Friday on My Mind Archives - Page 10 of 31

Affordable housing – a key election issue

affordable-housing-election — A roof over your head – image by Capri23 at Pixabay.com

Wherever you go in Australia to visit friends and family, the conversation very soon turns to the scarcity and high cost of rental housing. The topic will then quickly shift to the ever-rising cost of houses and why parents worry about their adult kids taking on seven-figure mortgages. As residential property analyst Michael Matusik recently said, it comes down to the Bank of Mum and Dad.

Few cities or towns have escaped the 20% rise in residential real estate prices (for the year to September) or the inevitable rental hikes that followed. Stories that circulate about landlords taking advantage and tenants deciding they’d be better off sleeping in their cars are not uncommon. Check in with any emergency housing agency and they will tell you things are as tough as they have ever been.

AMP Capital chief economist Shane Oliver says that while housing affordability has always been an issue in Australia, it has moved from a periodic cyclical concern to a chronic problem.

“The 20% rise in prices over the last year has put the spotlight on the issue again. With the surge in house prices since the 1990s has come a surge in debt which brings with it the risk of financial instability should something go wrong in the ability of borrowers to service that debt.”

Oliver said the gains have been driven by record low mortgage rates, buyer incentives, a tight jobs market, a desire for more home space as a result of the pandemic and working from home, numerous government home buyer incentives, the “fear of missing out” and lower than normal listings. This has pushed average prices to record highs and real house prices to 23% above their long-term trend.

Oliver says the average capital city dwelling price rose 200% over the past 20 years, compared to an 82% rise in wages. The disparity has become more telling in the last 10 years with dwelling prices increasing by 58% and wages rising by only 26%.

The popular wisdom, if your parents taught you such things, was to spend no more than a quarter of your gross household income on housing. Over the decades, this figure has risen to 33% and in the major cities has peaked at 50%.

As we are now in pre-election mode, it’s appropriate to mention the Affordable Housing Party, a single-issue party which is on a membership drive to avert the risk of de-registration. Led by Andrew Potts, the party had its first tilt at Federal politics in 2017, fielding a candidate in the Bennelong By-Election.

The party’s policies include phasing out negative gearing, ending the capital gains discount on investment properties, stopping foreign investment in Australian property, taxing investment properties which are left empty and cracking down on full-time AirBnB operators.

Radical? Yes, but the problem needs some radical thinking before we end up with 200,000 people couch surfing and sleeping in their cars.

The AHP’s research on the housing sector focuses on negative gearing, which means the cost of owning an asset exceeds profits, resulting in investors claiming this loss to reduce other taxable income.

As the research suggests, one ought not to expect the Federal Government (or any government), to shut the scheme down. As of April 2017, Federal MPs and Senators owned a total of 289 investment properties.

This could be a good time to bust a few myths about negative gearing, Tax Office statistics from 2017 show that 64% of the 2.2 million people who own investment housing have an annual income of less than $80,000. This seems to scuttle the argument that only the wealthy benefit from investment housing. Less than 10% of Australia’s 2.2 million property investors earn more than $180,000 a year. Likewise, 71% of investors own only one home, with 19% owning two and 10% owning three or more houses.

Labor Leader Anthony Albanese upset some of the affordable housing campaigners in July when he abandoned pledges to impose restrictions on negative gearing. The opposition went to the 2016 and 2019 elections promising to halve the 50% deduction on capital gains and limit negative gearing to new properties only.

National Shelter chief executive Adrian Pisarski said by ditching its commitment to reforming negative gearing, Labor had “abandoned” would-be home-owners and low-income households wanting to buy homes.

“It took 15 years of campaigning by many to get the ALP to find a spine on CGT and negative gearing and commit to helping reduce house price inflation,” Mr Pisarski told the SMH at the time. “This is a sad day for affordable housing.”

In May Mr Albanese launched the Opposition’s $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund. The fund would build social and affordable housing and create thousands of jobs now and in the long term, he said.

Annual investment returns from the Housing Australia Future Fund will be transferred to the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation (NHFIC) to pay for social and affordable housing projects.

Over the first five years, the investment returns would allow the building of 20,000 social housing properties, 4,000 of which would be allocated for women and children fleeing domestic and family violence and older women facing homelessness.

Residential property analyst Michael Matusik has a few ideas to fix housing affordability. He says part of the problem is the focus on new builds rather than the existing market.

Matusik-style reforms would include removing negative gearing (a policy set when interest rates were sky high) and charging stamp duties at a flat $2,000 per transaction.

Matusik suggests a 20% tax on all property transactions – including owner stock if sold within, say, three years. This would stop ‘flipping’ (buying a house, renovating it and selling again within a short period of time) which is a major driver of prices. The government should limit foreign buyers to new dwellings and they must also have a 50% Australian business partner who pays 20% tax. These new rules would also include measures to stop developers land-banking.

“If they don’t start building the project within five years, they lose development approval. After 10 years, if there is no action the site is sold underneath them. In short, you cannot buy a home (new or existing) unless you have an Australian passport and pay 20% tax. No Passport no buy.”

As for new housing, Matusik says all housing related incentives should be removed because they distort the housing/building cycle. He also suggests that greenfield developments be required to provide minimum levels of community infrastructure set as targets. No doubt he will extrapolate on these ideas in a future Matusik Missive.

More radical ideas from Gwyn Hooper, writing for a Byron Bay newspaper (the median house price in Byron is $2.8 million (units $1m):

Under Hooper’s affordable development plan, the Federal and State governments would provide finance and free land. Local Government’s role would be to manage the buildings and tenants and waive its usual development fees.

“The tenants would have a secure tenancy, pay an affordable rent (based on income), and would importantly be able to live and bring up their families without financial stress – an issue that can cause family breakdowns that only compound these issues.”

As these examples suggest, this issue needs to be de-politicised and brought out into the sunlight with an ‘open to new ideas’ sign attached.

Written in the comfort of my freehold home, ameliorating some of my baby boomer guilt, I think.

Last week: People who lived in the UK for more than six months between 1980 and 1996 are prohibited from donating blood because of Mad Cow disease.

B Positive – not just a blood group

blood-donor-positive — Image: Ahmad Ardity, Pixabay.com

That cute but corny aphorism came to mind as my friend Mr Shiraz misinterpreted my recent trip to Brisbane as a blood donor emergency. He wanted to know why we were braving extreme weather and I texted (flippantly) “Appointment with Dracula.”

What I meant was we had tickets to Dracula, a production by Queensland Ballet. Dracula aside (one of that company’s best IMHO), you may have noticed there is a bit of a blood donor drive happening in Australia.

The Australian Red Cross (Lifeblood) and individual State health departments are assisting in the drive to replenish blood stocks, as demand reaches a 10-year high. As a recent Facebook post by Queensland Health noted, the shortage is of the greatest importance when it comes to rare blood groups. The post encouraged people with A negative blood to “roll up their sleeves and give generously”.

Such exhortations make my skin crawl, bringing back memories of a daily blood test over a lengthy stay in hospital. My blood group is not that rare, and, despite my life being saved by a blood transfusion in 1969, I have never donated my blood to anyone. Dad, on the other hand, had such rare blood he was on a list to donate in an emergency.

