Friday on My Mind Archives - Page 6 of 31

You’ve got a friend

friends-friendship — Friends photo by Annie Spratt, www.pixabay.com.au

While resting and recovering from Covid (honestly, the virus I had at Christmas seemed worse), I started reflecting on friends and friendship. At this moment in time, my definition of friends are the ones who bring you groceries, chocolate and Panadol, walk your dog and check on your well-being every day (thanks, Sandra, Kaz and Dee).

The deal with friendship is the unspoken agreement that one will reciprocate as and when appropriate. Research on this topic tells us that, unsurprisingly, the main reason friendships end is that one friend feels that the other is being selfish; it is a one-way relationship. Other reasons friendships fail come under the heading ‘loyalty/betrayal’. Or it could simply be that your friend moved to another town or city, took up with a new partner after a divorce or bereavement, or has developed opinions and beliefs that conflict with yours.

The latter clearly was the case when people who believed Covid was a real and present danger and lined up for vaccinations, came into conflict with those who denied it existed.

The advent of social media around 2004 has turned the traditional concept of a ‘friend’ on its head. In short, they hijacked the word.

A former colleague/friend whom I had not heard from in a while posted a message on Facebook on Sunday warning friends he had been hacked.

“Ignore any friend requests from me – I’ve got too many friends already LOL.”

Like all of us, I have far more email addresses and mobile numbers stored away than any one person could categorise as ‘friends’. Many of them date from my journalism career, where ‘contacts’ are the key to everything. Over time I reduced my phone contact list from 1100 to around 300.

Despite having a recent clean-out, I still have 400 Facebook friends.

I deleted anyone I had never actually met, suspect accounts (where there appeared to be more than one) and people I’d had no contact with in the past 12 months.

Many of those ‘friended’ me because they read my weekly blogs or because they follow our music. One also tends to accumulate friends who use Facebook and Messenger to find people. The one-off reason for doing so comes and goes but the ‘friend’ remains on the list.

The irony is not lost on me that at least five of my oldest friends do not have a Facebook account and have no intention of starting one. Even when I share cat jokes. Prompted by the topic and these memories, I rang my old Kiwi school friend, who now lives in Sydney. He was his usual cheery self and I pictured his smile and that of his Dad, who he so resembles. This friend was best man at both my weddings, which is not something many people can say.

I told him we both had Covid and after commiserating he said he and his partner are still Covid-free. He attributes this to living something of a monastic life and wearing a mask when he does go places where people mingle.

We exchanged old war stories from school days. We were probably what people call ‘nerds’ now, before the term was invented. We were bookish and, even at a young age, interested in philosophy, psychology and comparative religions. We once got detention for riding a library trolley up and down the corridors (before school started), but that’s another story.

There’s been a lot of research done into the topic of friendship and how it is essential to our health and happiness. As we age, the number of friends in our physical address book dwindles. We lose people to cancer, heart disease and other illnesses. Others develop dementia and forget who we are.

Friends made when our children were growing up tend to fade away as the kids mature and move away to live their own lives. The vast size of the continent we live in contributes to the dissolution of friendships, as people move interstate for work or family reasons. I am probably fortunate to have kept in touch with a small group of men from school days. We are geographically scattered and to be honest do not have much in common these days.

Yet when we spend time together we are transported back to carefree teen years at the beach, drinking from tall necked beer bottles and daring each other to test the treacherous surf.

Clinical psychologist Anastasia Hronis writes that it is hard making new friends at any age, which is one of the reasons for our epidemic of loneliness. Writing in The Conversation, Dr Hronis, of Sydney’s University of Technology, says that for most adults, making new friends is hard work.

“In school, making friends can be as simple as going on the monkey bars together. But as adults, making, developing and maintaining friendships can be much more difficult.

“This matters, because we need friends. And while old friends are golden, nothing stays the same forever. Old friends move away, or have their time taken up by child-rearing or their careers. Without action, loneliness can quietly grow around you.”

The onset of the Covid pandemic produced the perfect storm of conditions for making friendships difficult to maintain.

