Category: Friday on My Mind

 

Seven out of 10 Australians think it is a crime to come by boat without a visa and seek refuge. Moreover, 60% of people surveyed by Australian Red Cross think there is an official “queue” of people seeking asylum. Both assumptions are incorrect.
Releasing its survey for Refugee Week, Red Cross CEO Robert Tickner said he was concerned about the level of misunderstanding.
“We think if some of the myths are dispelled we will have a more compassionate and stronger community.
“It’s not a crime to come to Australia by boat without a visa and ask for protection. Everyone has the right to seek asylum from persecution in other countries and it’s not illegal to cross boundaries without documents or passports to do so.”
Mr Tickner said the Red Cross survey also showed people were confused about the numbers of refugees and asylum seekers* in the world today. The number is approximately 17.9 million, yet about a third of respondents picked a figure four times higher and 25% thought it was about nine million.
I’m not a fan of surveys like these, often based on small samples, which are typically sent to media outlets on a Sunday afternoon – ready-made news stories for a slow Monday. I’m making an exception here because, on any analysis, you will find that the deep-seated misunderstandings about asylum seekers and refugees stem from our own government’s PR smokescreen which uses terms like “illegals” when the correct term is “irregulars”.
There is no official queue of people seeking asylum in Australia. The UN system prefers a discretionary process, so there is no guarantee people will be resettled, even if they have been waiting for a long time.

A drop in the bucket

I spent an hour or two trolling through volumes of statistics on this subject. Many refugees want to establish safe, secure lives here, despite the xenophobic attitudes of some Australians.
Of the 35,000 people who lodged offshore refugee applications last year, only 6,500 were granted visas. That’s less than 20%, but sadly, it’s been a fairly constant number for decades, whether our borders are managed by the right or left of politics. Permanent visas available under the skilled and family migrants programme, however, have been steadily increasing and now stand at 190,000 a year. Refugees resettled in Australia represent about 5% of the official migration programme.

Meanwhile, Australia has no commitment to an annual intake of refugees from refugee camps around the world. In just one example, 1.7 million people have been displaced by the Syrian civil war – about 30% of them living in 22 government-run refugee camps along the Syrian-Turkish border. How long can this be sustained?
The plight of the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority group persecuted on religious and political grounds, has been well documented. The Burmese government passed a citizenship law in 1982, the same year they changed the country’s name to Myanmar. The law effectively excluded Rohingya people, saying they were (illegal) Bengali migrants from Bangladesh. This has cast many of the Rohingya into a no-man’s land. About 140,000 refugees live in nine border camps between Thailand and Burma. Some have been living this way for up to 20 years. Eventually, those determined to change their circumstances engage people smugglers.
We’ve all read the claims and counter-claims surrounding the most recent wave of people trying to land anywhere in South East Asia that isn’t Myanmar. The ships were turned away more than once by other Muslim nations, left to drift in the Andaman Sea with dwindling supplies of food and water.

Who pays people smugglers twice?

People smugglers were blamed for creating this situation, and rightly so, but the efforts by governments to solve the problem did not help.
Faced with international outrage fuelled by headlines about “floating coffins,” the Indonesian and Malaysian governments offered to take in asylum seekers, providing they could be resettled or repatriated (sent back) within the year. However, the ABC reported that the UNHCR estimates that at least 2,000 people are still stranded at sea off the Bangladesh and Myanmar coasts. Now we are mired in an un-verifiable debate about whether or not the Abbott Government (and the Rudd/Gillard governments before them), paid people smugglers to turn around and take asylum seekers back to the point of origin. We’ll never get a definitive answer on this because it falls under the purview of “national security”. If we do pay people smugglers, they are in effect being paid twice for a service they are unable to deliver. The cash will then inevitably be recycled into more boats to bring outcasts close enough to foreign shores to force border protection agencies into some form of action.
When pressed by the ABC if he knew whether ASIS (Australian Secret Intelligence Service) officials had ever paid people smugglers in the Labor years, the current Opposition Leader Bill Shorten replied:
“No serious leader of Australia would start talking about ASIS matters. What I can absolutely say is I have been informed Labor has never paid people smugglers to turn around boats at sea.”

Michael Bradley, managing partner of Marque Lawyers, when interviewed on The Drum about the legalities of paying people smugglers to turn the boats around, concluded “I don’t think a crime has been committed, but we’re only speculating until we know the facts, which will be never.”
“That leaves the question of whether this is good policy. Is it in Australia’s national interest that we pay people smugglers to turn around?
“My instinctive reaction was to say no, but on reflection that’s mostly based on my revulsion at the depths which our government is prepared to plumb in pursuit of its policy of preventing asylum seekers from reaching Australia.
“More importantly, the policy itself, in the absolute sense, isn’t necessarily a bad one. It’s just that it can’t be effectively implemented without resort to measures which are morally bankrupt and which debase us as a society.”

Get to a rally tomorrow!
You will have heard a lot about this topic in Refugee Week. If you read news online, it is worthwhile scrolling down to see what readers have to say. If, like me, you plan to attend a rally tomorrow (Brisbane King George Square from 11am Saturday 20th June) and be one the faces behind the banner, you need to know that not everyone thinks we need more compassion and lower barriers to the entry of asylum seekers.
I ran out of paper and ink when printing out The Drum’s two-page story, as it was followed by 47 pages of comments! It’s where people with monikers like The Bronze Anzac and Joe Blow get to have their say and trade opinions with libertarians.
*An asylum seeker is a person whose refugee status has not yet been determined.

Sorry about that headline there – old tabloid journos write their own obituaries, did you know?
I read an intriguing book a month ago – part crime mystery, part science fiction. The Last Policeman by Ben H Winters is set in New Hampshire USA at a time when a large asteroid known as Maia is on a collision course with earth. It has gone beyond speculation – they know where and when the asteroid (6.1 kms wide) will touch down near the Indonesian archipelago.

