Are we ready to go? It's just after 10:30 A.M., so I think we should start the meeting. A very warm welcome to everyone, shareholders, colleagues, guests. Welcome to the Plato Income Maximiser 2022 Annual General Meeting. Thank you very much for joining us in person. We have a much better turnout than we had for our previous AGM earlier this morning. It's great to see a lot of familiar faces as well, and also for joining us online. Before we move to the agenda, I'd like to introduce my fellow board members. We have Lorraine Berends and Katrina Onishi, who the Independent Non-Executive Directors together with me as the Independent Non-Executive Director. Chris Meyer is part of the Pinnacle Group. I was going to introduce Don sitting in a chair, but he's not that well today, but he's joining us online. Don, we can see you. Could you raise your hand to let us know you can hear us? Okay. Welcome to Don, and he's been having honey and, you know, stuff to make sure he can present his investment management update a little bit later. Calvin Kwok, the Company's Secretary, is here as well. We have the Auditor, Chris Chandran, who's down here in the front row from Pitcher Partners, and he's available to answer any questions shareholders may have on the 2022 financial statements. Calvin has informed me that we have a quorum, and I declare the meeting open. I'm also advised that there are no apologies have been recorded prior to the commencement of the meeting. The agenda is up on the slide. It's pretty straightforward. I will provide a short Chairman's address, and that has been released to the ASX this morning. We'll then deal with the formal business of the meetings, which are the usual matters. Seeing if there are any questions on the Financial Statements, Remuneration Report, and re-election of directors. The highlight for me anyway is the Investment Manager update, which Don will provide. Peter Gardner is here as well from Plato, and Peter is also available to help with that process, to help Don with that process. After that, there'll be an opportunity for any questions shareholders may have, either online or in person on the investment side. You're welcome to ask questions on the formal resolutions, but if you do, please limit them to the matter being considered by the resolution. The notice of meeting has been circulated to shareholders, and I propose to take it as read. I'll now move, if I may, to the Chair's address. If you could get that slide up. Here we have a tech expert running around going to collect this. Okay, don't worry. Should I keep doing this or? Okay, perfect. All right. Great. The Chairman's address, I thought it's five years since we listed. Over five years we listed in May 2017. I thought it's appropriate to remind existing shareholders who've been with us since the start and also new shareholders on really what Plato Income Maximiser, PL8, seeks to do. To my knowledge, we're the first and only Australian-listed investment company that pays monthly dividends. It's our intention very much to continue to do this. I anticipate a question from the floor on whether we'll be able to do that. We'll come to that in due course. We have approximately AUD 575 million of pre-tax assets. You'd be able to see that on the screen if Don's head wasn't in the way. That makes us one of the larger LICs on the ASX. There's an advantage of. Sorry? Yeah, that's right. It is one of the larger LICs, and that is an advantage in terms of liquidity. We've been trading at a premium, which is we're very appreciative. We don't take for granted. One of those is the factor of size and the liquidity and the performance of the fund manager in doing what we said we would hope to achieve when we listed in May 2017. That's probably an appropriate time to move to the next slide, if we can, chart, which is the company performance. The portfolio performance since we listed has been an 8.9% annualized total return from the inception date, which was, as I said, May 2017 to 31 October 2022. I would like shareholders to note that that performance is after fees and expenses. There is a debate and flexible practice among the LIC sector as to whether you provide your performance before or after fees. We've got the LIC representative here, so I won't go into that particular debate. We do believe it's appropriate, certainly for Plato to show it after fees, because that is really what the shareholder return represents. The income to date has been 7.6% annualized income. The TSR performance, which is the total shareholder return, is 7.4%. The total shareholder return measures the change in the share price and the dividends that have been received over time. That is slightly less than the portfolio performance and the income because the TSR performance doesn't include the benefit of franking credits. That obviously is very important from an income product perspective. That TSR performance doesn't include franking, so arguably it understates the return that shareholders have had. Um, if we move to the next slide, please, Char. That's the dividend update and, you know, stating the bleeding obvious. The intention of this LIC is to pay shareholders a monthly dividend. In that slide, you will see shows the dividend history of the company. We started off at four and a half cents. We went to five cents for a considerable period of time. Then COVID hit in March two thousand and twenty. We lowered the dividend down to four cents to make sure that we could continue to pay that stream of fully franked dividends. Once the COVID, um, issues had worked their way through and the economy started to recover, we were able to increase the dividend to four and a half cents and then