Dr Hronis cites research that shows 54% of Australians reported a keen sense of loneliness. Before COVID, around a third of Australians reported feeling at least one episode of loneliness.

When researchers in a recent study interviewed adults about making friends,,the most important challenge cited was a lack of trust. People found it harder to put their trust in someone new compared to when they were younger.

If you are an older person starting out in a new town or city, you may find this research dispiriting. US researchers estimated it takes roughly 50 hours of shared contact to move from acquaintances to casual friends. Progressing the contact to close friends can take more than 200 hours.

Dr Hronis says there are many other barriers stopping us from having friendships, including an introverted personality, health barriers and personal insecurities.

“It’s entirely possible to overcome these barriers as adults and build meaningful, long-lasting friendships. We don’t have to accept loneliness as inevitable,” Dr Hronis said.

“If you put in ten minutes a day, you can maintain existing friendships and build new ones. Send a text, forward a meme, add to the group chat or give someone a quick call. Don’t get caught up on how much effort, energy and time goes into building friendships. Ten minutes a day may be all you need.”

Now you know why I got in touch this week! It wasn’t exactly intimations of mortality that brought me to it; the trouble with technology is, it is too easy to dash off a text or an email (that may or may not be read).

Sometimes what we all need most is to hear a familiar and friendly voice at the other end of the phone – with no risk of catching anything.

I’ll leave you with this performance of the best-known song about friendship. We were fortunate indeed to hear Carole King and James Taylor duet her song in 2010, when they performed in Brisbane. The 2010 world tour band included bass player Leland Sklar and drummer Russ Kunkel, both playing in this 1971 video.

Now there’s friendship for you.

Public holidays irrelevant to retirees

public-holidays-Queen — The Queen’s coffin leaves Westminster Abbey. Wikimedia cc

I’m afraid to say the one-off public holiday to mourn the death of Queen Elizabeth II passed me by. This was partly because we are both in isolation after testing positive to Covid.

Also, the concept of a public holiday, when you get paid for not going to work, ceased to be relevant to me about 2005 when I quit my full-time job. As happens in the media and many other organisations, some people are rostered on to work a public holiday. This is paid at double time and a half, compared to ordinary time if taking the day off. This is only so for full-time or part-time employees on an industrial award. Casual workers can take the holiday off, but they don’t get paid.

Public holidays in Australia (there are up to 16 national and State-based public holidays), have their own special act of Parliament. The act decrees at what rate an employee should be paid, if he/she takes the day off or has to work on a public holiday.

Public holidays are controversial in Australia, starting with Australia Day on January 26 and the ongoing debate that it is culturally insensitive to celebrate the day white people invaded the country and engaged in frontier wars. Queens Birthday is another holiday subject to the whims of whatever brand of politician is in power. Some states hold the Queen’s birthday in June, September or October. Ironically, the Queen’s actual birthday was April 21. I expect that in 2023 this holiday will either be gazetted King’s Birthday or perhaps we will celebrate both?

Labor Day was traditionally celebrated on the first Monday in May with union marches and music. But some states and territories moved the date to March, September or October. Only Queensland kept the tradition.

National holidays come in a bunch (two around Christmas and New Year and another two at Easter), despite some 10 million Australians reporting to the Census that they have no religion at all. Christianity decreased by more than 1 million people in the 2021 Census, but is still Australia’s most common religion. Other religions continue to increase.

Then there is Anzac Day, which is becoming more popular rather than less, given that it mostly commemorates the fallen in WWI. As songwriter Eric Bogle famously said: ‘someday no-one will march there at all’.

Back in the 1990s, when careers and work/life balance were on our minds, we assembled as much annual leave as we could find and embarked upon a nine-week tour of the US and Canada. I was taken around a daily newspaper in Vancouver and the editor, on learning that Australian journalists (then) got six and a half weeks leave a year, pleaded with me not to share that with his staff. Canada, which is less generous than some, pays two weeks a year (if you have been with the employer for a year). This extends to three weeks if you stay for five years and so on. In Australia, the powerful federal Australian Journalists Union negotiated six and a half weeks, which was meant to reward the employee for working unsociable shifts. In the US, workers have no paid federal leave entitlements at all. Yet 77% of employers informally offer leave to their workers, along the lines of the Canadian model.