This curious work of fiction stars the well-meaning obsessive, Detective Hank Palace, who is investigating a suicide he thinks is probably a murder, just when the powers that be have decided it is a waste of time and effort investigating cases that are never going to trial. So the police force is on what the mining industry calls “care and maintenance”, relying on a heavy street presence to thwart outright anarchy.
Intrigued, I tracked down and read the second book in the trilogy (got the third and final from the library yesterday). I’ve been seriously taken in by the all-too realistic scenarios – the underlying tensions between survivalists, conspiracy theorists (who think the military could divert the asteroid with a mid-space nuclear explosion), escapists, who have “gone bucket list” or found easy ways to do themselves in. Then there’s the other people; the ones with guns and knives and no particular moral code. One of the policemen in Winters’ second book is having a little melt-down, during which he splutters “Just you wait until the water runs out…”

I have no particular thoughts or qualms about a pending apocalypse beyond worrying about the effects of climate change. I still cling to a notion that goodness and common sense will prevail and we can save the planet while there is still time.
Pah! I hear you survivalists say. Oh, you thought survivalist movements existed only in Texas? There are many such groups in Australia, clusters of people who think the world will go stinko and not so very far off in the future. They are busy cornering the market on bottled water, iodine tablets, canned and dried food, guns and ammunition and the complete series of Packed to the Rafters and Kath & Kim.
Some of the end-of-the-world-ists thought it might happen on December 21, 2012 when the Mayan Calendar predicted the end-time. A lasting image which did the rounds on Facebook was a cartoon by Dan Piraro depicting two Mayans examining a calendar carved on a round rock. “I only had room to go to 2012,” says one. “Hah! That’ll freak somebody out some day,” says the other.

The end is nigh, sooner or later

Doomsdayers have been around forever – the classic wild-eyed, bearded fellow in rags prowling the city streets with a sign proclaiming “the end if nigh”. There was a lot of it about in the 1930s when 20% of people couldn’t get any work at all.
The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 created a tense atmosphere and an industry for people who built atomic fallout shelters for people who could afford them. Some made their own or converted their basements. Others moved to New Zealand or Australia (some are still here). At the time, Russia had nuclear weapons and was building a missile base in Cuba, a bit close to Miami for comfort. It was the time of the Berlin Wall, the KGB, the Stasi and the Cold War. Everyone was paranoid.
President J.F. Kennedy promulgated the idea of civil defense and the building of fallout shelters, where people could hide until the fallout (atomic dust) settled or drifted away to pollute other countries. Some of those shelters still exist and have been useful during hurricanes, tornados and earthquakes.

Armageddon out of here

I didn’t really want to single out any one organisation that believes in the Armageddon, but since they have turned up at my door uninvited many times in the past, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who continue to warn of an end-time, spring to mind. But as the New York Times observed, in a lengthy 2007 essay about Armageddon, the Jehovahs have nominated the end-time eight times between 1914 and 1994. More recently, we had Y2K in 2000 and the aforementioned Maya non-event in 2012. The true believers no doubt have other forward dates in mind. If you hunt around, you will find a Doomsday Clock, a Rapture Index, cataclysmic forecasts involving the super-volcano under Yellowstone, magnetic pole shifts and climate change disaster scenarios.

The Australian did a piece a while ago about an entrepreneur in the US who has built the ultimate underground shelter where 80 people (each parting with $US35k), can go and hang out for a year, hoping that whatever happened up there will dissipate to the point where the surgeons, doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers and trauma counsellors who survive can emerge from their techno-cave and rebuild civilisation.
It is worth having a look at the overview video. This is not an unlikely response in the US, where wealthy people have paid to have their remains put on ice until such day a cure for the ailment that killed them can be found.

Get a good job (and a haircut, damn hippies)

Meanwhile in Australia, June 2015, $US35k ($A45k) could possibly be enough for a deposit on your first home, assuming you have a good job that pays good money. The 7 million-plus Australians who rent houses or units, unable to get a foot on the home owner ladder, would have been grossly insulted this week by Treasurer Joe Hockey’s glib solution to housing affordability.
Last week I wrote about homelessness and how it touches even seemingly prosperous villages like ours. But it can be just as much of a struggle for those who do manage to put a roof over their heads.
Did you know that of the 7.2 million Australians who were renting in 2011, 3.02 million need help to pay their landlords? Two thirds of those people were receiving Commonwealth Rental Assistance and a third lived in social housing. (ABS stats).

A Griffith University study found that between 1997 and 2010, Australian house prices increased nationally by 220%. The deterioration of housing affordability in Australia is more alarming in relative terms. In 1980 the average salary in Sydney was $13,780, and the average house price $64,800, a multiple of 4.7 times earnings. By 1990, house prices in Sydney were a multiple of 5.89 times earnings, and 6.58 times earnings in 2000. By 2010, the average salary was $65,565, but the average house price was some 10.1 times higher, at $663,000.

Academics Gavin Wood and Rachel Ong writing for The Conversation observed that Australia’s housing system is saddled with growing indebtedness. Between 1990 and 2011, mortgage debt soared relative to average household incomes. The table below shows how the proportion of home owners with outstanding mortgage debt has increased. Fortunately, interest rates are much lower than in 1990, so home owners can service loans that are larger relative to household income.

So let’s hope they have a good job that pays good money.

The first chilly days of winter should turn our thoughts to those who don’t enjoy the warmth and security of a brick house, a fireplace, a comfy bed and a doona. You may glimpse such people huddled in doorways, covered with threadbare blankets or sleeping bags, as you rush from one place to another. There could be a piece of cardboard with “homeless – please help” written on it. And there may be a dog, keeping a wary eye out.
There are many and complex reasons why people end up homeless and (for a minority of those considered to be homeless) sleeping rough, in their cars, in abandoned buildings, in parks or on the street. While the dishevelled person huddled in a doorway with their belongings in plastic bags might be the stereotype, Homelessness Australia says 6% of homeless people sleep rough or in improvised dwellings like tents and shelters. The others find temporary accommodation, maybe at a mate’s place or at a hostel. That still means that on any given night in Australia, six to seven thousand people are sleeping rough.

