Two Scoop $100 million Prize

A man with a South African accent and an Absa bank account has not won Australia's record lotto Jackpot.

The jackpot which eventually swelled to over 100 million Aus dollars (R650 million) was won by two people, a Queenslander and a South Australian.

I can't even imagine how those two people must be feeling today. They each woke up $53 million dollars richer.

Yesterday's lotto draw as I said was the biggest in Australian history.

A local television station which has the rights to broadcast the live lotto draw, similar to e-tv, made a big show and dance about it, having a live count down to the big event and all.

The reckoned, that by the time those yellow balls fell into the lotto machine last night, two in three Aussies were in possession of a ticket. And the chances of winning? 45 million to one.

That meant that every person who had a ticket, including me, had a 99.9979% chance of not winning.

Anyway, according to the people who run the OZ lotto, an hour before sales closed, they were selling over 10 000 tickets a minute.

And with all the tickets that people in Perth bought - over $20 million - (Apparently Perth people are the luckiest when it comes to lotto) the most one person walked away with here was $33,468.

I wonder how the guy who bought $7 000 worth of tickets must feel today?

If I had a time machine I would go back and choose these numbers: 12, 3, 38, 21, 23, 29, 40.

AU$90 Million!

What would you do with R585 million?

That's a whole lot of moola and all I have been thinking of since buying a ticket for tonight's $AU90 million OZ Lotto draw.

I dont ever remember the SA lotto getting past R40 million and even this staggering prize is a first for the Aussies.

Can one person win it? Is it possible? Can a person with a South African accent and an Absa bank account take it all?

I will tell you tomorrow...

With just hours to go until Australia’s biggest lottery jackpot is drawn, thousands of West Australians are flocking ticket counters across the State.
The lure of winning tonight’s $90 million division one prize is so intense that many who have never bought tickets are joining the queues while others are forming syndicates to improve their chances of winning.
“I would say that one every in every 10 people that stand in my queue are first-time players,” said Shan Iddamalgoda, owner of the Southlake Newsagency at South Lakes.
“We have to assist them by giving them advice on how to play. Everybody is excited by this,” he said.
Lotterywest said that based on current sales, they expect tonight’s OZ Lotto draw to reach in excess of $20 million in sales, meaning that more than $6.4 million will be raised to benefit the WA community.
Lotto ticket retailers will process as many as 35 tickets a second, or 10,000 tickets every five minutes, during peak buying times, Lotterywest said.
Mr Iddamalgoda, who has hired two extra staff members to keep up with steady stream of people coming into his shop, said he could not remember it ever being so busy for a lotto draw.
“When I opened the shop this morning, there were already about 50 people waiting,” he said.
Mr Iddamalgoda said he expected to take in more than $60,000 in lotto ticket sales today, after raking in close to $50,000 yesterday.
Yesterday, 1586 people bought tickets at the Southlake Newsagency with one person buying tickets for $7000.
At the Lakeside Lottery Centre in Joondalup, owner John Kent has been kept busy organising syndicates.
While he has organised 60 of his own syndicates, he has seen a steady number of people buying in bulk, with a woman buying $16,000 worth of tickets on behalf of company-run syndicate today.
“People are very excited by tonight’s draw. They see this as their ticket out of the recession,” Mr Kent said.
The largest syndicate Mr Kent has organised was a $25,000 syndicate with a $1000 a share buy-in.
“The excitement I am seeing is comparable to Christmas. It is huge. I definitely think that it is going to be won tonight,” he said.

Just Another Day At The Office

Imagine you are at work, doing what you normally do when all of a sudden a man in a frenzy bursts through the doors and shouts: "Call an Ambulance, my wife is giving birth".

That is exactly what happened to Helen Roughley, a Perth woman yesterday.

