Turning a buck ... into fifty cents

Rob Schaap rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au
Wed Mar 14 04:27:46 PST 2001


My first e-mail as a citizen of a third-world nation, folks. Somebody in London has just unloaded his last couple of Ozzies and the noble dollar has finally broken through that irksome 50 cent barrier. 49.87 US cents will now get you a dollar, and not a lot more will get you a productive Australian asset. Get your mining companies while they're going, folks!

Gone indeed are the seventies when we used contemptuously to wipe our wiry bums with ol' George's visage, as we took our fearsome currency abroad with us on those famous extended ethanolic holidays or ours. Just as gone is 1982, when an Ozzie was still the equal of a greenback. Gone are the nineties, when a point on the real interest rate and the knowledge Ozzie had the world's richest population in terms of per capita mineral resources kept the battling Ozzie at 80 cents. None of that counts any more. We don't make our own IT (we used to, but the government thought it ought to compete without sunrise assistance and destroyed it in order to save it), so our currency ain't worth what's written on it.

Which strikes me as kinda weird in a world that's busy deciding IT is way overvalued, but who are we to argue now, eh?

Anyway, off to, er, reappraise my Amazon order.

And Doug, if you'd finished your New Economy on time, I coulda snapped it up at 62c to the Ozzie. So I reckon you owe me about $3.60 ... if you pay up today, that is ...

Cheers, Rob.



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