According to Homelessness Australia, the main reasons include domestic or family violence (23%), financial difficulties (16%), housing crisis (15%), inadequate or inappropriate dwellings (11%), relationship or family breakdown (6%), housing affordability stress (5%) and 20% described as “other” which we assume includes mental health issues or a combination of events. One in 200 Australians are said to be homeless at any point in time, albeit at times for a relatively short period. On our population today that’s about 119,000 people without a secure roof over their heads.
She Who Visited Melbourne Recently said she was surprised, no, shocked to see so many people, women, young women, on the street, apparently nowhere else to go. She and her friend had been out to dinner and there was so much food they couldn’t eat it all and asked for doggie bags. Naturally enough, given their generous nature, they offered these food packages to a couple of homeless women, despite some concern that they might be told to eff off. But no, the food was gratefully received.
The Salvation Army told the Sydney Morning Herald last week poor families in Australian cities are living on as little as $18 a day. The Salvation Army surveyed 2,400 people and found that their average weekly income was $305, but they spent $180 on accommodation, leaving just $125 to cover all other expenses including food, transport, clothing and utility bills. Those on Newstart had the least money after housing costs, with childless couples managing on just $9.57 a day. Two-thirds of parents were unable to afford children’s activities or an internet connection and one-third could not provide fresh fruit and vegetables for their children each day. Clearly people living on a budget like that are at risk of becoming homeless – do you eat or do you pay the rent? And how many of them will read this internet-delivered essay?
It isn’t hard to find the statistics for homeless people in big cities. There are agencies that keep track of indigent people, although the accuracy of the figures is questionable, given the tendency of homeless people to roam and the Gen X practice of “couch surfing”, which is basically kipping on the couch at a mate’s place until one of his housemates objects to the extra body not paying rent.
The real issue with statistics on the homeless is that the reliable numbers (from the Census) are already four years out of date. In 2010, the Federal Government sought to improve this, commissioning the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic Research to design and implement the Journeys Home survey. The survey tracks a national sample of individuals exposed to high levels of housing insecurity. The sample uses Centrelink’s Homeless Indicator which tracks recipients of an income support payment flagged as either “homeless” or “at risk of homelessness”.
The May 2015 Journeys Home survey found that about three out of five respondents experienced homelessness at some stage over the two and a half year survey period, most for a relatively short period of time. Of the three types, primary homelessness − people without conventional accommodation − was much less common, with only around 12% of respondents literally homeless at some stage over the survey period and typically for relatively short periods.
Journeys Home defines a secondary homelessness as people who move frequently from one form of temporary shelter to another, and includes ‘couch surfing’ and use of emergency accommodation (refuges, shelters, etc.). Tertiary homelessness refers to people staying in boarding houses on a medium to long-term basis (13 weeks or longer).
I wondered which of these categories is more prevalent in our Hinterland village, a prosperous little town of 3,000. Rental properties are tightly held here and you need good references to get a foot in the door. The Maleny Neighbourhood Centre is holding a “conversation” later this month about emergency housing, as the people who run the centre are well aware that homelessness is an issue here.
The Centre has a project through www.streetswags.org/ to distribute swags to people who need them. The waterproof swags, which have a pillow compartment where the person using the swag can store clothes, are made by prisoners at the Woodford Correctional Centre. They cost $80 each and the Neighbourhood Centre is hoping to raise money to buy swags for people who come to the centre on a daily basis with nowhere to sleep at night.
Adrian Pisarski, executive officer National Shelter says the swag is a practical response, but a temporary fix.
“There is a building body of evidence around the world that when we provide housing, most homelessness disappears,” he says. “We have tended to pathologise homelessness rather than go for the obvious solution.”
But tight rental vacancies in most capital cities and regional towns mean intense competition when a house or flat comes up for rent. Musician friends moved to Melbourne a few years ago and turned up for a 5pm rental house inspection to find 50 other people waiting in line.
“If we’d known, we would have brought our instruments and busked,” they joked.
The University of Melbourne’s Dr Shelley Mallett, writing for The Conversation in 2014, described a similar scene she witnessed in West Brunswick where the house next door was up for rent. Like the time before, a couple with a baby took up residence. Mallett said young, single people found it hard to compete in some segments of the rental market and were more likely to be in precarious housing situations such as unaffordable housing or overcrowded households. They were also more likely to be the victim of a forced move. No wonder, then, that young people are leaving home aged 23 or 24, later than other generations, often returning to the family home multiple times following job loss, tenancy breakdown or other life crises.
Whatever compromises have to be made between parents and their adult children, it surely beats a swag on a park bench in the middle of winter.

My laptop is doing odd things – taking forever to load things I think I need and occasionally sending messages that the hard drive is full – blue-screen critical. The same goes for my two terabyte external hard drive – chockers, as are most of the USB memory sticks lying around.

I downloaded a programme which analyses your computer and graphically shows you what type of files are taking up most room. Yes, I know, the programme just added to the mess, but it was a salutary lesson. Part of the problem is that modern PCs come with back-up systems that take up an enormous amount of space on a hard-drive and if you don’t set it up right, it just keeps on adding back-ups, willy-nilly. Then there are very large music and video files and photos. OMG, the photos. I don’t know where to start – do you? Let’s not even think about the cupboard full of prints and negatives from the 1970s through to our first digital cameras.

Those of us with a penchant for hoarding (you know, collecting bent nails in case times get really tight), add to the physical clutter by becoming a digital hoarder. For example, I’m pretty sure my Outlook folder (27GB) contains every email I ever sent and most emails I ever received. The smart thing to do would be to delete everything. I recall a business acquaintance once telling me he came back from three weeks holiday and did just that with the hundreds of emails that accumulated while he was away – control alt delete.

“If it was that important, they’ll get back to me.”

We are now being told that we can store electronic files in “the cloud” and, what’s more, it doesn’t cost anything. Do I feel secure about my scanned family archives being stored off-site by some faceless internet company? Not bloody likely.

I have gradually been whittling away at the edges of my hoarding habit. The trouble is when you’ve been writing for 40 years, that’s a lot of paper. Boxes full of journals, two four-drawer filing cabinets full of what are probably first drafts, second drafts and multiple copies of the same documents.