It didn’t happen often, but he would at times get a call (typically at 2.30am): “Mr Wilson, we’re sending a taxi…”

Lifeblood, the donor agency of Red Cross, is on a mission to replenish its blood supplies. It appears that through the pandemic, blood donor numbers had dropped off.

As lockdowns lift in Victoria, New South Wales and ACT, elective surgeries will start again and meanwhile we are just weeks away from holidaymakers taking to the roads, with the inevitable spate of accidents.

The impact of Covid-19 has been felt among blood agencies around the world. A study published by the US Library of Medicine noted the rise of concerns, confusion, and misleading rumours with regards to blood donation during the pandemic period.

“Additionally, due to the government’s interventions such as home sheltering, mass lockdown, and curtailment strategies towards public gatherings amid the COVID-19 outbreak, the arrangement of the voluntary blood donation drives has been debarred. Likewise, there has been a general reluctance of the public to come to the blood centres to donate blood.”

Lifeblood Executive Director of Donor Services Cath Stone said half of all blood donation appointments in Australia were not being attended, while hospital demand was at its highest point in a decade.

“Our donors have shown us incredible support over the last two years; however, as life moves to COVID-normal, it’s important that people continue to donate to help ensure hospitals can continue to treat patients.”

Lifeblood’s reserves of O Negative blood are being challenged, with the number of O Negative donors falling during the pandemic, despite increased hospital demand. O Negative is a universal blood type and can be given to anyone in an emergency.

“Only 9% of Australians have O Negative blood, but it makes up 16% of orders from hospitals because it saves lives in emergencies.”

While Australians are being persuaded to donate, here’s the status of blood supplies around the world.

It is comforting to learn that 97.5% of the global population is covered by organised collecting. Almost 120 million units of blood are donated every year, but as the World Health Organisation data shows, donation rates differ wildly. Some high-income countries see seven times more donations than in low-income countries.

If you have ever been involved in a motor vehicle accident, a brawl or a workplace mishap, you will know that sometimes victims lose too much blood. Transfusions are needed for health conditions including anaemia, complications during pregnancy and childbirth, severe trauma (accidents) and surgical procedures and transplants. Transfusions are also used regularly for patients with conditions such as sickle cell disease.

The WHO and Lifeblood are vigilant about screening donations for HIV and Hepatitis A B and C, to name a few diseases.

A survey in 2018 found that 72 % of countries had a national blood policy. Overall, 64% of reporting countries, or 110 out of 171, have specific legislation covering the safety and quality of blood transfusion. National blood policies are most prevalent in high and moderate-income countries.

There are great variations between countries in terms of age distribution of transfused patients. For example, in high-income countries, the over-60 transfused patient group accounts for up to 75% of all transfusions. In low-income countries, up to 54% of transfusions are for children under the age of 5 years.

In high income countries, transfusion is most often used for supportive care in cardiovascular surgery, transplant surgery, massive trauma, and cancer therapy. In low and middle income countries, it is used more often to manage pregnancy-related complications and severe childhood anaemia.

The WHO has been campaigning to persuade countries which allow blood donors to be paid to switch to a voluntary system. In countries including the US, Austria, Germany and some Canadian provinces, individuals can earn about $50 a time for donating blood. The collecting and warehousing of plasma has become a multi-million dollar business. The main commercial advantage is that plasma can be frozen and kept for up to a year.

Blood is usually separated into three major components: Red blood, plasma and platelets. Red blood has a life span of 42 days and is used for emergency transfusions. Plasma is the colourless liquid separated from blood. It is most often used to treat burn victims and those with bleeding disorders. The main function of platelets is to stick to the blood linings and prevent bleeding. Platelets have a shelf life of five days and are most often used for organ transplants and surgeries.

Musician Mal Webb has been a blood donor for “at least two decades”.

“I recently switched to donating platelets, which means I can do it more often.”

Sometimes even when you want to donate blood, the tight regulations around blood quality can rule you out, as a friend who used to give blood found out.

“Unfortunately, they changed the rules some years ago so if you had been in England for any length of time you might have Mad Cow disease and so couldn’t donate.

“I was disappointed as I felt good giving blood, knowing I was helping other people.”*

There are examples of physicians experimenting with blood transfusion on animals as far back as 1668. The current system can be traced back to the early 19th century, In 1918, British obstetrician Dr. James Blundell performed the first successful transfusion of human blood to treat postpartum haemorrhage.

Lifeblood and State health departments face an uphill battle trying to convince Aussies to give blood. Although one in three Australians will need a blood donation in their lifetime, only one in 30 give blood every year. It seems it was always thus, though. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald in September 1949 spoke of a ‘blood donor crisis’. The article quoted a NSW Red Cross spokesman.

“Our most urgent need is to make members of the public realise that their blood is worth bottling,” the spokesman said, hijacking a WWI term more often used as the ultimate compliment on a job well done.

If you haven’t donated blood for a while or had never even considered it, here’s a handy link: https://www.lifeblood.com.au/blood

Tell them FOMM sent you.

*People who lived in the UK for more than six months between 1980 and 1996 are ineligible to give blood due to Mad Cow disease.

By hydrofoil to Hydra

In introducing today’s FOMM about Hydra by She Whose Pen-Name used to be Mrs W, I need to explain how often, when travelling in Southern Europe, I was mis-identified as a local. Perhaps it was the Celtic complexion, infused with Spanish blood. Or the faux fisherman’s cap. Either way, I’d get something like this:

Greek cafe owner: “Welcome! Where are you from?”

BW: “Australia” (café guy looks at colleague and chortles)

“No, no, where are you really from?”

Confused, I say “Melbourne.”

“Ah, Mel-born – I have a cousin there – Stavros – perhaps you know him?”

HYDROFOIL TO HYDRA

By Laurel Wilson

April 2004: Shirley Valentine and I have one thing in common－ we both had always wanted to travel to Greece; but I was travelling with my husband, rather than trying to get away from him. My fellow traveller claimed that he could ‘speak some Greek’, having sailed to Europe in the ‘70’s aboard a Greek liner. He certainly looked the part, with his jaunty Greek fisherman’s cap, but it soon fell to me to translate the signs and attempt to get us on the right bus.

After three fascinating days in Athens, we were armed with essential traveller’s knowledge- we knew to say ‘kalamere’ instead of ‘calamari’ if we wanted to say ‘good morning’, we had worked out the main differences between our alphabet and the Greek one, and we could recognise the toilet signs.

We were on a pretty tight budget, but also craved a bit of adventure, so we chose not to travel on organised tours. One of our do-it-yourself adventures found us taking a local train to the port of Piraeus, near Athens, en route to the island of Hydra (pronounce Eedra, as we soon discovered) one of the Saronic islands off the southern coast of the Peloponnese Peninsula. The only thing I knew about ‘Hydra’ was some vague legend about a woman with snakes for hair, perhaps not an auspicious beginning.

(BW: Leonard Cohen lived there in the early 1960s with other writers and poets).

Getting to Piraeus was quite simple, but finding the ferry terminal was another thing altogether. We eventually succeeded, just in time to see our intended ferry connection sail away. Having some time to wait for the next one, we looked for somewhere to enjoy afternoon tea. We found a likely-looking café, but were told that they didn’t serve cakes or sweets. “We’re a restaurant,” the proprietor said, as if that explained everything. So being wise tourists, we had what was on offer. However, what we thought was a snack turned out to be a gargantuan meal of capsicums and tomatoes stuffed with rice, a Greek salad, mountains of bread and a cup of the thick mud-like ‘Greek’ coffee (it used to be called Turkish coffee, but national pride got in the way).

