Friday on My Mind Archives - Page 20 of 31

Simple as ABC Part 2

ABC-South-Bank — ABC HQ South Bank Brisbane

If journalists tend to have a universal blind-spot, it is their inability or disinclination to follow up on a story. When it comes to writing about budget cuts at the ABC, I plead guilty to said offence.

It is almost two years since I wrote about the Federal Government’s edict to the national broadcaster to trim $254 million – 20% of its then $1.22 billion operating budget – over five years. The media in general was having lots to say about this in November 2014. Petitioners were petitioning, GetUp was getting up; the ABCFriends group was lobbying and raising funds. They should have seen it coming.

A Senate Estimates hearing in February 2014 asked ABC managing director Mark Scott a hypothetical: if, given funding cuts, could he guarantee he would not have to cut services to regional Australia.

Scott said inter alia that nothing would be spared from that kind of review, and he could give no guarantee that any services would be spared, including rural services.

“But I am not expecting that, because a clear commitment was given to maintain the ABC’s funding.”

The above was gleaned by what is known in the trade as fact-checking, also a reminder that the ABC’s renowned fact-checking unit was one of the casualties of the internal review that followed. We turn to the ABC itself to report on this story, because that is what bloggers do – they research and cite the work of others. Not that we’d suggest the axing was an ideological ploy, but it was Kevin Rudd’s government who provided $60 million over three years to fund ‘‘enhanced newsgathering services”. In the May 2016 budget, this funding was cut to $41.4 million over the next three years.

If you have faith in my calculations, this means the ABC has to trim $2.039 million a year from its ‘enhanced newsgathering’ budget over the next three years. This is when managers start eyeing their underlings, looking for value for money, identifying functions they could live without.

The end result is redundancies – that is, abolishing positions or roles and making people who occupy them eligible for a payout.

ABC redundancy payments totalled $9.33 million in the year to June 2015 (annual report, notes to the accounts P.172)

In 30 or so years working in the Australian media, inevitably I know people who work for (or used to work for) the ABC. Not so many decades ago it was a job for life and I know a few who have survived under successive managerial identities (the latter known by some as ‘carpet strollers’). But the Liberal government’s insistence that Mark Scott cut that very large number from his operating budget has, over the last two years, seen redundancies, early retirements, centralisation of news and the scrapping of high-profile units like The Drum and the ABC Fact Checking Unit and the closure of ABC Shops.

If you did not know what the unit did, it included checking the accuracy of politicians’ public comments, tracking election promises, along with other historical and statistical investigations. Labour-intensive work, naturally. But despite being shortlisted for a Walkley Award in 2014, the ABC Fact Check team was chopped.

As ABC news director Gaven Morris said in May, “Unfortunately, having a standalone unit is no longer viable in the current climate.”

As it happened, The Conversation, an online news and commentary portal operated and funded by Australian universities and its readers, started its own fact-checking unit.

There has been a paucity of follow-up stories on the closure of the ABC Fact Checking Unit since the story broke in mid-May. The Australian had a stab at globalising the story, citing Duke University’s censuses of international fact-checking units. More than 100 sites are operating in 37 countries, Duke said. The Australian implied we are falling behind.

My photographer/author mate Giulio Saggin was one of the casualties of the ABC cutbacks, with his position as ABC online photo editor made redundant, along with two other positions at the Brisbane headquarters. He’d held the job since 2007. Fortunately, Giulio is versatile and has been free-lancing long enough to cope with its feast or famine cycles. The redundancy coincided with the launch of his third book – a manual, if you like, for free-lance photo-journalists.

What might worry ABC fans more is speculation that ABC Classic FM may be in danger of more cuts and structural changes.

Former Senator Margaret Reynolds has already started an ABCFriends campaign.

One of the key issues with the ABC is the perception, rightly or wrongly, that it caters to intellectual snobs. This attitude can be encapsulated in two observations I made in my 2014 piece.

“Hopefully they will axe Upper Middle Bogan and It’s a Date” I wrote, intellectual snobbery exposed for all to see. So I was wrong. It’s a date is into season two this year and season three of Upper Middle Bogan starts in October. ABC management appears to appealing more to the mainstream, putting up with shots across the bow from those who find such shows cringe worthy.

In 2014-2015, the top ABC episodes by peak viewing were headed by the Asian Cup Australia v Korea (2.137 million people watched a game of soccer), followed by Sydney’s New Year Fireworks (at midnight), 2.075 million.

Of the top 20 TV shows commanding an audience of 1.32 million or more, only three could be described as news and current affairs. Q&A, despite a huge social media profile, did not make that list.

So people prefer New Tricks, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries or Dr Who? Well, TV is escapism at best, so why the hell not?

Whatever else ABC management tinkers with next, they ought not to rock the boat too hard with Radio National or Local ABC Radio, lifeline to people in the bush and those with vision impairment.

I attended the funeral of an old mate last year; he’d struggled with various levels of blindness for the previous 20 years or so. His son told me his Dad had a radio of one kind or another in every room in the house, even the laundry. They were all tuned to radio national.

Vision Australia estimates there are 357,000 people who are either blind or have low vision. For many of these people, radio is literally the only way they can keep in touch with what’s going on in the world.

I don’t actively listen to radio in the house, but I’m always tuned in when driving. I’ve made about 20 trips to Brisbane and back these past two months and it has become apparent what I am missing by not having RN on at home. This apparently makes me one of the 17 million Australians the ABC reaches across all platforms.

The ABC’s new managing director, Michelle Guthrie, a corporate lawyer with experience working for News Ltd and Google, has an ambitious target: she wants to increase the ABC’s reach from 71% to 100%. Just how she will do that remains to be seen, but as Margaret Simons writes in The Monthly, one of the early pointers is an internal memo that states Guthrie wants 80% of the budget spent on content and only 20% on administration.

Carpet strollers beware.

Singing the feral cat blues

Feral cat fredy mercay — Feral cat and Phascogale credit Fredy Mercay

Cat-lovers look away now. Land management and wildlife conservation groups have been increasingly concerned about the escalating feral cat population, particularly in northern Australia, where wild cats have few predators and vast swathes of unpopulated territory to scour for food.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) estimates there are 15 million feral cats in Australia, with each killing an average five animals a night.

These figures are conservative and already two years out of date. Consider this: an average cat has one to eight kittens per litter and up to three litters per year. A single pair of cats and their kittens can produce as many as 420,000 kittens in just seven years.

Whatever the numbers, they are truly, as Grand Designs host Kevin McLeod might say – “vast”. So far the control of feral cats has fallen to commercial hunters and rangers (using humane traps and rifles), trapping and monitoring and baiting programs. The Federal Government has in recent years been trialling a new feral cat bait ironically dubbed Curiosity, specially formulated to cull feral cats and minimise the incidental deaths of other natives species. It is hoped the new poison will replace Eradicat (1080-based bait).

Yes, yes, I know – this is reminding you of a Little River Band song, (‘Curiosity killed the cat.’) I dimly recall interviewing John Farnham for a student newspaper and asking if he was going to perform the song that night. Farnham, who was lead singer with LRB from 1982 to 1986, admitted he had not yet learned the song. That’s a fair digression from the original subject, although now you’ve got the bloody tune stuck in your head, right?

Curiosity ® was the subject of a 2013 trial at Roxby Downs in South Australia, to trap feral cats in a trial area and monitor their survival using radio transmitting collars before and after baiting. Native wildlife species were monitored to determine whether or not the baits led to a decline in population size at the site. Here are the results.