subsequently to, um, to... Sorry, when I say 0.4 of a cent, I beg your pardon, and then to 0.5 of a cent, and now we're at 0.55 of a cent. That shows the monthly dividends since inception. There are two dividends we've paid which are not represented on that graph. In March 2019, we paid a dividend of AUD 0.03 a share because we anticipated with a possible change of government at the time of that election, the franking regime may change, and the franking credits we had might have been trapped in the company. We paid a three-cent dividend. Earlier this year, on the fifth anniversary of the company, we paid a 0.55-cent dividend as a birthday present for shareholders. That was a one-off. We might do that again in 10 years, but that'll be a decision for the Board. If you look at the next slide, that shows the share price as against the NTA. We've been in the fortunate position, unlike many other LICs, that we've tended to trade at a very healthy premium to the NTA. That shows that there is, I think, demand for the product which PL8 represents, which is a share which provides monthly income and an acknowledgment of the performance of the Manager in terms of meeting the objectives of being able to generate income and franking credits to enable us to pay that monthly dividend. As you will see, that graph shows the share price premium over time. We announced an SPP last year and the share price went back to the NTA, but it since recovered reasonably quickly to once again trade at a premium. That's the history of the share price to NTA. We could move to the next slide. We have some news for shareholders, and we announced today on the ASX and before the meeting that we will be undertaking another share purchase plan or SPP. Consistent with the one we did last year, it will enable eligible shareholders, effectively people in Australia and New Zealand, the only ineligible ones are probably in the United States, but we don't have many of those, an opportunity to acquire a minimum of 2,500 shares and up to 30,000 shares. Um, and these are newly paid ordinary shares, and there won't be any brokerage or transaction costs. Um, from your perspective as shareholders, you want to know what price you'll be paying for these shares, and they'll be the lower of one of two things. One is a dollar eleven, which is the pre-tax NTA of a dollar, um, seven point eight cents, um, as at, uh, Friday's close of 18 November two thousand and twenty, plus the franking credit balance of, uh, two point nine cents per share and rounded up to the nearest, um, one cent. So that's the highest price you'll pay. If on the day that the SPP closes, which is going to be Friday the 9th of December, the pre-tax NTA is lower than that, you'll pay the pre-tax NTA on the closing date plus the franking credit balance again on 18th November of AUD 0.029. This maximum possible issue price of AUD 1.11 at that represents an 8.6% discount to the closing price on 18th November, which is Friday, the business day before we made the announcement today, and a 9.4% to the VWAP, the volume-weighted average price, for the five trading days up to 18th November 2022. A question which I'm sure shareholders will ask is, why are we doing this? The answer is pretty simple. The board has, via the investment manager and via Pinnacle, received very strong shareholder feedback indicating that they would like to be able to make additional investments in the company, but that the current share price premium to NTA is a significant deterrent to that. An SPP, share purchase plan, at around NTA with a slight raising for the franking balance, I'll come to that in a minute, is the simplest and most cost-effective way to satisfy this additional demand. In anticipation of a question, we do believe we've done the analysis very carefully, that the company's profit reserve and franking credit balance are sufficient to maintain the current level of monthly dividends, including under any additional capital raised under this SPP. The rationale for including the franking credit balance per share in the price calculation for the issue of new shares under the SPP is to reflect the value to shareholders of the company's current franking credit balance. The NTA calculation does not include any benefit of the franking credit balance, but we do think it's appropriate to include this in the SPP, and it does help to protect those shareholders who elect not to participate in the SPP, so it minimizes their loss of the franking value. The procedures for the SPP, you don't need to take notes now, but you will be receiving a booklet and information. Those will go out on the 23rd of November. That's this Wednesday, either by email or post, depending on your preference. It will explain in detail in those how to apply. It should be pretty straightforward. You can either apply by BPAY or electronic funds transfer, EFT. The last day for application, as I mentioned, is 9th December 2022. You will receive information from Automic, our share registry on that. You'll also see in the booklet and what you receive there is a helpline and an internet email address. If you do have any questions on that, we'd be happy to help you. That is the end of the Chairman's address, other than I would like to just mention cybersecurity. It's obviously a very important topic for every board, every company, every organization, I guess, which holds private information. As a company, we have your shareholder information. We have tax file numbers. We have your addresses and so on. They're actually held with Automic, our share registry. We've met with Automic. It is critical that we do whatever we can to protect your information as best as we can. We're satisfied that