this. And following Coalition Governments also have not been good btw. We need to go back to simple maths. Our politicians think they’re rock stars who need to be in the limelight every three seconds and they waste billions of taxpayer dollars in the process.
In today's @financialreview @cjoye writes that Australia’s professional political class has pulled off a remarkable trick. While borrowing the country into a $2 trillion hole at the highest interest rates in decades, it has squirrelled away $356 billion of taxpayers’ money in a sovereign wealth fund that, on his numbers, holds up to $150 billion more than its original purpose intended.
He says the surplus funds should be used to repay debt. Punting more than $150 billion of excess funding on financial markets while running enormous deficits and carrying $2 trillion of debt that is heading towards $110 billion a year in interest makes zero sense.
In 2020, the Commonwealth could borrow for 10 years at about 0.6 per cent. This week the 10-year bond yield was 5.4 per cent, its highest since 2011.
The money was taken from taxpayers to cover promises made to the public service. The promises are covered. Give us our money back.
Graham Lethlean retweeted
Ever wondered why PM Albanese is so ill-advised? Like does anyone advise him. I did the research, strap yourself in. For context Labor legend PM Bob Hawke had 15 staff in his PM office.
Graham Lethlean retweeted
She Was NOTHING Like the Other Protesters... 👀
I went to a ‘kids protest’ against Pauline Hanson expecting more of the same.
Then I met this student.
We disagreed on plenty, but she did something almost nobody else there was willing to do: have a genuine conversation.
Maybe there IS hope for the next generation after all.
SUPPORT: ProtectAvi.com so we can keep hitting the streets!
Graham Lethlean retweeted
Hughesy, quick one.
We've got a small restaurant in Perth. Paid our staff super every quarter for five years, in full, never missed.
Turns out the ATO counts it as paid when it hits the employee's fund, not when it leaves your account. Clearing house takes five days. We paid on the due date. So it landed five days late.
Five days late = the whole quarter counts as never paid. Then 10% interest a year on the full amount, backdated to 2021, ignoring the fact we paid.
Bill came in at $140k. Thats interest on money that's been sitting in our staff's super accounts earning for them the whole time.
Best part is there was no way to check. No report exists. You can't even get a login to the clearing house. I asked. They said employers don't get one.
Accountant says he's got other clients the same. Feels like half the small venues in the country are sitting on this.
Anyway, on a payment plan, still open, still cooking. Just gonna work a whole year and all profit goes to the ATO. Cheers
Is this fair ATO?
Graham Lethlean retweeted
To Britain’s farmers -
You got through one of the hardest summers in a generation. Five heatwaves. A flash drought. England’s driest July on record. Grass that stopped growing. Harvests weeks early. Fields that baked, cracked, and still had to be worked.
That is not a season you simply endure. It is long days, winter forage opened in August, water rationed, and crops taken when they were ready - yield or no yield. Arable, livestock, horticulture, dairy: none of you escaped it.
Congratulations is the right word, even beside the exhaustion. You kept animals watered and fed. You got the harvest in. You kept food moving when the weather was doing everything it could to stop you.
September rain has given the land a first drink.
The outlook now leans towards a wetter, more unsettled autumn. That is what is needed: rain that soaks in, soil that will take a drill, grass that grows again.
Thank you, well done. And here’s to hoping autumn is kinder!🍻
Graham Lethlean retweeted
Another attack on livestock farmers. If this gets up. The livestock industry is fucked and they know it. Who could afford to hire a vet to put rings on lambs or put down a hangstrung sheep. Or mules.
Graham Lethlean retweeted
I am not a builder. I am not an engineer. I am not a farmer, nor a miner. I cannot build a railway, sink a mine shaft or raise a bridge. In the civilisational sense I am spectacularly useless, merely a steward of memory through my work. But I refuse to let that memory be softened or rewritten.
Europeans built Australia. Not “contributed.” Built. The farms, mines, railways, ports, roads, bridges, dams, power stations, factories, universities and institutions which turned isolated colonies into one of the richest nations on earth did not appear by accident. Our ancestors crossed mountains, cleared land, sank shafts, strung telegraph wire across a continent, opened the Pilbara, built the Snowy Mountains Scheme and spanned Sydney Harbour. They did it through hardship and mistakes, yes, but also through ingenuity, discipline and enterprise.
Yet the coping never stops. Serious people increasingly speak as though Australia emerged from a multicultural committee meeting, with everyone contributing equally to the institutions and prosperity we inherited. They idolise Aboriginal Australia, as if pre-colonial society were perfectly peaceful, harmonious and free from conflict, all while casting white Europeans as though they alone brought violence to the continent.
Apparently the railways laid themselves. The wheat belt farmed itself. The mines excavated their own ore. The dams rose from the valleys. The Westminster system, common law and universities presumably washed ashore already assembled. Point out who overwhelmingly built these things and suddenly historical reality becomes racist. The people who built the country increasingly appear chiefly as villains, the "evil white colonisers," while those who arrived yesterday receive retrospective credit, as if without them, our civilisation would be nothing.