In 2014 Environment Minister Greg Hunt appointed Gregory Andrews as Australia’s first Threatened Species Commissioner. The Commissioner’s role is to develop priority actions to prevent extinctions and halt the decline of Australia’s most threatened species. The Commissioner will oversee the next stage of Curiosity, which Mr Hunt said was showing promise as ‘an effective and humane approach to the problem.’

Curiosity comprises a meat-based sausage containing a small hard plastic pellet filled with toxin. Feral cats do not chew their food so will reliably swallow portions of the sausage including the pellet. Most native animals nibble and chew their food so will reject the pellet.

“The Curiosity bait for feral cats uses a new toxin called para-aminopropiophenone, or PAPP, which is considered best-practice world-wide and is analogous to putting the animal into a sleep from which they do not wake up,” Mr Hunt said.

Feral cats, which are notoriously difficult to trap and appear to be less interested in baits than live prey, have forced 20 species into extinction and are putting 124 others under threat.

In July RMIT University began a research project into the extent of feral cat control across Australia and to estimate the number of cats removed from the environment each year.

Research director Richard Faulkner told FOMM the aim of the survey is to see how (as a nation) we are measuring up against the Threatened Species commissioner’s strategy/target – a cull of two million by 2020. Mr Faulkner was surprised by the strong participation rate.

“When we launched the survey six weeks ago we were not sure how it would go. We anticipated that 500 participants would be good – we are now at 3,400 and counting!”

The national survey aims to gather responses from rural and remote regions of Australia as well as suburban areas.

In 2014, Greg Hunt, confronted with damning evidence from the CSIRO, called for an eradication program including development of a biological control. The CSIRO study found that mammal extinctions were 40% higher than previously estimated and feral cats ranked higher than climate change as the primary cause.

While advocating measures including “island arks” and biological controls, Hunt warned that the latter could be worse than the problem if not properly controlled.

The ‘island ark’ concept – where pests are removed from a fenced reserve or island which is then re-stocked with endangered species – has worked well in New Zealand. Predators including cats, possums, rodents and mustelids (ferrets, stoats and weasels), were removed from Tiritiri Matangi and Kapiti Island, both now havens for native birds (and bird watchers).

Meanwhile the vast northern Australian landscape has become a happy hunting ground for feral cats. Arnhem Land covers 97,000 square kilometres and has a human population of 16,000 or so. If you discount the probably rare moments when a feral cat goes down to a river to drink and becomes croc food, cats are free to roam and multiply.

Some of the newer baiting proposals include ecologist John Read’s “grooming trap” which sprays toxic gel on the cat (which licks it off when grooming).

There is also a project dubbed ‘Toxic Trojans’ using live prey to attract and kill cats.

There are arguments against biological controls, baiting and trap-alter-and-release programs and you will find most of them outlined here by animal rights group PETA.

Some of Australia’s feral cats are domestic moggies gone astray, but they are not the dingo-sized beasts seen in Arnhem Land and the western deserts. Many of Australia’s feral cats are believed to be descendants of those brought by Dutch explorers as early as the 1600s.

“Most of the cats we’re talking about are really wild animals that don’t engage with humans,” Richard Faulkner says.

Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) manages more feral cat and fox-free areas on mainland Australia than any other organisation. The largest areas are Scotia in western NSW (a feral predator-free area of 8,000 hectares) and Mt Gibson in WA (7800ha). Larger still, Newhaven (65,000ha in the Northern Territory), is under construction.

My contribution to this subject was a dark song written after a few weeks travelling in the NT outback where we saw a feral cat cross the Stuart Highway in the middle of the day. His was an arrogant, purposeful trot, as if this cat knew its scant risks of being killed were limited to sparse road traffic and wedge-tailed eagles (the latter probably more at risk of being run over as they scavenge road-kill).

Sometimes at night, when I’m taking the wheelie bin up to the road (trying to beat my PB), I hear a tinkling bell. This would probably be the neighbourhood cat, alerting night critters to its whereabouts by a bell attached to its collar. Good move that, and it makes puss easier to find when the owners want to lock her away for the night.

“So keep your cats locked up at night while you’re sleeping,

Make sure they wear a bell,

Out in the desert they’re quietly creeping, just how many it’s hard to tell;

In Arnhem Land we sit around the campfire, singing the Feral Cat Blues,

While descendants of our long-lost cats make the cover of the NT News,

The cover of the NT News.”

Listen: https://soundcloud.com/thegoodwills/feral-cat-blues

Risks of Olympic proportions

pole -vaulter-william-pacheco — https://flic.kr/p/GPBj4 William Pacheco/creative commons

So we’re watching the re-run of the World’s Fastest Man beating the World’s Second Fastest Man in the 100 metre Olympic dash. My heart goes out to the also-rans. Trayvon Bromell of the US, despite coming last in a field of eight, covered the 100m final in 10.05 seconds. Goodness me, I thought. It takes me one minute and 21 seconds to drag the wheelie bin 97m from the car port to the roadside (admittedly uphill), huffing like an old grampus (old Scots saying thought to mean ‘like a fat fish out of water’).

Make no mistake, people, you need to be in peak condition if you want to complete at the Olympic level. She Who Swears at the Remotes was channel surfing, realising that the various iterations of Channel 7 are showing different Olympic events at the same time. Flick flick, she went. Some Australian guy, apparently swimming in the open sea, had opened up a one minute lead on the rest of the pack. It was heartening to see all the support vessels hovering nearby in case of cramp, loss of will to keep going, cossie-loss, shark attack, remnant arctic ice or other. Flick, flick.

Oh, there’s blokes spearing through the water in kayaks, or maybe they are canoes? Foresooth, here are two women spearing through the water in a kayak/canoe.

“Look at their shoulder muscles,” I marvelled, adjusting the heat pack on my compromised AC joint.

Now we’re on to pole vaulting, a sport we take a mild interest in because we know someone who competed in this event at Commonwealth Games level.

“Crikey, there’s so many ways of killing yourself associated with this sport,” She observed. I googled “pole vault accidents”.

Some YouTube contributors delight in posting clips of athletes failing or hurting themselves, including an incident at the Rio Olympics where a Japanese competitor’s penis dislodged the crossbar. This is akin to funniest home videos, a program with which I am not amused. Pole vaulters have died competing in this sport, or have ended up in wheelchairs. So the supposedly funny/shocking videos are insensitive to say the least.

According to Chris Hord, assistant pole vault coach at the University of North Florida, pole vaulting is the deadliest track and field event.

“The sport is inherently dangerous because you run at full speed, almost 100-metre sprint with a 15- to 17-foot fibreglass pole in your hand, then you’re bending it, trying to get upside down to clear a bar in the air.”

Sunshine Coast physiotherapist and former Commonwealth Games pole vault competitor Andrew Stewart agrees.

“The worst part is if you accidently land on the tip of the pole, it will bend and throw you anywhere.”

Stewart competed from 1970 to 1984, culminating with a 5^th in the 1984 Commonwealth Games event in Brisbane. His own experiences of pole vaulting as a dangerous sport included breaking a leg and spraining both ankles, in the days when landing pads were much smaller.

This 2012 study by the American Journal of Sports Medicine makes for sobering reading.

A few weeks back our choir director Kim Kirkman was encouraging the tenors to reach a high B by pretending we were throwing the discus. That took me back to compulsory school sports days where we were taught to throw javelins or discus by over-zealous sports teachers whose mission in life was apparently to distract boys (and maybe girls too) from thinking too much about the onset of puberty. Now that I think on it, perhaps all that javelin and discus tossing is to blame for my problematic shoulder joint, which responds to steroid injections and physiotherapy but the pain returns when I fall back into bad habits (like not doing the archery exercise, hunching over the keyboard like a man possessed).