Automic has in place, you know, the preventative measures which they reasonably can have, and that includes data encryption, independent certification, external expert penetration testing, information security, and privacy incident response plans. We very much hope that your information doesn't get out there. Unfortunately, as you'll appreciate, there are no guarantees, and anybody who says that, you know, they've got a foolproof system against hacking, I would suggest is overoptimistic. We very much hope that we don't get any cyber security attacks. If we do, that we're able to defend them appropriately. That is the end of the Chairman's address. As I did say, it was listed with the ASX. I'll now move to the formal business of the meeting. It's the usual matters to be considered, the 2020 financial statements, the remuneration report, and the re-election of directors. If you are attending in person, you should have received a yellow voting card. I see a few around. That entitles you to vote. You're also entitled to ask questions if you received a blue non-voting card. You're welcome to ask questions. I'm told that if you have a red visitor card, you are kindly requested only to observe. From my point of view, if you have a red card and you want to ask a question, you're very welcome to do so. Shareholders voting online must be logged in on Automic's investor portal, and details, instructions of that were included in the notice of meetings. Shareholders present obviously are free to ask questions, and shareholders online are also able to ask questions. You can either type it in the Q.&A. box in the Zoom screen, or alternatively, you can click on a button in the Q.&A. box to let us know that you'd like to ask a question verbally. Just provide your shareholder reference number or holder identification number, and then you'll receive a prompt on screen to unmute yourself. When we get to the investment side, the conclusion of that, you're welcome to ask whatever questions you want on the company. When we do the formal business, I'd request that you just keep any questions to the matter under consideration for that particular resolution or matter. As noted in the meeting, our resolutions will be decided via poll, and I'll now declare the poll open. There'll be four resolutions for the meeting. Pretty simple. You either vote for, against, or abstain. All valid proxies received have been recorded and these will be reported to the ASX after the meeting. I will also display the proxy results we've received so far on the screen. The first item of business, which doesn't require a resolution, is the consideration of the financial statements for the year ending 30 June 2022. Those are in the annual report. The Director's Report, the Auditor's Report, and the Remuneration Report. I'd ask if anybody has any questions in relation to the financial statements, the content of the Auditor's Report from Pitcher Partners or the accounting policies adopted by the company or the independence of the auditor. We have Chris Chandran here to answer questions as well on behalf of the auditor. Please feel free to ask any questions you may have. Yes, sir. I might ask Todd, Pinnacle Investment Management, who does the accounts. Sorry. Can you just speak up, Todd, so the people online can hear? Yeah. You probably can't hear, sorry. Yeah, sorry. Oh, sorry. Yeah, the June 2022 distribution received from the underlying fund was a very large distribution. That's at AUD 20 million, compared to the previous year, which was, yeah, much smaller. Yeah. This time. To explain to shareholders. Yeah. As you know, the way the investment works is, the company has units in the Plato fund. As of 30 June, the Plato fund had not distributed all of the cash because they'd had a good year. The previous year was probably not as good year. That's why we didn't have that legacy. Good question. Thank you. Do we have any other questions on the financials? Okay. Thank you. Nothing online, Calvin? Okay. Thank you very much. I'll now move to the adoption of the remuneration report. You're all experienced attendees at AGMs. You all know what the remuneration report is about. It needs to be approved by the company with less than 25% against, otherwise you get a strike. Does anybody have any questions on the remuneration report of the company? Okay, thank you very much. We might just show the proxies. Holding our breath. It looks like we've got a reasonable chance of not getting a strike against us. That's good. Okay. The next items on which we need votes are re-election of directors. Again, you're probably all familiar with the need for a third of directors to retire at every annual general meeting. There are three directors who are up for resolution at this general meeting. The first one is the re-election of Katrina Onishi, who, retiring, puts herself up for re-election. Katrina's details are in the notice of meeting, but I must ask you, Katrina, just to say a few words to the shareholders. Yes. Thank you, Jonathan. Can I say it's been my pleasure and honor to serve as a director of your company for the last five and a half years. I joined the PL8 board just prior to the IPO in April 2017. I had been an investment manager for over 25 years. I'm also a fellow shareholder of PL8, as you are. As a, I guess, self-funded retiree myself, I understand very much the importance of the monthly dividend that PL8 pays its shareholders. I'm on the same page with shareholders, and as I wear my Director's hat, I'm always very conscious and cognizant of the responsibility that we as Directors hold to continue to achieve the company's objectives, which is to pay a fully franked monthly dividend to the