Four trends that just disrupted two-party politics

Adam: [00:00:25] Hello and welcome to comedian versus economist. We demystify the world of money and help you get a handle on the bigger picture. My name's Adam and we're joined, as always, by my little older brother and real life economist Thomas. Hi Thomas. 

Thomas: [00:00:39] Gday Adam how things are going. 

Adam: [00:00:41] Very well. Thank you. Look, before we start the show, we've got a small favour to ask. We're coming to the end of the financial year and taking stock of where we're at. Through our stats, we know we've got one of the highest listen through rates in the industry. Now we're on a drive to grow our list of numbers. So if you know one person who is intelligent, curious about the world with a good sense of humour, then please tell them about us or tag them in one of our social posts that would really help us out. And if you're here because someone told you about it, then welcome as always. Big show coming up. Let's get into it. I hope you're not a data hater because we've got lots of wages and labour data. Cameron Archer Normally I'd pronounce that data obviously, but I couldn't find anything to rhyme with data except farter. But that's not the kind of humour about on this show. We're far too highbrow for fart jokes. Oh, excuse me. Anyway, Vivian, did you eat your Wheaties this morning? Well, I hope you enjoyed them because we're entering a weight shortage. Will Aussie kids really have to become kale smoothie kids instead? No more Big Macs for Russia after McDonald's gave it the Big Nyet. The company is putting an end to its business in Russia after three years plus. We've got more of your listener questions coming up a little later in the show. But first, Thomas, I cast my vote weeks ago, so I actually forgot it was on. But apparently there was an election last weekend. What did you make of the federal election? 

Thomas: [00:02:11] Yeah, I had a wonderful time. It was good. I always enjoy staying up and watching the count come in. 

Speaker 1: [00:02:18] Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Thomas: [00:02:20] It's fascinating, I find.

Adam: [00:02:23] I was at the swimming, I went to the Australian National Swimming Championships, was out in Adelaide. Oh yeah. Horses for courses, I suppose. Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:02:32] Interesting results, I reckon. I mean. Yeah, epic results the more covered in the paper. But the thing that the thing that jumps out for me is that I reckon what we're looking at is a disruption of to party politics. Like, if you think about politics as an industry, it's run by a duopoly. The duopolies can control market share for generations, but now it's getting disrupted. And you've got these sort of incumbents cutting cutting their turf long. Yeah. And so the way the way I see it. So, you know, Warren Buffett talks about moats, moats of these things that protect a company's business, a company's market share from competitors. I reckon the two major parties had four moats, and those moats have steadily been eroding over the last few years and then really collapsed with with this election. 

Adam: [00:03:20] What were the moats? 

Thomas: [00:03:21] Well, the four moats people. First ones people. So they used to control a lot of people had a lot of volunteers. But membership of the major parties has been dwindling quickly in recent years. They're having more and more trouble turning out voters to election booths and these sort of things. So yeah, so they're not controlling people the way they used to. On the flipside, social media has made gathering a large number of people for a campaign purely for an independent campaign. If you have an inspiring candidate, it's much easier for them to mobilise a large number of people. So controlling people is not the moat that it used to be. The second one is media power. So, I mean, the Murdoch press ran a red hot behind the coalition, but they're still very much in the two party model, the mainstream media. It's like you think about the leaders debates are Labour won with 33% of the popular vote of the primary vote. Coalition didn't do much better. So the leaders debate is to people who control at most 60% of the vote. Hmm. Like it's kind of a bit redundant to talk about, you know, the leaders debate because there's a lot of other players that are just as relevant.

Adam: [00:04:30] In the US. Don't they have a they have a lot more people in the leaders debate like in the in the run up to the presidential election. I think they have. I remember seeing debates of like yeah, like ten people. Or is that just to the leader of the party. 

