It was Monday morning and we had just finished editing the podcast when we got the word that NSW had a new Fair Trading minister.
Meetings are cancelled, lunch is postponed, and schedules are re-drawn for the simple reason that this is, in our world, a big deal.
Eleni Potinos may have been a media footnote in the cabinet reshuffle instigated by NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet this week, but for us she is big news.
There are four things that jump out, for those of us who have been close observers of strata politics for the past few years.
One, she is a woman; after six men in a row, the first female ever to serve as Fair Trading Minister for the Liberals.
Two, at 35, she is relatively young, confirming Fair Trading as being a training-wheels ministry.
Three, she comes from Miranda, an area with a lot of high-rises. But it’s the fourth thing that’s the clincher – she has also been given the Small Business portfolio.
At a time when there is clear evidence that strata is too big an issue to be lumped in with broken toys, faulty toasters, dodgy mechanics and sneaky real estate agents, our newly minted Fair Trading Minister gets a whole other portfolio to look after as well.
Forget sexting and Barfgate – this is the real scandal. The government clearly thinks that with the Building Commissioner on the warpath, and 139 proposals on the table, they have fixed strata. They clearly don’t realise they are just at the beginning, not the end.
LISTEN HERE
Meanwhile we also look at the dramas at Tamarama where a bid to rescue a huge block that really shouldn’t be where it is has hit the Building Commission buffers.
We examine the major trends in the real estate in the past year.
And we have a non-Christmas poem that might bring a smile to your face.
TRANSCRIPT IN FULL
Jimmy 00:00
Exciting times, in strata land. We’re leading up to Christmas and then all of a sudden, Santa Claus drops in our laps, a brand new Fair Trading Minister!
Sue 00:10
Wow, yet another one!
Jimmy 00:12
This will be the Liberal Party’s 7th Fair Trading minister, since they came to power.
Sue 00:18
And how many years is that?
Jimmy 00:20
It’s like, one a year.
Sue 00:21
Oh my gosh!
Jimmy 00:23
Yes and it’s a woman, which is their first female Fair Trading Minister.
Sue 00:28
Yes, because Labor usually has female Fair Trading Ministers, don’t they?
Jimmy 00:31
The last three were, and they seem to have changed the name of the Ministry back to Fair Trading. We’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about trends in property. We’ll talk about what’s going on in the Tamarama apartment block. And, we might even have a Christmas poem.
Sue 00:49
Oh, excellent!
Jimmy 00:50
So that’s all coming up. I’m Jimmy Thomson, I write the Flat Chat column for the Australian Financial Review.
Sue 00:56
And I’m Sue Williams and I write property for Domain.
Jimmy 00:59
And this is the Flat Chat Wrap. So, as I said at the top of the podcast, we have a new Fair Trading Minister.
Sue 01:19
Yes. Tell us about her; I don’t really know anything about her, really.
Jimmy 01:23
Her name is Eleni Patinos. She is the member for Miranda, down in the Shire. I was hoping to dig through Google and find out stuff about her political beliefs and whatever. What I hit first of all, was a couple of scandals… In 2018, Matt Kean, the former Fair Trading Minister (or Better Regulation Minister, as he was called then); his ex -girlfriend (or his soon to be ex-girlfriend), sent screenshots of fairly racy sexting texts.
Sue 02:04
Wow, so that was happening back then, too.
Jimmy 02:07
It sounded like they had something going on and it all got a bit ugly, but Gladys said “look, you know, it’s a personal matter.” As we discovered recently, she has her line in the sand on these things and it’s pretty easy to stay inside. She didn’t sack Matt, but the previous year, there had been an incident after a State of Origin game, in which John Barilaro’s ministerial car was used to transport an MP back home, who was quote ‘unwell,’ unquote. The next day, the back seat was sort of covered in vomit, so this became known as ‘barf-gate.’ I think he was the one who said “look, it wasn’t me. It was her.”
Sue 03:01
What, our new Fair Trading Minister?