Then there are the shoeboxes full of letters from one’s parents, siblings and lovers. Last year I did a “cull” of the correspondence files which to be honest, amounted to throwing out Christmas and birthday cards from the 1970s and 1980s. But when it came to Father’s letters, and the letters I wrote to him (retrieved after he died and my sister and I cleaned out his flat), I confess I sorted them more or less chronologically, put rubber bands around the bundles and carefully put them back into a new shoe box.

“Someday my son will find this interesting,” I tell myself, thinking about the historical relevance (Dad complaining about Mr Muldoon and Rogernomics (unpopular 1980s economic policy in New Zealand). He probably won’t, but you never know, do you?

Our children, generally speaking, don’t appear to have a clutter problem at all, apart from their bedrooms.

For Gen X and Y it’s all about NOW and who will be first to post a party photo on Facebook. They live with phone in hand and (having conducted a straw poll) I can tell you that few of their cohort ever back up data.

Hoarding ranges from very specific collecting (stamps, butterflies, fridge magnets and so on) to a major psychological problem.  TV current affairs programmes love a good hoarder, especially if they can get footage of the reporter squeezing his or her way past 10 years’ worth of newspapers stacked in the hall. Keeping “stuff” because of its historic relevance is something else again. I have a couple of archives boxes full of newspaper cuttings, stories I wrote for the long-defunct Daily Sun. You might remember The Daily Sun – for a while there it was a genuine competitor to The Courier-Mail and we took our work seriously, often beating the CM to stories when they had five journalists for every one of us.

The Daily Sun library had paper files, thousands of them, kept up to date by librarians who would help you find the background stories you needed to write a new one. As far as I know this historic news archive (1982 to 1991) was taken to the tip. The National Library will have The Sun on microfilm, but those hand-pasted clips, an alternative view of Brisbane’s written contemporary history, are gone forever.

Burning Father’s Letters

Last year I wrote a song around this subject, Burning Father’s Letters, which includes a spoken word narrative about Charles Dickens and the Gad’s Hill Bonfire. In 1860 Dickens took more than 22,000 letters and private papers out to the back of his estate in County Kent and torched them. They included letters from famous writers of the day including William Thackeray and Lord Alfred Tennyson. Other writers of the Victorian era also burned their personal correspondence to thwart publishers who craved collections of letters which they’d publish after the writers’ death. http://www.thegoodwills.com/mp3-player/

Someone who has our new album wrote to say how the song resonated with him as he had been through this very situation after his Mother’s death. I want to close this week’s column with an extract from his letter to me.

“On my recent trip to the UK for my Mum’s funeral, I took with me a large packet of letters written to me over the years by both my father and my mother. They went back decades. The elder of my two sisters told me a while ago that the best thing to do was to burn them, but somehow I couldn’t do that. The finality of it all, the end of recorded, written memory just seemed too much. I guess in the end that’s what happens to most correspondence from those who die. I thought, “Will my kids ever want to read these?”‘ And the answer was No, they won’t. They will never know what it was like in my home when my parents got a telephone connected; the first black and white television; the crises and sometimes disasters that befell them. A chronicle of a working class family’s life from the 1970s in short – them in urban England; me, discovering the world.

“I took the bundle of letters back home and gave them to my other sister who has been reading them and who says they are beautiful and she is glad I didn’t destroy them. There are others – boxes of them from people who played an important part in my life. Can I bear to burn them one day? Will I have to?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You won’t read too much in the mainstream media about the online news magazine, The Conversation. In case you didn’t know about The Conversation (research-based articles by academics), the Federal Labor Government gave the not-for-profit news organisation seed money of $1.5 million in 2011 and an extra $2 million over two years in the 2013 budget. But Education Minister Christopher Pyne has cut the funding, so The Conversation has to replace 25% of its operational budget.
An article in Pro Bono Australia quoted editor Andrew Jaspan (pictured) as saying the aim was to be fully self-sufficient by 2017 through contributions from its global network.
“We must now take stock,” he said.

In the 10 days since the Federal Budget revealed the cuts, this stock-taking has resulted in more than 1,000 readers donating $190,000 via a direct plea for donations on the home page of the website. Meanwhile, The Conversation continues daily with the support of a majority of Australian universities and the CSIRO.
I feel a little bad about this as I get The Conversation in my mailbox every day and to my shame do not always read it extensively. This could well be the syndrome my son’s generation refers to as TMTR (too much to read). But the gems I have mined from this rich body of intellectual discourse have been nuggets of precious information I would not have found elsewhere. For example, on Wednesday, there was an insightful article about people with bipolar disorder and why they struggle to interact with others.
One of my readers donated $200 on hearing news of The Conversation’s fiscal plight. He says it is the only daily news he reads, the why of that probably best explained by Andrew Jaspan.
“We believe healthy democracies need access to high quality, non-partisan, evidence-based information,” Jaspan told Pro Bono Australia. “That has struck a chord with our two and a half million readers.”
Jaspan said yesterday the donations would buy some time while other initiatives are investigated. The funding target is $300,000 and on the response so far, that seems achievable. Crowd-funding platforms like Indiegogo or Kickstarter, both of which work with not-for-profits, extract a commission for their work. At least $60,000 of a successful $1 million campaign would go in commissions and processing fees.
So we can see why The Conversation decided to make a direct plea to its readers. One hopes they discover a wealthy benefactor out there.