greatest extent possible. If I'm reelected, that's what I will continue to work to do. I very much thank you for your support and appreciate your support in the future as well. Thank you. It's a very good, very good speech. That's gonna be a very hard act to follow. Does anybody have any questions for Katrina? To kill the suspense, the proxies, so you've got a good chance of being reelected. That looks very good, so thank you, Katrina. The next person up for election is me, so I will hand over the chair to Lorraine. Okay. Good morning from me as well. The explanatory statement about Jonathan similarly was in the notice of meeting. I'm gonna hand back to Jonathan to say a little about why he would like to be reelected. I just endorse everything which Katrina said. I'm also a shareholder, and I've been involved in a few Listed Investment Companies, and it is an absolute pleasure and a privilege to be able to serve you, and in particular, work with our fund manager, Plato, who have delivered on everything which they set out to do. I trust they'll continue to deliver that. If I am reelected, I look forward to continuing to be able to serve you. Thank you. Thanks, Jonathan. I'll just add that I'm also a shareholder, and I love those monthly dividends. Okay. The resolution's up on the screen. If we have a quick look at the number of proxies. Oh, Katrina beat you, Jonathan, but it's not a competition. Okay. If everybody could please cast their vote. Oh, sorry. Any questions? Oh, okay. Cast your vote, and I'll hand the chair back to Jonathan. Thank you, Lorraine. The next resolution is for the re-election of Chris Meyer as. Thank you. Sure, i f you could just move the thing forward. Thank you very much. As Director, Chris joined us earlier this year, replacing Alex Ihlenfeldt, who was one of the founding directors, and I would like to acknowledge Alex's contribution. He's a wonderful chap to work with, and you very much appreciate the effort that he put into Plato while he was on the Board. We're very excited to have Chris join the Board. I might hand over to Chris to say a few words. Thanks, Jonathan, and morning, everyone. Like my fellow directors, I'm also a shareholder of PL8, but unlike my fellow directors, I'm not a self-funded retiree yet. I'm still working for a living. I work for Pinnacle. Pinnacle is a 42 and a bit, I think,% shareholder in Plato, the asset manager. We provide most of the non-investment services, not just to PL8, the LIC, but also to Plato, the asset manager, and so that's everything from finance, legal, marketing, distribution, investor relations. Many of you may see me at certain conferences regarding PL8. I run the listed funds business. We're very committed to listed funds as Pinnacle. We have 10 of them. The success of the listed funds business is very important to us as an organization, and the success of PL8 is also very important to us. I've been involved in stock markets and fund management most of my professional career. I'm also on the board of the Listed Investment Company Association. If you elect me as one of your directors, I look forward to serving you and bringing that experience to the ongoing success of PL8. Thank you. Thank you very much, Chris. Do anybody got any questions for Chris or me on Chris's re-election? If we could just have a look at the proxies. If you could see the proxies, please. The technology works. Chris, I see well done. You beat me as well. I'm running third in this race. I don't know what I've done wrong, but that's okay. That brings us to the end of these resolutions. If you could please vote. Read through the full resolutions. If you're online, please select Confirm to complete your voting once you've cast the vote. If you're attending in person, please lodge your completed voting cards in the ballot box. There's an Automic going around here to collect those voting cards. I'll just hand them in, and I will declare the poll closed in a few minutes. Do you wanna all hand in your voting cards? Thank you very much. Fold them up, put them in. Thank you. Okay. There's space in the box. I sort of announced I'm voting all open proxies in favor of the resolutions too. Thank you very much. I declare the poll closed, and the results of the poll will be announced to the ASX as soon as they're available. That concludes the formal business of the meeting, and so I'll now hand over to the part which I think we're all interested in, which is the investment manager update. Over to Don, supported by Peter. Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. I hope everyone can hear me. I apologize for not being there in person today. I was looking forward to attending the meeting today, but I woke up with a very sore throat, and I didn't want today to be a superspreader event. I think we all now know if you're sick, you should stay at home and don't spread things around. Apologies for not being there in person. Well, certainly things have changed a lot since the last AGM in terms of markets and outlook, but I think the one thing that has stayed the same, and if we move to the next slide, is that, you know, PL8 continues to pay a higher yield than the market, and that is obviously the objective of it. You know, it's been strong over the last 12 months. This was the year ending September, compared to a market of 6%. PL8's delivered about 8% gross yield, has also continued to outperform the market in total return terms. The next slide shows you the longer term performance. This is not of PL8 itself, but it's the underlying fund which PL8 invests into, which is the Plato Australian Shares Income Fund, which is now over 11 years old. The blue lines represent, the top ones represent the total