But getting back to the men’s 100 metre sprint and other such events, the victors feeling obliged to do a victory lap wearing their nation’s flag like a cape. Mr Bolt, a man much-used to the attention of the media, struck a few poses, the images carried around the globe in an instant. Our journalists salivated over the Jamaican champ’s promise to return to Australia (he was last here in 2012).

Media sports coverage, such as it is

Just so you know, journalists work with some limitations when it comes to reporting on the Olympics. To actually attend as a media correspondent you need accreditation. The accrediting body, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), has a fair bit of muscle.

For example, they banned the use of animated GIFs during the Olympics. GIFs are short animated videos on loop which often pop up on social media. They are more often visual gags designed to shock or amuse, but oft-times capture immortal moments of triumph.

As Business Insider reported, it appears the Olympic ban is not being observed in certain segments of the social media with many GIFs to be found on tumblr and twitter.

A GIF which appeared, if I’m correct, before the IOC ban was announced, depicted a beggar lad alone in Rio’s slums overlooking a blazingly lit Olympic stadium and fireworks display. It briefly touched a nerve before being subsumed by the weight of status updates on Facebook.

The other media curiosity revealed at the Rio Olympics was the Washington Post’s use of robotic reporting technology. The Poynter Institute reported that Heliograf, using data and language templates, churns out medal tallies, event schedules and even results, the automated news briefs forming part of the Post’s Olympic blog.

FOMM reader Ms Hand alerted us to this under-reported technology breakthrough. We’re not surprised. Speech-to-text technology has existed for quite some time, of benefit to vision-impaired writers, scribes with temporary or permanent RSI or lawyers who can no longer afford secretaries to transcribe their daily dictation.

For all you know I could be talking aloud and one of those smart programmes is writing down what I say. Isn’t that right, Siri?

As a former newspaper scribe, I have mixed feelings about machines taking over what was once the detail work of junior journalists. Attending to sports results, racing form, TV guides and the like was the cadet journalist’s way to learning about deadlines, accuracy, punctuation and the consequences of making mistakes.

Meanwhile, back at the pole-vaulting pit, it takes skilful human beings to track down the vitally important Olympic stories like the Japanese pole vaulter who failed to qualify because his penis touched the bar. News Ltd scribe Dan Felson’s breathless, euphemism-laden piece (‘let down by his trouser-friend’) went global. Read it if you must.

Despite its ever-present risks of injury or injured pride, pole vaulting continues to attract devotees.

Sydney man Albert Gay, 73, set an Australian record this year at the Australian Masters Athletics event. The Macarthur Chronicle reported that Gay ‘leapt into the record books’ for his age group with a 3m attempt (the Olympic world record is 6.03 metres, set this week by Brazilian Thiago Braz Da Silva).

Gay said he took up athletics and pole vaulting when he retired, at 62.

“It tests your bravery,” he said. “You’ve got to be a little bit of an idiot to do it.”

SWSR adds: “I prefer to confine myself to channel surfing from the comfort of the recliner, where the only danger to be faced is the possibility of the Staffie unexpectedly launching himself into my lap.”

No interest at all

piggy-bank-1239661 — Johanna Ljungblom/FreeImages.com

Though the headline might put you off, we must ask: why are interest rates dropping, who does it affect and where will it all end?

Few people would be unaware that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) dropped the official cash rate to 1.50% on August 2, the lowest rate since records have been kept.

The supposed reason is to stimulate the economy (that is, to encourage spending and borrowing). It is theoretically OK to do this when inflation is low or falling as it is now. Conversely, as inflation rises, so do interest rates (RBA considers that this will restrain borrowing and spending).

An official cash rate of 1.50% is a huge problem for self-funded retirees such as yours truly and She Who Supports Ethical Investment. Four years ago we invested in a bank term deposit paying 5%, with interest paid annually. The annual payment dropped into our bank account this week. But where do we turn when this tiny golden goose gets killed off next year?

On current speculation, cash rates could drop to 1.25% by the second quarter of 2017. Given that inflation is currently 1%, that is a pretty skinny return.

The theory is we (self-funded retirees and younger people trying to save), will turn to the share market, where one can not only get better yields, but also the prospect of capital gains (and a tax break via dividend imputation). That means the company paying the dividend has already paid tax on it, so the franking credits (tax component) is refunded to the investor. But as we all know, the share market is volatile; you can lose money, companies can reduce or suspend dividends; gadzooks, companies can go broke and your modest $12,000 investment drifts away like steam from a kettle.

We’re told inflation has dropped from 1.7% in January to 1% in June, yet each week we seem to spend more at the supermarket and the petrol pump. House insurance premiums are rising, ditto rego, electricity and water rates. What’s really going on?

The low interest scenario, not by any means restricted to Australia, is set to continue for the foreseeable future.

Pre the GFC (2008), self-managed retirees could obtain interest rates of 6% to 7% on term deposits so their SMSFs were earning a fair, tax-protected return, sufficient to pay pensions and preserve capital (thus avoiding the inevitable dip into the public purse).

In this low interest rate environment, the biggest risk is that naïve investors will be lured into higher-rate schemes which are either unsecured and risky or just outright scams. The best known of scams is the Ponzi scheme, where a promoter offers you 12% on your investment, making interest payments with new deposits and eventually fleeing to some country with no extradition treaty.

Caveat emptor, mate.

Nevertheless, an official interest rate of 1.5% looks generous compared to the UK, US and Japan, the latter entering negative interest* territory in February. In post-Brexit UK, the Bank of England cut the cash rate this month to 0.25%, its first rate cut in seven years. The rationale for doing so was to support growth and return inflation to a sustainable target of 2%. UK inflation was 0.3% in May, so we can see what they mean.

Steve Worthington, adjunct Professor at Swinburne University of Technology revealed an odd cultural reaction to negative interest rates in an article written for The Conversation.

One month after the Bank of Japan’s decision to unleash negative interest rates, applications to join the loyalty programmes of Japanese department stores such as Mitsukoshi, Daimaru and Takashimaya (which offer discounts on goods of 5% to 8%), were 100-200% higher than in the same month of 2015.

Such consumer behaviour undermines the intentions of the central banks. Prof.Worthington proffers that if the weapon of negative interest rates does not work as expected on currency values or domestic consumption and investment, what else is there left to deploy to prevent deflation and a further slowdown in economic activity?

Prof. Worthington says negative interest rates are intended to boost domestic demand by forcing banks to lend money out and encourage consumers to both borrow and spend.

But they cannot bank on the unpredictable behaviour of individuals and organisations. Prof Worthington referred to the unexpected result this week after New Zealand’s central bank cuts its cash rate to a new low of 2%.

“Rather than that lowering the value of the NZ dollar, it has actually sent their dollar higher – economics theory meets reality and is found wanting!”

Many Euro Zone countries are already in negative interest mode, Japan has just joined the club and the US (0.5%) and UK (0.25%) is as close to zero as you can get. There are even a few economists in Australia who believe we could be at zero interest within a couple of years.

A collaborative essay in the Wall Street Journal examined the trend to negative rates, uncovering some evidence the policy was backfiring. The authors wrote: “some economists now believe negative rates can have an unintended psychological effect by communicating fear over the growth outlook and the central bank’s ability to manage it.”