This is the story I wrote:

A Perth mother with no medical experience delivered a baby in a carpark in the middle of a downpour this morning while a police officer, a port worker and the frantic father looked on in awe.
Helen Roughley of Port Kennedy said she could still not believe she had helped deliver someone’s baby, saying it would be one of the great memories of her life.
Ms Roughley — who has an 18-year-old son and a 20-year-old daughter — was at work at a Success BP service station when shortly after 7am a man walked in and asked her to call an ambulance as his wife’s water had just broken.
After calling the ambulance, Ms Roughley went out to the expectant mother who was in heavy labour in the front passenger seat of a car. The couple’s two toddlers were sitting in the back seat.
“I could see she was going to have the baby at any moment so I decided I had to do something. I went into the store and put on a pair of gloves,” Ms Roughley said.
“At the time, I was shaking, thinking ‘where the hell is the ambulance’,” she said.
A South Metro TIG police officer and a Fremantle Port Authority worker saw the commotion and came to help.
As the rain pounded down, the port worker held out his reflective jacket to prevent the rain streaking into the car as Ms Roughley squeezed inside.
“I just knew I had to do something. I told myself ‘I am going to do this’,” she said.
The young mother, who was in her twenties, was panicking and the first thing Ms Roughley said she did was to calm her down.
“I told her to breathe in and out and to relax. I could see the shoulders of the baby coming out. I put out my hand, told her to push and it sort of just popped out,” she said.
A healthy baby girl was born and moments later, an ambulance pulled into the carpark.
Paramedics examined the baby and clamped the umbilical cord before taking the mother and child to King Edward Memorial Hospital, where they are both doing well.
Throughout the delivery, Ms Roughley said the woman’s husband paced around and eventually got into the car with her.
“You could see, he was very nervous and worried,” she said.
As the ambulance pulled away, Ms Roughley went into her office and poured herself some ice coffee.
“I needed it. I then called my area manager and said, ‘guess what, I just delivered a baby’!”

RIP King of Pop

Michael Joseph Jackson is undoubtedly the greatest performer to have ever lived.
His music rocked us all, his dance moves inspired a generation.
His dress sense may have not caught on but MJ was always a man that danced to the beat of his own drum.
Michael Jackson, the entertainer.

We watched, sometimes in morbid fascination, his public antics from holding his young baby from the balcony of a French Hotel for all to see, to covering their faces in veils like child brides to him wearing a face mask in public even before we heard about bird and swine flu.
Michael Jackson, ever the entertainer.
We watched in total fascination as he morphed from cute black kid to ugly white man and then cringed when allegations surfaced that he was fond of boys.
And even though he went to court most days in his pyjamas, he did it with style, always dancing to his own tune.
Michael Jackson, the entertainer.

And in the face of it all, he withstood the scurrilous allegations and beat it, showing us, he wasn't bad.
It didn't matter if he was black or white, all he wanted to do was rock with you.
And in the end he did.
Like all legends, MJ died young and when the world least expected it.
And even in death - as countless reams of paper and gallons of ink fly off the presses and hours upon hours of television are dedicated to him and DJ's the world over flood the airwaves with his music -Michael Jackson, the entertainer, continues to thrill.

The King is dead, long may he live.

Michael Joseph Jackson: 1958 - 2009.

R.I.P - we all know you were black.

Beeping Python

Every now and again, a story in Perth comes along that would make news anywhere in the world.
This one involves a python, an endangered animal, a tracking device and a couple of thieves.

Woylie's who look very muck like rats are have been placed on the endangered species list here in Australia.
Scientists, wanting to know why these animals are disappearing have placed radio collars around some of their necks and track their movements.
Australian Department of Environment and Conservation officers tracking these creatures in the Narrogin bushland, south of Perth were recently hot on the trail of a particular woylie.
The signal being emitted of it pointed them to a specific are and as they got closer they discovered the signal was in fact being emitted from two-metre long python.
It turns out the python had just eaten the wyolie, collar and all.
The gluttonous python was taken to DEC’s Woodvale Research Centre for care, while officers waited for the device to pass through its system.
Sometime over the past weekend burglars broke into the Woodvale facility and stole the python along with its give-away tracking device still secretly sending signals out from the reptile’s insides.
Yesterday, WA police and DEC officers used airborne radio tracking technology to trace the reptile and found it encaged in a Perth home.
The Python is due to be released back into the wild but the thief who stole will be put in a cage.

The Prime Minister, the Email and the Ute

A political brouhaha has been blowing through Australia over the past week or so that has got the media in a bit of a tizz here.

They have gone as far as to attach "gate" at the end of it
It's called "Ute-gate".