Thomas: [00:04:44] That's the pick. The candidate. Yeah, it's the Republican primaries and. Yeah. Yeah. And that starts to pick the candidate for each party. Yeah. So media like he used to have for the smaller parties, it was much harder to get your message out because the media were the gatekeepers of it. And if you weren't coming from a major party than you were, they treated you as irrelevant and you didn't get any airtime. So so the collapse of sort of the mainstream medium business model and the rise of sort of the Internet and then social media has meant that traditional media is not as important as it as it used to be, not not even close. So you can you can really run a campaign, a successful campaign, entirely through social. Media, which I think, you know, most of the independents that got up, that's what they were using. Social media. Hmm. So that so that used to be a mote in favour of the two parties. That that doesn't. That's not so that's not a thing anymore. The third one third moat is money. So they used to, you know, used to get a lot of donations. They, you know, they're very well funded, still very well funded. But the like the two independents in in Sydney and Melbourne, they were very well funded as well and they were able to tap private donors. The Climate 200 fund got behind them as well. But, you know, they were they were going dollar for dollar with the major parties through the election. Through yeah. Through the campaign in those seats. 

Adam: [00:06:06] Is that they, they got the Australia 200. That was. What's his name. Holmes a court. 

Thomas: [00:06:11] Holmes a court. Yeah. 

Adam: [00:06:12] Yeah. He still had to fund that. They like it still required like a, like a billionaire to come along and and sponsor the. 

Thomas: [00:06:19] Independent indefinitely held. But I think he was saying that he only funded a third of the to the two candidates. So two thirds came from the community or from other donors. So he was his and yet, yes, he was instrumental, but he wasn't the sum of it like it. There was significant other money involved as well.

Adam: [00:06:36] I had never heard Tio before Saturday night. 

Thomas: [00:06:39] As a like. 

Adam: [00:06:40] A port power game. I'd never I'd never heard teal as a political party colour and it's not, it's in there independents. Right.

Thomas: [00:06:49] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Adam: [00:06:50] And there's a tidal wave all of a sudden it's getting hit by a tidal wave and they moved out of the colour before. You hadn't heard of before Saturday. No. 

Thomas: [00:06:58] Yeah. I said yeah. That rock you live under.

Adam: [00:07:04] It seemed to me though, and this is like a casual observation. It seemed to me that a lot of this tidal wave was women as well. It seems like there's a there was a strong shift towards more women coming into the political landscape then, you know, the old boys club that seemed to exist up until now. 

Thomas: [00:07:20] Yeah. I mean, you look at you look at the polling like the liberal vote the with women collapsed with the Brittany Higgins allegations when they came out and they came to light the female vote collapsed and the way it was the allegation itself and then also the way it was handled is sort of like that. There's a lot of analysis saying that that yeah there's a lot yeah. Really on the nose with female voters. 

Adam: [00:07:43] So a lot of the candidates and a lot of the successful candidates and that was across, you know, in my election in my electorate in Boothby, we had two women on from Labour and Liberal who were running as well. So it seems like there's a definitely a push to get more women involved in politics and more representation. So that's good. 

Thomas: [00:08:03] MM Yeah. I mean this is one of the great stories that come out of it, I think. Hmm. 

Adam: [00:08:07] And it's not, it's not only the end of the sausage fest in Parliament, 50% of votes were either pre-polling or postal votes. So it seems like the sausage fest on election day might soon be finished too. Is incredible. I just. Oh, childish. I wanted to get the phrase sausage fest in there. It's once every four years, people. 

Adam: [00:08:33] Who knows? Maybe the next election we won't even have a voting day. Like what? I don't get why? Why? It has to happen on one day. I still don't understand. We might. Who knows? We might be able to vote using a computer soon. Using this new thing called the Internet. Who knows? It's a brave new world we're heading into. Uh, anyway, the last. The last motion we can get is for. Right? So you look, you've really been paying attention. 

Thomas: [00:08:58] We both know it was his brand. So he's the, you know, the Labour brand or the Liberal brand. It used to be used to convey, you know, all the or had all these brand associations and across the country you knew what you were getting. If you're voting for the Labour candidate, that doesn't help anymore because you know, that's what really the Liberal Party really struggle with is you have the demands of your inner city populations and you're trying to balance those with the demands of your regional populations and they want entirely different things. And you know, the Liberal parties need to make that strategic choice that they were going to stick with. They're the more regional sort of right wing policies and the inner cities really turned on them. 

Adam: [00:09:42] Right. 

