Friday on My Mind Archives - Page 17 of 31

Censorship, guns and the right to arm bears

guns-bears-censorship — This image is classified (S) for satire under FOMM’s censorship guidelines

I was idly wondering if I should have a go at George Christensen for pulling that silly, anti-greenies gun stunt at the firing range but self censorship kicked in. What if he knows where I live? I blanched. The process known in journalism school as ‘self censorship by osmosis’ still kicks in, even 18 years down the track.

You may have assumed I was about to jump into the very deep pool of acrimonious discourse about mass shootings, guns and gun control. Actually, no, there are enough rabid views out there from one side and the other. Perhaps you will have seen Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s repost of the kind of vile trolling one can attract by advocating for the environment (if not, don’t bother looking it up – Ed.)

Instead, I thought we should look at a worrisome instance of censorship; where a respected economic analyst/journalist had an article taken down by the national broadcaster, the ABC. Emma Alberice’s reasoned piece about corporate tax cuts was removed by ABC management, reportedly after complaints from on high about its alleged lack of impartiality. Alberice’s article argues there is no case for a corporate tax cut when one in five of Australia’s top companies don’t pay any tax.

After public criticism, the ABC deflected cries of ‘censorship’ saying removing the analysis and an accompanying news story were ‘entirely due to concerns about Ms Alberici’s compliance with ABC editorial policies that differentiate analysis from opinion’.

The analysis has since been scrutinised by experts and given the seal of approval. It has even been re-posted at a public affairs website owned by the eminent Australian, John Menadue, AO. You may recall Menadue. He started his working life as private secretary to Gough Whitlam (1960-67), before forging a career in the private sector then returning to public service in the mid-1970s. He has since led a distinguished career in both public and private life, most notably as an Australian diplomat.

Mr Denmore, one of Australia’s more incisive commentators on media and economics, wrote this in Alberici’s defence:

Mr Denmore (the pseuydonym of a former finance journalist), sees this issue as plain old-fashioned censorship.

He concludes that Alberice was merely offering insights, which have got the nod from some serious-headed economists, as ‘uncomfortable truths’, which those in high government office and boardrooms found too confronting.

Now, a week later, the ABC has reinstated* Emma Alberici’s analysis, albeit with some passages removed. As former ABC journalist Quentin Dempster reported in The New Daily, the author and her lawyers negotiated an agreed form of words for the reposted analysis.

The removal of Alberici’s original analysis coincided with a planned US visit by a high-level delegation of Australian business and government leaders. The latest advocate of global of ‘trickle-down economics’,+ President Donald Trump, will meet with PM Malcolm Turnbull today. No doubt Mal will be taking notes on the US president’s ‘open for business’ approach of slashing corporate tax rates from 35% to 21%. Australia’s more modest proposal, which is currently blocked in the Senate, is to reduce the corporate tax rate from 30% to 25%, over a decade.

+A term attributed to American comedian Will Rogers, who used the term derisively, as did later opponents of President Reagan’s ‘Reaganomics’.

The nation’s top business leaders, under the umbrella of the Business Council of Australia, will also meet with US governors and top-level US company executives. Australian State Premiers, including Queensland’s Annastasia Palaszczuk, will also attend.

Business Council head Jennifer Westacott told the Sydney Morning Herald she feels that Australian business is “in the weeds of politics” and

“Meanwhile in the US they’re getting on with it.”

Westacott and Council members support the Australian corporate tax cut proposal as the only policy that can deliver jobs and growth.

Opposition leader Bill Shorten is taking the hard line – a corporate tax cut cannot help ordinary people, at a time when companies are using tax havens and keeping wages low. Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen admits there is a case for company tax cuts, but said the LNP’s plan is unaffordable when the budget is in deficit.

The attempt to gag debate on this subject is, however, more worrying than the toadying going on in Washington. Australia ranks 19^th in an international survey of countries judged on press freedoms. Reporters without Borders (RSF) maintains the list of 180 countries, many of whom oppress the media in far more serious ways than plain old censorship.

Australian media freedoms pursued by stealth

At first glance, 19^th from 180 sounds good, but Australia has some issues, not the least of which is concentration of media ownership. The risk of self censorship is high, given the lack of job opportunities elsewhere. The 2017 survey notes that new laws in 2015 provide for prison sentences for whistleblowers who disclose information about defence matters, conditions in refugee centres or operations by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization.

I sometimes fret about a FOMM I wrote before these laws were introduced – an eyewitness account of US Marine movements after a chance encounter at a Northern Territory roadhouse.

“Aw shucks, we all just stopped to use the latrine, Ma’am.”

There’s more: a new telecommunications law has opened the door for surveillance of the metadata of journalists’ communications. Federal police raids on Labor Party parliamentarians in 2016 violated the confidentiality of sources. The Reporters without Borders report says the latter showed that authorities were “more concerned about silencing the messengers than addressing the issues of concern to the public that had been raised by their revelations”.

Meanwhile, a new draft national security bill seeks to restrict foreign interference in politics and national security. It contains secrecy and espionage provisions that could result in journalists being sent to prison for five years just for being in possession of sensitive information.

Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk, called the draft bill “oppressive and ill-conceived”.

“If this bill were passed, journalists receiving sensitive information they had not sought would automatically be in violation of the law. If this law had existed in the United States in 1974, the Watergate scandal would never have come to light.”

The free-wheeling nature of social media ensures that dissenting discourse does not stay banned for very long, though often exposed to a much smaller audience.

You may censor me, but never my T-shirts

I suppose now you want me to explain the relevance of the Right to Arm Bears T-shirt, eh? This now threadbare item was bought from a tourist shop on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls in 2010. I have been trying to find and purchase a replacement online. The manufacturer (Gildan) has similar T-shirts but none as fetching as the grumpy-looking bears wearing hunting jackets.

Wearing a shirt that makes a political point, however ironically, is an individual’s right in a free country to express an opinion. In my case it succinctly states my position on American gun laws, just as another T-shirt bought from a stall at Woodford, depicting a full-masted, 17^th century sailboat (”Boat People”) says a lot about my attitude to refugees. Perhaps I should replace it with a Save the ABC shirt. Seems like the ABC needs all the friends it can find.

*Read Emma Alberici’s revised analysis here:

Catch a (brush) turkey for Christmas

turkey-christmas — Brush turkey for Christmas dinner? – image by She Who Takes Bird Photos, aka Laurel Wilson

The only thing more difficult than taking a photo of a brush turkey is selling the notion of preparing one for a (budget) Christmas lunch. Those of you quick on the uptake will have already registered that Mr FOMM is being ironic. Brush turkeys as you may know are a protected and even endangered species. Besides, they have a “stuff you’ attitude which is refreshing (bok!) And the chicks are cute.

As it happens, turkey is the least popular meat for people laying in provisions for Christmas. The ubiquitous Christmas ham leads the pack by a good margin, along with chicken, then turkey.