Jimmy 03:03
The new Fair Trading Minister was the barfer-in-chief.
Sue 03:07
Oh, dear!
Jimmy 03:08
But look, it’s not a huge scandal; neither of them are. Well, I suppose the sexting thing is just a bit unfortunate. She’s a young woman. She joined Parliament when, I think, she was 29. She’s been there since 2015. She’s been an undersecretary in transport. Well, this is another thing that came up. One of these commuter stations that become quite notorious, was being built in her constituency in Jannnali and they were going to demolish nine houses to build it and so, there was a big outcry about this with the local residents, because they didn’t want it. They didn’t want the commuter parking garage where they were going to put it and the nine people who lived in the houses, didn’t want to be forced out of their houses. There was a bit of disgruntlement, because they were holding public meetings about it and she wasn’t turning up; that’s their local MP. In one of them, they put an empty chair with her name on it, on the stage. Yes, a lot of anger there. So she’s quite a controversial figure, in many ways, but the thing that really bugs me is (we shouldn’t prejudge; she might be brilliant… Let’s hope she is). But, not only have they continued with the name ‘Fair Trading…’ It seems, until I’m corrected, I believe that they got rid of ‘Better Regulation and Innovation,’ and gone back to Fair Trading, but they’ve also given her Small Business…
Sue 04:43
As well as Fair Trading?
Jimmy 04:45
As well as Fair Trading.
Sue 04:46
But Fair Trading is an enormous portfolio; why on earth would they give her something else as well?
Jimmy 04:50
And somebody relatively new and inexperienced. She’s sitting in a safe seat. She’s got twice as many votes as her nearest rival in the Labor Party, so it’s an absolutely safe seat. It looks like they’re kind of fast-tracking her into the Ministry and of course, as we know, Fair Trading is the training wheels ministry. They’ve just landed this thing of 139 different proposals and things they want to do in strata, so whoever is Fair Trading Minister is going to have to wrangle that through, in the next year or so. Plus, she’s got Small Business. And small business; what we’re hearing about now is that after the pandemic (well, if the pandemic is in fact over), small businesses are going to need a lot of help, to get themselves back on their feet. It’s a big task to give a young person of any gender. Let’s just wish her luck.
Sue 05:46
Absolutely!
Jimmy 05:48
Oh, by the way, Kevin Anderson has gone off to do Lands and Water and Racing; I think he’s been given.
Sue 05:56
I guess that’s a National Party’s… They like those kind of things, don’t they?
Jimmy 06:01
Yes and horse racing provides a huge amount of money to the budget. It does feel a bit like a sideways shift. I didn’t think he’d done a bad job.
Sue 06:10
No, but maybe he’s not on Dominic Perrottet’s Christmas card list.
Jimmy 06:16
Maybe not. Okay, when we come back, we are going to be talking about what’s been going on in Tamarama; the Tamarama drama. That’s after this. Sue, you’ve been following the Tamarama story, right from the beginning, almost. Now, this is a building which is very prominent; it sits up on the cliffs above Tamarama. How high is it; about 10 storeys high?
Sue 06:49
Seven storeys. Well, it was seven stories.
Jimmy 06:51
Right. It’s a big, long, wide building. It’s the kind of building that you look up from the beach and you think “why did they let them build that there?”
Sue 06:58
Yes, it certainly wouldn’t be allowed now, which is one of the reasons that they wanted to refurbish and renovate the whole building, because they could have knocked it down, but they would never be allowed to build another building quite that big.
Jimmy 07:09
Yea, absolutely and for obvious reasons; painfully obvious reasons. So, this is a building that was originally designed by Harry Seidler?
Sue 07:20
That’s right, but his original design never really went ahead; somebody else took over and they completely rewrote it. So, it’s not really a Seidler building, but it’s a kind of 60s brutalist building.
Jimmy 07:32
I think the Seidler family are very anxious to…
Sue 07:35
Distance themselves.