That still means that 23% of employers in the world’s biggest economy either cannot afford to pay workers who are not working or they don’t much care.

Compare that with some of the Nordic countries. According to whoseoff.com, which ranked countries by the quality of their annual leave, Spain, Austria and Finland emerged as the top three. The latter allows 25 days a year for annual leave and another 11 days for public and religious holidays. Spain offers 39 days a year (and a daily siesta) and 10 public holidays. Austria’s 39 holidays include 25 days’ paid leave and 13 public holidays. Austrians who have worked for the same company for a long time can take as many as 35 days annual leave.

You can see that this is not by any means a level playing field. In Japan the annual leave entitlement is 10 days. Workers who have been employed continuously for at least one and half years are granted one additional day of leave for each year of service to a maximum of 20 days. There are no legal provisions for pay on public holidays, despite Japan having 16 national public holidays. Japan’s leave entitlements may seem niggardly, but ironically employers find it hard to convince salarymen to take holidays. There is a culture of ‘attendeeism’, which could be interpreted as a fear of someone replacing you while you are holidaying in the mountains.

So how does Australia stack up? For each year of service an employee is entitled to a minimum of 4 weeks of paid annual leave. If the employee is a shift-worker, they are entitled to a minimum of 5 weeks of paid annual leave. Every employee is also entitled to 10 to 13 paid public holidays depending on the state and territory. Long service leave, which varies by jurisdiction, is also available to long-standing employees.

In researching this topic (under duress, dear reader), I came across a report based on a Unicef study on maternity leave. As you might have come to suspect, the US has no national scheme for paid maternity leave. At the other end of the scale are Estonia, Austria, Japan and Sweden where women can take up to 88 weeks of paid leave (Estonia),

As The Guardian story says, the UK rates in the bottom third of OECD countries. Australia is ranked second-last. Maternity and paternity leave in this country both fall under parental leave which is 12 months’ unpaid and for which parents can claim 18 weeks leave pay (at the national minimum wage). Only one parent at a time can take unpaid job-protected leave.

State public holidays are a bonus – for example Melbourne Cup Day in Melbourne, Brisbane’s Ekka show holiday and so on. Australian workers are perhaps known, but not exclusively so, for taking a day either side of a public holiday. For example, I’d love to know how many Australians didn’t go to work today, parlaying the mourning for Queen Elizabeth into a four-day weekend. Some people do this officially (taking a day off their holidays). Some just call in sick and hope their boss doesn’t spot them at the footie or the cricket.

As we’ve been told, yesterday’s national day of mourning is a one-off event. I’d have thought most of us would have had our fill with the blanket coverage on TV channels (ongoing). I’m still trying to work out if the bird’s eye view of Westminster Abbey was a camera or a drone. I did so feel for those eight sturdy chaps who carried the Queen’s coffin for what seemed an unreasonably long time. They didn’t waver, even when you read that the lead-lined oak coffin weighed something between 250kg and 317kg.

Meanwhile I struggle to carry a box of tissues from one room to another. I can’t believe we went all this time without getting Covid and now here we are.

Make sure you wash your hands after reading.

Safe from harm while Nanny’s there

Born two weeks or so before King Charles III, Bob reflects on the only monarch we have known in our lifetime and the phenomenon of ‘recreational grieving.’

Queen-Nanny-Monarchy — HRH Princess Elizabeth (aged 19) in the Auxiliary Territorial Services, 1945. Image from the Imperial War Museum cc

When I was still in the womb, my mother was keen on the idea that she and Elizabeth II would give birth on the same day. I made an entrance two weeks ahead of Charles, so whenever our birthdays roll around, I reflect on our status as 1948 babies, born on opposite sides of the track.

I did so chuckle at the meme on social media with a picture of Charles and the caption: ‘73-year-old finally gets a job’.

Like most people in Britain in the 1950s (and obviously even now), Mum was a royalist. There was much excitement upon the green and pleasant land and in neighbouring countries like Wales and Scotland ahead of the Coronation in 1953. I shall leave others to comment on Ireland.