Northern hemisphere folk might find this hard to fathom, but rich hot food is not a priority for the Australian Christmas lunch. No, we prefer ham, chicken, prawns, a variety of cold salads and condiments, followed up with fruit salads, ice-cream, custard and yoghurt, all of it more befitting our typical 30+ degree Christmas Day. The diehards do Christmas pudding, but as we all know, it takes a long afternoon nap to sleep it off.

Retailers work hard at this time of year to sell us on the idea of (a) over-eating (b) over-spending and (c) eating food we rarely eat. The latter includes turkey, which has its biggest sales between December 20 and 24. I’m aware turkey is very big in the US and Canada on November 23 (Thanksgiving). According to the University of Illinois, 88% of Americans surveyed by the National Turkey Federation eat turkey on Thanksgiving; 46 million turkeys are eaten each Thanksgiving, 22 million at Christmas and 19 million at Easter

Compare that with Australia, where 3 to 5 million turkeys are killed and sold for meat every year. On average, Australians eat approximately 1kg of turkey per person per year, most of which is consumed during one week at Christmas.

You’ll pay about $110 for an organic turkey, or about $22 a kilo.

You can find loads of information on the Internet about meat consumption, much of it available on animal welfare websites, which point out the factory-like habitat of animals being fattened for consumption. I have a few things to say about that and one is that after being sent on an assignment to one of Queensland’s largest (cattle) feedlots, I went vegetarian for two or three months.

As you may not know, there are 2.1 million Australians (11.2%) who say they are vegetarians (Roy Morgan Research, 2016). Vegans are lumped in with vegetarians, though it’s not the same thing.

If you were curious about what vegos eat at Christmas, musician Emma Nixon says she makes a roast vegie, quinoa and lentil salad.

“It’s good hot or cold. I take the leftovers to Woodford ”

Another muso, Karen Law, says her family eats fish but is otherwise fully vegan. This year they might throw some salmon on the bbq, plus a lot of salad, bbq sweet potato and kipfler potatoes.

Folk dancers Peter and Linda Scharf favour tofu kebabs, with satay sauce, falafels, bean patties, salads with extra trimmings and dressings. Not to mention plum pudding (no suet) and a couple of glasses of ‘fermented grape juice’.

To spew or not to spew

Meanwhile, non-vegan Aussies are very big on eating prawns at Christmas – 50,000 tonnes were consumed last year at this time. Just so you know, 80% of prawns sold in Australia are imported and it costs about $50 a kilo to buy locally-caught prawns.

As I am one of an indeterminate number of people for whom prawns induce violent chundering*, I cannot explain the appeal. I watch people spending inordinate amounts of time shelling prawns (is that the right term) and it always seems to me there is more to throw out than what makes it into the ice bucket.

One Christmas past we returned from a holiday at the beach to be greeted with an awful smell, which was quickly traced to a full, broken, leaking and putrid wheelie bin on the street outside our house. Someone had waited until our (clean) bin was collected and replaced it with their munted* bin full of prawn waste. Eeuuw, people!

Full credit to Brisbane City Council waste management who (a) picked up the offending bin within 24 hours and (b) replaced it with a brand-new bin.

But I digress (yet again)

We are a wealthy country with relatively high disposable income, low-ish unemployment and a reputation for spending more than we earn.

Australian Retailer Association executive director Russell Zimmerman told SBS News last year that food and drink accounts for 40% per cent of the total Christmas spend.

The Pork Producers of Australia said that in the four weeks leading up to Christmas, 8.4 million kilos of ham was sold in 2015 and about the same in 2016. In terms of traditional bone-in hams, it was about 4.3 million kilograms in 2015 and 4.6 million kilograms in 2016 – an increase of 7.6%.

Our local research found that the price of Christmas hams can range from as little as $7 a kilo in discount supermarkets to $18 a kilo for organic and/or free range ham bought from a butcher. A premium boneless leg of ham could cost you upwards of $30 a kilo.

That seems cheap when you read about Spain’s jamon imberico, the truffle of the pork world. A 7.5 kg leg can cost between $A180 and $A720. Iberian ham comes from blackfoot pigs, raised on pasture planted with oak trees. According to my favourite source (The Guardian Weekly), the demand for Iberian ham in China is such that the escalating price is denying humble Spaniards their once-a-year treat.

Just so you know what you’re eating, all fresh pork sold in Australia is 100% Australian grown. However, approximately two thirds of processed pork (ham, bacon and smallgoods products) is made from frozen boneless pork imported from places like Denmark, the Netherlands, Canada and the United States.

According to an international study by Caterwings, Australians chew their way through 111.5 kilograms of meat per year, per person. (Someone’s eating our share). This data probably does not take into account the 11.2% of Australians who are vegetarians and vegans, the 604,000 Muslims as well as those of the Jewish faith who do not eat pork; or the unknown number of people who have developed a mammalian meat allergy by exposure to ticks (more on that topic next week).

If you can’t afford $90 or so for a leg of ham, I have a suggestion. There are these prehistoric-looking birds that roam around the scrub. They are notorious for scratching up people’s vegie gardens and using leaf litter and mulch to make huge mounds, inside which they lay their eggs. Yes, they are protected and indeed endangered (the chicks are left to fend for themselves as soon as they can walk around). But who’s to know if you knock one off, pluck and gut it, stuff it and cook for 17 or 18 hours or until tender? Don’t forget the basil.

Just don’t throw the waste and left-over meat in the wheelie bin and forget to put the bin out. That would be unneighbourly.

*Munted – Kiwi for ‘damaged or unusable.’

*chundering – Oz for vomiting

Christmas 2016

A new way to pay off a speeding fine

There came in the mail a rare thing – a ‘Go Fast Award’ or speeding fine. In this case, a speed camera captured our Ford Territory in transit on Caloundra Road (off Steve Irwin Way leading into Landsborough). Oh, you know that road too?

The infringement notice alleges the vehicle was doing 68kmh in a 60kmh zone. Fair enough, those are the road rules and I broke them.

“Tch, tch,” said She Who Never Speeds, consulting her diary to confirm that it was me, not she, who was driving at the time the award was made. “You might get in trouble using their photo,” she added.

Their photo my arse!

The speeding fine is $168 and I will also accrue one demerit point on a previously unsullied drivers’ licence. No big deal, you’d think. Alas, this will put a dent in my personal spending money, the next tranche of which is not due until January 1.

“You should complain!” said She Who Never Speeds, “What about that money tucked away in your TAB account? Imagine if you were on Newstart!”

I did some homework on the Queensland Treasury offshoot called the State Penalties Enforcement Register (SPER), which will come to an arrangement if you can’t pay fines by the due date.

Debts registered with SPER come from a wide pool of infringement notices and court orders. Every now and then one of the tabloids will spice up a slow news day with a beat-up drawn from statistics kept by SPER. The most common tactic is to focus on which postcode boasts the biggest SPER debt.