I will never build a harbour bridge or blast a railway through the Blue Mountains. My job is smaller and more pathetic: I keep the ledger. I remember who built the roads, raised the towns, worked the mines, farmed the land, fought the wars and built the institutions. We built it. The least we should do is stop pretending otherwise.
Graham Lethlean retweeted
The top tax threshold sat at $180,000 back in 2008.
Today it sits at $190,000 — a tiny $10,000 increase across 18 years.
Meanwhile, inflation over that same period has risen dramatically, meaning the purchasing power of $180,000 back then is roughly equivalent to around $270,000 or more today.
The government is making billions from bracket creep.
Graham Lethlean retweeted
The coal-fired capacity of Australia’s national electricity grid is down to just 21 GW.
And under Net Zero, aggressively championed by Labor, the Greens, and the Teals this remaining 21GW will be forced to close, with Australia prohibited from replacing them with new high efficiency coal fired power stations.
Their delusional justification? That Australia unilaterally abandoning coal will somehow “stop bad weather.”
This is virtue-signalling fantasy at its most destructive.
Meanwhile, China is roaring ahead with another 501 GW of new coal-fired power under development or construction.
Net Zero is nothing but a traitorous act of economic sabotage.
The betrayal is peddled by lying grifters, spivs, and rent-seekers who insist new coal plants are “uneconomic.” All while they stuff their pockets with taxpayer-funded subsidies to import Chinese-made solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries.
And then there are the gullible brainwashed low IQ fools - Communist China’s useful idiots - who have swallowed this propaganda, burying their heads in the sand to fact that China already has more coal-fired capacity per capita than Australia and in addition has more than 20 times the entire capacity of Australia’s existing coal fleet (which we are closing down) under development.
Think of our National destructive stupidity - for every GW of coal that Australia plans to close down - China is planning to build another 20GW.
Australia’s Net Zero advocates aren’t misguided idealists—they are actively harming the national interest.
By sabotaging our reliable energy base, enriching foreign suppliers (especially China), and weakening our economy and sovereignty, they function as economic traitors engaged in self-inflicted industrial sabotage.
Their policies de-industrialize Australia, export jobs and emissions overseas, and leave Australians poorer and more vulnerable.
Reliable, affordable energy base on Australia’s coal resources is the foundation of prosperity. Undermining it to chase symbolic global targets while our competitors laugh and build is not leadership—it is national self-harm.
Graham Lethlean retweeted
Alan Kohler on SpaceX’s historic valuation.
@AlanKohler has spent more than 50 years at the centre of Australian financial journalism, and few people alive have watched this country's booms, busts, and policy shifts with more clarity.
In this conversation, Alan and I trace the arc of Australian capitalism from the Poseidon nickel boom of 1969 through to the rise of Elon Musk and the AI era.
Alan draws striking parallels between the charismatic deal-makers of the 1980s, Bond, Elliott, Skase, and the story-sellers of today, and explains why irrational exuberance always takes longer to unravel than anyone expects.
He also gives a frank assessment of what Australian housing policy has got wrong, why superannuation remains the country's greatest economic achievement, and what capital gains tax reform should actually look like.
Search Straight Talk with Mark Bouris to listen to the full episode.
Graham Lethlean retweeted
We’re going backwards fast.
This clip pretty much sums up the mess Australia is in. For 10 out the last 15 quarters, per capital growth has gone backwards and over the four years since Albanese has been elected per capita growth has gone backwards.
It’s worth nothing the economic turmoil caused by Morrison’s response to Covid lit the match for this economic malaise.
No major party has a plan to lift Australia’s prosperity.
Tax rates and regulations need to be slashed, infrastructure needs to be funded and built, profits need to stop going offshore and our education/immigration sectors need to be completely revamped.
People First has the solutions to address these issues. Please lend your support by signing up at Peoplefirstparty.au today.
Graham Lethlean retweeted
This year the Home Office moved to stop expert sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand coming to shear British sheep.
The people who keep the animals comfortable were declared surplus to requirements.
For over a decade, around 75 of the best shearers on earth have flown in each spring on a simple visa concession. In a few brutal weeks they take the wool off up to two million sheep.
A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes. Hundreds a day. Calm hands, no panic in the animal. It is a global trade and a young body's game, and Britain has never grown enough of its own.
The official line? Fourteen years to train Britons, so the door is closing.
Here is what that tidy sentence ignores. A sheep must be shorn every year or she overheats, cannot move properly, and gets eaten alive by flies and maggots. Shearing on time is welfare, plain and simple, written into law and into the animal's own skin.
So a government that lectures farmers without pause about welfare has quietly made the most basic welfare task harder to carry out. After the outcry they allowed one "final" year. Then the experts are gone for good.