If you delve into the detail of any government’s budget you will find funding cuts that one could hypothesise were made on partisan grounds, to shut down criticism of the government. It is easier to single out when, like The Conversation’s financial support, the sum involved is pocket change on the scale of a Federal Budget.
Art for art’s sake?
Meanwhile, this year the Abbott government got a bit tricky with arts funding too. Instead of cutting funds to the Arts, a new entity was created to distribute the funds. The National Programme for Excellence in the Arts takes $105 million from the Australia Council and puts it in Arts Minister Senator George Brandis’s top drawer for re-distribution to arts organisations. There has been much discourse on this move, with the easy conclusion that the top end of town arts initiatives (opera, ballet, light classical), will be generously endowed, while there will be less money available for writers, experimental art and theatre. Of course, the same sort of criticism could be levelled at the Australia Council, which has developed a reputation for favouring the arts in Sydney and Melbourne. So at best, Senator Brandis could just be trying to revitalise regional arts. Radio National’s Michael Cathcart asked him what kinds of excellence was the Australia Council not supporting.
Senator Brandis, after dancing around the question for a few minutes, said it was about “contestability” – that it was not an ideal situation that all arts funding be administered by the Australia Council. He said he wants to give artists and performers who miss out on funding “a second go”. In many ways, this could be a response to what is a widespread perception that the Australia Council is a “closed shop”.
But as Cathcart pointed out, the Australia Council, which has a remaining budget of $185 million, is also being directed to trim $7.2 million from its own budget over four years through “efficiencies”. The Budget papers says these savings would be met by cuts to artists in residence and the ArtStart programme, which means small companies and start-ups would be disadvantaged. Cathcart’s telling question was when he asked Senator Brandis whether some sections of the arts community were anxious that this would amount to “State-sanctioned art”.
“That’s a nonsense criticism. The money comes from the government and ultimately the taxpayer. If you take that argument to its logical conclusion you wouldn’t have any support for culture or the arts for fear that it is, to use your words, State-sanctioned.”
Nevertheless, purveyors of fringe arts see their funding, peripatetic at best, wafting away on the autumn zephyr. There will be no “Abbott the Musical” in the foreseeable future.

Crowded market?

As we have discussed in this forum before today, online crowd-funding platforms are fast taking the place of government and council-operated grant systems. But can crowd-funding be “scaled-up” to raise serious amounts of cash? Business magazine BRW listed the top ones last year, mostly computer games, toys, IT gadgets and other inventions. The stars of Bondi Rescue, Jesse Polock and Maxi Maxwell, raised $105,380 through Pozible to complete a Jet Ski ride from Sydney to Cairns, to raise awareness of mental health charity headspace and make a documentary. So anything is possible.
The financial securities industry has hopped on to crowd-funding in the US, where 534 companies successfully hit their online equity target in year one (2,824 did not), raising on average $407,685 per company. Forbes Magazine says the next step will be to allow ordinary investors to participate in crowd funding equity start-ups. In Canberra, Treasury issued a discussion paper on this subject in December. Our corporate regulator ASIC has already had its say about risk management; it would limit the maximum amount raised and cap annual investments by individuals. (ASIC doesn’t regulate crowd-funding activities unless they involve investment schemes).
So The Conversation continues apace, its future a little hazier without that guaranteed money from the Feds. But it has an established track record and an international growth trajectory, so there’s no good reason why a direct-action crowd-funding campaign wouldn’t work.
It just takes people to move beyond pressing “Like” on their Facebook page. I gave The Conversation $50 and if they’re still around in May 2016, I’ll do it again.
Hopefully some of you will too.
https://theconversation.com/au
…and in closing, we have joined Soundcloud, a music streaming website where you can go and listen to a song from each of our four albums. Be sure to “like” us, if indeed you do!

She Who Pays The Bills has been keeping a household budget since long before we took up the business of joint accounts and sharing one car (more on that later). When I was perusing The Courier-Mail’s comic-book summary of the Federal budget (a free read in a coffee shop, OK), it came to mind what a jolly old mess households would be in if, like our dim-witted leaders in Canberra, they had doubled their debt from one year to the next.
Some households may already have a deficit: maxed-out credit cards, cars on lease-plans, already-spent-the-redundancy, horrific mobile phone bills and investment houses so highly geared that a tardy tenant or a late-night flitter could tip them into foreclosure.
Those of you who do not have a household budget (a month by month accounting of what is coming in and what is due to go out), well, good luck with that. Those tempted to start need a blank Excel spreadsheet and name it Budget 101. Or, if you want to have the heavy lifting done for you, try this link: https://www.moneysmart.gov.au/tools-and-resources/calculators-and-apps/budget-planner.
The Federal Budget 2015 interactive spreadsheet (above) was set (by me) to show the tax distribution of someone earning $200k a year. Find out where your tax dollar goes at http://www.budget.gov.au/

How to find out how broke you are

Hindsight is a wonderful thing – we over-60s have lots of it and it usually comes dressed up as sage advice with a pinch of arrogance tossed in.
Household budgeting ought to form the core of a Practical Living exam children have to pass before they are allowed to leave school. Moreover (just using that term to show I went to Uni), mutually agreed household budgets ought to be the anchor of prenuptial agreements. Parents should actively involve their children in the process, (Junior Senators get the final say in passing the Family Budget). That is no less odd a situation than the Federal Government finds itself in.
So let’s start with Housing, which includes rent or mortgage repayments, house and contents insurance, Council rates and utilities (electricity, gas, water, heating/cooling). Conventional wisdom is that this should consume about a third of your income. If it is more, you just can’t afford to live where you’re living.
Utilities can cover a range of expenditures that were not around in our parents’ days – mobile phones, internet and pay TV. You probably know of households where Mum, Dad and all three kids each have a mobile phone. There will also be at least one Ipad and two TVs. The technology has become all-pervasive and there are more gadgets to come. The cost to a family can be considerable, especially with teenagers whose lives are governed by peer groups.
The Health portfolio causes families a lot of angst. Should we support the public health system and take the risk with long waiting lists for elective surgery, or do we fork out up to $5,000 a year for private insurance? How much should we set aside for prescriptions, over-the-counter medications, supplements and the like?
Moneysmart devotes a section to insurance and financial budgeting. What you pay depends on your stage of life. A 39-year-old Dad with family commitments should and probably does have a life insurance policy, but he’s about to get a rude shock. When he turns 40 his premiums will rise sharply with the increasing actuarial risk of his dropping dead without warning.

Buy a pushbike, maybe?