The ‘Struggle Street’ approach uncovers Logan City/Kingston, the Gold Coast and surrounds and Ipswich/Booval as the regions with the highest SPER debt (all-up tally $73.56 million). By stark contrast, the postcode 4468 (Morven, (near Augathella), has a SPER debt of just $7000. The postcode 4025 (Moreton Island) is another with a low SPER debt of $15,000 (people hooning about the sand dunes in 4WDs, no doubt).

The lower numbers in such isolated places may indicate fewer drivers and/or a more law-abiding population. The truth is rather more prosaic – an absence of speed cameras. It is no coincidence that the suburbs with the highest SPER debt are those in proximity to motorways and heavily trafficked main roads.

There’s no way to dress up SPER’s unhappy bottom line. As of October 2017, SPER debts totalled $1.20 billion. Treasurer Curtis Pitt told the ABC in May that SPER debts had doubled over five years to more than 1.5 million new cases. The Labor government has blamed the increase on the previous LNP regime, for loading up SPER debts with unpaid tolls from bridges and tunnels.

You can get some sense of how long it might take SPER to rein in this runaway debt by looking at its collection rate ($283 million in 2016-2017 and $93 million for the five months to October). Nevertheless SPER managed to keep growth of the debt pool down to 3% (compared to 15% in 2015-2016).

If you will allow me to illustrate the SPER dilemma for low-income Queenslanders, consider an unemployed person existing on the paltry fortnightly payment provided by Newstart. SPER will probably settle for $20 a fortnight, automatically taken from the welfare recipient’s payment.

As Harriet (not her real name) bewailed of her most recent speeding fine, “It will take me 10 years to repay all this (expletive) debt and in the meantime I keep getting (more expletives) what you call Go Fast Awards. You smug bastard!”

But wait. While Harriet emulates her pet fox terrier’s habit of chasing its tail, SPER has come up with a new scheme to help people suffering genuine hardship.

From today, Queenslanders facing hardship can apply for Work and Development Orders (WDOs). People unable to repay accumulated fines and penalties will be able to clear their debts by attending counselling or education courses. Previously the only recourse was to perform unpaid community work.

WDO is a case management system which considers a person’s whole debt history and circumstance rather than just focusing on individual debt.

WDOs will be available to people who are experiencing domestic or family violence, are homeless or under financial hardship, or those with a mental illness, intellectual or cognitive disability or serious substance use disorder.

A SPER spokesperson said WDOs would replace the Fine Option Order system, with debts reduced at a rate of $30 an hour. Participants are allowed to work up to 33 hours per month.

SPER will now partner with government and community-based sponsors who will manage people undertaking financial or other counselling, education, vocational or life skills courses, and unpaid community work.

The Community Service scheme was first introduced in Toowoomba in the mid-1980s as an alternative to fines and custodial sentences. Courts order offenders to complete a set number of hours of supervised community work. Those who do not complete their ‘hours’ get breached and are liable to be re-sentenced for the original offence.

The 2016-2017 Attorney-General’s annual report cites examples of the kind of unpaid work offenders may be required to do. In the Southern Region, offenders from Ipswich Probation and Parole can now perform community service making paper or crochet poppies for donation to local Councils and RSLs (for events such as Anzac Day and Remembrance Day).

In the Brisbane region, 17 offenders spent eight days over a period of four weeks repairing and painting the Sandgate-Redcliffe District Cricket Club’s fence. A total of 271 hours was spent working with club members to repair damaged palings and apply two coats of paint to approximately 1km of fencing.

In 2016–17, a total of 371,262 hours of court-ordered community service was completed in Queensland, equating to a value of approximately $9.1 million. While this equates to less than 1% of SPER debt resolved in 2016-2017, the community benefits are hard to dispute. The social merits of WDOs are also laudable, although some would see this as being ‘soft on crime.’

Meanwhile, what about the speeding fine issued to She Who Never Speeds, due for payment by December 19?

If you are one of the thousands of Queenslanders who got caught by a speed camera either exceeding the limit or running a red light, you know how this goes. The ‘ticket’ goes to the owner of the registered vehicle. If he/she was not the driver at the time the alleged offence was committed, the owner fills out a statutory declaration stating he/she was not the driver. If She Who Never Speeds sends the statutory declaration in a week or so before the due date, by the time a new infringement notice is sent out to the driver (me), the fine will not have to be paid until (guessing) the end of January, 2018.

In the interim, I’m wondering if I can wangle an informal WDO with SWNS – we pay the fine out of general housekeeping and I will carry out 5.6 hours of (supervised) heavy gardening. People who know what She once did for a living will find this wryly amusing.

Wikipedia and the 105-year-old blogger

wikipedia-blogger-carlsson — Dagny Carlsson (aka Bojan) image by Almega – https://www.flickr.com/photos/almega/9206567927/in/photolist-f2xXun-f2y4TM, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51725946

For reasons yet to be linked to Wikipedia, this week I ended up on the home page of a 105-year-old Swedish blogger who goes by the moniker Bojan. I know, it sounds like material for a Nordic noir series. When starting out with the online arts at the age of 100, Bojan starkly rejected comparisons with the ‘100-year-old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared,’ (a popular Swedish novel by Jonas Jonasson).

Bojan’s invariably short pieces reflect on the wonders of daily life that people half her age take for granted. She comments often about the seasons, the weather, old age and being single and alone.

In one recent blog (I found one dated November 5, 2017), Bojan wrote about Swedes who live by themselves. The Google-translate app I suspect renders the English somewhat less fluent than it might be in, say, a Henning Mankell thriller. But you’ll get the drift.

“The other day I read the news that in Stockholm, there are thousands of single-family households, more specifically 380,000 or 40% of the population live by themselves. In the past, there was some suspicion of living alone, but now it is more tolerated. It’s also easier to be single when there are several of them. I myself have been single since 2004 and I think so, of course. It was obviously more enjoyable to be part of a flatness (sic?), but it is pointless to feel sorry for it. Single households are today Sweden’s most common housing form, and nobody thinks it’s something strange. At first, I thought it was pure sorrow to live by myself, but one must get together and live on.”

Bojan started getting together and living on at 100, after buying a computer and teaching herself how to use it. Some of her more recent posts suggest she has become a reluctant ‘cause celebre’ through the conventional media’s fascination with a centenarian who has mastered the online universe. She has done many interviews, appeared on TV chat shows and been the subject of a film, “Life Begins at 100”.

Filmmaker Asa Blanck tracked Dagny Carlsson down and persuaded her to participate in a project which even he admitted was likely to be thwarted by the subject’s death. But no, Dagny turned 105 in May and continues to amuse readers, day by day. (A sequel is planned – the very definition of optimism).

Dagny’s blog is as Blanck found her – “a brusque old lady – all gallows humour”. She promised readers she would not be intentionally nasty but if she ‘trod on toes’, she did not really give a damn, or det kvittar mig, as they say in Sweden. Dagny dreamed of being a teacher when she was young but ended up working as a seamstress. She escaped an abusive first marriage and found love with her second husband, who died when she was in her 90s.