The trip to Hydra was on a very large and speedy catamaran. According to the company website, it is one of six in the Hellas ‘Flying Dolphin’ fleet. (There is a local connection too – Flying Cat No.2, was reportedly built on Queensland’s Gold Coast in 1998). It was a fast, smooth and comfortable ride of about 1½ hours, compared to twice that for the conventional ferry.

The first sighting of Hydra was memorable － seemingly impenetrable sheer cliffs, then suddenly a lovely snug little harbour lined with small fishing boats, backed by a charming small town which featured impressive stone mansions along with tiny cottages, steep narrow streets and a jumble of small shops and cafes. Although there was quite a deal of construction in evidence, the overall appearance was harmonious, thanks to the heritage laws which require newer constructions to conform to the traditional character and colours of the island’s established buildings.

Several teams of donkeys, mules and ponies accompanied by their minders waited patiently for passengers or goods to carry. Motorised transport is forbidden on Hydra, a welcome change from the noisy and chaotic traffic of Athens. Tourists often try the donkey-rides, using a type of side-saddle, but I didn’t want the poor things to suffer, so chose to walk instead. (BW: As I recall, they carried our bags).

The island is quite dry and rocky, resulting in limited scope for gardens and some suggest this is the reason for the brightly coloured shutters, doorways and window sills to be found on the island’s buildings. As we walked past one of the many closed bars, we could see and smell the fresh coat of bright green paint being applied to the shutters.

We felt no need to test our fitness by climbing to the highest point of the island, but did stroll along the wide track which curved around the headlands on either side of the village. On our first walk, we passed the prominent statue of local hero Admiral Andreas Miaoulis, who acquitted himself very well in the 19^th century Greek War of Independence. Later that evening, we strolled around the Western headland to view the sunset, quite indistinct owing to the still visible smog from Athens.

If we had been a bit more energetic, we could have walked to some of the monasteries and convents dotted around the 52sq km island, or visited the ancient village of Episkopi, with its evidence of Mycenaean civilisation. Diving, sailing and yacht cruising are also available for the more active tourist, as well as swimming, though the beaches are rather pebbly, with not much sand in evidence. The local historical museum, housed in a traditional Hydriot mansion on the eastern side of the harbour, was closed while we were there, though the Byzantine Museum, situated in a building with a distinctive marble bell tower, was open to visitors.

We arrived in March, earlier than the bulk of tourists, which meant that many businesses were closed and undergoing maintenance, but we didn’t feel deprived, as there were plenty of restaurants and cafes open. Most of the businesses that were not yet open seemed to be large bars with open-air dining. During the tourist season, these promise (or threaten, depending on your point of view) loud music, with dance parties lasting all night.

It seems the cruising season had already begun, as a couple of ships arrived while we were there, disgorging very prosperous looking tourists. Souvenir shoppers were catered for with lace, jewellery and craft shops which opened during the hours that a cruise ship was in port and then closed again, figuring rightly that it wasn’t worthwhile to remain open for the few longer-stay tourists such as ourselves.

At that time of year, accommodation was readily available and very reasonably priced. Our self-contained one bedroom unit, situated just behind the village centre, cost only €35 (approx AUD$ 60) per night. It was quite a modern unit, one of several in a converted split-level home behind a walled and gated courtyard.

(BW: This is 2004, remember!)

We weren’t looking for the kind of party lifestyle that some seek on the Greek Islands, but instead were treated to a quiet and peaceful three days in a beautiful setting. Peaceful except for the feud that broke out one morning while we were having brunch. An old fellow wandered into the café and approached another chap sitting at a table near us. After much shouting and gesticulating, he retreated, to the jeers and smirks of several of those in the café. Half an hour later, he came back for a re-match. Discretion overcame my first impulse to ask the locals what it was all about, but everyone seemed to find it as entertaining as we did, even those involved, I suspect.

Later we took a moonlit walk along the harbour, relishing the peace and quiet. Only one bar was still open with faint sounds of laughter and music following us like mist.

“Fancy a nightcap, Mr W?”

“Nai parakalo, yassou – whatever!”

The original FOMM travel articles

Just thinking about how much we love to travel (re: last week’s mention of Japan), got me thinking about how much we are missing being able to scratch our itchy feet. We are not the only ones. When it comes to having family or close friends living overseas, not being able to visit is particularly hard. We all know someone who has not yet met their new grandchild (in London or New York). We appeased the travel bug in 2020 and 2021 by taking month-long caravan treks in the outback, but it is not the same as travelling overseas.

An old family friend in New Zealand is having a few health problems and at 89, this much-travelled woman’s days of dropping in on friends around the world unannounced is probably over. It would have been good to just hop on a plane and turn up at the hospital. In her travelling days she was wont to describe her spontaneous arrivals as, ‘It’s just me, turning up like a bad penny.’ But we did send flowers.

Our friend went ‘backpacking’ in the 1950s with an intrepid Kiwi friend. They were both teachers and had a hunger to work their way around the world. Very few young women travelled alone in 1954, let me tell you. At the time my parents met them in Scotland (autumn 1954), they were out every day in the back blocks of Montrose, picking potatoes, saving up for their next travel adventure. Dad read a story about them in the local newspaper, tracked them down and invited them to stay for the weekend. He’d been thinking about emigrating for some time and had noted they came from the district where he had been offered a job. They became firm friends and of course that was the genesis of our emigrating to New Zealand in 1955.

Our old friend used to send me stamps she’d collected in her travels (the US, Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden Switzerland, Sarawak, the Solomon Islands, to name a few). The album is still in the bookcase here. It’s not worth much money but it brings back treasured memories. Once I reached my 20s, I felt compelled to leave NZ on what was then known as the “OE” (overseas experience). But you were supposed to go to London, go drinking with other Kiwi and Aussies in Earl’s Court and head home once your money was spent.

It didn’t always turn out like that. Young Kiwis or Aussies travelled, met their true love and settled in foreign climes. Serious travellers worked out the only way to keep travelling was to learn a bit of the local lingo and wangle a job. In France I picked grapes (the Vendange). After 10 days of dawn to dusk picking, I could barely get out of bed.

Later I landed two part-time jobs in Edinburgh, where I lived for six months in a bed-sit. The three-hour shift cleaning a department store before it opened was easy work and we got a free cooked breakfast. The evening shift cleaning offices went from 5pm to 8pm. Those two gigs helped pay my rent and grocery bills and at weekends we’d go adventuring in the highlands or south to the Lakes District.

I recently discovered a folder of travel articles from 2004, when we swapped houses with an English couple and spent six months living in a village in Surrey. Work wasn’t going so well, so I took all the long service leave and holidays that were owing and absented myself for six months.

It’s intriguing now to look back on these rambling emails to folks back home as the forerunner to Friday on My Mind. My then-colleague Jeffrey Sommerfeld had developed a weekly email to hundreds of our contacts (he was so pre-Twitter). He tells me now that so many of my contacts asked after me (in a kindly way), that he forwarded our unedited and sometimes rambling accounts to family and friends. They loved being kept in the loop about the adventures of Bob and ‘Mrs W’.

