Today marks my last broadcast for some weeks. As you know, I enter hospital for surgery in relation to prostate cancer.
May I thank all those people who've written with such kindness and generosity and care. They number in their thousands and I will never be able to properly thank people for their spontaneous and unstinting kindness.
I can only hope that men get in early, go to your doctor, don't be afraid, have all the checks. Ask the questions, whether it be about prostate cancer or colonoscopy or your PSA score or even what your blood tests are meant to tell you.
Men are, by and large, hopeless when they become their own doctors. “I'll be all right”, or “I don't need to go”, or “I'm frightened of what he might tell me”.
Head up, shoulders back and go for it.
Which I suppose is what I wish the New South Wales Government had done on this wretched Beechwood Homes fiasco. As you'd now know, and some to their own detriment, the collapse of Beechwood Homes left thousands of consumers, employees and tradespeople stranded.
There's now an administrator, Andrew Wily who's compiled a comprehensive report into the $20 million collapse. And he raises one very important point.
Transfers of money were made just before the company's owner, Larry King, placed the company in administration on May 13. Now this fellow, King, lost 72 million dollars on a failed thoroughbred breeding syndicate. $72 million.
Now the administrator is asking whether $47 million had gone out of the company Beechwood Homes and into the thoroughbred outfit, Written Bloodstock.
Now I've made this point many times before.
Linda Burney, the Fair Trading Minister is as decent a lady as you'd get. But she gets advice.
And as with Cross City tunnels and Bathurst Hospitals and M5 East car emissions and the Lane Cove tunnel, you could go on and on, where are the bureaucracy in all of this. Who is properly advising the Minister?
If a builder lost $72 million on his racehorses, it's clear under the New South Wales Home Building Act that the Department of Fair Trading has a duty to start asking questions.
There had been more than 100 complaints relating to this crowd over three years.
All the Minister said was she'd been closely monitoring the situation.
If you were a consumer left out of pocket you would be, pardon the expression, bloody angry. Consumers were entitled to be warned.
Now, thanks to a complex web of loans, this same bloke Larry King, who everyone thought owned the company, has now become its biggest creditor.
In other words, a builder whose losses on racehorses helped bring down a housing construction company becomes the same company's largest creditor. And there are other companies associated with this fellow King that owe huge sums to Beechwood but are lining up as creditors as well.
Yet there are 650 trade creditors, fair dinkum ones, and another 580 consumers who are going to lose $24 million. But because companies associated with this fellow King claim to be owed 50 million, he'll have controlling votes in creditors' meetings.
Now what's the New South Wales Government going to do. What is Linda Burney going to do?
If it means recalling the Parliament to pass appropriate legislation you should.
A bloke gambles on racehorses, allegedly transfers money from a housing construction company, Beechwood Homes, into his thoroughbred syndicate, Beechwood Homes goes under and through a complex series of loans, the owner of Beechwood Homes who has precipitated its collapse is now lining up ahead of tradespeople and dudded home owners to claim the largest slice of whatever is available for creditors.
If the Government stands by and allows that to happen, then it deserves whatever weight of criticism comes its way.
Linda Burney has a massive problem on her hands and she doesn't have a lot of time to deal with it.