Jimmy 07:37
So, it’s a 60s brutalist building. It sits on top of a cliff. It’s seven storeys high; how many apartments?
Sue 07:43
78 apartments. It was seven storeys high, but the building has added two penthouses on the roof, so it’s now eight storeys high, and it’s now 80 apartments.
Jimmy 07:53
So, it’s 80 apartments. To us, it looked like council flats, in totally the wrong place. The stories coming out of there were about defects and the fire safety orders and all that sort of stuff. It was a very troubled building. They came up with this idea, which is based on the replacement or renewal; what we call the ‘75% Forced Sales’ law. That law that allows 75% of owners in a building to decide to sell the whole building to a developer or knock it down, or do stuff with it. Under those laws, they decided to build the penthouses on the roof, to pay for all the many repairs that the building needed.
Sue 08:40
And also, create car parking underneath, as well, so they sort of dug down, as well. They did an awful lot of work to the building.
Jimmy 08:48
And what happened this week?
Sue 08:50
Well, the other work that they did was put on balconies and putting on walkways and putting on courtyards and changing the internals of the apartments, so they did lots of things. In lots of ways, it’s kind of like a completely new building and everything was going really well; the roof was going to go on next week. It’s kind of like a wavy roof and it has a bit of a dome on it, which is a nudge to the the original design that Harry Seidler did. But then this week, as you so rightly say, I was just getting on a plane to go to the Outback for a day (well, a couple of days), and I got a call from David Chandler’s office that they were putting orders on the building.
Jimmy 09:30
That means what?
Sue 09:32
Well, they’re putting a stop-work order on the building… That they had to stop work with effect from 5pm on Thursday, because (and this is kind of part of an ongoing argument I think)… We heard about it first at the OCN strata seminar. David Chandler has said that he’d had problems with a certain building and we kind of thought “oh, I wonder if that’s Tamarama?” I asked him if it was and he said he couldn’t possibly comment. His office phoned and basically, it turns out that there are only fire sprinklers being installed in the new building, on the lower levels, according to what the 2016 regulations (fire regulations), recommended. But, since the building was being done, there have been a new set of regulations that came in, in 2009.
Jimmy 10:25
In the intervening five years.
Sue 10:27
That’s right. 2019 regulations that say there has to be fire sprinklers on every level. So, the owners of the building, basically, were saying “well, our consultants, our legal advisors, the certifier, the builders, were all designing it according to the 2016 regulations, which were the ones in place when it was all being redesigned and rebuilt.” But, the Building Commissioner feels that it should be rebuilt according to the 2019 regulations and that is the problem.
Jimmy 10:57
Right. Now, this sounds expensive.
Sue 11:01
Yes, it is expensive. But, you kind of think from the outside well, they might have a case to say “well, no, look, the 2016 regulations were the one in place when we started, so they should be the ones that we’re abiding by, when we finish.” But you know, David Chandler has huge powers and you could actually mount, perhaps, a legal challenge, but that would probably end up being as expensive as putting fire sprinklers in the building, anyway. So I think there’s lots of negotiations going on now, to find out what they should do next, because it was originally the poster child for all the crumbling buildings; crumbling old strata buildings, around Sydney, who have to do some work.
Jimmy 11:44
And it’s either a case of sell the whole building, or sell parts of the building; to build new apartments, to pay for the work that needs to be done.
Sue 11:53
Yes and there are a lot of buildings around Bondi mostly, because you know, those buildings, they become victims of the sea.
Jimmy 12:01
Yes and they’re older buildings, anyway.
Sue 12:03
With concrete cancer, yes.
Jimmy 12:04
They’re some of the oldest apartment blocks in Sydney.
Sue 12:07
Yes. There’s a number of those that are currently undergoing renewal and they’re selling off different spaces; they’ve found different spaces in the building, where they can build on top. Obviously, that’s a fantastic…
Jimmy 12:20
Because that’s prime real estate; a penthouse.