return, including franking credits, accumulated for the Plato Australian Shares Income Fund. The gray line is for the market, including franking. At the bottom, we have actually the cumulative distributions for in blue, again, for the fund and in gray for the market. You can see in both cases the fund has delivered more total return and more income, and primarily as a form of income than the market. We continue to sort of meet our objectives, which is to outperform, and these are after fees. Moving to sort of markets. Say we've delivered on what we said we'd do, but markets have certainly changed a lot in the last 12 months. You know, if we look at the next slide, there's a huge amount of uncertainty in the world. If you read the media, you would actually think it's probably the worst of times. We've got inflation at 30-year highs, currently 7.3%. We've seen rapidly rising interest rates, albeit from an incredibly low level. We've seen 2.75% cumulative rise in cash rates here in Australia in about six months, and the market's probably looking for another percent or so more in the next year. We obviously have a war going on in Ukraine with Russia invading Ukraine. We still have supply chain issues from COVID, although these are starting to improve. You know, most of us are homeowners, and house prices are falling. You know, it's been a long time since they've fallen, and they're falling pretty fast. This year we've seen both bond and equity markets selling off together. There's really been no safe place to hide except maybe cash. We'll talk about that in a minute. The sell-off in bonds and equities was actually the worst since 1994. Having said that, we've seen a pretty strong rebound in markets in the last couple of months. You know, the Australian market is now year-on-year actually flat, particularly when you include franking credits, it's pretty flat or even up. It did look a bit doom and gloom certainly mid-year, but people are looking through some of the current problems. Nevertheless, financial year 2022, you know, the financial year ending June 30, 2022 was the third worst financial year on record according to InvestorDaily. There are a lot of problems out there, and the papers are full of doom and gloom. I think, you know, I'm as much a look for the positives as well as the negatives, and I think there's still very many positives out there. If we look at the next slide, whilst there still is a lot of uncertainty, there's, you know, things actually aren't all that bad. Here in Australia, our economy is essentially at full employment. I mean, there are. You know, every cafe you go to, every shop, there's sort of signs in the window looking for workers. Um, and if everybody's got a job, they continue to pay their mortgage. They might struggle a little bit with interest rates rising, but you normally, uh, if you've got a job, you pay your mortgage. Um, it is the case that cash rates have risen a lot, but if you actually look at a long-term trend, they're still at a very normal level. Um, I think the abnormal bit was, uh, the fact that interest rates were at nought point one percent, basically zero, for a couple of years. That was the abnormal bit. We're actually re-returning more to a normal level of interest rates, I think. Um, the other thing, if we look at, you know, we invest in Australian shares, and that is the, the pool of investments that we look at for PLA. Um, corporate balance sheets are very strong. Debt levels, by and large, are very low. We've got an example of the biggest company in Australia on that later in this presentation. Well, still on that one, I mean, there are a lot of companies in Australia, you know, that will actually benefit from the current stresses in Ukraine. Australia is a very large exporter of LNG and a very large exporter of grain. You know, Russia is holding back gas from Europe. Australian companies such as Woodside and Origin and Santos are benefiting from higher LNG prices. Our coal companies are benefiting from higher coal prices, and we grow a lot of grain, so companies associated with that are making quite good, handsome profits at the moment from those. Whilst house prices are still falling, they're still well above pre-COVID levels because we had a massive increase in house prices sort of throughout COVID. Not initially, but once people thought it wasn't too bad, then house prices rose dramatically. If you've been in your house for a few years, you're probably still well in the money. Many borrowers are well ahead of repayments. We have massive amounts in offset accounts. You know, there is stress in some people, but for the average homeowner, things are still looking pretty good. It's actually, whilst we might have had the third worst financial year for super funds, that followed the second best financial year for super funds. You average out 2021 and 2022, and you've got a pretty normal environment. To me, there's a lot of positives around, even though there are negatives. The reality is the share market has bounced quite handsomely more recently. I think the worst may be behind us. Let's look at interest rates and what's happening on the next slide. Last year, and we've been saying this for a couple of years, the RBA was telling us that interest rates would remain low at 0.1% for three years, right out to sort of 2023, maybe even 2024. They were still saying this somewhat remarkably, even in February of this year. If we look forward at what's happened in this calendar year, things have changed dramatically. That expectation of cash rates remaining at basically 0 for three years has been completely changed. We now see that what has actually happened is that interest rates have