And like all political scandals carried by the main stream media the "gate" phrase comes from the Pulitzer prize winning scoop of the Washington Post on what is now famously known as Watergate affair.It started out as a break-in at the Democratic Party’s headquarters at the Washington DC Watergate building in 1972 and ended two years later with the forced resignation of Republican Party President Richard Nixon .

Now "Ute-gate" here is nothing near the scale of the Nixon affair and comes nowhere as close as South Africa's own Oilgate scandal and in fact there has been some debate in the media whether the term gate should actually be used.

A little background.

The Australian Ute-gate affair centres around whether Treasurer (Finance Minister) Wayne Swan misled Parliament about representations made on behalf of a car dealer, who happens to be a friend of the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. It revolves around whether there was any inappropriate behaviour concerning the administration of the proposed OzCar deal that will enable car dealers in Australia to acquire credit during the global financial crisis.The Opposition Liberal Party, led by one of Australia's richest men, Malcolm Turnbull accuses Swan of misleading parliament and effectively giving the prime minister's pal preferential treatment.In turn, the government accuses the opposition if using a "forged email" to base the scurrilous allegations on.

On the surface, it seems like no corruption has actually taken place and the entire brouhaha stems from whether an email referred to at a hearing by a senior public servant -who may or not be sympathetic to the opposition -real or not.

It so happens that a raid by the Australian Federal police into the said public servant's house did turn up the email and it was indeed a fake.

Juicy indeed but if one has to consider that the OzCar scheme has not yet been implemented and therefore no one has benefited from any alleged impropriety then the whole Ute-gate thing is merely a storm in a political tea cup.

Never-the-less both sides of the political spectrum here are calling resignations and the whole saga it seems will have ample legs until a head or two rolls.

The Aussie media seems so starved for new that they are willing to take a term reserved for the highest form of corruption and attach it to a story about a forged email.

In the meantime I watch in awe.

Bikie's Hit The Road

Rat-out A Bikie Week

This week the Western Australia police launched a unique campaign which they hope will help them in their battle against organised crime.

It's called "Dob a Bikie".
A Bikie is a colloquial term for a biker and it is unashamedly Australian. Australians have created an entire lexicon of words they have shortened (or lengthened) to fit into their daily lives such as righto, goodo and Maca's (McDonalds) - which they pepper their conversations with.

Bikie's here are leather wearing, long bearded, Harley Davidson driving gangsters. They control the drug and nightclub market throughout Australia and go by names such as the Coffin Cheaters, Hells Angels, Gypsy Jokers, Finks and the Camencheros amongst others.

These gangs are ruthless and have had long running, bloody battles with police.

Recently some of these gangs have been outlawed in parts of Australia where authorities have imposed laws - similar to ones the Apartheid government used - that has banned membership or gatherings by these people.

They live by a code of silence. Recently when a former leader of one of the gangs was shot here in Perth, he refused to allow doctors to remove a bullet lodged in him because according to their code they do not get the police to sort out their disputes. Had the police removed the bullet it might have led them to shooter and these guys do not want that.

This week, the police have gone on the offensive urging Perth's residents to rat out the bikies in their neighbourhood. Not like the police can just arrest a bikie because he happens to live in your street, what they actually want from people is intelligence like car registration plates and the such.

Just hours after launching their campaign, the police received more than 300 calls from the upstanding four wheeled drivers of the community. 60% of which were being investigated. The other 40% were from bikies themselves, pranking the police's hotline.

Court's In Session, Mind Your English

I recently spent time at the Perth Magistrates Court. I was covering a court appearance of a people smuggler and while waiting for my case to start, I began scanning the court list.

Coming from Joburg where the typical court list will is usually in simple easy to understand language I was left quite amused at the Australian legal terms.

In South Africa if you steal, it is called, Theft, If you hit someone it is called Assault, If you kill, you are charged with Murder, if you rape you are charged with Rape etc etc.

The Aussies as I have come to learn do things way differently.

Take for an example my case. Had I been in SA, the charge would have read: Human Trafficking.

Here that charge is: "Attempt bring organise facilitate people who would become citizens and Intent to bring non citizens to Australia".

That was one of the more simple ones.

I will attempt to run through some charges people on the court list here with the charges they would face in SA.

Stealing a car: "Steal Motor Vehicle".

