Skipper's blog: The highs and lows of 2011

THERE is no doubt about it. In terms of years notable for all the wrong reasons, 2011 was up there with the Ford Edsel, Leyland P76, Chrysler outboards and Bert Newton’s toupees.

It was a year that was to commerce and economic growth what A Current Affair and Today Tonight are to top-flight investigative journalism and politicians are to propriety, ethics and integrity. It was a year that, if sold as a “back in time excursion” to future generations of inter-galactic time tourists able to indulge in such frippery, would result in an avalanche of refund requests due to its unrelenting negativity, its fear-laden business ambience and rancid air of doom, gloom and fatalism – basically the Tony Abbott of years.

Bearing in mind that this piece is supposed to be my festive offering, I need to shape up, be reasonably chipper and upbeat, and produce something that will at least lift your spirits, if not your net worth. How about a sardonic, wry and humorous but hardly objective or unbiased (where’s the fun in that?) look at the “Goods” and “Bads” of the annus horribilis through which we’ve just stoically and resolutely navigated? Anyway, Merry Christmas and unfettered prosperity (you’ll be bloody lucky!) in the year ahead, dear reader, and here goes on the best and the worst…..

Good year for:

* Unhygienic, sandal-wearing, dole-bludging, rabid Greenies and ocean savers.

A recent interview on the ABC (where else?!) with some fixated, zombie-like, myopic woman from PEW should have everyone who likes to wield a fishing rod quaking in their boots. The ABC piece started with this woman trolling the sea bed in some sort of one-person submersible pod that actually looked like an extension of her. If you looked really quickly, it was almost as if this PEW shrew was actually an integral part of the machine, with a dome over her desiccated, addled, pleasure-forsaking features like the one on the robot in Lost in Space. When interviewed, this woman droned like a programmed automaton and cared as much about leisure and commercial fishing as Bill Clinton did about wasting a good cigar. BIAs, state governments, principled pollies (if that is not a contradictory term), boaties, fishos – everybody must put up a united front against these wealthy, bored, fixated, brainwashed, find-a-worthy-cause-even-if-pisses-everybody-off dilettantes and meddlers. This must be the cause celebre of 2012.

* Bill Barry Cotter

He mightn’t have had a vintage boat show season but he goes into 2012 with a psychological advantage over his erstwhile pride and joy but now arch-enemy, Riviera, with the latter still under the care of an Administrator and minus a CEO. Also, the acquisition of Mustang will leave him in the box seat for when the “expensive but not ridiculously extortionate” market comes back (and come back it almost certainly will) some time before Halley’s Comet next does a fly-by. Other than the fact that his signature product is affordable by most of us in the same way that you’d buy a Rolex Gold Oyster to keep you going while the battery in your Casio was being replaced, he has yet to put a foot wrong. 

* Yank boats

Touchy subject this, and the importers probably aren’t shifting as much gear as they figured, but if the product has been landed with the AUD at parity or better with the Yank dollar, and if they can afford to hang on until the green shoots (don’t you just love a cliché?!) of recovery haltingly appear, then it’ll eventually be full steam ahead to the nearest Porsche or Ferrari dealership. On the flip side of the coin, though, there could be a bonanza for punters in the wings, as some of the neophyte, opportunistic and less dedicated marine “kingpins” ditch their wares and move on to time-shares in Kazakhstan or Somalia. Keep watching the Saturday papers for the “Marine Auction” listings.

* Tohatsu Corporation

Unbelievable, but this “tiny” (in relation to our market, anyway) entity will now play a disproportionately major role in the future and fortunes of both North American outboard manufacturers. Even if not overtly branded “Tohatsu”, they will surreptitiously, cleverly and steadily build market share on the strength of the fact that the current stakeholders of the fruits of two industry pioneers (one who supposedly invented the concept and one who advanced it so much that he actually had a book written about him) came to them for key product.
When you realise that the other vanquished nation from the marathon international stoush that finished in 1945 (i.e. Germany) now owns the prestige-car industry which used to be the pride of one of the victors (the British), who have crowed fervidly, nauseatingly and ad infinitum about that victory for almost seventy years, you’d have to wonder if it’s remotely wise to win a war at all.