As Blanck observed: “She had managed to rise above her strenuous, grey existence and she had decided she would finally do what she had wanted to do all her life: write.”

Sweden’s blog-readers soon caught up with Bojan’s racey, funny insights and seemingly outrageous behaviour for ‘someone of her age’. For example, she writes about women wearing jeans and how they never did in her day. At 101 she went out and bought a pair of denims.

Ah yes, now I remember how I ended up on Bojan’s blog. I’d been deeply delving into the Wikipedia universe – a free community encyclopedia we writers tend to take for granted. Anyone can contribute, edit or update ‘Wikis’ within Wikipedia. You just need to register as an editor and then be mindful your input will be monitored by a legion of truly vigilant Wikipedia editors. Your input could be as simple as correcting a typo to contributing a new biography of someone you think should have a Wikipedia entry.

One of the things that fascinate me about Wikipedia is the community vigilance which results in entries being updated very quickly. Within hours, it seemed, of the news of Tom Petty’s death, someone had updated his Wikipedia bio, including the premature announcements on social media and the controversy surrounding the timing of Petty’s fatal cardiac arrest.

Wikipedia is essentially a collection of some five million articles in English and another 40 million in 293 languages, all contributed pro-bono by people who care about history, accuracy and detail.

I asked my blogger friend Franky’s Dad if he had ever edited items for Wikipedia. Yes, said FD, a few hundred since 2006. He’d even created a piece about a singer, Bob Wilson. I was momentarily aghast until discovering the latter is a singer, guitarist and songwriter from Pleasant Valley California. Franky’s Dad, aka Lyn Nuttall, maintains a music trivia website www.poparchives.com.au, which aims to find out ‘Where Did They get That Song?’

FD reckons editing Wikipedia is one thing but creating a new entry can be hard yacka, what with their exacting standards for formatting and referencing.

The Listener’s technology correspondent Peter Griffin confessed he was a Wikipedia ‘freeloader’ until deciding to attend an edit-a-thon in Wellington. Events like this were attended by 70,000 people worldwide last year. The main idea is to pick a neglected subject and add to the body of work. There is also a push to correct what is seen as a gender imbalance. Griffin was not confident until encouraged by a veteran Wikipedia editor to “get stuck in and break things”.

The key intention is to keep it factual – not easy in the Trumpian world of fake news and flat-out fabrication. Griffin’s group were on safe enough ground, however, collating biographies of female scientists.

“The seasoned editors smiled knowingly as we fumbled along,” Griffin wrote in The Listener’s September 16 print edition.

“But after a full day, we’d created about 20 biographies of women in science and extensively edited 30 more.

“I’d like to think we increased the sum total of the world’s knowledge.”

Even famous racehorses have a Wikipedia entry. Australian racing’s latest super-horse, Winx, has won 22 races in succession, amassing more than $7 million in prizemoney for her owners. A few weeks back she won the country’s premier race (The Cox Plate), for the third time. No such profile for Regal Monarch, a racehorse with just four wins to its name, put down after falling in race four on Melbourne Cup day.

You’d think tragedies like this (remember Dulcify, 1979), would prompt connections to retire Winx to lush green pastures and make another fortune at stud. But there is an ambitious program in 2018 to race the mare again in Australia and against the best in Europe.

There was even talk she might contest the Emirates Stakes in Melbourne this weekend. But trainers know. Chris Waller last week said Winx would go to the spelling paddock. At least someone other than me could see that Humidor’s fast-finishing second in the Cox Plate did her in.

As Peter Griffin found at the edit-a-thon, only facts are allowed in Wikipedia, and each fact must be backed by a rigorous reference. So seriously is this edict taken, editors this year banned the UK Daily Mail as a source, citing poor fact checking, sensationalism and fabrication.

Additionally, bots continually crawl the Wikipedia site for signs of vandalism (intentional corruption).

So I guess I’ll keep my opinions about Winx to myself, then.

Homeless for a rainy night

homeless-for-night — The Hope Centre for the homeless, Logan. Photo used by permission

For some, today is a reminder that anyone can become homeless, with various agencies (and reality TV) bringing this urgent issue to light. It also marks the end of the financial year, a kind of witching hour for those engaged in financial markets, investing in rental housing, or running Australia’s businesses, large and small.

For seventy-nine intrepid souls, our charity sleep-out on Maroochydore beach was thwarted by early morning drizzle turning into heavier rain.

Some abandoned their posts, leaving sheets of cardboard for others to make shelters with. Others took up the scarce positions under the eaves of the Maroochy Surf Club.

I took refuge in a nearby toilet block, mopping my wet hair with a sweatshirt. I decided I’d done enough, including raising $700+ and headed home in the wee hours. I briefly imagined a truly homeless mother in a similar situation. The two-year-old wants to be carried and the seven-year-old is saying “This is dumb, I wanna sleep.” So they walk 300m in the rain to the 1997 Ford wagon and do as best they can.

The St Vincent De Paul Society homelessness sleep-out raised more money this year ($125,577) with fewer people sleeping out. That’s an impressive result from a regional population of 300,000, (1,500 of whom are homeless).

The 2016 Census homeless tally (105,000 in 2011), won’t be known until 2018. But a 2014 Australian Bureau of Statistics survey found that 351,000 Australians had experienced homelessness in the previous 12 months.

There were a few speeches last night before we headed out to a balmy 17 degree Maroochydore evening. Mix FM’s Todd Widdicombe threw gentle barbs at local politicians and did a good job of generating competitive bidding for the charity auction (including a pillow sold to local politician Steve Dickson for $320).

St Vincent De Paul Society tells us most social housing on the Sunshine Coast was built more than 30 years ago. The Coast’s private rental vacancy rate is less than 2% and one-bedroom units are hard to find. A chart of social housing demand shows that 64% of people are looking for accommodation for one person. Developers on the coast tend to build three and four-bedroom homes and two or three-bedroom units. Many units are rented to holiday-makers.

Older people facing a tougher future

This is not a problem unique to the Coast. Pensioners and working parents have been priced out of the rental market in all metropolitan areas across Australia, according to National Shelter’s Rental Affordability Index (RAI), released on May 17.

Chief Executive of COTA Australia (Council on the Ageing) Ian Yate told a conference this week that older Australians were the forgotten faces of the housing crisis. He cited as examples the 70 year old divorcee facing homelessness, the 80 year old with a knee replacement who can’t find appropriate or affordable accommodation, the 68 year old couple retiring, still with a significant mortgage.

“Older Australians are increasingly falling through the cracks in the growing housing affordability and supply challenge,” he said. “A growing number of older Australians need to rent, rather than owning a home outright.

“We are already starting to see rates of home ownership by older Australians decline, and this is forecast to drop even further in the next 10-15 years.”