Here’s a nostalgic taste of how travel was before Covid and 9/11. I’ll follow up next week with our experiences of Hydra, a Greek Island best-known for once being home to poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen.

March 2004: TRAVEL can test the strongest relationship – just ask me. On second thoughts, don’t ask me because I don’t know my left from my right and can’t read a map.

My last bout of travelling in the 1970s was a solo effort, one last fling with tepid youth, if you will. I was practising to be a writer so did not really care where my feckless, directionless kind of travel took me.

In 2004 Mrs W and I made a base in Surrey for six months and made periodic forays to “the continent” as the Poms say.

I persuaded Mrs W to start with three weeks in Greece, nurturing warm memories of that stark country and its beautiful islands as a friendly and laid-back travel experience.

We flew via Singapore, arriving in Athens at 6am in that slightly stunned and disoriented state that flying in a pressurised container for 12 hours can induce.

The first stage of our adventure went without a hitch, lugging our (considerable) baggage on to the airport bus, arriving in central Athens about 8.30am.

I identified the Metro sign across the road and off we went. Much of Athens was a building site at the time, as the city prepared for the Olympics.

The escalators were out of order that day so we lugged four bags and a guitar down four flights of steep stairs to the (new) Athens metro station at Constitution Square.

On arriving at the right stop (Monistraki), I discovered there were five exits and I had no idea which one would take us to our hotel!

So there we were, us and our baggage, on a busy, dusty street, trying to decipher the tiny print on my (photocopied) local map. Mrs W was by now unimpressed with my forward planning. She was also discovering that my claims of knowing the language (after seven days on a Greek cruise ship in 1973), as complete bollocks.

Did I say we were in this situation largely because we had pledged to use local public transport and eschew taxis unless absolutely necessary? I used my mobile to call Hotel Tempi which I had pre-booked for three nights. Friendly host Yannes said we were just two streets away from the hotel “is easy – Parakalo.” but we turned right instead of left and took a very circuitous route via the fish market, across a road jammed with trucks, cars and two or three hundred motorcycles, carrying and dragging the baggage we needed en route to six months in the UK (which we did not get to until April).

Fortunately, our host encounters grumpy, jet-lagged tourists each and every day so was able to calm us down and send us to our room with the promise “I bring bags later”.

The hotel stored our bags (“no charge, is easy”) while we toured around southern Greece, starting with three days on Hydra.

In three weeks of exploring Greece on public transport and on foot we got lost many times: the big question for couples travelling on a budget to ask themselves is – does it really matter? As the Greeks would say “chalárose kai apólafse” (relax and enjoy).

Next week: A donkey ride on Hydra

Purple haze – the jacaranda story

On Remembrance Day (November 11), we met a Year 12 student who had been singing in our community choir but had taken time out to concentrate on her studies. She told us (with some excitement), that school was set to finish the following week. That reminded me of the old Queensland maxim about flowering jacarandas and exam times. The story goes that if the jacarandas are flowering and you are behind on your studies, it is too late!

That may have changed over the decades as climate change has led to earlier flowering, not only of jacarandas, but cherry blossoms (and pohutakawas). More on that later.

When I visited Brisbane in late September, the jacarandas were already starting to bloom. They flower later across the Southern Downs, as we know, but even so, this old jacaranda in the grounds of St Mark’s Anglican Church (above) was starting to lose its blooms as I took this photo on November 9.

Warwick has some lovely mature examples of this tree, many of them in the front or back yards of private homes. In some towns and cities (Grafton, Toowoomba, Brisbane, Sydney’s north shore), jacarandas were planted on either side of city streets, to create a stunning, if ephemeral display from mid-October to mid-November.

Jacaranda is the name for a genus of 49 species of flowering plants in the family Bignoniaceae, native to tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas. Wikipedia describes it as a ‘cosmopolitan’ plant.

It is common across many continents and countries including Argentina, Botswana, Brazil, Florida, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Paraguay, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Southern California, Spain, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The jacaranda is also found in New Zealand. It has been introduced to most tropical and subtropical regions and is widely planted in Asia, with trees visible in Nepal, Pakistan and India.

These days, the tree is seen as an invasive foreigner although with a loftier status than the camphor laurel, deemed to be an invasive weed. Regardless, Australian towns and cities compete for status of champion jacaranda; examples including Grafton, Brisbane, Toowoomba, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth (although not until December in WA).

Apart from the obvious connection with school and university exam times, the jacaranda’s purple haze is the first real sign of Spring. Many romances have hatched under their sheltering boughs. Songwriters have mentioned the jacaranda in songs, even!

When at their peak, the showy trees are hard to beat for a visual spectacle. Unfortunately, the triumph is short-lived, with storms, rain and wind soon littering the ground with purple flowers. As staff in hospital emergency rooms would attest, ‘slipped on wet jacaranda flowers’ is a common refrain when patients present at the fracture clinic.

When visiting Brisbane on September 27, I was surprised to see this jacaranda on Coronation Drive. Although I set out to write a ‘light and fluffy’ piece, it did not take much to uncover the climate science take on this. An article in The Conversation and republished in other journals similarly observed the early flowering of jacarandas in South Africa.

Jennifer Fitchett, Associate Professor of Physical Geography, University of the Witwatersrand, explained why early flowering of Jacaranda mimosifolia is a ‘warning sign’. Gauteng Province’s proliferating jacarandas have in recent years started flowering in early September. Octogenarian residents interviewed by researchers recalled the trees flowering in mid-November in the 1920s and 30s. The trees, native to Brazil, were introduced to Pretoria and Johannesburg in the late 1800s. Civic leaders of the time deemed them an ornamental worthy of lining streets in the suburbs and CBD. You could write a thesis about how the seeds ended up germinating in foreign soil.

Professor Fitchett wrote that jacaranda flowering had gradually advanced over the decades to mid-October and now to September. She described this process as ‘phenological shift’, which has been observed in multiple flowering tree species around the world. The earlier flowering is a key indicator that the planet is warming.

Prof Fitchett initiated the first known phenological shift study done in South Africa, singling out the jacaranda. Phenological research is rare in South Africa, compared to the work done across Europe, Asia and North America.

“Because jacaranda blossoms result in such a dramatic change in the urban landscape each year, they are often reported on in the news and, more recently, in social media posts,” she said.

“We mined these sources to compile a list of flowering dates of jacaranda trees spanning 1927-2019.”

These records allowed researchers to confirm the advance in flowering dates, quantifying a mean rate of advance of 2.1 days per decade.

The flowering took place against a backdrop of warming temperatures, ranging from 0.1-0.2°C per decade (daily maximums) and a more rapid 0.2-0.4°C per decade for daily minimums.

Japan’s world-famous tourist attraction, cherry blossom season, has been under threat in 2020 and 2021. Covid restrictions meant that international tourists keen to witness the ‘sakura’ were unable to travel. Those who managed to sneak in a tour in early 2020 may have found their timing was off. The data suggests the peak blooming date in Kyoto has been gradually moving from mid-April to the beginning of the month.