Sue 12:23
Or, they might be able to put balconies on and then resell a couple of the apartments. But some of them have found little areas, like; when old buildings were built, they sometimes had communal laundries. They’ve got these little spaces, which aren’t really being used for much anymore, so they’re turning them into maybe, a studio apartment, and the building is selling that off. So they’re kind of working out really interesting ways of raising money, to do these kinds of things. As well, with the Tamarama block, they they took out a strata loan to help finance it in the interim, and then they kind of felt that when they sell off the penthouses (which were due to go on the market this week for $20 million, or over $20 million each)… But obviously, you kind of think, well, that’s going to be a bit delayed now.
Jimmy 13:10
I think that once that building is fixed, that’s a prime piece of real estate. It’s empty at the moment, isn’t it? Are there people living in it?
Sue 13:21
I think there might be maybe, a couple, but most people moved out, during the renovation, and were preparing to move back in, very soon. Well, unless
Jimmy 13:29
Well, unless they’ve got very deep pockets, they may not be able to afford to move back in… I mean, they might have to sell, which I’m sure they’d be able to do, in it’s location and get a really good price for it, but from what I hear, the bills are just going up and up and up.
Sue 13:51
What, for the renovation?
Jimmy 13:52
Yes.
Sue 13:53
But then their apartments will be worth so much more now, than they would have been from the very beginning, so you kind of have to weigh it up. There have been some people during the process, because it has taken a long time and people lived there while some of the work was being done, but had to move out while other parts of the work was being done. Some people sold out and some people bought in there, while the work was going on, because they could see the potential. Among them, I think, there’s an architect, who saw the potential and has bought an apartment. So, there is demand for them.
Jimmy 14:28
You’re not going to get an apartment with that view, in that location, ever again.
Sue 14:34
No, that’s right.
Jimmy 14:35
It’s a one-off.
Sue 14:38
For all intents and purposes (if they get the fire sprinklers sorted out), it is pretty much a brand new building. It looks fantastic. It looks so much better than it did before. They’ve had designers in, to do the interiors. The lobby is looking great. You know, they’ve got a lot more space there now; a lot more access to the open air and a lot more access to the views, as well. The penthouses look as if they’re going to be quite amazing. I’ve seen some renders of them; they look quite extraordinary, really.
Jimmy 15:12
I mean, looking at some of the prices that places have gone for in the past year or so… I mean, $20 million in that location, for that floor space that they’re being offered sounds modest, I would say.
Sue 15:24
A bargain, Jimmy!
Jimmy 15:26
For someone else; not for me.
Sue 15:29
Well, no, because there’s lots of demand for the beachside areas now after… WelI, I can’t say after COVID, but as a result of the pandemic, a lot of people want to live by the beach now.
Jimmy 15:39
Although, I don’t think it has beach access, does it?
Sue 15:43
Well, it’s only a short walk down to the beach.
Jimmy 15:45
A short abseil.
Sue 15:47
Well, you could abseil, Jimmy!
Jimmy 15:51
It’s been a while since I’ve been down there, but I seem to recall that it’s…
Sue 15:56
You just walk down the pathway down to the beach and Tamarama is a pretty nice beach. I’ve never been swimming there really, because there’s quite a lot of rips in there. I don’t think that would be a great place for you to swim, especially as you can’t swim.
Jimmy 16:12
Well, no, especially since I can’t swim. But they have a rip there. They have a name for it; the Tamarama Express, or something like that. Surfers use it, they find the rip and it takes them out and then they jump on their surfboards and get eaten by sharks. Look, it’s a shame that all that work has gone into it and it’s been stymied at the last minute, for very good reasons, I’m sure. I did notice that the orders were attributed to Matt Whitton, not David Chandler. David Chandler is the Building Commissioner; Matt Whitton is his assistant.
Sue 16:50
One of his inspectors, isn’t he?
Jimmy 16:52
His second-in-command, really. It’s what I was saying last week, that David Chandler is becoming increasingly anxious (maybe), to not be seen as the Messiah; that he wants to share the glory, a little bit. Because you know, there are powerful people who really don’t like what he’s doing. Not for any other reason than it stops them doing what they want to do.