Anglicare’s annual report into housing affordability shows that welfare recipients and single-person households are the least likely to find appropriate accommodation. Queensland’s stock of social housing is just 3.6%, compared with a national average of 4.5%.

Rents are generally lower on the Sunshine Coast and the weather markedly warmer than the Southern States, even in winter. Little doubt this is why young people take their battered old wagons, surfboards and sleeping bags to the beach.

While many people in crisis use their cars as a refuge between one home and the next, others have developed an on-the-road lifestyle.

I once met a woman in her 50s whose camper van is her home and always on the road, unless she’s visiting family in one state or the other. Recently we met a couple who have a permanent caravan moored in a small town van park. They also have a bigger van for their grey nomad adventures. Safe to say most of their capital is tied up in these depreciating assets

For those who’d rather have a fixed abode, the Queensland Government recently made a ‘better-than-nowt’ commitment to provide 5,500 new social and affordable housing units over the next 10 years. Last year, the Government launched a Better Neighbourhoods initiative in fast-growing Logan City, with an affordable housing target of 3,000 by 2030.

Hoping for Hope Centre II

Family and Kids-Care Foundation established the Hope Centre in 2009, a complex of 19 self-contained units, designed for individuals and small family groups in crisis.

President Tass Augustakis told FOMM the charity is currently considering participating in the Better Neighbourhoods Logan initiative, seeking funding for a second Hope Centre which can accommodate larger family groups.

“The thing that got me going to start the Hope Centre was seeing women sleeping in cars with their kids. It just shouldn’t be happening, but it still is.”

Family and Kids-Care donated the land for the first Hope Centre and raised funding from the Federal Government to build it.

“After reading about the State Government’s affordable housing strategy, I’m organising a meeting to discuss Hope Centre II,” he said.

“We can provide the land, but we need the Government to contribute between $10 million and $12 million to build a four or five-level unit building.”

Cameron Parsell, a researcher with the University of Queensland, last year revealed that it costs governments more to provide services to the homeless than it costs to provide standard accommodation.

He produced ‘compelling and robust’ data in The Conversation which showed that chronically homeless people used state government funded services that cost approximately $48,217 each over a 12-month period. He compared this with another 12-month period in which the chronically homeless were tenants of permanent supportive housing.

“The same people used state government services that cost approximately $35,117 – $13,100 less when securely housed, compared to the services they used when they were chronically homeless.”

Urban studies researcher Emma Power, also writing in The Conversation, says single, older women are among the fastest-growing groups of homeless people in Australia. Yet most are unable to apply for community housing because the sole eligibility criterion is their low-income status.

Sadly, women who are not leaving a violent situation or who do not have a recognised disability will risk homelessness before they qualify for community housing.

The answer is for governments to provide more secure, low-cost social housing and/or increase rent-assistance payments across the board.

But as Power points out, the latter is not ideal. Although it assists renters in the short-term, it effectively subsidises private landlords.

This has been going on for a long time and it is getting worse, despite a lot of work by charitable organisations like St Vinnies. I tucked myself into my cosy bed (early) last night, feeling OK about raising the equivalent of a fortnight’s rent for someone.

But it is a band-aid at best.

Dog dogging my footsteps

dog-dogging-footsteps — Photo of Pomeranian dog enjoying harbour views on Hydra (Greece) by Laurel Wilson

It’s been a while since we had a dog underfoot and this one specialises in getting as underfoot as possible. If not that, he’ll be in someone’s lap – a 22.5 kg lap dog.

When I take Dog for a walk up the main street he gets sooked-over big time- “Aw what a cute Staffie – is he friendly?” Well, he does have a green harness and lead with “friendly” emblazoned upon it, so, yeh. We are just baby-sitting this one, and I use the word advisedly as he is an anxious dog who (a) does not like to be outside when all the humans are inside, and (b) dislikes being left alone for more than two or three hours. This makes a weekend trip to Brisbane for the ballet just a bit tricky.

He’ll lie doggo on the back seat of the car for a lengthy time but then starts whining and the whining turns into screaming. Oh, you know this behaviour? The other thing Staffies do is a supressed excitement grunt not unlike Marge Simpson’s hhmmnn (when Homer is being irritating).

On Wednesday night Dog was in his element – a choice of laps to sit in with the ritual watching of the State of Origin. He got excited and confused with all the yelling and cheering in the 78^th minute. Last time (when Queensland was beaten), we made him wear a maroon beanie and put photos on Facebook.

If you inhabit Facebook you will see a lot of dog photos (and videos) including one that had 17 million views.

The obvious question is who watched these videos and why? Other dog owners, I’m guessing.

The RSPCA says there are 4.5 million dogs in Australia, with 39% of households having one.

Dogs in Australia experience lifestyles ranging from the cossetted fur babies who have the run of the house, their own beds (usually at the foot of the humans’ bed), pet insurance, gourmet pet food and the vet on speed-dial. In the middle are working dogs; guiding disabled people, sniffing out drugs or explosives, guarding junk yards, tracking bad guys, herding sheep, baling up pigs or hunting down rabbits. At the other end of the scale are the neglected dogs, chained up all day while the owners are away and often abandoned once their owners realise how much work is involved.

Many ‘rescue’ organisations have been formed to take neglected dogs away from bad circumstances, to rehabilitate them and foster them to caring families. One such foster-Dad was telling me his rescue dog flinches whenever someone nearby swears loudly. So dogs get PTSD too.

We could have a lengthy debate about dogs and their respective levels of intelligence. German Shepherds are said to have the intellect of a seven-year-old child. One night we were watching Inspector Rex (remember Rex?) on our big screen TV, positioned against a lounge room wall with our bedroom on the other side. Previously we had thought our female Alsatian was uninterested in TV. But then Rex appeared and went ‘woof’. Our dog scampered behind the TV, then into our bedroom and came out a few seconds later with a perplexed look.

Smart dogs come when called

The difference between the German shepherd and the Staffie is the latter will come when called. Our Shepherd would spot some other dog on the other side of the park and off she’d go (at pace), coming back when she felt like it. She was too smart to try crossing Annerley Road on her own, but too dumb to open the side gate once she did come home.

She Who Takes Dog Photos has, among her many interests, a knack for identifying dog breeds. She did this repeatedly on our travels, in the US, Canada, the UK and various parts of Europe. (One time, after a few moments of disbelief, I said “Get away, there’s no such dog as a Dandie Dinmont”)

I had to bow to her encyclopaedic knowledge of dog breeds. On the surface, this is a fairly useless skill. But you can start conversations with complete strangers and some of them may end up giving you directions or sharing lunch on a train (Italians take their dogs on trains).

Unfortunately, dogs go in and out of fashion. Teenagers (‘I want a puppy’), will pick whatever type of dog their peer group likes at the time – (Rottweilers r cool!) Older people, perhaps influenced by popular media, want a dog like the one Madonna has, or Prince Harry. Back in the 60s and 70s, Afghan hounds were popular, then Irish setters, breeds known for shedding and for not having much between their ears.