Thomas: [00:09:43] And so so the brand doesn't really help you. And that's kind of, I think, just a general trend anyway, that people want customisation. They want things made specifically for them. They want they want they want their product tailored to them. They're not willing to just accept whatever the brand has to offer. By the parallel I keep thinking of with this is like where when Virgin came in and disrupted Qantas. So in Qantas like okay, people want cheaper flights. Well Qantas isn't about cheap that we can dilute the brand that way. So we'll just launch an entirely new company and call the Jetstar and that Jetstar offers the cheap things. So the Liberal Party needed to do something like that, they needed to launch their inner city, liberal or whatever. 

Adam: [00:10:25] Couldn't they have just got rid of the Nationals. Yeah, well, not that. 

Thomas: [00:10:31] Well, I mean that, but they had to make that choice. Yeah, yeah, it was impossible choice. You lost one or the other because they just wanted different things.

Adam: [00:10:38] Yeah, right. 

Thomas: [00:10:39] Yeah. So in business, like liberals would have would have launched, you know, in a liberal or liberal or something and, and then try to keep the whole liberal light.

Speaker 1: [00:10:49] Liberal. Yeah. 

Adam: [00:10:52] Alright. Thomas, you know I loves me some data. The wage and labour data was out last week. What did we learn. 

Thomas: [00:11:00] Mhm. Yeah. Well the jobs data continues to outperform. It's come and still the unemployment rate down to 3.9%. That's a 48 year low. Right. The lowest level since 1974. Yeah. So that's going great guns. 

Adam: [00:11:14] Do we have that highest level of unemployment in 1974. 

Thomas: [00:11:17] Sorry. 

Adam: [00:11:18] Lowest level. Lowest level. Sorry. That seems like a strange era to have low unemployment. 

Thomas: [00:11:23] 1974.

Adam: [00:11:24] Yeah, that was like. 

Thomas: [00:11:25] You went around. 

Speaker 1: [00:11:26] Oh, no, no. 

Adam: [00:11:28] But historically, looking back, like, there's like I was like, yeah, the kind of surf era, the hippie era, like a seemed like there would have been a lot of people who were unemployed during that time. 

Thomas: [00:11:40] Yeah, no, I wasn't. Well, they probably weren't looking for work. So things you're not looking for work in a hippie in a Kombi, going for a surf ride account? Yeah, but an employment was below 2% through the sixties and seventies. Really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well yeah, yeah. But I mean that, that was Australia back then. 

Adam: [00:11:59] Just anyone over it was it. 

Speaker 1: [00:12:01] No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Thomas: [00:12:07] And, and boomers like to complain about how they had. Yeah. So a good result down unemployment. The number of unemployed now is down to just 537,000 people say without a job. Officially, that's down from 700,000 just before COVID hit. And yeah, according to the ABS job ads has 400,000 open job ads. So, yeah, 400,000 open positions, 537,000 unemployed. So wow, I could pretty balanced. Yes, that's pretty.

Adam: [00:12:35] Why don't we just give them all the job. 

Speaker 1: [00:12:38] Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:12:39] We got it is a good it's good to be in the right not in the right right industries and things but the people are talking about like this is this is this is about as good as it gets. The unemployment rate. They can't you know, maybe maybe we get down to three and a half. Hmm. Maybe maybe a touch below that. But it's like hard to see it really going lower than that.

Adam: [00:12:56] Have foreign workers come back yet? Are they coming down? 

Thomas: [00:12:59] Immigration still negative, right, Stuart? We're still losing population. So that's down from, you know, that's 200 to 300000 in since the Howard era has been immigration has been running at that level. Um, yeah. So that's obviously obviously that's having an impact keeping the unemployment rate lower than, than it would be. But right. But even even with that, it's still the jobs market still looking pretty strong. 

Adam: [00:13:23] I keep reading it seasonally adjusted this data like what does that mean to some people. I like to work in something. 

Thomas: [00:13:30] You just you just this some seasonal factors you sort of this is like a mathematical equation that sort of looks at what happens in different months and then tries to smooth it out. Like, you know, Christmas time. 

Adam: [00:13:41] There's a lot of heat run.

Thomas: [00:13:43] You know, that has an impact on like retail sales and big impact on retail sales and Christmas. So you trying to like smooth that out. So that's what seasonally adjusted means, right? Try to you try to strip out the seasonal factors. They might not be that big like I don't know if they're that huge in the labour market. Yeah, right. The really interesting thing in the. 