If the primary motive of low or zero interest rates is to encourage citizens to borrow or spend, it appears to be a lost cause. The OECD index of household savings shows savings are high and likely to go higher in countries such as Germany, where the percentage of disposable income which is being devoted to saving rose to 9.7%, and is forecast to rise to 10.4% this year. The OECD also forecasts the rate to rise in Japan.

While Australians now are saving just under 10% of their disposable income, in the noughties we were saving virtually nothing and gearing ourselves into unsustainable debt.

A Federal Treasury paper, The rise in household saving and its implications for the Australian economy, theorises that had household savings remained at 2004-05 levels, consumption would have been 11% higher than its current level – about 6% of GDP.

“The primary effect of the turnaround in household saving has therefore been to reduce the extent to which interest rates and the exchange rate have needed to rise to maintain macroeconomic balance.”

The paper noted that subdued household spending will also present challenges to the retail and residential construction sectors.

So what does the average punter do – buy a safe (apparently ‘trending’ in Japan), stash the cash under the mattress, buy gold bullion, collectables or vintage wines?

You can still find a few banks with term deposit rates around 3%, though the rate does not vary much between six months and five years.

Self-funded retirees who need a certain level of return to maintain their lifestyles have only a few options: take riskier investment strategies (hybrids, debentures, unlisted property trusts), dig in to capital; apply to Centrelink for a part-pension or (shudder) start job-hunting. (Either that, or forget about that trip overseas…Ed).

*instead of receiving a return on deposits, depositors must pay regularly to keep their money with the bank.

Showing mercy on old ships

africa-mercy — Africa Mercy, courtesy of www.mercyships.org.au

If you’ve ever taken a long journey on a ship, chances are you reminisce about the romance of it all; sitting in deckchairs with your dearly beloved, watching flying fish pass over the bow. The sweet memories bypass the sad realities of sharing an 8-berth cabin with other young travellers, determined to ignore the claustrophobic realisation that your cabin is below the water line.

Ships do a reliable job ferrying people and cargo from one port to another. According to statista.com, the number of passengers carried by the cruise industry is expected to exceed 25 million in 2019. The numbers are also huge around container trade, which accounts for about 60% of all world seaborne trade. The quantity of goods carried by containers has risen from around 100 million metric tons in 1980 to about 1.5 billion metric tons in 2013. If those numbers dazzle you, just stare at your flat-screen TV or your other household goods for a while and multiply it by every other similar household in Australia and you quickly realise the extent of trade by sea.

But there comes a time when the rigours of salt water and the impact of waves pounding at the hull takes its toll and ships must be retired.

While you may have seen documentaries about third-world ship recyclers, pulling beached ships apart by hand, there are occasions when older ships are used for worker accommodation, emergency housing or as hospital ships.

Mercy Ships is an organisation which provides much-needed medical care for people in developing countries. The idea was born in 1964 when founder Don Stephens, then 19, survived the devastation wreaked by tropical hurricane Cleo in the Bahamas. In the aftermath of the storm, Don was struck by local people talking about the need for a hospital ship to treat their injured and provide urgently needed medicines. Though it took many years, in 1978 he and fellow fundraisers paid $US1 million for the Victoria, a former cruise liner. Work began to convert her to a hospital ship and in 1982, the vessel, refitted with three operating theatres and a 40-bed ward, sailed as the Anastasis – the first Mercy Ship.

The Anastasis was home to Queensland nurse Helen Walker from late 2004 to February 2005. Specialising in ophthalmic nursing, she spent three months volunteering in Benin, West Africa. She and a colleague from Jamaica assessed 5,000 people who had gathered outside the city stadium many days before, after hearing the Anastasis was soon to dock at Cotonou.

The main mission was to perform cataract operations, routine amongst Australia’s 65+ age group, but life-changing for poor people in Africa.

“Those who showed evidence of advanced cataracts were allowed inside for further assessment by the British or American ophthalmologist, who also volunteered his time to help the poorest of the poor,” Helen said.

Helen, who now works as a remote area nurse in far north Queensland, tells a story which she says typifies the resilience of the Benin people.

“Pascale, an elderly gentleman dressed in his best suit and waistcoat, stopped to mop his sweaty brow as he was gently escorted from dockside to the eye examination room aboard the Anastasis.

“He had said to the taxi driver in the north of Benin, ‘take me to the big white ship’.

“How this man, with only ‘perception of light’ sight, had made it to dockside is beyond me.

“We did our eye checks, found him a bed and he had his cataract surgery next day.

“The following morning, when the eye pad was removed and the eye chart held 6 metres away, Pascale was able to read half way down the chart!

“I watched for the usual lively signs of happiness that the Africans show, but Pascale had only the faintest smile on his lips. He just knew that we would fix his sight.”

The Anastasis was one of four Mercy Ships, three of which have been retired after serving in 150 ports throughout developing nations.

Mercy Ships relies on donations and volunteer staff to carry out its works. In Australia, the head office is in Caloundra, Sunshine Coast. The most recent field mission starts this month in Cotonou, Benin, where the flagship Africa Mercy will be based until June next year.

Africa Mercy is a former Danish rail ferry acquired in 1999 and commissioned in 2007 as the world’s largest non-governmental hospital ship.

The eight-deck Africa Mercy’s lower decks are a modern hospital with five operating theatres, an intensive care unit, an ophthalmic unit and a recovery ward with beds for 82 patients. The ship also has accommodation on its upper decks for 484 crew members including families, couples and individuals.

The ship’s medical equipment includes a CT scanner and X-ray laboratories. Physicians can consult with pathologists in the US via satellite communication.

In 2016, the medical team will provide up to 7,000 surgeries a year, including patients suffering from maxillofacial deformities such as cleft lip/palate. The team will also be providing reconstructive plastic surgery for patients suffering from severe burns, congenital abnormalities, and soft tissue tumours.

From February to May next year the team will be providing surgeries and treatments to female patients suffering from obstetric fistula, uterine prolapse and other gynaecological conditions.

Ships used to garrison troops and workers

Your average land-lubber may not know this, but ex-passenger ships and ferries have long been used as barracks for navy personnel, construction and oil rig workers and as emergency housing.

Barracks ships were used to garrison UK troops in the Falkland Islands after Argentinian occupation forces were ousted in 1982. Rangatira and another former ferry, Odysseus, housed workers building an oil platform in Scotland circa 1977–78. Rangatira housed workers who built the Sullom Voe Terminal in the Shetland Islands in 1978–81.

I fondly remember taking a journey from Sydney to Singapore aboard the Chandris Line’s backpacker special, the Patris.

After Darwin was almost destroyed by Tracy on Christmas Day in 1974, the Patris anchored in Darwin Harbour for nine months to provide emergency accommodation. Many people of my vintage journeyed on the Patris in the 1970s, as it was often the first leg of the great Overland Trail from Singapore to London via Pakistan, Afghanistan and other countries now seen as no-go zones.

According to MuseumVictoria, after leaving Darwin in November 1975, the Patris was converted to a car ferry cruising between Greece and Italy. In 1987, after a long period of idleness, she was towed to Karachi, Pakistan and left in the hands of shipbreakers.

Surely a humanitarian cause like Mercy Ships is a nobler end for vessels nearing the end of their service lives? But as care2.com observes, the vast majority of old ships are sold to breaking yards on the tidal beaches of South Asia.

European-based ship recyclers offer ship owners between 150 and 225 euros per ton of steel. South Asian shipbreakers can offer up to 450 euros per ton.

You can read more (above) about this dirty, dangerous work and the workplace health and safety risks taken by workers in places like Karachi (Pakistan) Alang (India) or Chittagong (Bangladesh).