As I recall (I was four), each household received Coronation souvenirs – a mug, a tin of Cadbury’s milk chocolate (it may have had the royal crest embossed on the chocolate but I can’t vouch for that). There were also flags and bunting. (Rule Britannia was one of the first songs I learned (the marmalade and jam version came much later).

The picture I’m painting here illustrates the genesis of the mass mourning which has accompanied the death of Queen Elizabeth II on September 8. The ABC dispatched Michael Rowland to provide daily updates to ABC Breakfast, which included vox pop interviews in London’s Green Park. The loyal subjects who wished to leave floral tributes, cards and letters were re-directed there after it was clear that soon you would not be able to see the Changing of the Guard behind the massive wall of floral tributes.

Ordinary folks were interviewed ‘Well, she’s always been there, inn it – she’s like our Mum’ and similar sentiments that demonstrated the depth of public love expressed in the memory of the 96-year-old monarch known fondly as ‘Nanny’.

My Facebook feed filled up with tributes by friends I might have assumed would be republicans in the true sense of the word. Greens leader Adam Bandt was rightly chastised for his too-soon statement:

“Rest in peace Queen Elizabeth II. Our thoughts are with her family and all who love her. Now Australia must move forward. We need a Treaty with First Nations people, and we need to become a republic.”

All the same, some of the emotional outbursts over the death of a woman in her 90s (that tends to happen), have left this Scots-born champagne socialist a little stunned.

The death of Lady Diana Spencer in 1997 sparked a similar, if more dramatic outpouring of what psychologists call ‘recreational grieving’.

In 2012 The Scotsman wrote about this phenomenon of mourning the ‘intimate stranger’.

“It’s an apt term for something that allows us to indulge in the ceremony of grief without feeling particularly upset. We mope, wallow and wail en masse, but we needn’t lose any sleep over our ‘loss’”.

The writer related how he ended up weeping in the shower while listening to Daydream Believer, after hearing that Davy Jones (of the pop band The Monkees), had died.

As he says, this is not a new phenomenon. When heartthrob actor Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, 80,000 people lined up in New York to file past his coffin. Just think back a few years to when we lost David Bowie, Prince, Robin Williams, Leonard Cohen, Amy Winehouse, John Prine and Mr Spock.

Although I am not a monarchist, there was much to admire about Elizabeth the Last (as poet Denis Kevans dubbed her). She worked with 15 UK Prime Ministers and 164 Commonwealth Prime Ministers during her rule. Her daily duties as Crown were never-ending, yet she never wavered (even during the furore that arose after her Australian representative sacked a sitting Prime Minister in 1975). (Still outraged. Ed.)

Much has been written over the decades about the concept of colonialism, inherited wealth and title. History would tend to suggest that the Scots, as one glaring example, should be the least likely people to be gnashing their teeth over a wealthy woman who only started paying tax in 1992. There have been sporadic reports of protests; people with placards saying: ‘Not My King’. One person carrying a sign that said ‘F*** the monarchy’ was arrested.

But they are a minority, as European correspondent Rob Harris explained in the Sydney Morning Herald:

“Thousands of mourners lined streets in Scottish towns and cities, as the cortege made the 281km trip from the Queen’s favourite Highland retreat to the capital. Her daughter, Princess Anne, dropped a curtsy as her coffin was carried into the palace (Holyrood House) in Edinburgh, where her mother had stayed only weeks before.

“From Aberdeen to Dundee and along the motorway verges around the River Forth, veterans, army cadets, school children and families stood quietly or applauded, clutching flowers and Union flags.”

As wakes go, this one is only getting started. Such is the level of staged planning going into this production, we run the risk of important domestic news being relegated below the fold. As it is, our parliament has been suspended for 15 days so PM Anthony Albanese can attend the funeral. Morris dancing sources tell me that, in the UK, all dancing will stop for as long as the royal wake lasts.