She Who Itches to Travel had a Japan trip lined up for 2020 to see the cherry blossoms, ride the bullet trains and, if not actually climb Mt Fuji, take photos from miles away and say we did. That this never happened was more about my tendency to procrastinate and worry about becoming destitute.

In January SWITT decided we’d left our run too late and postponed the 2020 trip to Japan’s autumn. I agreed, imagining parks blazing with autumn colours, all the while converting yen to dollars. Then Covid appeared and everything changed.

The Japanese have been studying phenological change for centuries, so they have a better handle on it than most. Cherry blossom flowerings last only a few weeks. They have been occurring earlier and earlier in recent decades.

The ABC reported in April this year that the famous cherry blossoms in Kyoto, Japan, peaked on March 26, the earliest date in 1,200 years, according to data compiled by Osaka University. Records that date back to 812 AD in imperial court documents and diaries show that the previous record was set in 1409, when the cherry blossom season reached its peak on March 27.

Kyoto experienced an unusually warm spring this season. The average temperature for March in Kyoto has climbed from 47.5 degrees Fahrenheit in 1953 to 51.1 degrees Fahrenheit in 2020. Japan’s national newspaper Mainichi reported that despite diminished human activity stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, carbon dioxide levels in surrounding areas did not decrease.

The ABC’s report also mentioned that Washington DC’s famous cherry trees bloomed early this year.

Similarly, New Zealand botanists have observed the early blooming of the pohutakawa, often known as the country’s Christmas Tree. The pohutakawa, with its distinctive red flowers, usually blooms in mid-November through to early January. Early flowering north of Auckland was noted in October. News portal Stuff says the early flowering is due to a relatively dry and warm winter. This might thwart the gathering of kina (sea egg), with local Maori tradition of taking the flowering as a sign that the shellfish is ready to harvest.

As I said, I didn’t set out to do yet another climate change story, but it’s a bit ubiquitous. In the spirit of ‘do your own research’ I have provided more links which confirm what you have just read. As Greta Thunberg would say “Wake up! Your house is on fire.”

Go out into the suburbs with your camera or phone and capture those luscious jacaranda blooms while they last.

https://www.brisbanekids.com.au/jacarandas-brisbane-find-year/

https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/4/1/japan-sees-earliest-cherry-blossoms-on-record-as-climate-warms

https://www.sciencealert.com/japan-s-cherry-blossoms-burst-into-color-sooner-than-they-have-in-1-200-years

A Free Education – the Whitlam Legacy

free-education-whitlam — Students protesting about abolition of free education Image courtesy of www.solidarity.org

I will be forever grateful to the late Gough Whitlam for allowing me an opportunity to pursue a free education. I was 30 at the time with no qualifications and a chequered work history. My future lot in life was looking like casual labourer/dish pig. Not that there’s anything wrong with good honest sweat of the brow. But my undoubtedly sharp mind was frustrated by menial work and I was at a roadblock.

At the time unemployment was high and I was struggling to find any kind of work. I’d left school at 15 and had been in constant employment ever since, most of it unsuitable, apart from a three-year stint as a trainee psychiatric nurse.

Then came the concept of a mature-age tertiary degree or the prospect of studying screen-writing at the Australian Film & Television School. The latter proved a hard nut to crack, so I opted for a three-year course in journalism and media studies. What a journey. There were four school terms in a year at the time, so I figured by Easter of the first year I’d know if I could cut it or not. My results were mostly A’s and B’s so I knuckled down to full-time study, hammering out assignments on an ancient Olympus typewriter picked up at a police auction.

My student colleagues wasted no time explaining the privilege of a free university education. In 1974 it had been ushered in as one of the first in an astonishing array of social policy reforms by one Edward Gough Whitlam, without doubt our most controversial politician.

Yesterday was Remembrance Day but also the 46th^t anniversary of The Dismissal, the fateful day in 1975 when the Queen’s representative in Australia, John Kerr, sacked a sitting Prime Minister. Gough Whitlam came to power in 1972 with the memorable campaign ‘It’s Time’. And it most certainly was. In a few short years Whitlam and his government dragged Australia out of a 1950s mindset into the era of afros, paisley shirts and flared jeans.

Most people under 50 are unlikely to know this story unless they studied law, politics or social policy at university. On Labor’s election, Whitlam and his deputy, Lance Barnard, formed a duumvirate (a two-man cabinet). They then spent two weeks working on a massive amount of draft legislation. If you are of my generation, I suppose your life experience will dictate what you think is the crowning achievement of these social reforms.

For me it was a free tertiary education. For women (or men) going through an ugly divorce, it was the single-parent pension.

Regardless of a ‘free’ education, the life of full-time student was a pauper’s existence, devoting most of our time to qualifying for a job-related degree. I recall doing a deal with the university bookshop and my local dentist to pay off my debts in instalments. Meanwhile, I played guitar in a bush band, worked as a free-lance journalist and took casual jobs when I could.

It is now 32 years since free tertiary education was scrapped by Bob Hawke’s neo liberal Labor government, to be replaced with the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). While Whitlam’s nemesis, Malcolm Fraser, tried ending free education in 1976 and again in 1982, it was Hawke who killed it off in 1986 by introducing a first-ever student fee. The Hawke government abolished free education by stealth, first with the $250 admission fee when students enrolled, then a fee system for international students before progressing to HECS in 1989.

The scheme began modestly, charging students a ‘proportion’ of the cost of their education. This morphed into open slather in 1994 when Labor allowed universities to ‘charge what the market would bear’, for tertiary courses.

As Tom Fiebig wrote in the socialist newsletter, Solidarity, a typical university student today will graduate with a $20,303 debt. Some 150,000 students now have more than $50,000 in debt.

Under HECS, students were given interest-free student loans, most predicated on not being due for repayment until one’s income reached a certain level.

So that was just one little thing that Whitlam and Barnard did, not nearly as universally acclaimed as the Medicare model. There was so much more: they abolished conscription, ended capital punishment, introduced no-fault divorce and a single-parent pension and started talks on Aboriginal land rights. There was equal pay for women, Legal Aid, the Federal Schools Commission, major subsidies for the arts and the National Sewerage Scheme, which put an end to Australia’s night cart collection system. While we are still today debating the need for an appropriate anthem, Gough got things started in 1972, giving God Save the Queen the flick and opting for Advance Australia Fair.

Whitlam finished our involvement in the Vietnam War, bringing the Australian Army Training Team home. Most troops, including conscripts, had already been withdrawn by his predecessor, Billy McMahon. What is not so well known is that when abolishing conscription, Whitlam arranged for the release of seven men who were in jail for refusing to go to war.

As one might expect when a new leader is stirring up a stagnant system, Gough Whitlam had his critics. He was hardly to blame for the 1970s global oil crisis, rampant inflation, lengthy recession and massive unemployment. But those disruptive events made Whitlam an easy target for those who successfully branded his government as poor economic managers.

I have chronicled many of these events in a song, ‘When Whitlam took his turn at the wheel’, which we posted on Bandcamp yesterday.

I did not have room for a verse about the ‘Blue Poles’ incident. Whitlam had opened the National Gallery, which wanted to purchase a modernist painting by Jackson Pollack. The asking price was $1.3 million (at the time a third of the gallery’s annual budget). The gallery director needed the PM’s personal approval. Although he did not need to make the purchase price public, Whitlam did so, creating a political and media scandal. Alternatively, it symbolised his foresight and vision (or his profligate spending). In 2016 there was a fresh furore when Victorian Senator James Paterson urged the government to sell Blue Poles (citing an insured value of $350 million), to reduce debt.