Or you could go to www.mercyships.org and read more about a truly enlightened use of recycled ships.

Homeless for a week

The first time I thought of Homelessness Week 2016 (August 1-7) was when a young family member posted something on Facebook, aiming to raise funds for a St Vincent de Paul homeless charity, Fred’s Place. Alice took part in a community sleep out on Thursday night, raising funds to keep Fred’s Place operating.

Vinnies operates a few such sites across Australia. This one in Tweed Heads offers a home and support for people experiencing homelessness or who are at risk of homelessness.

Fred’s Place is a fully renovated home with three bathrooms, a large laundry, internet and telephone, television, staffed kitchen, inside and outside areas to socialise, storage and mailing facilities. There’s also a dedicated room for Centrelink, Medicare, Counselling, Legal Assistance and Housing NSW, all available on a weekly or fortnightly basis.

You might read elsewhere about chief executives sleeping rough for a night to get the smell of homelessness in their nostrils and raise money for charities. They’ll be up bright and early next day for eggs benedict and lattes at their favourite café, but who’s quibbling about that? All of these once-a-year sacrifices by those fortunate to have a job and a roof over their heads helps highlight homelessness as a serious issue.

New data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows that almost 256,000 people received assistance from homelessness services in 2015. So yes, it is serious.

High rents and tight vacancy rates are forcing many people to settle for less than ideal accommodation, be it share houses, hostels, motels, serviced apartments, or, down the other end of the scale, living in their cars, in campgrounds, under freeway overpasses, in tunnels or huddled in doorways.

As I wrote in the Hinterland Times last year, the Sunshine Coast is not immune from homelessness. In upmarket Noosa, where the median house rent is $650 a week and a three-bedroom unit rents for $510, 60 people, including 22 children, ended up at Noosa’s Johns Landing Camp Ground.

I began to wonder what happens to these people on the fringes, heading off to work each day, in a region where there is a paucity of emergency or affordable housing.

Habitat for Humanity, an organisation founded by Millard Fuller and supported by former US President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, builds houses for families who want to improve their circumstances. More accurately, the people who will ultimately live in these houses help build them. Those wanting to own a Habitat home have to be employed, scratch up a deposit and have the capacity to repay a no-interest loan. They must contribute 500 hours of ‘sweat equity’, helping volunteers and pro bono tradespeople. Habitat for Humanity has built, rehabilitated and repaired over 800,000 homes, providing four million people with improved living conditions.

The first time I visited Winnipeg, it was a refuelling stop on a flight from London to Los Angeles. We sat on the tarmac and looked out the window where men in bright orange parkas circled the aircraft, fogging it with hand-held hoses to stop ice forming on the wings. Subsequent visits to Winnipeg, at one time home to the elder brother of She Who Was Born In Canada, Eh, were thankfully in the summer.

Those who have never been there probably know of winter on the Manitoba prairies via SBS weather, cheerfully reporting Winnipeg to be 40-below in January (average daily max -13.9). We were on a tour of the city with my brother-in-law when I spotted a homeless person asleep on a park bench.

“Jon, what happens to these people in the winter?” I asked. He then explained Habitat for Humanity, which at the time was very active in Winnipeg. When you live in a town where the rivers ice over and you have to plug your car in to stop the engine block freezing, you need a house – with central heating.

Habitat is a concept which would appeal to people who disapprove of social security, as Habitat for Humanity is a ‘hand-up’, rather than a handout. In Canada, Habitat’s funding is greatly enhanced through a chain of thrift shops called ReStore. Jon Toogood says he and several colleagues founded ReStore in Winnipeg in the 1980s and the concept has since spread world-wide. ReStores sell donated household goods and recycled building materials. Jon tells me the two stores he co-founded grossed $1.2 million last year.

Habitat for Humanity has not caught on in Australia to the extent it has in New Zealand where there is a national head office, 10 affiliates and 13 ReStores. There are two chapters in Queensland (Gympie and Ipswich). NSW has five chapters, Victoria has three and its operations include two ReStores.

Spokeswoman Jen Farmer said Habitat Queensland was currently researching to see if a ReStore could be viable here. Ipswich coordinator Ken Fischer said the local chapter was set up in 2005. Its first project was to renovate a house moved from Victoria to a quarter acre block. Mr Fischer said three prefab houses were donated to Habitat in 2011 to replace Ipswich homes destroyed in the flood. The homes were located on the same land, but raised on 2.5m stumps.

Mr Fischer said the Ipswich chapter had recently begun to work with social services groups to train homeless people to become trades assistants and work on Habitat projects. Long-term, they plan to look at how Habitat can provide housing for homeless people.

Not that it matters now, but I remember my brush with homelessness. I had paid for a one-way air ticket to New Zealand and had £11 to survive in London for a week.

Even in 1977, £11 didn’t go far. A contact told me about a hostel in Charing Cross where I could stay for a week, all found, for £9. I had to pay up front and, relieved to have somewhere to stay, it took a while to realise this was one of those homeless shelters where they feed you dinner and breakfast and put you on the streets between 9am and 5pm. I was assigned a bed in a large dormitory full of smelly, farting men whose tubercular coughs and nightmare screams kept me awake half the night. Some of those screams might have been my own.

In the bed next to mine was a 30-something Irishman who’d come to London to work on building sites but no such work eventuated. Like me, his capital had dwindled and he was now hard pressed to make himself look presentable and stay upbeat to look for work. We found a homely workers’ café in a Soho back lane where lunch – soup, bread rolls and a bottomless cup of tea – cost 50p. As I recall, my Irish friend and I shared a tureen of soup, snagging extra bread rolls from the counter while no-one was looking.

Appropriately, Mel Brooks’ comedy High Anxiety was one of the movie choices on the flight back to sunny, green New Zealand. I scored a job as a storeman packer two days later and rented a room in a share house with like-minded people. I sometimes wonder about the Paddy with the soft voice and shy manner and how his life turned out.

The dog ate my spectacles

Spectacles-Dumped rubbish-Lifeline. photo: Chris McCormack — Dumped rubbish next to the Lifeline bins in Point O’ Halloran Drive, Victoria Point is costing Lifeline thousand to remove the rubbish. Photo: Chris McCormack

Is it wrong to blame a dog, hours after said dog has done something to make you cross? They say dogs have no sense of time, and, clearly cannot distinguish a pair of spectacles from a chewing toy. Staffies get anxious when you leave them alone for a few hours and this one chews things. We have learned to behave as if there is a toddler in the house – every chewable object goes ‘up high.’

Nevertheless, I apparently left my reading specs sitting on top of an unfinished (aren’t they always?) crossword on the dining room table. Dog therefore must have got up on his front paws and grabbed said spectacles, putting a tooth through one lens, scratching the other and chewing the end of a spectacle leg. Making Marge Simpson annoyed-at-Homer noises, I set off to the optometrist and duly ordered a replacement pair. Imagine my ire dissipating on discovering private health insurance covered all but $18 of the cost. First world problem, right?

I was just about to leave with my new specs when I was asked if I’d like to donate the old pair to a charity which collects, repairs, cleans and distributes recycled specs to people who don’t have health insurance (or $18 for that matter).

Curiosity piqued, I set off to learn more about charities which collect and distribute specific items, as opposed to those which operate charity bins and Op Shops (more on the latter later).