Transport gobbles up a large chunk of household money. I mentioned at the outset that we have been sharing one car for as long as we’ve been together. Last time we bought a property, I worked out that the house and half-acre of land cost roughly what we would have spent on a second vehicle over 20 years. We weren’t being especially clever. We just couldn’t afford a second car at the time and never got round to buying one.
The RACQ estimates that car owners spend from about $8,964 a year (to own and operate a small car) up to $21,448 a year for a top of the line SUV. This is based on buying new and running the car for five years. The cheapest of the small cars cost $42,298.71 to own and maintain over five years and the large SUV cost $107,441.14. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
It does not necessarily follow that the family which does not own a vehicle and uses public transport and taxis will save that much over five years. Some city families have two cars but end up using public transport as well, to avoid tolls, parking costs and the stress and delays of commuting by road. Moneysmart’s budget planner advises people to set aside money for fines, air travel, rego and driver’s licences. To which I might add, factor in about 3% a year for inflation in the household budget so that when you renew your licence in five years’ time it won’t be such a shock.
The big imponderable in Moneysmart’s planner is listed as Entertainment/Eat-Out. Seriously? Does anyone budget for the nights when everyone gets home late, tired and grumpy and the easiest way out is dial-a-pizza? Oh and let’s rent a video while we’re at it. People whose work life involves frequent business meetings in city coffee shops will easily go through $100 a week, more if they’re in the habit of meeting friends for lunch.
Children ought to budgeted for, starting with a First Baby Package (cot, pram, stroller, rocker, baby clothes, change table, self-help books, pre-natal classes – shall I go on?) Later on there are toys, books, computer games and videos, not to mention
babysitting, childcare, sports and activities, school fees, excursions, school uniforms and books. Oh yes, and child support (where applicable).

Cohabitation and compromise

The problem with these catch-all budget calculators is you can feel hemmed in. Moneysmart’s “personal and medical” section is where most of the household savings can be made. But it will require that good old mainstay of domestic harmony – compromise ¬– to decide which items among cosmetics and toiletries, health and beauty, computers and gadgets, jewellery and accessories, sports and gym and “hobbies” are expendable. Those of you thinking of co-habiting with someone might want to talk this section over with your prospective partner.
Mind you, it is good for One’s self-esteem and One’s sense of independence to have One’s own money and do with it what One wants (even if Two thinks you’re mad to spend $600 on Fleetwood Mac tickets).
If you have never done the household budget exercise or let it slide, it could be an illuminating start to the weekend. Clearly the people who took part in a recent Choice survey think about household budgets. Their main cost of living concern (Feb 2015) was electricity, then food and groceries, fuel, and health/medical. A third of those surveyed said they were finding it difficult to get by on their present income and 21% said they lived off a credit card to cover the gap until payday.
I can’t see too much in the Federal Budget to ease those concerns.

I had a ‘jump the shark’ moment this week. What, you don’t know about jumping the shark?
It is a buzz phrase coined to describe the point in a TV series when far-fetched events are included merely for the sake of novelty, indicative of a decline in quality.
The term originates from an episode of Happy Days where The Fonz goes water-skiing and literally jumps a shark. There are loads of examples of bad choice formula departures in contemporary TV drama. ER had a couple and long-running medical soap Grey’s Anatomy has had several shark jumping moments – for example, the episode in which all of the surgeons started singing while operating. An operate-etta if you like. Last week, Dr Dreamy witnessed a car accident and saved three people using his outstanding medical skills and some glad wrap. Then he jumped back in his car and drove out onto the road and while reaching down to get his phone collided with a big truck. Next thing we know he’s on the operating table, trying to tell the Emergency Doctors that he has a bleed in his brain, but he can’t talk. That’s jumping the shark.

This usually comes about when the series writers feel hemmed in by the constraints of a fixed number of sets or locations. The splendid Danish political drama Borgen, for example, takes place mostly in the female Prime Minister’s home or the Castle (houses of parliament). So it’s not really surprising that the writers have the PM visiting Danish troops in Afghanistan or making a peace-keeping mission to some transparently fictitious African nation. These outdoor sorties typically happen in hospital soaps too, because there’s just so much you can do in an operating theatre where every actor is wearing a mask (or at least holding it in front of their mouth). Pastemagazine.com lists the ten worst offenders, but since they are mostly shows I didn’t watch (Will & Grace, Buffy, Roseanne, The Cosby Show), I’m none the wiser.

So here we are, about to mark the first year of Friday on My Mind, but fortunately I haven’t reached the stage where I feel it necessary to leap over sea creatures. It’s just that seeing the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy prompted me to talk about our secret obsession with medical soaps and obscure sub-titled drama series.
And an anniversary like this is kind of important; it prompted me to finish printing out the weekly column and filing it in a ring binder appropriately enough called Friday on My Mind. I print another copy for my sister in New Zealand who does not have a computer. That’s right; some people don’t have computers, or mobile phones or even answering machines.
So I’m thumbing through these 62,400-odd words, and odd some of them are indeed, to see how I went.
There’s a few that didn’t work because I tried interviewing people and quoting them and then you have to edit 2,800 words to 1,200 words which is never a great idea. She Who Sorts My Syntax wrote a couple, so I’m not officially up to episode 52 yet.

There was a fair bit about our CD – you know what they say, write about what you know. A regular reader and house concert attendee ambled over to the “merch” table at our CD launch and playfully said: “I suppose I’d better buy one of these CDs you’ve been banging on about for ages.” He bought multiple copies, so I figure he was just making a point, and a good point it was.

If you only just found us
For those of you who recently joined, I’ve been emailing this column to an ever-growing list of people and then I post it to a WordPress website. If you subscribe or “follow” on the website, the column comes to you as an email in any event. It’s just dressed a little differently. I have a handful of online subscribers who evidently prefer to receive Friday on My Mind in this way. Then I post it to Facebook, where I hang out quite a bit, and Twitter, where I don’t go at all. You can post comments online or email me directly and statistics show the majority of readers prefer the latter.
As some of you might know, I wrote a column for the Toowoomba Chronicle in the mid-80s, being blessed with an editor who was happy to let me write what I liked and take the flak. My English Lit lecturer at the time, one Bruce Dawe AO, encouraged me; he liked the ye olde English I sometimes employed and what he called the “common touch”, something you’ll find plenty of in Bruce’s poetry. Try as I might, I could never break through to writing such a column in the city media; we wrote plenty of gossip columns and I contributed to The Good Mail, a famous column on the back page of the Sunday Mail. The late Don Busmer was the editor of that page or to be more accurate he compiled it while doing 101 other things to get the weekly miracle out the door. Don came in one Tuesday morning (we had Mondays off) and after an hour or two pronounced Sunday’s page a “three-piano column”. Apparently, he’d written a snippet about an old person’s home that was very keen to get its hands on a (free) piano. By Tuesday morning The Good Mail had found not one but three pianos. It was a bit like Macca on a Sunday morning but written down.