A fine orator and debater and a compelling public figure, Gough Whitlam went well on the international stage. He was the first PM to visit China, but as the song says – ‘today nobody knows’.

(Satire)

Here’s a short transcript from an interview with a sympathetic community radio station.

Natasha: Welcome, Comrade. So what made you think about writing this song, Bob?

Bob: Well, Natasha, I read a few stories recently which observed that it was the 7^th anniversary of Whitlam’s death. I started thinking about the legacy that he’d left and how today’s generation is probably blissfully unaware of his achievements”.

Natasha: You have written in a previous episode of FOMM that you met Gough one time and that it did not go well?

Bob: I made the mistake of handing him my card from the Courier-Mail where I was employed as a business journalist. He looked at the card, made a scathing comment about the newspaper’s campaign against historian Manning Clark, gave my card back, turned and walked away.

Natasha: You don’t mention that in the song, although you do take a swipe at Gough’s vanity?

Bob: Yes, he probably would have thought the song was about him.

Natasha: Thanks, Bob Wilson. This is Socialist Songs Hour and here is that song, When Whitlam took his turn at the wheel.

You can listen to the song on our Bandcamp page https://thegoodwills.bandcamp.com/ and if you like, add it to your digital music collection. Share with your friends.

ScoMo’s Climate Plan to Save the Planet

ScoMo-climate-Plan — Image: twitter@GeorgeBludger, reposted from 2018 because it is so clever.

It occurred to me, having just volunteered to work for three different community groups, that what I need, apart from worrying about the Australian government’s failed policies on Covid, climate change and refugees, not to mention bushfire risk mitigation, is a Plan.

I use the capital letter deliberately as it seems that is what our peerless leader, Scotty from Marketing, wants us to do. His Plan (well, actually it’s not his Plan) should be called a Process because after all, that is what the National Party agreed to support. As we know, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and his country party cohorts emerged from days of climate talks to announce with fanfare great that it had ‘agreed to support a process’ to meet the government’s bare minimum target of zero net emissions by 2050.

Australia’s emissions are still among the highest in the world on a per capita basis, well behind similar developed countries.

At the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this week, PM Scott Morrison somehow wangled his way into the discussions. It’s not that long ago (December 2020), that he was snubbed by a United Nations climate conference in London hosted by the UK and France.

British PM Boris Johnson had invited Morrison to speak at the December 12 summit but reneged. Selwin Hart, the special adviser to UN Secretary-General António Guterres on climate action, said at the time Australia had ‘not met the threshold needed to speak’.

But given a platform at COP26 (after pledging to meet zero net emissions by 2050), Morrison gave an optimistic speech, claiming that Australia’s emissions could fall by 35% by 2030. Greens leader Adam Bandt described the speech as ‘cringeworthy’, saying it contradicted statements made in Australia. The national climate plan (NDC) merely reaffirmed the formal 2030 target of 26-28% set by former PM Tony Abbott, he said.

“Australia is also siding with Russia and China to block global action on the climate crisis, refusing to phase out coal and gas, the leading causes of global heating,” he added.

The Guardian said Morrison’s 2050 plan lacked modelling, with almost a third of the abatement task comprised of cuts via unspecified “technology breakthroughs” and “global trends”, while a further 20% will be achieved through offsets.

To be fair, Morrison has been thwarted by climate change resistance from his Coalition partner, the National Party. The Plan may or may not be influenced by trade-offs demanded by the Nationals (which has a rural support base), regarding the issue of methane emissions.

Michelle Grattan wrote in The Conversation that Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor had rejected the US push for a 30% reduction of methane emissions by 2030.

For city folk, methane is a global warming gas produced by cows burping and farting. Morrison backed his Minister, saying the government never had any intention of agreeing to the (methane) reduction.

Veteran finance commentator Alan Kohler has had a bit to say about climate change and the urgent need to keep temperature increases below 1.5 degrees celsius. As he wrote in The New Daily a few months ago, precise risk analysis of global warming is difficult because ‘feedback loop tipping points’ are unknown and unpredictable.

“It’s known that with 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming, the combination of permafrost melt in Siberia, wildfires in the world’s forests and warming of the ocean will release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

“(This) means a feedback loop could take the temperature to 2.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures – and perhaps beyond – no matter what we do.”

Kohler is good value, in that he often exposes seemingly turgid reports that no-one else has looked at and translates them into plain English.

For example, the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA) issued a draft prudential practice guide on climate change which included 4 degrees of warming as one of its two “scenarios” for banks to use in their future planning.

“A 4 degree rise in the average global temperature would make large parts of the planet uninhabitable and lead to the total collapse of the banking system. No need for any planning,” Kohler commented.

“The other APRA scenario was for 2 degrees of warming or less, consistent with the Paris Agreement of December 2015, which should happen if all countries meet their Paris pledges (which they haven’t).”

Successive Australian governments have been terrified about drafting tough new laws to support carbon reduction. This is a country which cleared vast swathes of forest and scrub to establish pastoral land and open-cut coal mines. We have allowed fracking, built a vast network of gas pipelines, supported offshore oil drilling and relied on coal-fired power stations for much of our energy.

We also export millions of tonnes of coal to countries which have dirtier power stations than ours. We have exacerbated the global crisis rather than mitigating the effects of carbon emissions.

We here at FOMM HQ reckon we have been hearing about climate change, greenhouse gases and global warming since we became conservationists in the 1960s. She Who Taught Geography says she was aware of it when studying at university in the late 60s. We were called ‘tree huggers’ then and probably still would be now, despite knowing what we know.

So here in Australia, 50 years later, we are still in rampant denial about what rising carbon dioxide levels have done to the planet.

It’s no new thing. Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted in 1896 that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the planet’s ground temperature through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth’s atmosphere to global warming.

By the 1990s, a consensus emerged among scientists that greenhouse gases were deeply involved in most climate changes and human-caused emissions were bringing discernible global warming.

Unhappily, many people are climate change deniers. Just like those who subscribe to Covid-19 vaccine conspiracies, they defy the majority opinion of the world’s scientists.

Perhaps they were not paying attention when some of the world’s biggest fund managers started selling off their fossil fuel investments circa 2016. The latest local example of this was the State’s biggest investor, Queensland Investment Corporation, which manages State employees’ superannuation.

The topic of fossil fuels and divestment (selling oil, gas and coal stocks) was also debated at COP26. The pro-investment argument is that 80% of the world’s energy is still sourced from fossil fuel and a sudden rush for the turnstiles is unlikely.

Fossil fuel opponents understand how divestment can turn the tide quickly by shutting down fossil fuel ‘sponsorship’ (sometimes known as ‘greenwashing’).

Yet another conference, then, where world’s leaders (average age 60), left COP26 without doing anything meaningful.

The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin’s stark message this week is that from 1990 to 2020, the warming effect on our climate by long-lived greenhouse gases, increased by 47%, with CO₂ accounting for about 80% of the increase. The numbers are based on monitoring by the World Meteorological Organisation’s Global Atmosphere Watch network. As WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas said: “We are way off track.”