risen on the next slide from 0.1%-2.85%. As I said, the market is sort of expecting about another 1% of official interest rate rises over the next sort of six-12 months. In terms of that longer-term, you know, picture, the current interest rates aren't excessively high. I think that's something, especially when inflation is running very high. I think that is one of the challenges on the next slide, actually, is despite the fact that interest rates are rising, that bond yields are rising and the cash rates rising, and term deposits are, for the first time in basically 10 years or 11 years, rising, inflation is rising even faster. Sorry, that inflation rate was the end of September, 6% in June and 7.3% for the 12 months ending September. Inflation is eroding away the earnings that you can get on term deposits and bond yields, so that actually, investors who are sitting in these, what we call safe assets, are losing money even more than they did when, you know, a year or two back when interest rates were much lower, because inflation has suddenly rebounded. We're all aware of that. I think the issue is that safe assets are now losing you a lot of money. You know, I think investors are still struggling to make ends meet, and hopefully PL8 can fill that void with the strong dividend yield that it pays on a regular monthly basis. Moving on, just to sum up the last, and this is probably pretty old news, we did a webinar on it a few months ago, but if we look at the August reporting season, this is actually for this year rather than last year, but it was a cracker of a season, really. We saw AUD 44 billion in dividends declared in the month of August. Remember, most of those are fully franked, so actually if you add the franking in there, you're probably getting closer to, you know, AUD 55 million-AUD 60 million, a billion dollars, sorry, from companies. There were some huge results. I mentioned, you know, resource stocks, and particularly the coal stocks, and the likes of Woodside and Origin had massive increases in dividends, albeit from fairly low levels last year. Given the higher prices for energy, we continue to see stocks like Whitehaven Coal and Woodside likely to pay very strong dividends this year as well. You're still seeing stocks like JB Hi-Fi doing quite well, even though people are talking about slowing consumer discretionary sales. We haven't really seen a lot of evidence of that yet. There's also companies like Computershare, which a couple of weeks ago made a massive upgrade to its forecast profits. They actually benefit from higher interest rates. There are some companies that actually benefit from higher interest rates, and we're looking for those, seeking those out. The other ones that benefit from higher interest rates are banks. We're actually quite bullish on banks because, you know, rising interest rates, banks tend to rapidly increase their mortgage rates. Whenever the RBA raises rates, the banks immediately pass those increases on to their customers, but they're much slower at raising the deposit rates. And so if you go back through history, um, when interest rates rise, banks' net interest margin, which is really their profit margin, um, uh, between what they pay on their, uh, receive on their, on their, on their loans and what they pay from their deposit to the depositors, that actually goes up. And we've seen in the recent, most recent banking results, um, increases in the net interest margins across all the banks as they are benefiting from a rising interest rate cycle. And we haven't seen a rising interest rate cycle, say, for about eleven years or twelve years. Um, and I think some people have forgotten how much banks actually benefit in those things. So we're actually pretty bullish. And if you look at the, you know, there were some big increases in dividends on a, on a market cap weighted basis. Dividends increased 20% in August. It is the case, and this is both an opportunity, but also a slide here I think that people need to think about. The Australian market is very concentrated. The top seven stocks represent about 2/3 of the income. Four of them are banks, but we're fairly bullish on banks. Three of them are iron ore miners, although BHP and Rio also have copper and other assets. You're probably aware that BHP has made a bid for OZ Minerals to increase its exposure to copper going forward. That's one to aware. I just wanna focus on one result, and it is actually the BHP's result. It's the biggest company in Australia. It had a near record profit result in August of AUD 22.4 billion. Was just, you know, a tiny bit shy of its best year, which was about 2011. Their result was extremely strong, despite the fact that iron ore prices have come off. It shows the benefit of being a diversified miner. BHP has a coal division, and that coal division increased its EBITDA from less than $300 million in 2021 to nearly $10 billion, $9.5 billion in the financial year we've just finished. That is a huge turnaround, like 30 times more. That more than made up for the reduction in iron ore earnings. It was a record annual dividend for BHP, $3.25 US, fully franked. Remember that BHP actually sold or spun off its assets, oil and gas assets to Woodside in June of this year. I think a telling point, I mentioned before about low debt levels, it's why BHP can easily fund the OZ Minerals purchase. BHP basically had no debt at the end of the year. It had just $300 million of debt, which is only a couple of days' cash flow. I think, you know, it is the biggest company in Australia, and I think it highlights how strong the Australian corporate land is. Moving on, it's always about expectations, though, and a couple of things