Lions chairman (Brisbane) Kenneth Leonard told me Lions in Australia and Japan have been increasing their collections of eyeglasses to more than 500,000 a year. Recycle 4 Sight involves volunteers as well as people on Work for the Dole, inmates from a female community correction facility and people on Community Service Orders from the court. Collectively, they have achieved a nett 400,000 refurbished pairs of spectacles annually.

Since 2000, Recycle 4 Sight has distributed 2.5 million pairs of re-graded spectacles to Africa, Europe, Middle East, China, the Pacific Rim, Southern Asia and Oceania.

Another useful charity, Soles4souls Australia, collects, cleans up and re-distributes ‘gently worn’ and new shoes to needy people around the world. It might seem obvious, but Soles4souls sets out on its home page exactly what types of shoes it wants (and doesn’t want). Sports shoes, kids’ shoes and men’s and women’s fashion, work and business shoes get a tick. They say no to heels of three inches or more, Ugg boots and slippers and women’s fashion boots. It might not need to be said (you’d think) but they also do not want single shoes, damaged shoes or empty shoe boxes.

If only this charity had been around when I decided to ditch my Doc Martens, expensive English leather shoes favoured by 53-year-old songwriters who want to look cool. I’d looked after them but rarely wore them as they were heavy and the narrow-fitting shoe did not suit my wide feet. So one day circa 2004 I put these shoes in a plastic bag and slipped it through the slot of a local charity bin.

Some years ago American songwriter Kristina Olsen, who spends a great deal of time in Australia, told me about a charity which collects old guitar strings. Actually, there are quite a few charities which collect old guitar strings (and musical instruments) to ensure poor people in third world countries get the opportunity to make music in a style we obviously take for granted.

Musician Darryl Purpose and his activist friend Kevin Deam have delivered more than 20,000 sets of used strings since starting the Second String Project in his native Holland. Many professional musicians use a set of strings for a few gigs then replace them and throw the old ones away. The Second String Project collects these lightly used strings and sends them to poor musicians.

Smalls for All was launched in 2009 by Maria Macnamara after she read an article about the problems facing women in Zimbabwe who didn’t have any undies. Donors are asked to purchase a packet of (new) underwear but Smalls for All will accept ‘gently-worn’ bras (which, few men realise, can cost up to $200).

Macnamara says a lack of underwear is a health and hygiene problem for many poor African communities. Many women often only own one pair of tattered pants or have none at all. Underwear is also seen as a status symbol and offers a degree of security.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Charitable Recyclers (NACRO) sent me useful information about illegal dumping at charity bins and Op Shops (see photo above). A report released in May and supported by charities including UnitingCare (owner of Lifeline), NACRO and the Queensland Government, estimated that about 8,200 tonnes of rubbish were dumped at Queensland charity sites in 2014-2015.

The report identified rubbish including soiled mattresses, broken furniture and window blinds, green waste and household waste.

NACRO told FOMM the research found 50% of donors were ‘unintentional dumpers’ who didn’t understand the consequences; 40% were ‘champion donors’ and just 10% were ‘deliberate dumpers’. These people are (charitably) perceived to be the least informed about the consequences and ‘may not respect charity work’.

NACRO chief executive officer Kerryn Caulfield told FOMM people may think they are doing the right thing by leaving items outside donation bins and Op Shops.

“But in fact they are dumping a huge burden on the charity they are seeking to help. Sadly, people pilfer these donations if they are worth anything and not already damaged by the weather and in the process damage other items. The charities are left to clean up the mess.”

Sources told me about worst case scenarios: prawn shells wrapped in newspaper dumped in a charity bin, contaminating everything inside. How about people who help their smallest child climb through the slot to retrieve the DVD player that still works!

The main problem for someone wishing to donate to a charity is where to take it. Most major charities have depots in the city but in smaller towns you should probably ask at your local Op Shop. Coincidentally, it is National Op Shop week August 21-27. So, dear reader, go carefully through your wardrobe and bookshelves and see if you can come up with useful books, ‘gently worn’ clothing, and other (clean) items in good condition. (See above re: unwanted spectacles, shoes, guitar strings or bras.)

So in a week when a deranged man killed 84 people in Nice, when there was an attempted coup in Turkey, when Sonia Kruger (someone whose utterances we are supposed to take seriously, apparently), said uninformed things about Muslims, when Pauline Hanson went on Q&A, Bob wrote about the dog chewing his spectacles.

But as those who read to the end would know, there is usually a relevant sub-text to Friday on My Mind. In this instance, despite callous acts of terrorism and madness, political stupidity, racism and egregious behaviours here and abroad, people are still capable of acts of kindness and charity.

Time capsule tips

Time-capsule-photo-of-Colin-Meads — Photo of Colin Meads: Commons wiki/File:Colin_Meads_Sheep.jpg

From the misty annals of childhood comes a memory of the town fathers burying a time capsule, not to be opened for 100 years. They had asked the townsfolk for suggestions as to what the capsule should contain and our little urchin’s cabal suggested such items as an alarm clock (with two bells atop), a gob-stopper, that famous photo of All Black Colin Meads with a sheep under each arm, a train ticket and a can of pick-up-sticks. Somebody said we should get an episode of Life with Dexter and put that in too.

Digression alert: it is untrue that Meads (1960s rugby version of Paul Gallen), kept fit running up and down hills on his farm with a sheep under each arm.

Historians and archivists may scoff, but the practice of encapsulating the trivial lives of a cross-section of society for future generations is still in vogue. Time capsules are often buried beneath the foundations of a new building to mark a special occasion, a centenary, perhaps. The idea is to set a date in the future when they should be dug up and opened.

General interest in the concept increased after Westinghouse created one as part of its exhibit for the 1939 New York World Fair.

The 2.3 metre long, 360kg capsule, made of copper, chromium and silver alloy, contained items including a spool of thread and doll, a vial of food crop seeds, a microscope and a 15-minute newsreel. There were also microfilm spools containing such prosaic fare as a Sears Roebuck catalogue.

Wikipedia’s entry says Westinghouse buried a second capsule in 1965. Both are set to be opened in 6939, that is, 4,922 years from now.

Sometimes time capsules rise to the surface before the appointed time. When the statue of John Robert Godley, the founder of Christchurch, toppled to the ground during the 2011 earthquake, workers pawing through the rubble found two time capsules under the plinth. A glass bottle containing parchment and a long metal container were handed to the Christchurch museum.

Director Anthony Wright told the Daily Mail a third capsule was discovered beneath the base of the cross of the badly damaged Christchurch Cathedral. All three capsules were opened a month later and were found to contain items including old newspapers and photographs, a City of Christchurch handbook (1922-23), what appears to be a civic balance sheet, a few coins and a brass plate.

So what’s it all about, then? As self-confessed time capsule nerd Matt Novak writes, time capsules rarely reveal anything of historical value. In many ways, time capsules are like small private museums which are locked up for 100 years or more and nobody is allowed to visit.

Buried-capsule-seeds — Time capsule in Seattle containing seeds. Photo by Eli Duke (flickr)

The exemplar of the genre so far is the 200-year old Boston time capsule, discovered in January by construction crews. The capsule was set into the cornerstone of a building by one of the nation’s founding fathers, Samuel Adams, and patriot silversmith Paul Revere. The contents of the capsule (coins, newspapers, photographs and a silver plaque inscribed by Revere), now belong to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

The National Archives of Australia maintains a web page dedicated to serving people who are planning to bury a time capsule for posterity.

The NAA says careful choice of materials to be included in a time capsule will contribute to the longevity of both contents and capsule.

The latter is worth bearing in mind, given that witnesses to the Christchurch unearthing said one of the capsules ‘smelled like blue cheese.’

