CHARLES WOOLEY
In Switzerland last month I was hit with an $A8 per night visitor tax. My employer pays the hotel bill but the clerk at the Chateau D’Ouchy in Lausanne decided the visitor tax was a personal rather than a work expense. Anyone travelling in Europe or America rarely notices a few extra bucks on the outrageous hotel bill.
But here in Tasmania, we are told such taxes are regressive and hard to impose and would drive tourists away. The Swiss with about 40 million tourists a year have a much better grip on fiscal reality and we can surely learn from them. The desk clerk told me I was the first visitor who ever questioned the tax and besides she told me, “You will find it is so much higher in many other parts of Europe.”
In Lausanne on Lake Geneva my film crew and I had million dollar water-views of snow capped Swiss mountains. It’s probably the most expensive country on earth and my canny soundman thought he could survive if he retreated to his room, enjoyed the scenery, and ordered a burger. It cost $A70.
So here’s a traveller’s tip. If you sniff around you will often find that expensive hotels have discreet guest lounges to lure those business travellers who can afford the room but not much more.
I followed a trickle of foreign guests down to the basement and discovered a bar serving Gold Sprint Spezial Bier. The bier wasn’t really so spezial but the price was right. They also threw in a beef ragout and in the company of fellow spongers, mostly academics and travelling salesmen, it made for an enjoyable night.
I was first introduced to what I call ‘The Art of Freeloading’ in my early days at the ABC. I got my first job in Perth, Western Australia, at the height of the seventies mining boom. The older journos soon taught me the skills necessary to live within the constraints of our (in those days very modest) wages. “Charlie, if you look around you will find there’s a free lunch and all you can drink every day of the week somewhere on Adelaide Terrace,” explained Cliff Neate, one of my first producers. Cliff was a journalistic legend of the free long lunch. Much later Malcolm Fraser, the most doleful of Prime Ministers, would inform us that there was ‘no such thing as a free lunch’.
Fraser was a silver spoon boy and had never had to scrounge for anything in life. He grew up on his wealthy father’s sheep properties, was sent off to Oxford University and returned to win the safe conservative western districts federal seat of Wannon. He eventually achieved the office of PM by deception and impropriety and then bizarrely became a leftie later in life. His CV sounds like a lot of free lunches but you can bet he never allowed himself to enjoy any of them. When Fraser made his famous ‘no free lunch’ pronouncement no one laughed louder than Cliff Neate who declared, “Obviously Malcolm never lunched with Lang and Bondy.”
On Adelaide and St. Georges Terraces in seventies Perth it was like the Great Gatsby every day of the week. With business tycoons like Lang Hancock and Alan Bond, finance institutions, property developers and fly-by-night mining companies, the city was just one endless long lunch.
Well, endless until it all crashed down in the late eighties, but by then I had abandoned my bottle of Mylanta and fled back to the eastern states.
In a concession to Malcolm Fraser I must admit there was a small price to those lunches. The business baron’s PR people expected some journalistic coverage of their client’s latest enterprises or at least reportage of their opinions on what was wrong with the rest of Australia.
With Lang it was easy. Everything was wrong with the rest of Australia. He spent millions campaigning for Western Australia’s secession from the Federation. Lang hated the fact that the West had to pay taxes to the hated ‘Eastern States’. “They shamelessly bludge on us,” he would tell me. “If Western Australia seceded from the Commonwealth the eastern states would be bankrupted in eleven days.”
My producers back in Sydney loved this madness and couldn’t get enough of Lang. My freeloading actually paid its way. The only problem was that Lang liked to do interviews after lunch and in my early twenties I was as yet an unseasoned longluncher.
At the end of one very long day I was in the television studio with Lang for my first