to worry about. There's always gonna be the odd company where we think things are quite troubled. Part of our process is avoiding these stocks that may cut their dividends. The one which we expected to cut its dividend, and it did cut its dividend in August, but we think it'll continue to cut its dividend, is Magellan Financial. We all know the problems at Magellan, but we just want to highlight that if you have a simple process that you just sort of buy those stocks with the highest yield, you'd probably be buying Magellan. Because if you look back over the last 12 months, it did pay some dividends, but we expect those dividends to fall dramatically as, you know, its share price has fallen because it's lost a lot of its FUM. It's an important part of our process to be looking ahead and looking at not the last dividend that companies paid, but looking for the next dividend and try to avoid these dividend traps. Now we can also, if we move to the next slide, which is some other, I suppose, a little bad news that came out of the budget. It wasn't a big headline, and it's not gonna be a big deal for us. We've always looked out for opportunities to get franking credits. In the past, one of those opportunities, but it's only one, is to look for companies that do buybacks, off-market buybacks. McMillan Shakespeare completed one, and we participated in it. Only a few weeks ago, actually, just prior to the budget. It was worth about 20%, and it released a lot of franking credits, which is the sort of grayish AUD 4.57 number there, did release those franking credits. It was a pretty small buyback and was scaled back heavily, so we didn't add a lot of money to the clients. The ALP government has announced that they will no longer have this special treatment for off-market buybacks. They'll be treated as just a normal buyback, and they won't be able to stream the franking to investors. It looks like we'll no longer be able to participate in those. It's not a big deal. We've gone back through the history of the Plato Fund, uh, so over eleven years, it-it's only reflected around thirty basis points, uh, of contributions from those buybacks, so it's not a big impact, uh, we don't think. And the other thing is, if companies can no longer do those buybacks, um, they need to be probably a bit more progressive in the way that they pay their franking credits out, whether it be via normal dividends or special dividends. So we actually think that whilst, um... So given that this opportunity, uh, has finished, then there'll probably be more normal or special dividends. Um, it's probably not a bad time for the government to have done the timing of this, because we've actually had a, a record last twelve months. We did have some participate in a number of buybacks, and a lot of companies have flushed out those franking credits, such as BHP, which did with the spin-off of Woodside, or the banks such as ANZ, Westpac and CommBank, which did have excess franking account balances. They've just completed buybacks. A lot of the excess franking has actually been flushed out, so it's probably not a bad time looking forward for this to have actually happened. The main game for us is still looking for normal dividends and special dividends that are fully franked, and there are still, you know, we expect probably slightly more of those given this announcement. Just moving on to the next slide. This has been one of my favorite slides to talk about for the last few years. This actually uses our statistical model. We do actually forecast for every stock that pays a dividend in Australia. We forecast the likelihood that it will cut its next dividend. It's a bit of a litmus thermometer, a litmus test of the outlook for dividends, and it's quite clear. This is averaged up across all the stocks in the market that pay dividends. It's a market-wide sort of indicator of how good a dividend is, the dividend outlook. A high number is bad. If, you know, in the GFC and in the height of the pandemic in sort of March, April 2020, we saw that those were the peaks of high probabilities of dividend cuts across the market. The pandemic was actually worse than the GFC from that respect. GFC peak was around 40%. The pandemic had got above 45%. It did rapidly fall after, as we all realized that the COVID wasn't the end of the world and that dividends would come back and the banks would do okay and pay dividends, et cetera. You saw that fall to below average levels last year, which is why we've been very bullish about the dividend outlook. You can just see that in the course of this year, that probability has just ticked above the long-term average. It's still nowhere near, you know, sort of, high levels. We think the outlook for dividends is still pretty good. Not as good as it was a year ago, but it is still good, and we're quite bullish on sectors like the banks and the energy stocks. We still think there'll be plenty of good dividends in the Australian market over the next 12 months. That's pretty much everything I wanted to say. Just the conclusion is, yeah, for many people, they say rising interest rates is bad news 'cause it does challenge asset prices. I mean, to me, that totally explains why house prices are falling, is because when you go to the bank to get a mortgage to buy a new house, you can't borrow as much as you used to be able to, so you can't bid as much. The problem is that interest rates, in fact, aren't rising fast enough to offset inflation. As I said, if you're sitting in term deposits, you're actually going backwards. We have got that little bad news about the tax-free buybacks, but it's not a big deal from our point of view. I mean, in many years in the past, there's