Driving without a license: "Drove motor vehicle whilst not being legally entitled".

Assault GBH : "Unlawfully assault and thereby did bodily harm with circumstances of aggression".

Fraud: "Stealing as a servant".

Rape: "Sexual penetration without consent".

Murder: "Wilful Murder"

Other chargers people were in court for were, Threatening Harm (I kid you not), possession of smoking utensil, Wilfully wounding and my personal favourite, Burglary in the place of another person without consent.

Now when was burglary ever consensual, I ask with tears in my eyes?

Time, The Gift of Kings

There are many things in life that you can judge a person's character by: how they treat cleaners, waiters, subordinates and whether they are late for appointments.

It's a slow news day here in Perth so I want to talk about the latter before telling you about an observation I have made between press conferences here and South Africa.

You see, keeping time and honouring it for that matter cuts at the very essence of who we are and at a subconscious level, gives a person on the outside a perspective on the way we view the world.

Arranging a meeting for 2pm and rocking up at 2.20pm says a lot. It tells a person that you do not value their time and at some level your time is superior.

I remember covering events attended by Zulu King, Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu back when I started my career in Durban where the King was notorious for arriving late by at least an hour of the scheduled starting time.

I once asked why this was so and was told that his subjects should always be at a venue before the King arrived and not the other way around.

It is one way the Zulu King exerts his authority on his subjects.

In other monarchies, time is a gift.

An old adage says that punctuality is the gift of kings.

Which brings me to press conferences.

In South Africa press conferences rarely started on time. It was one of those things we reporters came to expect. During one presser, then Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala Msimang once waited for a crew from the SABC to arrive before she began.

"African Time" was a phrase often thrown out when waiting. Another one, and my personal favourite was, "hurry up and wait".

In Perth it is the complete opposite. When the police/government/opposition set a time you better believe it is going to start then.

I am often amazed by their punctuality. Once (because I stupidly forgot my GPS at home and got terribly lost) I was late for a 2pm police presser. I got there at 2.06 and missed the entire first half and had I been five more minutes late I would have missed the entire thing.

This is by no means a whinge but a mere observation: It is truly refreshing that elected politicians and public servants ie police honour pre arranged time committments with the media because failing to do so is a snub to the people they serve - you.

Kick This Racist Out

Ever heard the name Brydan Klein?

I hadn't until I perused a Perth news website reporting that this "Australian" tennis player is being investigated by the ATP for racially abusing an oppenent during during an International match on June 14.

His opponent, Raven Klaasen is a South African.

Nineteen year old Klein (who happens to be an Australian Open junior champion) called Klaasen a "Kaffir".

I might be wrong but with a name like Klein, the man sounds more South African than a dinkum Aussie.

According to Klein, he made "serious error in judgement".

"I deeply regret my serious error in judgment in using this word and I am very sorry for the offence this has caused. "After the match I called my opponent Raven and apologised for what had happened and also apologised for any offence caused to his support team. "This incident is now currently being investigated by the ATP and as such I have been advised not to make any further comment," he said in a statement.

I hope the ATP throws the racket at this man and bans him from carrying a tennis ball. He brought the game in disrepute and knew fully his actions.

One only has to wonder where a teenager born as Apartheid was breathing its last breath could learn willy nilly throw around a term like that in public.

I am so happy he does not wear a South African flag on his shirt and he is better off playing for Australia.

Bitter racists ex-South Africans should stay where they are - be they in Vancouver, Auckland or Perth.

There are many of us staying outside South Africa who love our country.I have met countless South Africans here in Perth who when they talk about SA they say "home" and will never give up their green passports. They stick South African flags on their cars and tattoo the tip of Africa on their chest. They proudly walk around in their Bok Jerseys and stay up until 2.30am to watch a Bafana Bafana game. They have never forgotten about where they come from and name their businesses things like Sabenza and Bafana. They shop in the South African shop and will drive 30km's just buy a packet of nik naks and sip a Fanta grape.

They are fully conscious of the past and agree that South Africa is much better place now than it has ever been.

No one I have met longs for Apartheid. People are under no illusions and understand that many social ills still stalk our country: crime, poverty and HIV/Aids.

But we love our country and will never wrap ourselves in a flag other than the one that flies outside Mandela's house.