Why broadsheets were better
Journalists don’t have that kind of space to play with today and if they do, it will be social pages, fashion, cooking or showbiz celebrities (and their many marriages and children with odd names), or strange fads like twerking and jumping the shark.
The Sunday Mail in Brisbane went tabloid in March 1992 and while The Good Mail continued for some years, you could tell that sports had their eye on the back page. When broadsheet newspapers convert to tabloid format, the main thing that happens is you get roughly half as much news and what news there is has to be more actively edited.
Nevertheless, tabloid sells. Last November, Queensland tabloid The Courier-Mail (which was a broadsheet until 2006), announced it had increased its officially audited circulation by 0.13%, the only Australian newspaper to record a sales increase over the six month period to September 30.
But there’s no space for a 1200-word column in a tabloid. I’d like you to think of Friday on My Mind as an old-style broadsheet newspaper column you can read without having to buy the newspaper.
There should be more of it.

watch video

Even though I have lived in the southern hemisphere since I was six years old, Kath Tait’s song about prejudice and xenophobia resonates with me. My folks immigrated to New Zealand, taking up residence in a two-horse North Island town in the 1950s. Kids at our school had strident voices and peculiar accents. I was a novelty – a six-year-old boy with a broad east coast Scottish accent. Women would come into the bakery after school and accost my Mum.
“Make him talk,” they’d say.Not so long after, I lost the accent and started saying fush and chups  like all the other fullas. Some 20 years later I went travelling, eventually settling in Australia because it was big and warm, it seemed less insular and there were so many opportunities to live and work in what seemed like different countries within the same continent. So I stayed, got married, had a family and have a piece of paper that says I am Australian, although deep down I’m a citizen of the world and I think we owe it to people fleeing persecution and hardship to offer refuge.

The lure of the land of milk and honey

Mum and Dad were economic refugees in the 1950s. I can remember Mum working out how to make her rations stretch out over a week of feeding two adults and three children – an ounce of butter and one egg per person per week, for example. I remember Uncle giving me the top off a boiled egg like some kind of caviar-like treat. I also remember Dad picking me up from school in a blizzard, pushing his bike through the ever-deepening snow and the gathering gloom.
So what could be so scary about leaving your country of birth and travelling 12,000 miles by sea to the promised land of milk and honey? It was probably the first and only time my Dad had a six-week holiday where his every need was taken care of, from the quiet knock on our shared cabin door at 7am (cup of tea Mr Wilson?), to the leisurely three-course dinners in the tourist-class dining room. Of course the Promised Land was not quite what they envisaged and the sponsoring employer didn’t do the right thing, but they persevered, making a good impression, going to the Kirk on the Sabbath and spending the afternoon listening to Jimmy Shand records.

Whatever happened to the open door?

New Zealanders and Australians have a bit of a hide taking the piss out of strangers and foreigners when one in four of us were born somewhere else. And now we have a government which is skating as close to a White Australia policy as you could possibly get. True, Labor governments have ballsed up our refugee/asylum seeker policy too. But it’s not that hard, as Kath Tait says in “Strangers and Foreigners.”

Lots of people think, when they own their own homes,
That they can keep the immigrants out of their living zones.
Strangers and foreigners are everywhere
But they don’t bother me, no I don’t care.
If you look at yourself you just might find
A stranger or a foreigner in your own mind.
So be kind to yourself and have some care
For strangers and foreigners everywhere.

Kath’s song goes on to discuss gays and lesbians, fools and dickheads and generally preaches tolerance in her uniquely under-stated way. We could do with more Tait-isms in this country. Our policy of diverting refugees and asylum seekers to offshore detention centres is not in any way defensible. It seems such a reversal of our acceptance of British and European migrants in the 1950s and 1960s and the Vietnamese in the 1970s. My folks looked forward most, I’m told, to an egalitarian land where anyone could “have a go.”

Second class wait here

My elder sister tells a story about the day we boarded the Rangitiki at Tilbury near London in 1955. She was 14 at the time so remembers clearly a voice over the ship’s loudspeakers: “Mr Robert Wilson, telegrams for Mr Wilson can be collected at the Purser’s office.” So my sister was sent to collect the telegrams. But she got lost and ended up in the first-class dining room where a waiter who was setting out the silverware for dinner kindly gave her directions.
“Have a good look around,” he apparently said. “Because once we sail you won’t be allowed up here.”
We sailed to New Zealand, via Curacao, The Galapagos, the Panama Canal and Pitcairn Island. I was at first confined to the nursery with younger children and babies until I complained loudly and often until I was released into my father’s custody.
So the five of us, from somewhere else, settled in New Zealand and Australia and now there are 30 whanau or extended family.
I’ve written a couple of songs about this. Impressions of New Zealand is just that, based on letters my Mum wrote about our first year in the colonies. The companion piece, Rangitiki, is more about emigration, economic refugees and why it was OK then but it is not OK now.
Now there’s a YouTube video, out there for anyone who wants to watch and listen and catch the subtlety of the message. I’m indebted to the photographers who allowed me to use their images, particularly Lukas Schrank, who has produced a 15-minute animated documentary about Manus Island, in which two detainees tell their stories over the telephone. We supported this venture when Lukas raised money through Pozible for post-production. Some of the stills from this movie appear in our video.