Sue 17:22
Sure, absolutely and, makes them a lot more accountable for their work.
Jimmy 17:30
Just before we leave this topic, tell us about this aeroplane that you got on when you got the news?
Sue 17:38
It was unfortunate timing, really. I was just going to the Outback to do a story on a station, which has become… It’s a working farm, its a big property. It’s wheat and sheep and they’re also now taking tourists. It’s kind of nice, bespoke luxury, but it’s out in the Outback and I’m just covered with mosquito bites. It’s a great place; Callubri Station, but to get there, Destination New South Wales chartered a plane for us five journalists to go there together. The plane was just wonderful. I’ve never been on a plane like it.
Jimmy 18:16
So this was a propeller-driven plane?
Sue 18:19
I got on this plane, and it has big armchairs and a sofa and a big table, that can fold down, so you can actually eat a full meal. It was incredible and I felt so much like I was in Succession, the TV show. A little group of people on the plane said… I said first of all “I want to be Logan,” and other people all wanted to be Greg, because he’s (maybe), a nice guy, but if you’ve seen the end of season three, maybe not! It was quite amazing; a fantastic way to get there.
Jimmy 18:59
It looked very luxurious, from your pictures.
Sue 19:01
Yes, and it flies quite low, so you could even get internet and phone coverage and make phone calls and send emails while you’re on the plane, which was a luxury, as well.
Jimmy 19:11
It was just as well, because when you got there, there was no coverage.
Sue 19:16
If you’re with Telstra, you can get coverage, but I was with Optus, unfortunately and I was completely out of contact for the whole time.
Jimmy 19:25
When we used to travel to the Outback, we always took a little Telstra Mobile phone, but it’s been so long since we’ve travelled.
Sue 19:36
It didn’t occur to me, that the whole of the Outback is not covered by Optus. How ridiculous!
Jimmy 19:44
Okay, when we come back, we are going to talk about what has happened in the past year, in property. That’s after this. Your feature in Domain starts with the phrase ‘Space, the Final Frontier,’ which always used to start the old Star Trek TV show. Then it goes on to say that space is the financial frontier, when it comes to apartments. So, please explain.
Sue 20:19
Well, over 2021, we spent a fair bit of time in lockup, in both Sydney and Melbourne, and a few other places, as well. People were really looking for more space in their apartments. They were really looking for particularly, space so they could work at home in their apartments, as well and also, looking for a bit of space outside, maybe a balcony or a courtyard too, because, you know, it’s hard being stuck inside, when you don’t have any access to the outside. That became the huge thing in 2021 and people were really prepared to pay a premium for that, too. So yeah, it’s been an amazing year; I mean, we’ve had enormous growth in property prices as you know, and Sydney apartments, the median price is now over $800,000, which is quite incredible. You know, that’s the median. It’s not like a really fabulous apartment.
Jimmy 21:10
Some of the fabulous apartments are going for ridiculous amounts. I see Jamie Packer paid $60 million. That’s the budget of a small country.
Sue 21:20
I guess Barangaroo really came into its own this year, as well and the apartments there. Some of the most expensive apartments went from around the Harbour side, because the first record was set when the Opera Residences…You know, that new building at Circular Quay, just down from the toaster building? A new aparment there went for $26 million.
Jimmy 21:44
That was quite a lot.
Sue 21:45
Absolutely. And then, at Barrangaroo, we had a penthouse; the top three levels of LendLease’s new tower, which hasn’t been finished yet, Tower 1… That apartment sold off-the-plan for $140 million.
Jimmy 22:00
Oh, my God!
Sue 22:00
It’s astonishing, isn’t it? We’ve also got the Crown Residences, just next to those LendLease Towersn and that’s where Jamie Packer has got a $60 million apartment, although I don’t think he’s settled on it yet. He said he’s willing to buy it, but it actually hasn’t gone through yet, so we don’t quite know whether he’s going to settle, but there’s been lots of purchases there, of more than $40 million.