If I make it to 2050, I can imagine 102-year-old me, spilling jelly and custard on my vintage Homer Simpson T shirt muttering: “Meh” (having been moved in a dinghy to a nursing home on high ground).

Unfortunately, ‘meh’ (shorthand for callous indifference), is the attitude of far too many people who won’t see 2050. They have all obviously forgotten climate activist Greta Thunberg’s fiery speech at the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos.

“I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic,” she said. “I want you to feel the fear that I feel every day and I want you to act. Our house is burning.”

More reading: Seven years ago!!!

Gender equity and ‘Men Make Dinner Day’

gender-equity-men-dinner — Share of adults that cook and/or do housework in selected European countries, by gender in 2016. Eurostat/Destatis https://www.statista.com/chart/15880/housework-europe-gender-split/

At the outset I should say that ‘National Men Make Dinner Day’ is a US invention and not celebrated in Australia – although it should be! The sub-heading is important – no barbecues or takeaway pizzas allowed.

Founder Sandy Sharkey recommends National Men Make Dinner Day for blokes who are completely lost in the kitchen.
“Keep your sense of humour (and a frying pan) and who knows, this could be the start of something beautiful (or charred)!”

National Men Make Dinner Day is the first Thursday in November (the 4^th of November this year) so get to it, men. Plan the evening meal, print out a recipe, purchase ingredients (and a good bottle of red), and then get cooking.

I was musing about this on Sunday night when I was in the final stages of serving up home-made pizza for dinner. On switching the tray from the top to the bottom, the tray slipped out of my grasp and the pizza landed on the half-open oven door. Much swearing ensued as I manoeuvred the pizza back on the tray; not before spilling some of the toppings on the kitchen floor.

I’m a marginal case in the kitchen but luckily there is She Who is a Great Cook. But she occasionally tires of the routine and announces:

“I’m bored with cooking, why don’t you come up with something tonight?”

“Hello, is that Roddies Fish and Chips?”

My culinary skills include spaghetti bolognaise, Asian stir fry, pizza, sausages and veg and the occasional all-day roast in the slow cooker. Cooking in-house is enhanced around here by She Who Has a Green Thumb contributing produce from the garden.

As is my wont, I started researching the touchy topic of whether men do much cooking at home, or housework in general. It is called ‘gender equality’ in the jargon of academia.

There was much media commentary when the 2016 Census results began to trickle out. It seemed that one in four Australian men did no housework at all. That ratio has improved since then, with the Covid lockdown having a lot to do with helping men improve their cooking and housework skills.

The US-based Pew Research Center surveyed couples about how Covid had affected the way they share household duties. Pew found there were differing perceptions before and after the pandemic. For example, in 2019, 49% of men said they were satisfied with this aspect of their relationship, compared with 39% of women. In 2020 the gender gap widened, with 55% of men saying they were happy with the sharing of household duties, compared with 38% of women.

Gender equality has made big strides in the EU, except for housework, according to Martin Armstrong, writing for Statista. The most balanced split was in Sweden where 79% of women said they do cooking and housework, against 56% of men. The gap was wider in the UK (85% 49%) and the less said about Greece (84% 16%), the better.

(BTW, there must be some awfully messy households in Hungary – see above table- unless they’ve all got housemaids.Ed.)

Australia’s latest survey on household task-sharing indicates that 47% of couple households report that household chores are equally shared. I consider myself well entrenched in this cohort. I do the washing up 90% of the time (although not always to SWIAGC’s satisfaction). I vacuum 100% of the time (my Doctor told me it’s bad for my back. Ed) and it’s probably 50/50 in the laundry. Cooking, well, I make lunch about half of the time but cook dinner maybe once or twice a week and not on a schedule. My bad.

I am probably getting a bit long in the tooth to be blaming my upbringing, but our household in the 1950s was very traditional. Dad went to work and earned the ‘bawbees’ and did outside chores like mowing, heavy gardening (potatoes) and knocking off the occasional chook. Mum was in charge of the kitchen (and plucking and gutting of aforementioned chook). She did the laundry (in a copper), rinsing with a mangle over two concrete tubs. Those were the days! The kids had set chores which included feeding the chooks, helping with washing up and taking turns with the lawns and garden.

Dad, as they’d say ‘never lifted a finger’ in the house. To be fair, he worked night shift as a baker and slept in the afternoons, so could hardly be involved in the preparation of the evening meal. He would get up about 5pm, have a bath and sit and read the newspaper until dinner was served at 6pm.

As I entered adulthood, I vowed not to become that kind of man – the ‘head of the household’. Relationships with women who were becoming aware of feminism helped consolidate my stance.

Over the years I became aware that, feminism aside, not all couple households operated within a loose framework of gender equality. At one dinner party, as I rose to clear away plates and start serving dessert, one of the men muttered ‘Mate, you’re letting the side down’.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies carried out a study of opposite-sex couple households in 2020. In 12% of couple families, household tasks were always done by the female and in 30% of couple families, they were usually done by the female.

By comparison, in 8% of couple families these tasks were usually done by the male and in 2% of couple families, they were always done by the male. As noted, in 47% of households, chores were equally shared.

Most males (74%) were satisfied with the way household tasks are divided compared to 52% of satisfied females. Now that is a gender gap!

Some people are just not designed for certain household chores. You are either a good cook or you’re not, IMHO. If you’re the one that always overcooks the vegies, burns the chops or drops the half-baked pizza on the oven door, why not step back and let the gourmet chef do it? I’m sure our old friend Mr Shiraz won’t mind my sharing this anecdote.

Mr Shiraz is and always has been the cook in his household and a damn fine chef he is. He and partner are also avid gardeners, so there is always a plentiful supply of fresh vegetables and herbs to spare.

Once when we were invited over for dinner, our son, who was then five, piped up: “What’s Trevor cooking tonight?”

No wonder he grew up understanding that men (and boys) must iron their own clothes, thus dutifully ironing his school shirts and shorts.

National Men Make Dinner Day’s Sandy Sharkey provides an amusing list to motivate men to do more cooking (and not just on one day).

First and importantly, you can wear your tool belt in the kitchen – just replace the hammer with a whisk;
Find recipes which include beer as a legitimate ingredient;
Whoever is cooking always gets more attention from the dog;
Since you choose the recipe, you can avoid things you don’t like (turnip, brussel sprouts, kale);
Some desserts (crème brulee) require the use of a propane torch (how good is that);
Form new bonds with male friends who also cook;
Participation in the kitchen earns optimum points with the wife (use them wisely).

Here is the easy way out: buy a rolled roast (no waste), place in the slow cooker with peeled potatoes, onion and pumpkin, add herbs and a dash of red wine. Put on low at 9am and by dinner time it will be ready to go. Steam some vegies and set the table.

With luck, your spouse will do the washing up!

Thanks to those who contributed to FOMM’s fund-raising campaign. If you feel inclined to subscribe for $10, $15 or $20, here is the link:

Alternative media (and a plea for alms)

alternative-media-alms — Image by John Inglar, pixabay.com Suspicious of the status quo media? There are alternatives to fake news, beat-ups and media bias.

