Is this the Western Australian persona?

As I go on my travels from meeting to meeting and from networking function to networking function I am always amazed by the sheer courage of people to take on new ventures and in many cases forge out on their own or take on challenges that once they would have bulked. Well done to all who don't take the easy way out. As I wrote recently there is so much talent out there seeking to make its way in business and in life in general.

I was fortunate to meet with someone this morning who is absolutely inspiring but who has, to my pleasant surprise, also has experienced something that I was beginning to think was either all in my head or a function of my own poor judgment or pure unfortunate happenstance. Both of us are born and bred Western Australians but we would contend there is an undoubted reluctance of our compatriots to pay for service until the goal has been achieved and sometimes not even then. This has obvious ramifications. One, it forces people to look elsewhere and those that are reluctant to pay have to,in the main, put up with inferior service which ends up seemingly justifying their stance. A classic vicious circle.

My own experience has led to concentrate my efforts on servicing Eastern States firms, market WA innovations to overseas clients or to international companies. Eastern States firms are increasingly a profitable target client base as the resources boom returns and the relative growth rate of Western Australian vis a vis the rest of the country ex QLD attracts them to our market. Not that this is without dangers either as our friends from over East are often frustrated by arcane planning laws, archaic restrictions on trade, a Soviet approach to trading hours, a strange debate on daylight saving and again a reluctance to pay for quality. Dangerous and contentious views? Maybe so, so please feel free to challenge me on any or all of them.

Just while I'm feeling gently combative let me hit you with my view on daylight saving in general and not specific to WA. Am I missing some simple piece of logic? The original purpose of altering the clocks was to "lengthen" the day in order to conserve energy. As our summer days receive the most sunlight hours anyway wouldn't it make more sense to have daylight saving in our winter. We get up in the dark any way so there's no difference there but by moving the clocks forward it would mean that it's getting dark an hour later. Anyone who recalls football or hockey training in the midst of winter will know that by half five all had to be over because it was dark. Those children now lucky enough to have lights burn more energy and households burn more lights and more fuel. So daylight saving in winter would add an hour of usable daylight in the evening and reduce one of the key downsides of that season. Just a thought? Having it in the summer surely means we run our pool filters longer and use our air conditioners at home more. Hmmm, what a good conservation of energy that is, not! Just to be completely perverse, even so I'm actually in favour of it but that should be the argument of the nay-sayers, nothing to do with carpets, curtains and cows.

Cheers, Jonathan.