As a former newspaper journalist, I know full well that this is one of the stories of the century, akin to a Pope dying. Every section of the newspaper is allowed to exercise creative process and contribute to the story. Hence business writers confirmed that the $5 note, on which QEII’s effigy is etched, will continue to circulate. A new coin, with Charles III’s profile, will circulate in 2023.

By tradition, details of the Queen’s will remain private. Despite Buckingham Palace publishing details of the Sovereign Grant (what it costs to keep the royal machine ticking over), estimates of the Queen’s wealth come from outside sources. Forbes Magazine calculated Queen Elizabeth’s personal fortune in 2021 (investments, jewels, art, and real estate) at $US500 million. Most of the real estate will be simply passed on to the next monarch.

When living in Edinburgh in the late 1970s, I was astonished to find that the Palace of Holyrood House, just down the road from the Royal Mile, was used by the Queen for only one week a year, in summer.

People I met in pubs and at folk clubs told me about the homelessness situation in Edinburgh. You would not want to be sleeping on the streets in that cold and ancient city, summer or winter. Yet just down the road from the tourism mecca of Edinburgh Castle sat the (empty) 16th-century historic apartments of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the State Apartments. The palace at that time cost 368,000 pounds a year to maintain, according to a 1978 Hansard record.

The palace is open to the public (for tours) throughout the year, except when members of the Royal Family are in residence. While Historic Environment Scotland maintains the Palace of Holyrood House, it is owned by Charles III, King of the United Kingdom.

Almost seventy million pounds was spent maintaining the other seven royal palaces in 2021-2022, expenditure drawn from the aforementioned (annual) Sovereign Grant (102.4 million pounds/$A175 million).

I’m leaving the last word to the venerable English songwriter, Leon Rosselson. He wrote a caustic song in 1978 about the monarchy’s profligacy – On Her Silver Jubilee.

(Advisory: this song contains references to a person who has died and may offend monarchists.)

Oh, the magic of the monarchy, the mystery sublime; Growing gracefully and effortlessly richer all the time; She’s the rock of hope and glory in the quicksand of despair; For although the pound may tumble, although panic fills the air; Although governments may crumble, and the cupboard’s nearly bare; Though the stairs begin to rattle, and the rats begin to stare; She enfolds in mystic unity her subjects everywhere; And we know we’re safe from harm while nanny’s there.

How we listen to music in 2022

cassettes-cds-streaming — Image: Technology exists to convert a cassette to MP3 – have we had a copyright ruling on that?

This week I decided to reflect on the many ways we can listen to music in this digital age. We’ve come a long way since the first recording etched on to a wax cylinder in 1860. In just 50 years, the mainstream way of listening to music has moved from vinyl LPs to cassettes to CDs and now to online streaming. It’s been quite an evolution.

This FOMM was inspired by a frustrating search for an album by Californian bluegrass singer AJ Lee and her band, Blue Summit. I was introduced to AJ at U3A Warwick’s Music Show, where presenters curate a list of YouTube clips and provide background on the tracks. This particular song was performed by the Brothers Comatose and AJ Lee, a splendid interpretation of Neil Young’s Harvest Moon.

On Monday I started packing for a week away in the caravan, part of it at the best music festival in Queensland, Neurum Creek Festival. This one has been running for 16 years at the Neurum Creek Bush Retreat, which is about 12 kms from Woodford. In preparing and packing, I decided to see if I could load new music on my Ipod, which is no longer supported by Apple. The problem is that as I now longer use ITunes, the music player I use can’t ‘talk’ to the Ipod. Mr Shiraz sent me a link to a piece of software that will mimic ITunes so you can ‘sync’ your music collection with an Ipod, a portable music player invented by Apple in 2001. Since Apple stopped supporting Ipods, many users have opted to put them in a drawer and move on. One alternative is to buy a cheap mobile phone, add a large storage card and use it as a personal music player.

I could tell how far CDs had dropped in popularity when looking to buy AJ Lee’s 2021 album, I’ll Come Back. I decided not to download it on Spotify, as the artists are paid a trifling amount when we listen to their music on that platform.