The International Time Capsule Society estimates there are between 10,000 and 15,000 time capsules worldwide.

The notion is popular with schools, particularly those with a strong sense of tradition. In celebration of its golden jubilee in 2007, Epping Boys High School of Sydney (whose alumni includes rock musician Iva Davies and barrister and TV presenter Geoffrey Robertson) invited Prime Minister John Howard to plant a new time capsule but also, as the Old Boys Union reported, open the one buried in 1982 (the silver jubilee). Alas, the school was closed for the holidays, so your intrepid reporter was unable to unearth a description of the capsule’s contents.

This set me to thinking just what should be inside a time capsule buried, for example, in the foundations of a massive new public housing eco village planned for, say, Wentworth.

It would have to be a big-arse capsule, because I’d be recommending items for posterity include the mechanical rabbit from Wentworth Park. If that is not possible, then at least include a Dapto Dogs racebook, so citizens 100 years hence can ponder the curious sport of dog racing.

The capsule should contain a large lump of brown coal (they won’t miss it, honest), so future generations can see why the planet went amiss.

She Who is Glass Half Full This Week says we ought to include some Aussie inventions: plastic money, the electronic pacemaker, the black box recorder, the cochlear implant…

Countering all this world-changing innovation, we need to show the substance abuse issues of the 21^st century – a hemp shoulder bag filled with all the illicit drugs of the day, and for good measure a bottle of whatever young kids turn to when binge drinking, and a packet of fags, adorned with graphic images of tongue and lip cancer.

It might not work in a hundred years’ time, but we should include a smart phone, charger and spare battery, along with a hard-copy cheat sheet. And yes, what 2016 time capsule would be complete without a victorious Queensland State of Origin team photo, hunkering down, singing aye-yai-yippy-yippy in 17 different keys, making odd, triumphant finger gestures.

The NAA might warn us not to use ephemeral recording materials, but what else do we have? I’d suggest a special DVD edition of Q&A with Alan Jones, Steve Price, Andrew Bolt, Phillip Adams, John Pilger and Marcia Langton discussing indigenous land rights, refugees and free speech, with Tony Jones trying to keep them all on point.

One could have such fun filling a time capsule. Items bound to puzzle people in 2116 could include: a (new) disposable nappy, a coffee pod, a Go Card, a government-issue hearing aid, one of those ear-expanding discs some young people wear so they can look like primitive tribes from darkest Africa. We could employ a taxidermist to stuff a cane toad and a feral cat and include literature explaining their stories. I’d be tempted to Include copies of every newspaper editorial before (and after) the 2016 election, just to show that whatever passes for punditry 100 years from now was always thus.

It could be fun to somehow preserve a ‘best of Facebook photo album’ to show future generations what people did with their spare time. It would not take long to curate images of tattooed people, pierced people, nude bike riders, hipsters, cats and dogs doing odd but cute things, photos of what people had for lunch, independent bands nobody ever heard of (now or in 100 years’ time), absolute proof that the earth is flat, out of focus selfies, a video of a serious young dude performing a handfarting cover of a Pink Floyd song (this really is on YouTube. Ed) and 17 versions of the same sunset.

Oh, and let’s not forget to include a laminated copy of that Friday guy’s take on time capsules.

Parish pump vs big media

Unsold newspaper returns — Unsold newspaper ‘returns’ await collection. Photo Bob Wilson

While our free local weekly, The Range News, had by default become a localised version of the Sunshine Coast Daily, we sorely miss our weekly news. At Crystal Waters Markets last Saturday a few of us were discussing things that happened in the village we did not hear about, partly because the Maleny-based TRN had gone, but also because the closure of the UpFront Club, a reliable source of gossip, had to some extent broken up the information network.

TRN’s owner, Australian Regional Media, chose to fold the paper on May 12, rather than include it in the portfolio of publications it had recently put up for sale. In the final edition, Sunshine Coast General Manager Ken Woods said that despite the paper being well embedded in the community, his team had been unable to revitalise the business, which had suffered from dwindling commercial support.

TRN had a long history of independent owners over 34 years. In 2006, it was sold to ARM which, through its listed parent company Australian Provincial Newspapers (APN), owns a stable of titles in Australia, including 12 regional dailies in Queensland and NSW and 60 community newspapers and specialist publications.

ARM’s 2015 annual report claims 87% penetration in its local markets and 1.6 million readers a week (newspapers and online). ARM’s audience growth was driven by increased digital audiences. Total online audiences grew 20% year-on-year, mobile audiences grew 43% and social audiences grew 20%, contributing to overall digital revenue growth of 36%.

The bad news would sound familiar to most media organisations.

“National agency revenues finished the year challenged, following an accelerated drop in top 10 national advertising client advertising spend. All other revenue from national advertising clients was flat year-on-year.”

APN let the market know in February it wanted to sell its regional and non-daily titles, while keeping its radio network, outdoor advertising business and numerous websites.

Along came Rupert Murdoch, wielding his 14.9% holding in ARM and offering $37 million to take it off APN’s hands. That happened in June and the sale is subject to shareholder approval, a foreign investment review and an ACCC ruling on market dominance.

If this transaction takes place, News Ltd will then own every daily newspaper in Queensland, along with most of the non-dailies and all the suburban weeklies in Brisbane.

The closure of community newspapers does not appear to bother profit-motivated publishing companies. A spokeswoman said ARM had closed ‘a handful’ of newspapers in the past year for similar reasons.

ARM would tell you they still cover Maleny news (and they do). Recently they wrote about a former Maleny school girl who had gone through a gender crisis and emerged as a policeman. There was also a story about the long-term owners of Maleny Newsagency selling their business. Then there was the controversial yarn about plans to stage a motorcycle race through the hinterland. I read those stories on ARM’s website, and here’s the thing: you will never read provincial stories like these on Huffington Post, Yahoo News or the Daily Mail.

There are still independent free newspapers circulating on the Sunshine Coast Hinterland, including the weekly Glasshouse Country and Maleny News, Sunshine Valley Gazette and the monthly Hinterland Times. The removal of TRN puts additional pressure on these publications for editorial and advertising space. Being a commercial enterprise, the number of pages in the newspaper that sells advertising is entirely governed by how much advertising is sold.

Meanwhile the dedicated internet browser can, with self-discipline, canvas a very wide sample of national and world news each day, for no cost, or a token amount. So many publications allow their content to be shared on social media there is a constant stream of news and commentary hour by hour, depending on your tolerance level for staring at a computer screen or a tablet device.

But the Net is not an easy place for media companies to make money. The New Internationalist’s cover story about internet billionaires tells us that 85% of every new dollar spent on Internet advertising goes to Google or Facebook rather than those generating the content.

A June 13 special edition of Media Watch investigated the multiple problems facing online news websites. Host Paul Barry began by reporting that in the past seven months, online news sites including Vice, Salon, Mashable and Gawker had all laid off staff. Buzzfeed has been forced to cut its 2016 revenue forecast by half. The Guardian lost 59 million pounds last year and is laying off 250 staff, even though 42 million readers a month visit its international digital news sites. The Daily Mail (53 million digital readers a month), is also struggling.

As independent publisher Eric Beecher told Barry, it is getting harder for news sites to sell ads for decent money “because everyone on the internet has an electronic billboard to fill”.

Business Spectator chief Alan Kohler had this to say about the challenges of persuading online readers to pay:

“The trouble with subscriptions is that there’s just so much free stuff still available; that getting people to pay for content that’s basically the same as what you can get for free is never going to work. I mean, it’s got to be very special to get people to pay.”

