#107 - Steve Baxter - Labor's Budget Will Destroy Australia's Future

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2 Worlds Collide Podcast 1h 22m 2 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 2 months ago
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What are the implications of Labor's recent Federal Budget on Australia's economy?

Sam Bamford 0:15
Hi guys, welcome back to 2L's Cloud Podcast. On today's episode, we have Steve Baxter. I hope you guys enjoy. And just like that, Steve Baxter. Mate, welcome to 2L's Cloud Podcast. How are you going? Good, Sam. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. You're welcome, mate. If it wasn't for your very persistent PR team, you would have just continually getting missed in the emails. So well done to your PR team for getting you on, mate.
Steve Baxter 0:36
I like them, but given what I pay them, they bloody well should do as well to me.
Sam Bamford 0:38
So that's a good thing. But, mate, welcome back to Adelaide. You were telling me that you were posted here in the military.
Steve Baxter 0:46
Yeah, we spent nine years here from 93, eight years here from 93 to 2000 or thereabouts. I was with Adelaide Log Battalion, which is down at Waradale initially. And then 16th Air Defence up at Woodside Hills back in the mid-90s, essentially. So, yeah, worked on the Rapier and RBS-70 missile systems.
Sam Bamford 1:04
And I was just reading about you. You left the, left Squad 15? Yeah.
Steve Baxter 1:07
Yeah, joined the apprentice, yeah, 15, Rockhampton. So Rockhampton, central Queensland. Was in grade 11, so there was no prep back then. So I was quite a young person in grade 11 at the same time. That was probably not good. I pretty well failed grade 11, but the army still took me as an electronics technician. More for them. And yeah, went and joined the apprentice scheme, signed up for nine years. Spent three years in Wodonga in Latchford Barracks, just south of Bandiana. And then got posted to Brisbane, to Bulimba, which was a base workshop battalion. Great posting on the Brisbane River, right across the road from the Hammer Hotel. It was quite nice. And then out to Enoggera with 1C Regiment workshops.
Steve Baxter 1:44
So I was a technician out there. Whilst I'll talk about repairing compasses, I'll talk about repairing surface-to-air missile systems, most things I repaired were compasses and binoculars. which sounds about as exciting as they are. You know, compasses, these things that should point north and don't, God damn them, and binoculars who are quite a precision instrument. If those binoculars don't put it the right way, then they're quite taxing on the soldier using them. So they're a bit of skill in maintaining them, but they still are. But when you go through like one of those sheds just south of Brisbane Airport there, the warehousing sheds, in one of those sheds there's 7,614 compasses. I know that because I pulled every last one out of a box, checked it, and put it back in the box.
Sam Bamford 2:23
Mate, that sounds like a standard army procedure.
Steve Baxter 2:26
Yeah, it was not the most exciting time of my service career, Sam, let me tell you.
Sam Bamford 2:30
And then from there, you obviously built a whole bunch of businesses. You were a guest or an investor on Shark Tank as well. Yeah. So just explain how that all sort of started.
Steve Baxter 2:42
Yeah, long story to get there. So I was doing my service career. We'd go away on exercise for four weeks to four months, I suppose. They were very long and boring. You couldn't take enough books for your young viewers, books, the things you used to make from dead trees and would read, right? So I ended up enrolling in part-time university. So I got up some exemptions for not having finished grade 12, and I started doing computer science at university, essentially, through part-time. Over four years. I didn't complete one whole year over four years because that's how much I was being deployed away. And then came across this subject, this weird computer networking subject. Ended up working out you could build an internet service provider in your house.
Steve Baxter 3:20
We're here in Adelaide, and my first phone line I installed in a rented Army Maricorder up in Flagstaff Hill. I'm pointing that way because it's sort of that direction.
Sam Bamford 3:27
That is, yeah, yeah, that is, yep. That's south. That's Flagstaff Hill.
Steve Baxter 3:30
yeah flagstaff hill so um and so yeah we did that install 14 phone lines at our army mary quarter and that was in mid late late 94 um and that went fantastically well to be honest end up getting a year off leave without paying 90 in 95 and then got an early discharge about four months early from a nine-year sentence in in 1995 and that just went went off moved into the city uh built that business to about 65 staff 35 000 customers sold that in around the turn of the century

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