Jimmy 22:23
Wow. I mean, it’s just seems unbelievable. I honestly wonder where people get the money?
Sue 22:29
Sure. I mean, this year has been quite interesting, because we’ve got record low interest rates, and we haven’t been able to travel, so we’ve got a very high level of savings. Really, when you buy a $40 million apartment, I don’t suppose anyone ever turns up with a case of $40 million worth of $50 notes. Really, it’s just whether you can actually borrow that much from a bank and then it’s all just a kind of a paper transaction. You might sell the place in a year or so for $45 million and you’ve never actually paid out very much, at all. But you know, for the rest of us, for us mere mortals, one of the most stunning things of this year was the news that it would take most people 16-and-a-half years, to save up the 20% deposit on a home. 16 and a half years!
Jimmy 23:23
Where are they going to live in the meantime?
Sue 23:25
Well, that’s right.
Jimmy 23:26
Well, they’re renting, presumably, or they’re living with their parents, or something else.
Sue 23:31
Well, that’s another thing that really went up; the parental contribution to their kids homes. Parents now on average, lend their children $89,000 and that’s up 20% from the year before. So, you know, if you’ve got a child who’s desperately wanting their own home, then you’re going to have to fork out quite a bit of money, to help them.
Jimmy 23:54
That’s another callback to Succession, isn’t it? Where Logan says to his kids “make your own pile.”
Sue 24:03
Yes, he doesn’t have very much sympathy for that kind of stuff, does he really?
Jimmy 24:06
Not really. Well, he’s a bit Scottish, isn’t he? So prices have been going up. I mean, it’s funny, because we were hearing on the radio this morning… They were saying “oh, the stock market’s gonna go down, because of the Coronavirus; because of Omnicron and house prices are going to be affected, because interest rates are going to go up, because of inflation.” It’s basically like they’re saying “it doesn’t matter what you try, you’re gonna be screwed.” I don’t believe it! I know people who put a deposit down on an off-the-plan purchase of just over a million dollars and when they checked to see how the progress was going in the sales of the other apartments (because that’s quite important; it’s an important part of your off-the-plan gamble, that other people are also buying in the same project), and they were told that the equivalent apartment to the one that they had bought, was now costing $140,000 more. That’s 14% more.
Sue 25:11
That’s amazing, isn’t it?
Jimmy 25:13
And that’s in less than a year.
Sue 25:15
And is that a place on the coast, maybe?
Jimmy 25:18
Yes.
Sue 25:20
I mean, there has been such a huge demand for places on the coast.
Jimmy 25:23
That was another big trend from last year.
Sue 25:25
Exactly. People buying holiday homes or maybe, they’re going to rent them out.
Jimmy 25:29
Or they’re going to go live there, because you can work remotely these days, apart from Nyngan, where you can’t…
Sue 25:37
Get coverage! It’s interesting to see what’s going to happen next year. I mean, there’s still strong demand for places on the coast; places by the beach, anywhere that’s kind of really nice to live. A lot of companies have been saying “no, no; we want people back into our offices,” you know, in the CBD offices. They don’t want all that really expensive space, standing there empty and idle. But then with the latest Omicron wave, a lot of them are saying “well, no, let’s delay that.” Atlassian has said that their people only need to come in once a year, or something. They just want to see them occasionally.
Jimmy 26:15
Just to make sure they actually exist.
Sue 26:16
So companies that work in the technology field, they have workforces who are very agile. They’re young people, who will quit and move on and find another job quite easily elsewhere. They’re finding a lot of those companies can’t actually say to their staff “no, you’ve got to be in the office two days a week or three days a week,” because those people will quit and they’ll go to another company like Atlassian, that doesn’t necessarily demand that they be in the office much at all. They’re finding they’re not using their offices as much, only just for a bit of collaboration and creativity and meetings every now and again. People maybe will continue their drift out to places beyond the cities. We’re seeing prices of both houses and apartments rising in those places, whether they’re on the coast or whether they’re in nice places inland, like Berrima or Orange; those nice places to live.
