Building egos in addition to homes

Building egos in addition to homes These settings produce one of the show's great unconscious jokes - and it does have lot of humour once you can spot it - the solemnity with which the audience is assured, by everyone on screen, how wonderfully a flat-topped box can complement a traditional landscape. The program's name indicates the one area where the owners do feel they demonstrate soul - design. Although the roles of architects and builders are acknowledged, it is always the couples' own taste, ingenuity and effort which are central. Very special shows are those where one of them - usually the man - has a fixation about some previously untried material, or - usually the woman - decides to run the project. A frisson is experienced in lounge rooms around the land if, early in an episode, McCloud says, ''So, have you ever managed a build before?'' These houses might be expensive, they might be enormous, but surely they are, at least, green? Words such as ''sustainable'' are thrown about on the program, but with more passion than rigour. Not a number of the homes in the 11 series are near public transport. Often a perfectly good older home on the site is destroyed, along with all the embodied carbon it contains. The new house, constructed by belching machines using materials flown in from around the globe, is generally enormous and open plan, with high ceilings and massive windows on one side. The lighting and heating bills must be considerable, no matter how much is spent on the triple-glazed gas-filled windows imported from Scandinavia. Systemic failures exposed by murder of Carl Williams in Barwon prison. Victorian Planning Minister Matthew Guy's contentious rezoning of farmland on Phillip Island last year followed the intervention of Liberal elder Rob Maclellan on behalf of a family friend. Several large Australian public companies provide federal police with information implicating themselves in possible foreign bribery offences. Senior Flight Centre managers failed to act on allegations of serious bullying: legal claim. The Victorian police watchdog's most secretive unit operated for several years with ''little governance'' and ''limited accountability'' and took far too long to respond to internal misconduct, according to leaked documents. Patients at Victoria's largest hospital for the criminally insane will have a third of their pension deducted as part of a pay-to-stay policy designed to give them ''real life budgeting experience''. TE federal government has started an investigation into 14 employment agencies suspected of rorting its multibillion-dollar job assistance scheme, as evidence mounts of the long-running program being routinely abused. Dozens of Victorian suburbs and towns remain overexposed to extreme bushfire risk this season because the Baillieu government failed to meet its targets to reduce fuel loads around the state's most vulnerable communities. The state government is shutting down Victoria's only 24-hour mental health helpline. Baillieu government is spending thousands of taxpayer dollars in a fight to keep secret the public service's advice on its election policies. TE Australian Taxation Office and federal law enforcement agencies want to intensify their campaign against offshore tax evasion, with increased penalties and greater powers for investigators expected to be considered by the federal government this year. COLES and Woolworths are selling imported food under their private labels without disclosing where it comes from, while still being able to boast it is "Made in Australia". Building egos in addition to homes Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 20/02/2012