The other major obstacle to making a living through online news is the ubiquitous Ad blocker, a (free) piece of software that banishes ads from pages as you browse. Research in the US suggests one in three internet users employ Ad blockers, estimated to cost publishers $22 billion in 2015.

ARM’s regional media online subscription offers subscribers unlimited access to ARM titles across all platforms, unrestricted access to The Courier‐Mail, digital subscription access to FOX SPORTS online, free multi‐platform digital access to The Washington Post and access to the Presto Entertainment bundle. That’s a lot of access for $6 a week.

Despite the impressive numbers around ARM’s online strategy, I suspect there is still a place for free a community newspaper.

I started my journalism career as a country newspaper reporter and my first boss described local news as answering your neighbour’s question: “Who is digging up the road into the park and why, and when will whatever they are doing be finished?”

Call it parish pump if you must, but if people want to know who cut down five roadside trees in Freestone Road, and why. Only the Warwick Daily News (and FOMM) will tell them that. (Main Roads, under the policy of removing any tree that is within one metre of the roadway).

Many of the large circulation newspapers are resorting to what used to be called ‘yellow journalism’ in a bid to attract/retain readers. To wit, the Daily Telegraph’s bizarre page one depiction of Labor leader Bill Shorten as “Billnocchio” – portraying him with a long wooden nose.

Big media, with its obsessions about politics, crime and corruption, big business and celebrities, not to mention haplessly editorialising in favour of a Coalition election victory, are missing the market.

The informal donkey voter

Eeyore's winter onesie — “Eeyore’ in his winter onesie! Photo by Penny Davies

On Saturday, an estimated 2.724 million Australians will either not cast a vote or will vote incorrectly, either by choice or by accident. I say estimate, because it’s my estimate, drawn from official Australian Electoral Commission statistics plus sums based on donkey voter research.

The AEC says there were 15.468 million people on the electoral roll as of March 31, 2016. That’s 94% of eligible voters, which means there are 978,933 people ‘missing’ from the roll. That’s a lower number than in 2013 (1.22 million), but it could still sway a tight election either way.

The second part of the equation is the informal vote, votes which for one reason or another do not get past scrutineers because the ballot papers have been filled out incorrectly or deliberately spoiled.

In 2013, there were 739,872 informal votes or 5.92% of enrolled voters, the highest proportion since 1984 (6.34%), which coincided with the introduction of above-the-line voting in the Senate.

According to Melbourne University’s Election Watch website, the majority of informal voters vote (1) only or fail to fill in all the preference boxes. Others use a tick or a cross instead of numbers. A few write their name on the ballot box (also a no-no). Some informal voters scribble slogans or graffiti on their ballot papers.

After meeting sources in dark corners of underground car parks, I can confirm that drawing penises is a favourite, suggesting (a) the voter thinks all politicians are dicks or (b) likes drawing penises.

The AEC did an analysis of informal voting after the 2013 election. The AEC estimates that just over half of informal voters meant to vote for someone, showing a preference for one or more candidates. But more than a third were disqualified due to incomplete numbering.

One alarming trend is a steady rise in the proportion of informal voters who put blank papers in the ballot box. This rose from 16% in 1987 to 21% in 2001, peaked at 29% in 2010 and dropped to 20% in 2013.

Meanwhile in Brexit

An analysis of the elusive 34% of Brits who did not vote in the 2010 election by Votenone observed that in the 2010 General Election, the UK total of protest and ‘spoilt’ votes was around 295,000, or 1% of voters. However, 34% of registered voters (16 million) just didn’t vote. Votenone advocate these people take direct action by doing just that, ie writing ‘None’ on the ballot paper.

“There have been petitions asking for ‘None of the Above’ (NOTA) on the ballot paper for many years. However, like the demand for votes for women in the early 20th century, success doesn’t come just from asking.”

The UK system is different from ours in several ways, not the least of which is that voting is not compulsory.

Meanwhile, the uniquely Australian phenomenon, the donkey vote, continues to ignore both the carrot and the stick, despite changes to the electoral system post-1984 which should have diminished the influence of the donkey vote. The so-called donkey vote is an anomaly of the preferential voting system. It describes the voter who simply numbers the ballot sheet from the left, or top down, without discernment.

Prior to 1984, the donkey vote was crucial in some seats as candidate names were listed alphabetically and party names did not appear on ballot papers. So numbering your candidates from the left meant that Aaron Aardvark, the Independent candidate for Aarons Pass, collected more votes than he ever thought possible. Some political pundits think the donkey vote is worth as much as 2% of any contest. On that basis, 309,360 votes will be wasted on Saturday.

Mr Shiraz found a 2006 study by the Australian National University which suggests the donkey vote is 1 in 70 or 227,114 votes.

If you want a clear example of how the donkey vote can skew results, look no further than the 2005 by-election for former Labor leader Mark Latham’s seat of Werriwa. There were 16 candidates, listed randomly on the ballot paper. In this instance the donkey vote was reflected in the high vote (4.83%) for Australians Against Further Immigration, a minor party who were placed first on the ballot. (Then again, maybe people meant to vote for them).

To compel or not to compel

The other slab of humanity missing at the polls is the 4.5% or so (696,060) people who are on the roll but don’t bother. A $20 fine applies if you are enrolled but do not vote – a potential $13.92 million windfall.

Australia is one of 22 countries where voting is mandatory, yet our voter turnout has been below 96% every year since 1946. In 2013, the figure was 93.23%; in 2010 93.22% and in the year of Our Kevin it was 94.76%. Nevertheless, we have the largest voter turnout of 34 OECD countries including the US, UK and Canada. In neighbouring New Zealand, where voting is optional, the turnout has only nudged above 80% once since 2002.

But getting back to our specific problem – how to engage the 2.724 million people who are apparently disaffected, uninterested, don’t understand, are too busy mowing lawns, chainsawing storm-tossed trees or having sex on polling day or misguidedly waste their democratic right in voiceless protest.

I heard Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull on radio yesterday urging people not to vote Independent as this could cause “chaos and instability in government”. Fair go Mal (and Bill), we’ve had five different PMs in six years, yet we only voted for two of them.

Meanwhile, a record 1.16 million people had taken advantage of pre-poll voting as of last Saturday (it was 775,000 at the same point in 2013). The speculation is that the increase in pre-poll voting (you qualify if you are going to be away from your electorate on the day, are 8kms or more away from a polling booth or have religious reasons for not voting on a Saturday), is because the government, in its wisdom, picked a date during school and university holidays.

In practical terms, however, nobody is enforcing these rules; you just get asked if you are qualified to vote pre-poll and if you say yes, then in you go. Rod Smith, a professor at the University of Sydney, who specialises in political parties and elections, told the Sydney Morning Herald electoral commissions encourage early voting.

“The categories are out-of-date and it is one of those instances where lawmakers are turning a blind eye to the way the legislation is being implemented.” Smith says.

The latest poll shows the Coalition is ahead of the Opposition 51/49, although other polls suggest 50/50 on a primary vote basis. The bookies have the LNP at $1.08, Labor at 8-1 and odds of a hung parliament at 4-1.

The challenge now is for someone to come up with what language guru Professor Roly Sussex calls a ‘portmanteau’ word (blending the sounds and meanings of two others, for example motel, brunch or Brexit), to describe Australia’s 2016 poll. Here’s a couple to get you started on election night: Texit, Sexit. Let’s hope there is no need to coin a post-election term like the one now widespread in the UK: Bregret.