Seven million and counting

Not everyone will agree with my take on emigration and refugees and that’s OK – it’s a free country. I consider myself to have ‘small l’ liberal ideas in the true sense, that all persons should be treated equally. I have a big problem with the Australian Government spending our tax dollars to keep people in onshore and offshore detention centres without those people being charged or convicted of an offence. Seven million people have come to these fair shores since World War II and made a life for themselves and their families. It is fundamentally unfair not to extend the hand of friendship to those who arrive here by unorthodox means, driven by persecution, fear and desperation.
As former PM Julia Gillard told the Migration Council conference in 2013.
“We are a nation of migrants. I know – because I’m one myself. My family made that journey of hope and courage to a new land.
Together we have built a nation that strives to be classless, confident and compassionate. But above all, a country which is decent. A country that has been enriched by the hand of welcome each generation holds out to those who come after us.”

Roll up, roll up, see the tattooed lady

We were mingling with herds of people last week at Suncorp Stadium (the Broncos won). On the train getting there, I espied an attractive woman in her late 20s, wearing a backless, strapless dress held up by natural means alone. While I was admiring the healthy tone of her skin, the fine down at the nape of the neck etc, she half turned to reveal what in rugby league terms is known as a “sleeve”.
The league boys go in big time for the sleeve – an assortment of tattoos which usually run from the cap of the shoulder to the wrist and rarely if ever leave any skin unadorned in between.
My observational skills and memory let me down now as I can’t recall what she had tattooed on her arm, but it was a new tattoo, very ornate and colourful. As she and the assumed boyfriend exited the train, he gently placed a helpful hand in the small of her back to ensure she alighted safely. This is not the first time I’ve seen beautiful young women, their arms, legs, or exposed areas of their backs thusly adorned so I wasn’t too shocked. Part of the shock factor is that living where we live, women in their late 20s wearing strapless backless gowns walking down the main street are a bit under-represented.
Getting new tattoos is nothing new.
Young people today probably think getting a new tattoo is something new and daring. The earliest known tattoos were worn somewhere between 7,000 and 5,000 BC, as a symbol of group membership or a rite of passage, according to resonancefrequency.net. To the Maori and other Polynesian groups, Ta Moko (facial tattoos), were like a history of your achievements, representing status in the tribe. The Australian Museum says it was a huge honour for men and women to have Ta Moko. Tattoos were applied to the face and buttocks of men, and to the chin, lips and shoulders of women. In the 19th century and earlier, Ta Moko was chiselled in using an albatross bone, with gum and dye from vegetation rendered to soot and mixed with oil.
Newly-inked young people might not know there was a time during the 1930s when men and women, desperate to feed their families, offered up their bodies to the tattooist and then went on the road with a travelling circus or carnival. Folks used to pay good money for a freak show.
If it wasn’t a bearded lady, a man with boobs, or a woman with a beard, it would be a sword-swallowing midget or the aforementioned tattooed lady. The latter called for all-over tatts so women (or men) could pose virtually naked, while punters could spend as long as they’d paid for to study the artwork up close.
I know these things, not only because of Dr Google, but because I’m old enough to remember the half-man/half-woman freak shows that existed at travelling carnivals.
Groucho Marx sang about “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” in the 1939 Marx Brothers film “At the Circus”, which is just about as tawdry as one might imagine. The original version has made its way on to YouTube, because of the notoriety when it was used as a ringtone for a character’s cell phone in the finale of Breaking Bad.
In the first part of the 20th century, people sometimes used tattoos to launch a new career. The Committee for Skeptical Enquiry (CSI) gives the example of Horace Ridler, a British ex-army officer who was down on his luck and in the late 1920s opted to become a circus star. He had himself tattooed all over with zebra-like stripes (the process took a year). The circus story was that he was forcibly tattooed by New Guinea savages.
Tattoos were a class taboo at the turn of the 20th century. Some middle to upper class ladies indulged in small butterflies or flowers but never showed them outside the house. In that era, women with visible tatts were considered to be “loose”, although why the same distinction did not apply to men is something Germane Greer could talk about for hours.
No regrets?
In 2015, it is hip and cool (and expensive) to get inked. Many musicians, sound guys and roadies I know have tattoos of one kind or another. They tend to be more than vague about why they did it and hell would freeze over before the word “regret” ever passed their lips. No such mystery why rugby league players go in for tatts – it’s a team thing – a bloke thing.
Our son has a couple of discreet tatts. When his mother first heard of this she asked: “Where did you get the tattoo?”
“Thailand,” he replied.
“No, I mean where on your body!”
My late uncle was in the merchant navy as a young man and had expansive tattoos on his chest and back. I can’t accurately recall, but I think one was of a sailing ship and the other a women or a garland of roses. (Sorry if I got this wrong – it was 60+ years ago and my cousin doesn’t do email.)What I do remember is Uncle telling my Dad that every day as he stood at the bathroom mirror shaving, he regretted having it done.
The permanency of tattoos is something the younger generation seem to treat in a cavalier fashion. Oh you can always get them burned off with lasers, they’ll say. Maybe. Typically it can take five to 10 sessions costing around $100 a time to remove just one tattoo.
We know of Holocaust survivors who still wore their ID numbers (tattooed on their arms by the Nazis), as a demonstration of resilience. This is all the more powerful an act when you realise that Judaism forbids tattoos, as per Leviticus 19:28 “You shall not etch a tattoo on yourselves.”
One place you’ll see plenty of ink is if you serve any time at all or go visiting in one of Australia’s jails. Getting inked is something a lot of inmates do, to stave off boredom, to become one of the boys, to identify themselves as part of an inner group. Typically, jail tattoos are home-made, using the ink from a biro and a safety pin or needle. Sources tell me infections are common, so too is Hep C, which you sometimes get from sharing needles.
In my police and court reporting days I knew a very tall, very gruff Senior Sergeant. One time he gave me a “Have you seen this man?” bulletin which described tattoos on the suspect’s hands, or to be more precise, between each finger. Sarge confessed he’d made a point of studying felons’ tattoos, under the guise of admiring them, but in reality tucking them away in the part of his long-term memory reserved for “grubs”.
These days he’d just whip out his smart phone and take a happy snap. “L.O.V.E and H.A.T.E?” Gotcha!