A sector already losing money on every fleece, already burning wool it cannot sell, now told it cannot even get the people in to take the wool off.
You could be forgiven for thinking somebody wants the British sheep gone.
Graham Lethlean retweeted
Everyone knows Dunkirk. 338,000 men rescued from the beaches, the "miracle" that saved Britain.
Almost nobody knows what happened 8 days later, 100 miles down the coast. This story was buried for years, and once you hear it you will understand why.
While Dunkirk was being evacuated, the 51st Highland Division was deliberately kept in France. Churchill wanted to prove to the French that Britain would not abandon them. So 10,000 Scotsmen kept fighting along the Somme while everyone else went home.
They fought well. Too well to retreat in time.
By June 10, Rommel's 7th Panzer Division, moving so fast the Germans called it the Ghost Division, had cut them off from every port. The Highlanders fell back to a tiny fishing town called Saint-Valery-en-Caux, with cliffs at their backs and the Royal Navy on the way.
A second Dunkirk. That was the plan. Operation Cycle, ships waiting offshore.
Then the fog rolled in.
The ships could not reach the beaches in the dark and mist. And by morning, Rommel had artillery on the cliffs above the town, firing down on anything that floated. Men climbed down cliff faces on ropes made of rifle slings trying to reach boats. Some fell. The rescue never came.
On June 12, 1940, Major General Victor Fortune surrendered the 51st Highland Division to Rommel. There is a famous photo of the two men standing together, Rommel grinning, Fortune staring into the distance like he is somewhere else.
10,000 men marched east into 5 years of captivity. In parts of the Highlands, nearly every family knew someone in the bag. They called it the lost division, and for decades many Scots quietly believed they had been sacrificed.
Two details worth knowing.
Fortune was offered better treatment as a general. He refused privileges and stayed with his men for the entire war, organizing care for the sick and keeping discipline in the camps. He was knighted from a hospital bed after liberation.
And in September 1944, the rebuilt 51st Highland Division was given one specific assignment, at the request of its commander. They liberated Saint-Valery-en-Caux. The pipers played in the same square where their brothers had surrendered four years earlier.
Dunkirk got the movie. These men got the long war.
Worth remembering them today.
Graham Lethlean retweeted
Australia has a relatively small population.
We share no land borders and are protected by vast oceans.
We have abundant agricultural land, enormous natural resources, and some of the world’s most valuable exports.
We’ve enjoyed more than 80 years without war on our own soil and never experienced a civil war.
There is no reason poverty should be increasing in this country.
There is no reason the middle class should be shrinking.
There is no reason each generation shouldn’t have the opportunity to live better than the last.
Australia’s challenges aren’t the result of a lack of land, resources, wealth, or stability.
They are the result of political decisions.
And for too long, we’ve kept electing politicians who fail us.
Graham Lethlean retweeted
We've asked our Defence Force veterans to put their life on the line for this country, now the government wants to cap the amount of healthcare they receive in return.
While NDIS fraudsters are running out of control, the government is cutting nearly a billion dollars in healthcare funding from our veterans.
This is Labor's Budget.
Senate Estimates June 2026.
Graham Lethlean retweeted
Haha “we were promised doctors and engineers, not uber drivers”.
Bizarrely, lots of Uber drivers are engineers and other useful trades, but the same immigration rules they came here on actually outlaw their using their quals here.
What a dog’s breakfast
Well we just hit a population of 28 million.
Too many too quickly.
We were promised doctors and engineers not Uber drivers.
3aw.com.au/australias-popula…
Graham Lethlean retweeted
A farmer dies in April 2026.
His son inherits the farm. The farm has been in the family since 1847.
The farm consists of: 300 acres of grazing pasture, a farmhouse built in 1892, a barn, a milking parlour, two tractors of varying ages, a Land Rover that runs about 70% of the time, and a herd of 180 Hereford-cross cattle.
On paper, the farm is worth approximately £3.2 million. This is because land near him has been bought recently by a London hedge fund looking for carbon credits, which has dragged the comparable value of every field within forty miles upward to a number nobody local can justify.
In cash, the farm produces a profit of about £28,000 a year in a good year. In a bad year it loses money. The son also works as a fencing contractor three days a week to keep the operation viable.
The inheritance tax bill on a £3.2 million estate, even at the reduced 20% rate, comes to approximately £140,000 after the increased threshold is applied. The son does not have £140,000. The son has never had £140,000. The son has £4,200 in his current account and an overdraft.
The son sells 60 acres to a developer to pay the tax. The developer puts solar panels on the 60 acres. The remaining herd cannot be sustained on the reduced land. The herd is sold. The barn becomes a holiday let.
A different family eats Brazilian beef this Christmas without knowing why the price went up.
The Treasury collects £140,000.
The land never produces British food again.
