Lucerne Investment Partners secures and builds client wealth, providing positive investment experiences and consistent returns regardless of wider market conditions.

They specialise in providing private wealth advice, funds management services. Our leadership team co-invests, placing their personal wealth on the line and aligning their interests with those of investors.

They have a number of investment vehicles open to retail and wholesale investors: The Lucerne Alternative Investments Fund a “fund of funds” model which provides investors access to an actively managed portfolio of funds designed to have a low correlation to equity markets.

Lucerne takes a considered and methodical approach to investment, keeping capital preservation front of mind.

The group was started in 2015 by a team who wanted to create a business better aligned to the interests of investors, rather than one based on earning commissions on trades regardless of investment results.

With a proven track record of results, our dynamic team values relationships, having worked with a range of investors for over ten years. Personalised service and long-term partnerships are at the core of our business.

Lucerne Investment Partners value integrity, care, excellence and doing things differently. A willingness to learn, grow and put our investors’ interests first, drives us to succeed.

More information can be found be visiting www.lucernepartners.com

As economies begin to rebound across the world, businesses are struggling to hire the right skills they need to fill roles.

This has seen a boom in the e-learning and upskilling sectors, and TEX.inc is at the forefront of this evolution.

“Australia would have 150,000-200,000 people from overseas, here, filling the gaps,” Tex.inc Founder and CEO Darren Scott revealed to Ticker News. “And those would predominantly be in the digital and tech space.

“But now, there is a pent-up demand, as companies are now trying to accelerate projects that were put on hold because of a slowdown.”

Tex.inc is an open video-based marketplace that enables real-time learning and upskilling by connecting people one-to-one with the right expert, at the right time.

“Gone are the days where you send your employees to a training course,” adds Scott. “Now companies are looking at the expertise that exists within their business – and using that breadth to train others.”

Should the companies experience shortages, what could it mean for business projects?

“Things could grind to a halt, or be delayed. This could also hurt Australia’s global competitiveness for years to come.”

For more information, head to their website.

Australian subs are going nuclear – so will we have nuclear war in the United States senate?

The Commander-in-Chief has his eyes cast across the horizon.

From getting Congress to pass his $3.5 trillion program to rebuild America, to keeping the government from shutting down at the end of September, to maintaining the United States from defaulting on its debts in October, to advancing the chess game with China following the unveiling of AUKUS; and the deal for nuclear-powered submarines for Australia last week and his meeting with the Quad leaders, including Prime Minister Scott Morrison, this week.

Not to mention, the CiC has nuclear threats to manage in Iran and North Korea too.

President Biden has a nuclear war to wage and win in the United States Senate beginning this week

Woven into the Biden agenda are a series of social and racial equity measures that Democrats across the country, and in every walk of life, view as essential:  

• Protecting the right of women to access abortion services. Texas has virtually outlawed abortion and a major test case from Mississippi, which prohibits abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, will be heard by the Supreme Court in October. 
• Gun control, at least by providing effective background checks on gun purchasers.
• Police reform, to change policed practices ager the murder of George Floyd by officers in Minneapolis.
• Voting rights, to ensure that all voters can vote freely and easily, in every State

As key Democratic priorities, Democrats in the House have passed several bills on all these issues (save abortion, which the House will consider in the coming days) and sent them to the Senate — where they have died, even though Democrats control the chamber.

These bills die because the Senate, over the past 30 years, has become trapped in the partisan quagmire of the “filibuster” – a Senate rule that enables any Senator to require a supermajority of 60 votes to pass any legislation.

In a 50-50 Senate, this leaves Biden 10 votes short on any bill Republicans oppose.  And so the Senate has blocked all gun control proposals, all legislation to support police reform, anything significant on immigration, anything to expand Obamacare.

However, it is voting rights that are at the heart of the Democratic agenda. 

Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen has induced Republican-controlled states to limit access to the ballot box. 

In Georgia, voters must show more ID when they vote by mail and there are fewer ballot drop boxes.  Florida has made it harder to vote by mail and also limited ballot drop boxes.

Texas makes it a criminal offence to assist voters at the polls and limits drive-through voting and extended voting hours.

The entire point of these new laws is to keep voting turnout down and to make it harder to vote by post – because too many people voted in 2020, and that record turnout denied Trump a second term.

Australians, who embrace the virtues of mandatory voting, are astonished that the “greatest democracy in the world” (as Americans see themselves) has a bias against universal voting.

The struggle for voting rights goes back to the end of the Civil War, the passage of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution to ensure that the freed Black slaves, and all citizens (except women until 1920) could vote. 

A fight that continued in the civil rights marches of the 1960s with Martin Luther King and John Lewis, and the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s.

Winning this fight now coincides with a determination that it is time the filibuster died in the Senate – not progressive legislation

For the filibuster to be eliminated or reformed, it takes a simple majority vote to change the Senate’s rules.  

Killing the filibuster is seen as “going nuclear” because it would change the Senate as we know it.

In a 50-50 Senate, each individual Democrat has the power to stop the Biden-Democratic agenda.

On voting rights, it has come down to Sen Joe Manchin of West Virginia. He supports the filibuster – and voting rights too.  He knows how crucial voting rights are to his president and his party. He also believes in the Senate and in working with Republicans.

Manchin has put together a voting rights bill that has every other Democrat on board. It makes Election Day a public holiday, requires same-day registration at all polling locations by 2024, and provides a minimum 15 days of early voting for federal elections. It also has strong voter ID requirements.

Many Democrats wanted much more – such as public funding for campaigns – but have agreed on a simpler bill with core voting rights protections that could pass the Senate if the filibuster is gone.

This week, if Manchin can find 10 Republicans, this bill can pass, and it would show that the Senate can still work even with the hurdles imposed by the filibuster.

If Manchin fails, it will mean the Senate is broken, and the fuse to go nuclear in the Senate will be lit.  The pressure on Democrats to end the filibuster as it stands today will be excruciating.

If the heart of the Biden-Democratic agenda is in the legislation for economic recovery, jobs, infrastructure, climate change, health care, seniors, education and kids, the soul of Democratic ambitions are with the protection of their most fundamental constitutional rights – for all Americans, not just the privileged

More over, voting rights are the soul of the Democratic Party.

If voting rights die in the Senate, a higher measure of enthusiasm among Democratic voters to step up again in next year’s midterm elections for control of Congress dies with it.

Worth going to nuclear war over.