been no buybacks anyway. We've always used them, seen them as opportunistic. The good news is that dividends have rebounded strongly over the last 12 years. Dividend levels are high. That dividend cut model is only just above average, so it's not total doom and gloom. We think there's still some great sectors, such as energy and banks, that have dividends. You know, we think that there's still good news in the Australian marketplace. PL8 has quite a kitty of franking credits and retained earnings to pay dividends. You know, Jonathan's talked about the opportunities today. Today, we announced an SPP for PL8, and I think that's a chance for investors to buy at lower prices into PL8 and get more of those fully franked monthly dividends. That's all I want to say. I'm happy to take questions. I can't actually hear people asking questions unless there's a microphone there. If you can't use the microphone, maybe you might wanna ask your question or Jonathan can re-ask the question so I can hear it. Peter will be in the room too, and he may want to answer some of these questions. Thank you very much, Don. I think we do have a roving mic that may be able to use to ask you any questions. I'll just throw it open to shareholders, both here and online, for any questions you may have for Don or me or anything. Yes, sir. Can we get a copy of that? Of the presentation. Yeah. I think it's been released to the ASX. Is that correct? Yeah, it's on the ASX website. I'm not sure if we have a hard copy here. No, no. Yeah, it's on. It was released this morning on the ASX website. You had it. Yep. Any other questions? Does the presentation answer every possible question anybody may have? Don's saying that, are Labor gonna attack any of the franking credits in the future? I'll ask Don to polish up his crystal ball. Don, I don't know if you heard the question, but what's your view on what Labor's going to do with franking credits? Yeah. Well, Anthony Albanese was pretty clear January last year. He said that refunding policy or non-refunding of franking credits would remain. I've seen some speeches by the Deputy Treasurer just in the last couple of days, and he was very clear saying the franking system is here to stay. They, I believe, consider the tax-effective buybacks is a bit of an anomaly where you can essentially stream franking credits to certain shareholders who most value franking credits. Whereas if you think about normal ordinary dividends or even special dividends, everybody gets the same amount of dividends and the same amount of franking credits, whether you can use them or not. If you're a foreigner, you can't use them, but you still get them. You know, all shareholders are treated equally normally in things like dividends. You know, from what I've seen, the ALP will continue the current system. There has been quite a bit of talk about potentially looking at how much people can have in superannuation. That's certainly been something that's been discussed a lot. That may happen. There may be some total limit on how much people can put in superannuation. At the moment, there's a AUD 1.7 million limit on how much you can have in tax-free super when you retire. There is no limit on the amount of superannuation that you can have. There are a couple of very large funds with super funds or self-managed super funds with more than AUD 100 million. That may be another area that I think the current government might look at. They've been pretty clear saying that franking remains. Thank you. Any other questions shareholders may have? Okay. Yes, sir. Just on that question, do you have a view about the retrospectivity of this franking legislation? The buybacks, I believe it's from the announcement date, which is the Mini Budget. There'll be no retrospectivity. It's just the companies won't be able to do it in the future. The McMillan Shakespeare one that we participated in will still be fine. There was, you may have also heard, there was another thing that the new government has brought back to life, which was there was a case that Harvey Norman did a few years ago where they raised equity at the same time that they paid a special dividend. Essentially they used the money that they received from the equity raise to pay a special dividend. The ALP has resurrected that potential legislation and look likely to ban companies from raising capital and paying dividends at the same time. They initially proposed that to be retrospective but have actually agreed. I've seen them admit that they won't be pursuing that retrospectivity, which I think is very positive. We put a submission in that and, you know, I think making things retrospective before you've announced them is not good policy. Yeah. If I could just add that, you know, from PL8's perspective, obviously, we don't pay dividends out of capital we raise. We raise the money on the SPP, but dividends come out of our profit reserve. That wouldn't affect us even if it gets passed. Any other questions? Otherwise, I will declare the meeting closed. Yes, sir. I just have a few technical questions. I'm wondering whether Secretary or somebody from Pinnacle I can discuss a few things. It wasn't relating to Don's things. Please feel free to ask whatever you want. Oh, do you wanna ask after the meeting? Yeah. I think better if I ask after the meeting. Okay. Well, we've got the Company Secretary here. We've got the auditors, we've got the accountants. Hopefully they'll be able to answer all your questions. Very good. Well, thank you very much everybody for attending. Wishing you all a good holiday season. Look forward to seeing you next year, and thank you very much for coming. Declare the meeting closed. Thank you.