Speaker 1: [00:14:01] Sorry I know it's so it's good we thought we'd paint I don't. 

Adam: [00:14:05] Know where we'd go. 

Speaker 1: [00:14:06] From from seasonally adjusted trimming the through. 

Adam: [00:14:11] The get the Christmas rush you go to the interesting vignette okay. 

Speaker 1: [00:14:18] Me so yeah so well well. 

Thomas: [00:14:23] Yeah well the jobs data is really hot wages. We got wages as well. No wages on the Wednesday that came in much weaker than expected. Not much, but substantially weaker than expected. People thought it might pop. We might see a lot of wage price pressure. We didn't happen. We got 0.7 in the March quarter, 2.4% over the year. 

Adam: [00:14:42] This is wages growth. Yeah. So this is, this is what we're talking about. Like it's not. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So how quickly wages are increase.

Thomas: [00:14:50] Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right, that's right. Yeah. So 2.4 of the 2.4% over the year pretty underwhelming. 

Adam: [00:14:56] It's not enough. 

Thomas: [00:14:57] I mean not enough, not more. It literally is not enough. So yeah, with inflation running at 5.1%, you can take inflation away from wage price growth and you get real wage growth. So the growth in purchasing power, 2.4 -5.1 is 2.7. So real wages have fallen by 2.7% over the past year. So your ability to go out and buy stuff that's now two. 7% lower than it was a year ago. That's the biggest fall in over 20 years. Because inflation's quite high at the moment. Hmm. Relatively. Yeah. So real wages are going backwards, and they're going to keep going back backwards. People are saying, like, well, that's. That's not a great outcome. Yeah, it's it's interesting in the sense, like, real wages are going down. So that hurts consumers. That's sort of not great for households are going to have to sort of cut more to dig more into their discretionary spending, to sort of meet their essentials and that sort of thing. So yeah, households are going backwards is what that means. But the real big thing, though, is that on a few members, like since the since late last year through most of this year, the RBA was saying that they were going to wait until they saw wage price pressure like it's looking for that. They put a number on it through. They said wage price index are above 3%, 3 to 4% before they would raise rates because until they got that they weren't confident that they'd get an inflation in the 2 to 3 times 2 to 3% target band. So they said they were going to wait for that three plus percent. Then they surprised us last month with a rate hike even though we hadn't seen that wage data. But what they said in the minutes he said, yep, we know, we said we would wait for the wage data, but we have been talking to a lot of businesses and businesses are telling us that wages are definitely going up. So we guess we're just going to pull the trigger. 

Adam: [00:16:47] We're we've been talking to a lot of businesses and this time we're going to listen. This time where we're actually yeah, we dropped the ball on interest rates. So now where we're heading, our heeding the warning and they're going to say something about it. 

Thomas: [00:17:03] But but it now looks like they were, you know, initially they're going to wait for this this release of the wage price index. But they they just pulled the trigger early. But now it's come out and said and it's cornices that we probably should have just waited, actually, because wages aren't growing, you know, anywhere near what we were worried about. Right. So it looks like the RBA has jumped the gun, which then means that all the market economists are now ratcheting back their expectations for rate hikes through the year now, whereas they were expecting them to hike rates aggressively and quickly because inflation data came in hotter than expected. Now wages data has come in softer than expected. So down the line, well, maybe it's not going to rise so quickly or it's not going to get so high. 

Adam: [00:17:45] Hang on, I'm confused. So why does so the RBA doesn't want wage growth?

Thomas: [00:17:50] No, no they do. They want they want there, they want it in the three to 3 to 4% they say. So remember they have an inflation target, they're trying to get inflation in a 2 to 3% target. Did they say for that to happen in wages needs to be running at 3 to 4%? Right. They want to see wages growing in a 3 to 4% target band as well. Effectively what they were worried about in April when they when they hike rates was that. Yeah. That it was actually running hotter than that and they were behind the curve. Sorry, sorry. In the May meeting. So they're worried that they were behind the curve and they needed to get out in front of the curve. Right. Yep. We believe that wages are where we want them to be, so now we're going to start winding things back.

Adam: [00:18:33] So they were just guessing. They didn't know. I don't have the data. It is kind of. 