Many people buy or adopt a dog on a whim and quickly come to the conclusion that they are too much work. For the 61% of households who don’t own a dog, here’s what can happen if you give in to requests for a puppy.

According to the BankWest Family Pooch Index, it can cost $25,000 to look after a dog over its lifetime. Some dogs die young, through accidents, ticks, genetic flaws or terminal illness. Most, however, will soldier on to reach the life expectancy of the relevant breed. An old poodle, part of our extended family, turned 18 the other day. He has a few ailments we humans share like cataracts, hearing loss, spinal degeneration and hip problems. But he knows what he wants. Yarp means he wants to go out. Yipe means he wants to come back in. Warf means “I want to come up the back steps but I can’t so could you please carry me?”

If you’ve never owned a dog, remember these important points:

Dogs lack opposable thumbs, so you need to do everything for them that humans use their hands to accomplish;
Female dogs which are not desexed can have up to 15 puppies at a time; said puppies at three months’ old will be consuming two to three kilograms of meat per day; finding good homes for them will be problematic
Dogs left alone while you are at work commonly bark and give your neighbours the shits; if you buy a companion for the first dog, you could end up with two dogs barking all day;
Teenagers say they want a puppy but then, when they get a boy or girl friend, will leave said puppy in your tender care;
If you want to travel, there are only three options: a dog and/or house sitter, a kennel or the dog goes with you.

When we travelled around Australia in 2015, it seemed every second caravanner had at least one dog. These people frequently use free camps because so many caravan parks have a ‘no dogs’ rule. We said hello to a couple travelling in a Toyota Hiace pop-top motor home. They showed us their set-up – two single beds and a dog bed in between for their Labrador!

Once at a free camp (there was only one other van when we arrived) I approached a dog. The owner, who was sitting in a camp chair reading a caravan magazine, said “Don’t pat him when he’s chained up. He’s on guard duty.”

Nice doggy – sit, stay.

I’m joining in a St Vinnies fundraiser for homelessness next Thursday (29^th). There are some 1500 homeless men, women and children on the Sunshine Coast, including some in our small town. I hope you can help meet my target of $500 (the regional target is $100k). Think of me and 80+ others next Thursday, with our sheets of cardboard, soup and rolls and (hopefully adequate) sleeping bags.

Here are links to articles I have written previously on this topic

http://bobwords.com.au/homeless-for-a-week/

http://bobwords.com.au/everyone-should-have-a-home/

http://bobwords.com.au/goodwill-housing/

http://bobwords.com.au/little-bit-compassion/

Thanks for your support.

A dog-doo afternoon

So I’m walking the dog in unfamiliar territory – Brisbane bayside suburbs. I have my little black plastic dog doo bag tucked into the hip pocket of my jeans, as one should. But it seems many people in this particular suburb don’t give a shit about dog shit, if you’ll pardon my Flemish. If you’d taken a plastic supermarket bag and a trowel on this walk and could be bothered, you’d end up with a good five kilos of dog doo just from this one suburban street and a small park.

The words (above) on an Amsterdam sidewalk translate to ‘dog in the gutter,’ but the city’s tolerance has been stretched. Dog owners must now carry a plastic bag or a trowel and inspectors can issue a €50 fine. There was also a suggestion that owners be traced (and fined) through DNA tests on dog doo, according to the English language NL Times.

Some responsible Australian dog owners have somehow trained their pets to back their arses under a tree or shrub to do their number twos. If you don’t have a bag you can just throw a bit of mowed grass over it.

In one of the episodes of the Stan series Billions, Public Prosecutor Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), bullies and shames a guy into picking up after his dog. It’s a gratuitous and outlandish scene in a series known for gratuitousness and outlandishness.

My favourite line is (guy) “Why don’t you mind your business?” Chuck replies “This is my business.”

(Actually it’s the dog’s business, if you want to be pedantic).

If you are a dog owner, this YouTube video of the dog doo scene will hopefully remind you to ‘do the right thing’.

There are many other examples of TV writers (Family Guy) and others taking up the dog doo theme.

Songwriter Loudon Wainwright III works the dilemma into a song (Man and Dog from his 2014 album Ain’t Got the Blues (Yet).

Here’s the appropriate verse:

“When a man has to carry a plastic bag
on his person at all times
when a dog dumps on a side walk
walking away is a crime, living in the city…

(this will lift your mood, maybe)

Loudon sings about walking your dog as being a good way to meet a woman, although one would suggest that carrying a (full) plastic bag on your person would not be alluring.

Walking a dog in a strange neighbourhood means people don’t call out hello to the dog by name (even if they don’t know yours). Also, you don’t know which yard has a dog that will bark and snarl or if the gate is open or shut. Some people, on seeing a large dog with jaws approach, will pick up their little squealing ball of fluff, which, while seemingly prudent, is apparently not the best way to socialise animals.

On my walk last Saturday I did meet a woman who came out of her driveway to sook over the normally sooky dog but he was too intent upon, as my friend Mr Loophole calls it, “reading the P-mail”.

I told She Who Sometimes Scoffs I was thinking about writing a column with the dog as narrator, which she said had probably been done. She was right.

Here’s a reading list which is probably by no means exhaustive:

So after flirting with that idea: “Why do you want me to come? There are so many far more interesting things over here.” Or “Why do you want me to put my lipstick away? Call a spade a spade, you stupid human.”

So I decided on a different approach, and that was to use the failure of dog owners to clean up after their animals as a clumsy yet probably accurate political analogy.

Let’s use the current Queensland Labor government as an example. The party has been in a tenuous state of power since January 2015 and will contest an election sometime in the next 12 months.

In the interim, the government is supporting Indian company Adani’s controversial plan to develop a new coal mine near Alpha in western Queensland. This would require the building of a railway line to the Abbot Point coal terminal north of Bowen to export coal from the (expanded) port. This proposal has sparked a broad protest movement with former Greens leader Bob Brown weighing in.

“In 40 years’ time people will be talking about the campaign to stop Adani like they now talk about the Franklin (Dam). “Where were you and what did you do?” they will ask.

“This is the environmental issue of our times and, for one, the Great Barrier Reef is at stake,” Brown wrote in the Guardian Weekly on March 24.

The Queensland Labor government wants this project to happen. Promised employment, it seems, is the government’s main reason for risking environmental damage to the Great Barrier Reef and incurring the wrath of many loyal Labor voters.

My point, if clumsily made, is that if and when the Queensland government is toppled, it will be a replaced by another regime. When protestors make their valid points about the risks of environmental damage, the next government can always say, “It’s not our mess”.

One could make the same case for offshore detention centres, the proposal to drug test welfare recipients or the cashless welfare debit card being trialled in South Australia and the Northern Territory.

The potential for the latter to become a big mess is that a cashless welfare card system could be extended to all welfare recipients, even pensioners. Now that’s not a mess I’d want to clean up.