Subsequent searches found the album on streaming services, which was not what I wanted. I went direct to AJ Lee’s website and the only option was to purchase a physical CD and wait however many weeks or months it takes to arrive from the US. Then I tried Bandcamp (where you will find our music). Success, the album was there. I duly downloaded the album and now can listen to it on my computer, my phone and, once I get around to it, burn a CD for my ‘new’ 5-CD changer.

The CD player failed some months ago and I eventually established that the model was obsolete and a replacement laser could not be found. I opted for a refurbished model from a seller on Ebay. It’s a quality Sony deck and, so far, is working perfectly.

Before I went into hospital for a procedure in late August, I spent a day (dusting) and alphabetising our CD collection (450-plus). I told She Who Loves Order in her Life I had done this ‘so if I cark it, at least you’ll know the CDs are in A-Z and not filed according to ‘mood’.

As audiophiles will tell you, CD music is superior to cassette but inferior to vinyl, because the digital sound is compressed.

Vinyl music played on top line analogue systems always sounds better than both CDs and the alternative (playing or streaming MP3 quality tracks). The cassette, with its annoying hiss and tendency to become snarled in the player, is a long last.

Audio cassettes were invented by a Dutch company (Philips) and adopted by mainstream America in the mid-60s. My memory of cassettes is that people would borrow someone else’s tape and dub a cassette to play in the car. This practice was and still is illegal, even if retailers happily sold boxes of blank cassettes and high-end twin cassette decks on which one could dub to a blank tape. (The last piece of music technology I actually understood. Ed.)

Most of us have a couple of shoeboxes in the cupboard full of cassettes – legitimate ones bought in music stores, or bootleg copies. The difficulty now is that, for most people, their means of playing cassettes has evaporated. My tape deck worked for about 20 years. One deck stopped working and then the sound quality became so poor we decided to switch to another medium.

I did a straw poll among people of my vintage to establish how they listen to music (if they listen to music at all). Most said they no longer had a CD player (it either died or they found the business of swapping them over tedious). Most late model cars no longer come with a CD player, so that accelerated the decline in popularity.

Some people opt for a WIFI speaker through which they can stream music from YouTube or Spotify. How this works is you turn the gadget on and say in a loud, clear voice: “OK Google, play The Goodwills.” There is a pause, a whirring sound and a disembodied voice says: “OK, playing DJ Goodwill.”

Others turn on their smart TV and then search for music videos on YouTube. Depending on your cinema surround sound system (if you have one), the sound quality is OK. The database of video clips is apparently bottomless, but the quality is uneven.

According to Gizmodo’s history of the compact disc, the first commercial CDs were available in Australia in late 1982 (about 150 titles). This was a few years before we moved to Brisbane and bought a Technics stereo system for around $1,500 (it was on sale). We started a CD collection then and even today, I prefer a CD to any other format.

What is hard to stomach is knowing I paid $25 to $30 each and sometimes more for an imported disc. Today you can go to a charity shop and buy CDs for coins. It’s not about money, though. Our CD collection is special in that at least 100 CDs were given to us either as a gift or as a swap (one of ours for one of theirs) by musicians we know.

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) said streaming accounted for 86% of $565.8 million music sales in Australia in 2021. Over the same period, physical music sales dropped from $100.5 million to $56.1 million. Vinyl albums led the way at $29.7 million, compared with $24.9 million for CD albums.

A Roy Morgan research report in 2020 said 12.7 million Australians were using a streaming service. Spotify is the clear market leader with 8m customers, almost double what it was in 2017. YouTube Music is next with 4.4m users in Australia.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) concurs, saying 61% of Australians used a streaming service in June 2020, up from 48% in 2019. As you’d expect, 88% of the 18-34 age group used music streaming services. Surprisingly (well, I’m surprised), the biggest growth in online music streaming was the 55-64 cohort (from 47% to 59%), 65-75 (30% to 44%) and the over-70s (17% to 26%).

I confess I’m part of that trend, although this weekend it’s all about live music, coffee and a CD shop – the way it should be.

Harping on about the arts

The Morrison government’s $200m RISE grants scheme for the arts helped many arts organisations and individuals revive their careers after the Covid hiatius. According to the Opposition, there’s still $20 million in the fund not yet distributed.

harp-arts-grants — The Brisbane Philharmonic strings with Emily Granger (harp) and Jonathan Henderson (flute). Photo by John Connolly.