Thomas: [00:18:38] We like to call it forecast. 

Speaker 1: [00:18:42] Cola. 

Adam: [00:18:43] What you want, it's guessing. They're just guessing at where wages were and then and they kind of got to they got it wrong. So now it's yeah it's not panic can can they influence wages at all. The RBA may raise interest rates to cool inflation. Can they do anything to raise or lower wages growth? 

Thomas: [00:19:09] I mean, effectively, to the extent that lowering wages, stimulatory lowering interest rates stimulates the entire economy. And then as the economy gets stimulated, wages growth picks up because there's so much economic activity. To that extent, it has an impact, but it's not direct. 

Adam: [00:19:24] You know, that doesn't work anyway, does it? Because if you lower rates, then inflation grows because there's more money. 

Thomas: [00:19:31] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. This is, this is the balance. 

Adam: [00:19:35] Is why economics is hard. 

Speaker 1: [00:19:37] Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of it. 

Adam: [00:19:40] Out of the 3 minutes, I'm already painting myself into a corner. All right, why don't we take a quick break here, grab a word from this week's sponsor. On the other side of the break, we're going to be talking about sky rocketing wheat prices, as well as McDonald's plans to leave Russia. Back with more. And comedian versus economist right after this. Welcome back here on Canadian versus Economist. Of course you can send us an email CV at Equity Mates dot com or via the website Equity Mates dot com forward slash CV. And you can also get us on Instagram and Facebook at CV podcast. Thomas. India is banning wheat exports. What's going on then? 

Thomas: [00:20:20] Yes, this is a bit of a grim story. So when India is banning wheat exports. So India's the world's second largest producer of wheat. Um, yeah, but they've had a heatwave that's like through. Yeah, a heatwave. It's sort of been pretty brutal and apparently knocked 10% of wheat production out of the. Well, the the the harvest is going to be 10% smaller. Right. So that's creating a bit of a big drama. Wheat prices were already up thanks to the war in Ukraine. Remember, Ukraine and Russia together account for 25% of wheat exports. So wheat prices have been soaring. Wheat prices are now up 62% from where they were at the start of the year. So that's a it's a big jump. Yeah. So but the India Indian government's worried that it's getting out of hand, that wheat price inflation is going to hurt local consumers, they're not going to be able to afford food that's going to create dramas and to try and keep a lid on prices, they've they've banned production exports. So they're not going to export any wheat. 

Adam: [00:21:19] Are we are we angry that India is hogging all the wheat or are we okay? 

Thomas: [00:21:24] Well, personally, I mean.

Adam: [00:21:27] Yeah, I mean, not good sharing as I tell my children. 

Thomas: [00:21:32] No, I mean, they're doing they're doing the right thing. So they're still allowing for when there's letters of credit and there's contracts that have been signed, they're allowing those to go through. They're also taking requests from countries that are trying to meet their food security needs. So if you if people genuinely need it, then they're open to that. But they're trying to sort of limit how much the shipping around and look after the local population. I mean, the interesting thing is it all ties in with this sort of growing theme of a food crisis that seems to be.

Adam: [00:22:04] Buried a bit about this. Mm hmm. 

Thomas: [00:22:06] Yeah. So UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres was saying that we risks shortages related to Ukraine, could tip tens of millions of people over the edge into food insecurity, leading to malnutrition, mass hunger and famine, and a crisis that could last for years. The US Secretary of State says it's the greatest global food security crisis of our time. The Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey is saying it's apocalyptic. Hmm. Yeah. So it's pretty. Yeah, pretty serious. 

Adam: [00:22:38] This isn't just a problem for developing countries. Or is this like a food crisis that's going to hit hit us, hit the rest of the Western world? The rest of the developed world. 

Speaker 1: [00:22:48] I. 

Thomas: [00:22:49] Don't think is going to touch us like Australia is, is food sovereignty. So we should be okay. But that said, like you look at the structure of the food crisis is it's a bunch of things feeding into each other. So you had the pandemic and then all this supply chain disruptions that you had a lot of the labour force knocked out with COVID. So they weren't able to do that. Then you had a lot of extreme weather events like the heat wave in India, and then you've also got rising oil prices from Ukraine so that, well, the war in Ukraine has restricted supply like food, commodities like wheat. But the the spike in oil prices also then feeds through into fertiliser. And fertiliser prices are through the roof at the moment, too, and that's where it can start to impact developed countries like Australia is if we're using a lot of fertiliser then we can really struggle with that. 

