I am going up to Sydney today (for the third time this week) to the Golden Stave lunch. It has been going for 30 years!

Amazing...

It started when I was managing The Saints in the UK and Neil Warnock the Chairman of The Agency invited me to a music business charity lunch in London.

I had already decided to return to Australia and had accepted a position as Managing Director of ATV Northern Songs - which owned all the Beatles copyrights - great catalogue!

After going to the lunch in the UK, I thought, "wouldn't it be great to do something similar in Australia?" Part of the rationale was that in Australia the music publishers and the record companies could not have a decent conversation between them about the issues that faced the industry as a whole. All they could do was fight over the crumbs of what the statutory rate for a mechanical license should be. It was tragic.

I thought, if you could get all the parties focuses on an exterior issue, perhaps they could learn that being in the same room at the same time was not that difficult.

So one of the first things that I did when I got back to Sydney was to have a chat with Kent Atkinson, who was in the advertising business, and a close friend, and incidentally also on the board of Paraquad. He was the only person that I knew that was involved with a charity. I told him the idea of running a charity lunch and asked if Paraquad would be interested in being the recipients of whatever money we could raise. He thought it was a great idea.

Then I called up a few people in the music business and asked if they would be interested in putting together a committee. I think that the first committee comprised of Peter Hebbes, Jack Argent and Ross Barlow. I am not sure whether Kent was on the committee or was an observer from Paraquad. Ross was the token record biz guy.

Anyway, we put together an event, held it at the Sebel Town House, got John Singleton to be the guest speaker (he was great), and after taking out the costs of the food we had about $2,500 left over - which went to Paraquad.

Paraquad was delighted. They had never had someone raise money and give it to them without taking a percentage of the funds raised before. And the music industry was, I think, a little bit shocked, that it could get together and do something that was truly charitable and selfless.

Now thirty years have gone by and the Golden Stave Foundation raises every year somewhere in the region of $800,000 net which is distributed to charities that focus on the needs of children.

I resigned from the board of the organization some years ago. I am not an administrator of things. I am an ideas guy.  But I take great pride that I was the instigator of the Golden Stave, along with Ross, Jack, Peter and not to forget some of the other people who got on board very early on and added their energies to the concept. People like Barry Chapman, Michael Chugg, Brian Harris, Graham Fear and a lot of others...

I thought it was remarkably ironic to read this week that Lehman Brothers may be forced into a sale after declaring losses of almost $3 Billion:

Major U.S. investment banks this week announced yet another painful quarter amid the implosion of mortgage-backed securities and risky credit investments. Regional banks have scrambled to secure fresh capital to stay in business, and by Wednesday there was new talk that embattled investment bank Lehman Brothers might be forced into a sale.

After all, it was the Chairman of Lehman Brothers, as I recall, who went to Edward Bernays and asked him to come up with a strategy that would move Americans from being a "needs based society" into a "desires based society". That is the root cause of everything that is causing the world to fall apart at the moment.

That concept or meme was successfully exported around the world for more than half a century. Demand based on desire rather than on need, and a greed mentality from investors, has led us to the point that we are at now....

While we should be focusing on really important issues that affect the planet and its survivability we are all still caught up in the trivia.

According to a new poll reported in the UK's Daily Telegraph, Americans are trading suburban sprawl with New Urbanism.

This move has been taking place for some time in Australia and I suspect has been happening equally in other places that have a very strong orientation to personal transport rather than public.

I think that I must have been one of the very early people participating in this trend - first out of Sydney to Mudgee looking for the country life style back in 1989, and then back to Sydney after we had a lengthy drought - though not as severe as the current one, and after being hit with soaring interest rates via the recession that Paul Keating said we had to have.

Now I see the bifurcation of real estate prices in Sydney, with suburban homes in the west decreasing in value and houses in the inner suburbs of the east, like Paddington and Surry Hills, continuing to defy gravity.

What it all says, is that we define ourselves by the spaces and communities that we choose to live within. Richard Neville has an interesting view about the near future in his blog.

I think that there will need to be a massive rethink of infrastructure everywhere around the world to deal with the sorts of challenges that come from a continuing high cost of petrochemicals and energy. Frankly I see New Urbanism as a short lived affair. Coming soon to a community near you will be lessons in economic survival in a new energy constrained society. It will include looking at real estate investment and local services and communities - and over the next 18 months we will start to see smart money from the US and Europe seriously looking to find places to move to in Australia and New Zealand. The guys who are buying oil futures now and driving the price toward 200 bucks a barrel are the same people who are reading the data on supply. They are used to doing the numbers. They will figure very soon that the safest places to be in a world which is coming apart are where people speak the same language, have few guns, have a plentiful supply of water, etc etc. That means that you have to stop thinking about countries as being destinations and start thinking about small communities.

The places that provide the right mix of services, access to an airport, access to broadband, security, education etc are going to be the places where real estate values skyrocket over the next couple of years. (By the way, the fact that the New South Wales government couldn't manage a piss up in a brewery may actually be a good thing. Their inefficiency and inability will hopefully mean that New South Wales doesn't get swamped with people!)

Kerry O'Brien did an interview with an global oil expert by the name of Richard Heinberg.

The program web page is here. You can go to the video or read the transcript of the interview there.

This is something really important to watch or read. This guy talks really convincingly about what the near future for the world is. He argues extremely succinctly about how global oil supply is what it is all about and if there really was enough supply the speculation would not be there. So we can expect volatility and high prices.

That means a total rethink of all global logistics including transportation, the way that we grow food, and the fundamental way that we operate in society.

If as Richard Heinberg suggests we need to build transportation around electricity, it is going to mean massive opportunity to those who plan to be in areas of business that provide into that kind of infrastructure.

Watch the interview - it is extremely important!