Jimmy 27:11
So it’s actually office space that’s a financial frontier?
Sue 27:17
Maybe so. I think a lot of the commercial real estate people are trying to talk up office space and saying “well, it’s coming back.”
Jimmy 27:26
Because that’s their job, apart from anything else.
Sue 27:28
That’s right and I mean, maybe it is, because there still will need to be collaboration spaces, meeting spaces and some companies are more dependent on that, than others.
Jimmy 27:39
When we come back, a Christmas poem. That’s after this.
Christmas at Hyperbole Towers
Hyperbole Towers is the fictional strata block featured in out PodCom created earlier this year.
The original version of this was written several tears ago under the title of Christmas at Dardanelle Towers. But then I heard there is a unit block called Dardanelle Tower so I changed it
But not only has the name changed, the focus in this rewrite has switched from strata committees being just a tad too politically correct, to maybe using Covid as an excuse for a screw-up.
The charming version of Jingle Bells accompanying the podcast version is by a Russian musician called Eugeniusz Betliński (it says here).
Please enjoy.
They’ve cancelled Christmas at Hyperbole Towers
The committee discussed it for hours and hours
Until the chair, surprisingly snarky, decreed there’d be no Christmas party
Bluster and fluster could not mask it, a party was in the too-hard basket.
The chair compiled a list of reasons for finishing off the festive season
Handshakes and hugs would have to be banned, mistletoe kisses in no-man’s land
Are you vaxxed? You daren’t ask. Sucking wine through straws beneath your mask.
So, issuing orders with a glower, she cancelled Christmas at Hyperbole Towers
They cancelled Christmas at Hyperbole Towers under the chair’s emergency powers
With no concern for democracy, she demanded utmost secrecy.
Property values would surely spiral, she said, if the news was leaked and then went viral
In any case, it would be a fizzer with everyone in an omicron tizzer
There’d be no sitting on Santa’s knee, due to covid-over proximity
And anyway hadn’t some holy roller said Santa was invented by CocaCola?
And she was sure that Baby Jesus would be concerned if we shared sneezes
With the risk of hay fever from festive flowers
They’ve cancelled Christmas at Hyperbole Towers
They’ve cancelled Christmas at Hyperbole Towers
We thought because the building’s ours, we could celebrate it if we liked
But even the idea of a tree was spiked
A twinkling fir in our foyer is definitely not okay
But citing the need for sensitivity when addressing issues like the nativity
The chair said we required mitigation against potentially costly litigation
By unnamed residents who’d be offended if the festivities were not suspended
So in our homes we’re forced to cower
Cos they’ve cancelled Christmas at Hyperbole Towers
They cancelled Christmas at Hyperbole Towers and when the mood began to sour
There are by-laws, the chair said in the face of profanity
Protecting our safety, privacy and sanity.
A by-law on sanity? That gives me pause …everyone knows there’s no sanity clause.
Finally the chair grudgingly admitted the reason she was so committed
To keeping us celebration-free … she’d forgotten to order the bloody tree.
So a PC, tree-free holiday is ours
Cos they’ve cancelled Christmas at Hyperbole Towers
Sue 27:49
That’s funny, Jimmy.
Jimmy 27:53
We’ve had our Christmas party cancelled for the last two years, but for other reasons, obviously.
Sue 27:59
So, cancel culture. It’s a bit hard to say; I haven’t even had a drink! But on that note, maybe just wish all our listeners a very happy and safe Christmas.
Jimmy 28:14
Yes and it’ll probably be a shorter form of the podcast next week, because I think we’ll dig out Hyperbole Towers, the sitcom.
Sue 28:23
That will be fun!
Jimmy 28:24
The pod-com. That’s all going to happen next week, but this week, thank you all for listening. Have a great Christmas and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye.
