A secret no financial adviser will tell you

THIS is something no financial adviser will tell you (and more on freedom of speech later). By far the best investment you can make today with totally guaranteed returns is to put a solar voltaic system on your roof.

The next best investment (which used to be the best investment) is to pay off your credit card. Again, no financial adviser would tell you that – buy Product XYZ instead.

The solar returns are truly astonishing. We have generated $500 worth of electricity in two months. That is $3000 a year. This is on an outlay of $9000 – and an upmarket, expensive system from the US (panels) and inverter (Switzerland) at that. It is a notional return of 33 per cent.

Ah yes, you might say, but the system might last only 40 years – unlike a fixed-term deposit which will still be there in 40 years. So let’s discount our 33 per cent return a little. However, given that the $9000 in the fixed-term deposit will not be worth much in 40 years we do not have to discount by very much.

And more importantly, the people who put their money in fixed-term deposits will have to pay tax on their earnings, whereas the solar earnings are tax free. It is a no-brainer.

The investment is so good you could put it on credit-card interest and in many cases still be ahead.

Credit cards aside, anyone with $9000 in a fixed-term deposit who does not have a solar electricity system on the roof is ignorant or a fool. I suspect the former, but if you are reading this and do nothing afterwards you will be guilty of foolishiness too.

Further, the price of electricity it only going to go up – and by more than the rate of inflation, so the investment makes more sense as time goes on.

Surely this is a case of if it is too good to be true, it is most likely not true? Not so. It is a case of what financial people would call “leveraging” – using existing assets to most advantage.

All other electricity generators have to buy land upon which to generate electricity. The cheaper and further away from city centres the land is, the more expensive is the transmission of electricity to the city centre – you lose a lot of electricity in transmission. The closer it is (with less transmission loss) the more expensive the land.

The home generator, on the other hand, gets the land – the roof space — for free, and the electricity is being generated right where it is needed in the town or city so little power is lost in transmission.

The story in a nutshell is that the electricity generators – nearly all state owned – are ripping consumers off blind because state governments need the money. In a way, this is a good thing because it makes solar generation on the roof one of the best investments going.

It works for all jurisdictions. Mean jurisdictions, like Queensland, charge a lot for the power they deliver and do not pay much for the power you give them. Kinder jurisdictions, like the ACT, charge less for the power they deliver, but give a lot for the power you deliver them. Either way, the electricity you generate saves or pays you more money than you would get with any other standard investment.

Capitalism may yet save the environment from the climate change that governments are ignoring.

DOT DOT DOT

Attorney-General Senator George Brandis and his newly appointed human rights commissioner Tim Wilson are absolutely right to trumpet the importance of freedom of speech.

But it must be Voltairian – one may disagree with the speech (whatever it is), but nonetheless defend the right for someone to say it.

Brandis and Wilson want to amend sections of the Discrimination Act which make unlawful speech which members of a (usually racial) group find offensive. They have a point.

But if you are running a freedom-of-speech argument it should be broad and consistent. If freedom of speech is more important than offending a racial group then it should be more important than offending a government.

Yet Wilson has recently written defending employers, particularly the Federal Government, making it a term of employment contracts that employees not criticise their employer.

This smacks too much of “my football team right or wrong”.

Why do Coalition (and indeed often, Labor) Governments slavishly follow the United States into every lunatic military adventure and slavishly aspire to the US market-is-supreme philosophy but do not adopt one of the very best elements of the US system of government and societal attitudes – freedom of speech.

From the nauseating loud-mouth US tourist to the most considered New York Times editorial, this is America at its best.

But what does this government do: ask public servants to dob in their colleagues who might be criticising the Government on social media anonymously. And Wilson argues that employers should have wide dismissal rights against outspoken employees.

This shows us that Brandis’s and Wilson’s trumpeting of freedom of speech is only politically inspired cant, not a deep-running belief in a human right of freedom of speech.

The US position is radically different to the intimidating stand this government has over public servants and its call for public servants to dob in colleagues who criticise the government anonymously.

US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens summed it up in the 1995 case of McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission:

“Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation—and their ideas from suppression—at the hand of an intolerant society. The right to remain anonymous may be abused when it shields fraudulent conduct. But political speech by its nature will sometimes have unpalatable consequences, and, in general, our society accords greater weight to the value of free speech than to the dangers of its misuse.”

George Brandis should read those words and squirm.

The US position has been summarised thus: The general legal theory is that the public’s interest in how public dollars are spent and how public safety decisions are made is very strong, and public employees are in a very good position to address those public interests.

What better example have we seen than the government’s reaction to measured statements by Treasury officials on the fairness of increasing the GST against allowing income-tax bracket creep to paste low- and middle-income earners.

The officials were punished for putting into the public domain uncomfortable but important truths that the government did not want disseminated.

This is from people preaching freedom of expression. It is enough to make you speechless.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 12 April 2014.