Returning to the original rant, people should pick up their dog doos. If you forgot a plastic bag (and we have all done this), as Chuck Rhoades suggests, “pick it up with your hands”.

Paul Giamatti’s character says to the shamed guy as he’s walking away:

“Sir, still some over here.”

“That’s not (dog’s name), man!

“It is now,” says Chuck, while talking on his mobile about his nemesis, the crafty funds manager, Bobby Axelrod (Damien Lewis).

The scene ends with Chuck thanking the guy for doing his civic duty. “Feels good, doesn’t it.”

One could extend this analogy to the real estate development company which mistakenly sent an email to its entire database thanking recipients for supporting their Sunshine Coast development. Mine was addressed, ‘Dear Bob’ and thanked me for supporting Sekisui’s development application for Yaroomba Beach. At some point I must have signed a petition against the proposal so I was one of unknown numbers of people who got the email from the developer thanking them for supporting the project. We got an apologetic email from Sekisui about the same time we read the story in the Sunshine Coast Daily.

To me, the second email was like the guy who walks his dog without a plastic bag and has a citizen shame him into picking up dog doo with his hands.

It’s called doing the right thing.

Smile at the dentist

smile-dentist — Dentist Smile Photo courtesy of http://www.nationalsmilemonth.org/

So I’ve just been to the dentist for a clean and descale. It’s a must-do, twice-yearly chore.

As I walk back to the car I’m looking for suitably long grass to spit out the remains of the fluoride wash. As I near 70, I’m hearing dental horror stories from my peers. Most of these anecdotes involve four-figure quotes for implants, bridges or crowns. I still have most of my own teeth and a couple of implants that set me back $1,600.

Maybe 25 years ago, pain drove me to a dentist. Luckily, I picked a good one (out of the phone book). He packed the problem tooth with antibiotics, put in a temporary filling and booked me in for a proper filling in a week’s time. It was the start of a process, overcoming dental phobia and accepting an expensive course of dental remediation. Some thousands of dollars later, I was at a stage where I could safely book in for a six-monthly check-up.

I’m doing this on a regular basis now and it’s been a while since we had any issues. I did crack a filling once on a chunk of dark chocolate, but OMG, it was such a nice piece!

As we age, we are more prone to gum disease, our teeth more likely to crack or shatter, and more importantly, those large old fillings we had in our childhood start to fail. Some of our teeth may have been saved by root canal treatments, which permanently kill the nerve but preserve the tooth.

Put your teeth in the glass, Mr Wilson

My Dad’s generation had a quick but not entirely painless solution to teeth and gum problems – they had all their teeth extracted. After going around gummy for a number of months they were fitted with dentures.

I was reading Annie Proulx’s novel, Barkskins, which charts the history of two families of wood cutters, carving out a life in New France – 16^th century Quebec. There are many things that could catch your attention in this 700-page, richly imagined generational epic, but this one stood out. Proulx’ character Charles Duquet suffers from gum disease and has had his teeth extracted. A vain man, he seeks out a denture-maker. Duquet’s new teeth are made from ivory. The French denture-maker explains that the teeth are ‘only for display, not for chewing’ and that he should take them out when eating. Also, they will turn yellow with exposure to sunlight, so perhaps Monsieur would like to order a spare set?

I figure the author of The Shipping News and other fine novels would be a peerless researcher, so I checked out the history of dentures. Then as now, dentures are a luxury poor people can rarely afford.

A full set of dentures in 2017 can cost from $2,000 to $2,500. Factor in about $150-$200 per extraction and it’s no cheap exercise. However, as those who replace amalgam fillings with porcelain or opt for caps and crowns can testify, dentures are a relative bargain.

The ever-informative Wikipedia (now banned in Turkey), tells us that dentures were available as early as the 7^th century (usually partial plates made with human or animal teeth and held together with gold bands). The Japanese invited full wooden dentures in the early 16^th century (and continued using them until the 19^th century).

US President George Washington’s dentures were made with ivory from hippos and elephants as well as gold, rivets, spiral springs and even real human teeth.

As recently as the Victorian era, young men and women were offered dentures as a 21st birthday present.

Manifold improvements in dental care have seen demand for dentures dwindle over the centuries.

A 2009 survey in the UK found that only 6% of adults had no natural teeth, a big improvement on a 1978 survey when 37% were entirely edentulous.

An Australian government report (2013) said that 19% of adults aged 65 and over had no natural teeth.

Our generation at least went through childhood with regular dental care. In New Zealand where I grew up, every school had a dental clinic, staffed (usually) by one qualified dentist and a team of dental nurses.

The nurses did the inspections and de-scaling and also filled cavities under the watchful eye of the in-house dentist. As a result of a life-long craving for sweets and chocolate, a lack of fluoride (a subject for another time), and less than rigorous brushing, my mouth is full of mercury amalgam fillings.

Other things can do your teeth in, including facial injuries from traffic accidents, assaults, playing sports and other mishaps.

One of the biggest impediments to maintaining a healthy set of teeth is dental phobia. Almost half of UK adults surveyed for National Smile Month in 2009 said they feared going to the dentist and 12% of them suffered from extreme dental anxiety.

This Monday marks the start of the 40^th National Smile Month in the UK, a dental health awareness campaign. Australia has a national dental care week in August, at which time we’d hope to have more recent data than 2013. Here some current UK figures.

One in four adults don’t brush twice a day, including a third of men;
One in ten admit they regularly forget to brush their teeth;
42% use only a toothbrush and toothpaste for their oral care;
Less than a quarter of adults use dental floss regularly;
One in three have never flossed their teeth;
The UK spends £5.8 billion a year on dental treatments;
Half of adults visit their dentist every 6 months;
25% have not visited a dentist in the past two years;
Around 2% of the UK population (about one million) have never visited a dentist.

An Australian report says that uninsured adults are more likely to have experienced toothache (20%) than insured adults (12%). I was too cheap to pay $17 for the whole report (with 2013 data), so I’m quoting the media release from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).

The report shows that of those who were eligible for public dental care in 2013, just over 20% experienced toothache, compared with almost 15% of adults who were not eligible. Only about half of Australians have some form of private dental insurance.

Expenditure on dental services (except those in hospitals) in Australia was $8.706 billion in 2012-13.

“The largest source of funds for this expenditure was individuals, paying directly out of pocket for 58% of total dental costs,” AIHW spokesman Dr Adrian Webster said.

Today’s children, flossing daily, their often near-perfect teeth the product of fluoride and orthodontics, are a reminder to the rest of us to make do with what we’ve got.

In my case, that means living with an undershot jaw; a genetic condition exacerbated by a face-plant motorcycle accident 40+ years ago. For a visual cue think dog breeds – Pekinese, Shih Tzus, Bulldogs (or Albert Steptoe).

When my current dentist first looked inside my mouth and asked me to bite he said something like “Holy Cow.” I know what he meant to say.

Last week’s FOMM − a reader wrote to say Dexy’s Midnight Runners may have been a one-hit wonder in Australia with Come on Eileen, but they also had another number one hit, Geno, in the UK.