Adam: [00:23:41] Right? So so what you're saying we're food sovereign but only if we can get the things we need to grow the food.

Speaker 1: [00:23:48] The food? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's a pretty precarious situation. 

Adam: [00:23:55] But I don't know that I'll be walking around spruiking our foods everywhere we are. 

Thomas: [00:24:02] Yeah. We rely on oil prices to sort of drive our tractors and then fertiliser to make it happen, so. Yeah. Like it. It does affect us, I don't know. And no one in Australia is talking about it becoming a crisis but. Right. Is probably, is probably where it's probably going to hurt is more in the middle income countries. Yeah. That's sort of where the saying like, you know fertilisers and fertiliser is going to have a big impact on Brazil. Brazil uses a lot of fertiliser. Right. And the other thing the other thing with the middle income countries is that they're pretty fragile at the moment anyway because they've just been through covered. A lot of middle income countries run strong social programmes through COVID. There's a lot of income support, a lot of health support, and they spend a lot of money and went to a lot of debt to sort of ride out the COVID wave. But that means that they're not the cupboards bare. They don't have anything to fight a food crisis with. They've run out of money. Run out of money, basically. All right. And so yeah, so I say one risk report was saying that the countries that are watching this are Egypt and Brazil. Argentina, Tunisia, Pakistan and the Philippines lie there. The middle income countries that are probably going to Argentina. 

Adam: [00:25:10] Not. I'm not Argentina. 

Thomas: [00:25:12] Argentina. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Argentina's got a lot of problems. Yeah. So I. 

Adam: [00:25:16] Just correct you wherever I can. 

Speaker 1: [00:25:18] Get. 

Adam: [00:25:19] Sport for a. 

Speaker 1: [00:25:21] Good match. 

Thomas: [00:25:23] Yeah. So that's that's going on. And the other part of it is they say we do have these agencies like the World Bank has a food has food programmes. And so far they've spent 30 billion trying to support countries, get the food they need, but they're buying wheat and food at market prices. So as prices go up, they're not able to yeah, they're able to buy less. It's important countries less and less so yeah. That's, that's where it is. 

Adam: [00:25:50] So we've got a we've got an oil crisis and a food crisis. So so we've got energy and food. 

Speaker 1: [00:25:57] Yeah. 

Adam: [00:25:58] We're struggling for with the world over the next little while. It's if you're looking for good news on this show, you know, it's sort of sorry to tell you you're not going to find too much of it. Most importantly, there is Weet-Bix going to be okay because that's my mum. But that's pretty much that was my covered plan. Everyone went out and bought toilet paper. I just bought like ten boxes of Weet-Bix that was. 

Thomas: [00:26:23] Built yourself for. 

Speaker 1: [00:26:24] Yeah, that's. 

Adam: [00:26:25] That's what I built my covered bunker out of the box as a way of. All right, Thomas, big news. McDonald's has made the decision to leave Russia. What's going on there? 

Thomas: [00:26:38] Yes, I mean, McDonald's is joining a long list of companies now that's backing the political sanctions on Russia. So we've had sort of state sponsored sanctions through the US and Europe. But companies are joining in as well. They're sort of bailing on Russia. So about 350 companies now at last count really have scaled down or bailed on Russia altogether. And big companies like Amazon, Apple, Volkswagen, Toyota, Samsung. Right. Bumble. Bumble, that. 

Adam: [00:27:09] Bumble was that. Oh, the dating app. Yeah. I mean, I'm so out of touch. Don't even know. Why do you do that? I'm sorry. I don't know if you're listening. 

Speaker 1: [00:27:20] I don't. 

Adam: [00:27:20] Know why. And I would. 

Speaker 1: [00:27:23] Have no good explanation for that. 

Adam: [00:27:26] Right. Russia? Yeah. Russia's food is getting pretty dire situation now. I saw it. Russia announced it was allowing over four days to join the army. So it's kind of interesting. They're getting they're getting a bit desperate. In a further move between now and when the last McDonald's door closes, every happy meal comes with a family conscription voucher for the whole family to join the army. So that'll be fun. I think the last store has actually closed now, if I'm not mistaken. 