Bad year for:

* Aussie boatbuilders

Make no mistake: the seemingly innocuous statement of “$23 per tonne” (sounds ridiculously cheap if applied to personal purchase of, say, gold, silver or cement, firewood, or even toilet rolls) will, in the annals of history, be right up there with “the recession Australia had to have”. If you are building boats, or anything that involves aluminium, fibreglass, stainless steel or fabrication, cutting, shaping and welding, be assured – as sure as Julia Gillard has an arse of truly pachydermic proportions – that you will be paying more to keep your doors open. For a country that emits less than 1% of the world’s carbon output to impose a tax like this is akin to Malta ordering a military strike on India. Of any policy brought in by any government (including the Volstead Act in the US which brought in prohibition and the hurried edict by the Samoan Prime Minister that the country would move into our time zone and no longer be one day behind just because it is on the other side of the International Dateline), the imposition of this tax in Australia goes beyond folly. What’s worse is that this current Socialist/Greenie/Luddite alliance has directly tied this tax to other supposedly compensatory revenue factors so even if Abbott of the wing-nut ears does get in, the buffoon who will be charged with handling finances (Joe Hockey – a man who always sounds as if he’s talking from home while wandering around the kitchen in his underpants) will have as much idea as a mufti at a bar mitzvah.
Should your manufacturing business go under, bear in mind that at least you paid for the privilege.  

* Outboard profit margins

It is fast getting to the stage where making profit on an outboard motor is as outdated a concept as fitting a new typewriter ribbon. I’d even go as far as to say that, with one manufacturer in particular, it would not be a surprise to hear that their bullied, frustrated, disenchanted and disillusioned dealers were now being asked to chip in money purely for the privilege of having that product go through their outlets.
If outboard margins drop as they have been doing, then it’ll eventually get to the stage that 5% total profit, whilst not remotely sustainable, is a fact of life. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there are dealers reading this who won’t be dealers next year.

* Rumblings on increased boating legislation

The Queensland media have been going hard and heavy on a couple of boating accidents on Moreton Bay which, unfortunately, involved fatalities. Whilst sad and regrettable, recent dissemination and analysis of a two-boat death crash by the Brisbane free-to-air TV channels and the main newspaper has had various experts and pundits pontificating about the merits of a “staggered” or “tiered” licensing system, whereby you would theoretically obtain your licence in something like a tinny and then, as you wished to progress in steps to a high-HP outboard rig and eventually a flybridge cruiser, you would have to up-skill and add classes or categories to your licence – like truck drivers do. Well, if the above ever happens, you can, in the words of Sam Goldwyn, “include me out”. Boating, a leisure activity, is already more harshly, restrictively and punitively legislated in this country than in any other boating nation. The Brits, for example, don’t even have compulsory licensing or registration (although both can be done voluntarily under the auspices of the RYA and Small Ships Registry respectively). They don’t have any trailer registration/licensing requirements either; once the trailer is hooked onto the tow vehicle, with the tow vehicle’s rego number on the trailer lighting board, then for legal and insurance purposes etc, the trailer is part of that vehicle.
What do we have here? We have boat licensing/registration; trailer registration, plus, in states like NSW, the annual cost of a roadworthy certificate. I recently worked out that, in NSW, the cost of having an average-sized runabout or tinny sitting in your driveway doing nothing – without it even getting wet – is over $300 per annum (including amortisation of the 3-yr licence fee plus the other annual costs). The day they start introducing more complicated and restrictive measures, like tiered licensing, is the day tens of thousands will bail and head for the car dealerships, the caravan/RV centres and the travel agents to book cabins on the cruise they always meant to take.

* Boat shows

Just going from bad to worse – too many, too often, too boring, too predictable; too formulaic and yielding next to no worthwhile sales results. A clear example of the “law of diminishing returns”. Other than Sydney, Sanctuary Cove and Mandurah, the rest are about as effective and relevant as a tarted-up but stock-engine Commodore on the grid at Bathurst – grandstanding, there to make a point and with a passing resemblance to the main players but, ultimately, wholly outclassed, trounced in power and performance and left languishing in a manner truly deserved by something with such a “programme filler” status.
Memo to BIAs: start working to increase boating participants rather than just increasing your coffers. Your dependence on state-based boat shows for revenue is predictable, lamentable and embarrassing.