Over the years I have found that readers value my occasional reviews of alternative media, as opposed to fake news or the mainstream media. Since the latter started finding it hard to make money (circa 2010), there have been many start-up newsletters and blogs that seek to go counter to the mainstream media. Some survive (and grow), others fade from view. It is a constant chore to keep up with who’s who in the alt-media zoo.

Alan Austin, writing for Michael West Media, said the alternative media attrition rate is high. West’s website (launched in 2016) had been the only new entrant since the Saturday Paper in 2014, Austin noted. Michael West is an investigative financial journalist who previously worked for the Australian Financial Review. On his ‘about’ page, West states: We are non-partisan, do not take advertising and are funded by readers. Our investigations focus on big business, particularly multinational tax-avoiders, financial markets and the banking and energy sectors. In a plea for monthly contributions to keep the machine rolling, West’s slogan is – Don’t pay so you can read it. Pay so everyone can.

That’s a mantra to keep in mind when perusing daily news online. Austin names four mainstream journalism outlets which are always ranked highly among the Top 50 Australian websites: news.com.au; abc.net.au; theguardian.com and smh.com.au. Of the four, only News Corp has a strict paywall. The ABC is and always has been ‘free’. The SMH and The Guardian prefer you to sign up for a daily email which contains a lot of news. The SMH asks readers to pay but provides a lot of free content on its website, as does The Guardian, which relies on contributions.

As time goes by, it becomes obvious that ‘free’ doesn’t really mean free. It means that if you value what you are reading, you are expected to chip in. When I first started this blog, it was relatively easy to source research material from a bewildering array of choices both local, state, national and international. More frequently I am coming up against messages like ‘you have read two free articles – why not subscribe?’

Today I’d like to point you to five alternative media outlets, chosen from readers’ recommendations and my own research. The list does not favour one publication over the other. The question to ask yourself before subscribing to a free daily email is, can you keep up?

The New Daily

I have in the past read occasional articles but am now trialling a (free) subscription. One of my regular readers recommended TND with the tongue-in-cheek caveat, ‘it might be too left wing for you’. I went browsing and found an article by Michael Pascoe which warned of forces marshalling in the US for the return of Donald Trump in 2024. If not Trump (T1), then a younger, more vigorous version (T2). As Pascoe says, it is a far scarier scenario than anything Covid can throw at us.

TND, a free online news publication, started in 2013 and now has 1.7 million subscribers. TND is backed by Industry Super Holdings, with senior executives including the former editor of The Age, Bruce Guthrie, and digital publishing pioneer Eric Beecher. Unlike some of its peers, it carries ads and tends to delve into celebrity news.

Pearls & Irritations

This weekly collection of essays focuses on Australian public policy and attracts contributions from well-credentialed writers. Formed by retired public service mandarin John Menadue, P&I has no sponsors, no ads and subscriptions are ‘free’ although there is a mechanism to attract sponsors with a structured schedule of monthly donations ($10 to $100) or one-off contributions. P&I recently went on a fund-raising quest to cover expenses including ‘legal challenges’.

Last week’s edition included an article by former diplomat Bruce Haigh, who took aim at former PM Tony Abbott’s “ham-fisted intervention” in Taiwan. In a widely reported speech, Abbott listed all of China’s “sins”, from Hong Kong, Uighurs and trade sanctions against Australia, as reasons to support Taiwan politically and militarily.

“This intervention by Abbott has about it the inept diplomacy which has seen relations with China, France and the EU collapse,” Haigh wrote.

In noting that the speech had not been coordinated with regional countries and major players like the US, France or Japan, Hague asked the question ‘who put Abbott up to this?’.

“Abbott’s speech contained a strong message and a line that has been pushed by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

“The tone, intended or not, reflected the language we have become used to from ASPI.”

The Australian was less critical of Mr Abbott’s pro-Taiwan speech, mentioning that it followed a similar message last year from another former Australian PM, Malcolm Turnbull.

When asked by reporters if he was representing the Morrison government, Abbott replied: “I am here as citizen. But, one thing about being a former Prime Minister is you do have a bit of a megaphone.

“I want the people of Taiwan to know that they are not nearly as isolated as Beijing would like them to feel,” he added.

I should note that this article is one of the few the conservative broadsheet makes available free of charge. You are more likely to be met with a paywall.

The Conversation

I have often referred readers to The Conversation, a digital platform where journalists present articles written by one or more academics. Not only is The Conversation ‘free’, it allows others to freely quote from and even reprint articles under a creative commons license. The project derives its content from a large, international network of academics and researchers. I make a monthly donation to The Conversation as it is often my go-to source for research and fact-checking. One interesting offering this week is a topic that has been turned over by others, including TND.

Crikey

This long-running alternative media publication has broadened its focus since the early days of focusing on media machinations. Crikey now has an investigative unit funded by former newspaper baron John B Fairfax. Crikey’s subscription model appears to be working – its mere existence says so. A visit to Crikey’s website allows the casual reader the chance to read two or three articles which are ‘unlocked’. An ad urges you to “Guard against stupid” and subscribe “from $1 a week” (the current annual subscription is a discounted $99).

Since I mentioned the investigative unit, this week David Hardaker concluded his four-part series, ‘God in the Lodge’. Hardaker’s quest was to examine Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s public position that his religious beliefs do not influence his policies.

Crikey has been generous with Hardaker’s series, unlocking all four episodes for casual readers. It also published daily commentary on the topic by key thinkers in religion and politics.

The Saturday Paper

This publication belongs to the same stable that publishes The Monthly and the Quarterly Essay (Schwartz Media). The Saturday Paper employs some of the country’s best writers and analysts. It is one of the few alternative media publications which has a print edition. The on-line edition provides quite a lot of ‘free’ content. But if you prefer a newspaper you can read in bed or at the dining room table, The Saturday’s long-form articles will keep you going all weekend.

Happy browsing, people. Do let me know if you uncover an independent media outlet with quality news and analysis I have not mentioned here.

Help keep FOMM going

This is also a good time to remind you of my annual plea for alms and many thanks to those who responded so promptly. It keeps me insured, maintains the website and covers other incidentals (coffee, dark chocolate, a nice lunch out for the Ed?SWPG (She who proofreads gratis.).

FOMM annual subscriber drive

Dear Friends of FOMM,

It’s time again to ask for contributions to help meet operating expenses which usually come up at this time of year. I was prompted when a long-term reader wrote a letter (it came in the mail) and tucked a $20 note in as her contribution.

It’s not compulsory though, and Friday on My Mind will continue to appear, free and without ads (except for our own outrageous music plugs).

Whatever you can afford ($10, $15, $20 etc), please send to our PayPal account using the email address goodwills <at> ozemail.com.au.

Please mark your contribution ‘FOMM subscription’. We use the funds to pay for insurance, website administration, domain name renewals and associated expenses.

The alternative is to email me and ask for bank details. Do not use last year’s bank details as we have changed to a local bank.

Friday on My Mind started in May 2014 and has been published almost every week since (I may have taken a week off around Christmas). There have also been guest columns, some written by my trusty editor, Laurel Wilson, often known as ‘She who etc” which is of course a nod to the late John Mortimer, whose crusty barrister character Horace Rumpole referred to his good lady wife as “She who must be obeyed”.

If there is a topic I have not entertained and you think I should, do mention it and I will add it to my ‘future FOMM’ folder.

Thanks in advance

Bob & Laurel