Thomas: [00:27:56] It's 30 years, two years McDonald's with it. 

Adam: [00:27:58] And so people have started stockpiling McDonald's before the last one shot that this guy who's like is took a photo of his of his fridge and he's got like 50 cheeseburgers. McDonald's cheeseburgers. It is fridge. 

Thomas: [00:28:15] Yeah, it's probably a black market for them. 

Adam: [00:28:17] Well, I think they now he's just sell they're just selling them online. People have been loading are really waiting for I mean, oh, my God. Things are bad when you're buying used McDonald's Happy Meals.

Speaker 1: [00:28:30] The toys are. 

Adam: [00:28:31] Already being made. It is a bite out a kid's burger. No, apparently a guy. Sorry, a meal with two burgers, two drinks and a cherry pie was being sold for about $84 Australia on online which you talk about a depreciating assets that's not that's not from the time you list to the time the auction closes that's that's going to be significantly less valuable. 

Thomas: [00:29:04] Yeah. Now they should have made it an NFT that's yeah. 

Adam: [00:29:09] I did write to that. McDonald's isn't actually removing the restaurants. They said it's a process that they call d arching. So they're not actually getting rid of like the the bricks and mortar and everything, the restaurant that that existed. They're leaving all that. They're they're just dancing, which, you know, the golden arches. Right? So. Right, right. So like the cookies and the fries and the drinks machine, whatever are still staying behind, so. 

Thomas: [00:29:40] Right. So they'll come back at some point. 

Adam: [00:29:42] Well, now they said they're permanently moving out. Like initially they announced I think it was temporary, but now they've said, no, that's it, we're out. Which creates an incredible opportunity for someone to finally set up a McDonalds chain.

Speaker 1: [00:29:58] In Russia.

Adam: [00:30:00] Coming to America from there, maybe from the eighties. Well, I think you had the had the golden arsed near you. He's like, yeah, just a direct McDonald's rival. Yeah. So I think this is this is a this is go time for McDonalds. 

Adam: [00:30:18] I Wonder, like, who cares if McDonald's like I get there's a general kind of, you know, it's bad that all these Western companies are leaving. But I wondered like, what would be the impact of McDonald's left Australia? Do you reckon that would have serious ramifications or do you reckon we'd all just go? No, I kind of miss the Big Mac every now and then. I don't eat it very often, so I don't know whether it's a big thing or not, but I'd like to think, I'd like to think as a society in Australia we would adjust fairly quickly to McDonald's leaves. 

Thomas: [00:30:51] Though, wouldn't you? Yeah, you'd want to hope so. 

Speaker 1: [00:30:55] Yeah. Like it's not a staple. 

Adam: [00:30:58] Like we we can deal with a global wage shortage, but don't you dare touch my McNuggets. 

Speaker 1: [00:31:04] You know, we travel. 

Adam: [00:31:07] Of. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah I like other. Would there be massive? I mean there'd be job losses. That's the big one, obviously.

Thomas: [00:31:15] I was just going to say, like a lot of people say, that McDonald's is really a property business, that McDonald's buys properties in sweet locations. And that's that's the real heart of the business. 

Adam: [00:31:25] So they're. 

Speaker 1: [00:31:26] Just the. 

Adam: [00:31:27] Property investment firm is sitting on like increasing land. Right? Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:31:33] Yeah. Which is what? That when they say that, the dancing process tells me that they're hanging onto the land. 

Adam: [00:31:38] Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. I didn't know that. Mhm. Oh. Anyway they're, they're getting out of Russia so we'll see how that plays out in any case. The, the burgers are better at hungry Vlad's. All right. All right. That does it for this week. Thank you once again for cheering. And don't forget to tell someone you know that you're enjoying the show. Tell them if you think they might enjoy it. Would really love for you to do that for us. And don't forget to check out all the other great podcasts from Equity Mates Media. Get Started Investing Equity Mates Investing Podcast. You're in good company. Talk money to me. Crypto Curious and the Dive. Thank you for joining us. We'll be back more with more next week on comedian versus economist. Bye for now.