Government buyback could solve power crisis

Wilpena-Pound-Power-Station — Wilpena Pound solar/diesel power station SA Photo by Bob Wilson

“If you’ve got money in your pocket and a switch on the wall, we’ll keep your dirty lights on.” So goes a song by American alt-country singers Darryl Scott and Tim O’Brien about coal mining and power generation.

Their album Memories and Moments includes a version of John Prine’s Paradise, which remains the definitive song about the downsides of coal mining.

That seemed a noteworthy way to introduce the potentially dry topic of energy, be it coal-fired, hydro, nuclear or solar/wind power. Continue reading “Government buyback could solve power crisis”

Blogging and human rights

blogging-human-rights — Protest in Iran photo by Christopher Rose https://flic.kr/p/7CJsu7

In case you were curious, the word blog in Farsi looks like this – وبلاگ. Iranians who didn’t like the way things were going in their country started وبلاگ’ing (blogging) like crazy after the 2000 crackdown on Iranian media. Iranians who interact with the internet are by definition risk-takers.

As recently as late 2016, five Iranians were sentenced to prison terms for writing and posting images on fashion blogs. The content was decreed to ‘encourage prostitution’.

The Independent quoted lawyer Mahmoud Taravat via state news agency Ilna that the eight women and four men he represented received jail time of between five months to six years. He was planning to appeal the sentences handed down by a Shiraz court on charges including ‘encouraging prostitution’ and ‘promoting corruption’.

The immediacy of blogging appeals to those who live under oppressive regimes. They use the online diary to inform the world of the injustices in their country as and when they happen. I cited Iran (Persia) as just one example of a country where expressing strong opinions contrary to the agenda of the ruling government is extremely risky business.

The founder of Iran’s blogging movement, Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger, spent six years in prison (the original sentence was 19 and a half years), before being pardoned by Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Derakhshan also helped promote podcasting in Iran and appears to have been the catalyst that spawned some 64,000 Persian language blogs (2004 survey). Clearly there is/was a level of dissent among people who think the right to free speech is worth the risk of incarceration or worse.

Blogging can be a lot of things in Australia, but risky it rarely is, so long as you are mindful of the laws regarding defamation and contempt of court. Not so for bloggers or citizen journalists of oppressed countries who try to get the facts out.

It is no coincidence that most of the countries guilty of supressing free speech are among the 22 countries named by Amnesty International as having committed war crimes. They include Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan and, closer to home, Myanmar, where persecution and discrimination persists against the Rohingya. Amnesty’s national director Claire Mallinson told ABC’s The World Today that not only are people being persecuted where they live, 36 countries (including Australia) sent people back into danger after attempts to find refuge.

Amnesty’s Human Rights report for 2015-2016 does not spare Australia from criticism, particularly our treatment of children in custody, with Aboriginal children 24 times more likely to be separated from their families and communities. We are also complacent when it comes to tackling world leaders and politicians accused of creating division and fear.

Still, at least if you live in Australia you can openly criticise something the government is doing (or not doing), apropos this week’s Q&A and the Centrelink debt debate.

According to literary types who seem to have warmed to my turn of phrase, FOMM is not a blog as such, but an example of ‘creative nonfiction’ which I am told is not only a genre, but also something taught at universities.

I never knew that.

Bloggers in comfortable democracies like ours use blogs to write about cats, dogs, goldfish, cake recipes, fashion, yoga, raising babies, travel adventures and produce how-to manuals about anything you care to name.

The definition of a blog is ‘a regularly updated public website or web page, typically run by an individual or small group, written in an informal or conversational style.’

Scottish comedian and slam poem Elvis McGonagall, who you met last week, satirises the blog format with this entry.

Monday:

Woke up. Had a thought. Dismissed it. Had another. Dismissed that. Stared at the cows. The cows stared back. Scratched arse. Shouted at telly. Threw heavy object at telly. Had a wee drink. Had another. Went to bed.

Tuesday to Sunday – repeat as above

The definitive blog is an online daily diary, kept by people while travelling, carrying out some stated mission like preparing for an art exhibition, producing an independent album, dieting or training for a triathlon. Most of these literary exercises are abandoned at journey’s end, or on completion of the mission. A fine example of this is folksinger John Thompson’s marathon effort to post an Australian folk song each day for a year. He did this from Australia Day 2011 to January 26, 2012.

Some of the tunes have ended up on albums by Cloudstreet, Thompson’s musical collaboration with Nicole Murray and Emma Nixon.

The social worth of a blog, though, is when an oppressed human being writes a real time account of what atrocity or infringement of human rights is happening in their third-world village, right now.

There are millions of blogs circulating on the worldwide web, many of which are concerned with marketing, selling, promoting and luring readers into subscribing to the bloggers’ products and/or clicking on sponsors’ links. It is nigh-on impossible to find a list of blogs independently assessed on quality, although some have tried.

The Australian Writers Centre held a competition in 2014 to find Australia’s best blogs, dividing entries into genres like Personal & Parenting, Lifestyle/Hobby, Food, Travel, Business, Commentary and Words/Writing. The competition attracted hundreds of entries which were whittled down to 31 finalists.

The AWC told FOMM it has since switched its focus to fiction competitions but has not dismissed the popularity of blogging. Even so, continuity is an ever-present issue.

The 2014 winner, Christina Sung, combined travel and cooking, two topics which spawn thousands of blogs worldwide, into The Hungry Australian. But as happens with blogs, the author has somewhat moved on since then. As Christina last posted in September 2016: ‘Hello, dear readers! Apologies for my lengthy absence but I’ve been working on a few writing projects lately.’

Likewise, the author of The Kooriwoman, the Commentary winner for a blog about life as an urban Aboriginal in Australia, has not posted since January 2016.

It is not uncommon for finely-written blogs like those mentioned to have a hiatus or disappear without notice, for a myriad of reasons linked to other demands and distractions in the authors’ lives.

The few lists of Australian blogs you can find tend to rank them on popularity (numbers of followers or clickers). The top 10 blogs in this list are all about food or travel.

Hands-down winner Not Quite Nigella is a daily blog curated by Lorraine Elliott who according to blogmetrics has 28,523 monthly visitors. It’s not hard to see why – the blog is constantly updated with recipes, restaurant reviews, travel adventures and the like, featuring mouth-watering photos and a chatty prose style.

So there are those like Lorraine who make a living from blogging and those who start with a skyrocket burst of enthusiasm and fall to ground like the burnt-out stick.

Whatever your absorbing passion in life happens to be – cross-dressing, wood-carving, wine-making, writing haikus, collecting Toby jugs, quilt-making, proofreading or growing (medicinal) marijuana, you can bet someone out there has created a blog.

Just yesterday for no reason other than a bit of light relief after months of heatwave conditions, I searched for ‘grumpy spouse blog’ and got 22 hits. Have a look at this one – it’s choice.