In the aftermath of ‘Albo’s first 100 days,’ it could be constructive to talk about one good thing the previous Federal government did – creating the RISE scheme for the Arts.

The $200 million RISE (Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand) grants scheme was designed to arrest the declining financial health of arts organisations and creative individuals. The Covid-19 stimulus program was welcomed by the arts community as organisations large and small shared in the bounty.

We were witness to the fruits of one such grant application by the Brisbane Philharmonic Orchestra. The BPO has been touring regional towns with its newly acquired Salzedo concert harp. This $75,000 instrument looks and sounds gorgeous. The BPO toured a string quintet with two soloists – Emily Granger (harp) and Jonathan Henderson (flute). This ensemble played for 110 people at Warwick Town Hall last Saturday. Apart from the interesting and varied programme (Ralph Vaughan Williams, Mozart, Schoenberg, Faure), this was an occasion for ‘show and tell’.

Audience members were invited to come up to the stage after the concert and inspect the concert harp close up. BPO director John Connolly told the audience the custom-made concert harp used up a lot of the grant the orchestra received last year. He briefly explained the complexity of the instrument, built from maple and spruce and invited the audience to come up and inspect it after the concert.

The BPO’s application brief was to acquire this instrument and then take it on tour to places where people have probably never seen a concert harp. On this tour, the ensemble played at Pomona, Maryborough, Warwick, Toowoomba and Brisbane.

The RISE Fund was established to support the arts and entertainment sector to re-activate after two years of Covid disruption. The program offered arts and entertainment sector organisations assistance in the presentation of cultural and creative projects. The funding of activities and events was aimed at rebuilding confidence amongst investors, producers and consumers (hate that word.Ed).

The first RISE grants were issued in December 2020 in support of artists and organisations affected by COVID-19. The aim was to fund the delivery and presentation of activities across all art forms to audiences across Australia. Projects aimed at audiences in outer metropolitan, regional and remote areas were taken into account, as were projects that involved tours and use of local regional services and support acts.

The grant scheme provided $200 million over 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 to assist the financial viability of arts organisations. Among the first grants awarded was $1 million to the Byron Bay Blues Festival and $1.46 million to Woodfordia for its smaller-scale Bushtime festival.

Queensland grant recipients included Kate Miller-Heidke and her husband and musical partner Keir Nuttall. The pair, known for ‘Muriel’s Wedding – the Musical’, received a $200,000 grant to produce a new musical, Bananaland. QMusic, the umbrella organisation that represents musicians in Queensland, was another grant recipient.The Granite Belt Art and Craft Trail received $80,000 to help present a three-day showcase of artists and artisans around the region. Some grant awards have attracted criticism, however (see footnote).

In what one might term its ‘death throes’, the Morrison government allocated a further $20 million to the scheme in March this year. Just this week Opposition Shadow spokesman for the Arts Paul Fletcher took aim at Arts Minister Tony Burke for failing to distribute the last batch of funds. I reached out to Mr Burke’s office to ask (a) has the money had been allocated and (b) did this Labor government intend to extend or supplement the scheme.

Citizen journalists don’t often get a response to approaches like this. We make do with public statements, published details of grant schemes and quoting other publications. In this instance, given there was no response from Mr Burke’s office, we’ll let the Opposition have a free kick.

Fletcher took the chance to turn Albo’s headline into ‘100 days of lost opportunities for the Arts’.

“Since the election, Minister for the Arts Tony Burke has repeatedly failed to confirm $20 million in funding from the last round of the (RISE) program,” Mr Fletcher said in a statement.

“The RISE fund helped to create over 213,000 job opportunities across Australia by assisting the arts and entertainment sector re-establish itself post-pandemic,” he added.

“In recognising arts and entertainment as one of our hardest hit sectors during the pandemic, the Coalition Government extended the RISE program as part of the 2022-23 Budget.”

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Anthony (Albo) Albanese spent much of the week explaining what he and his government had achieved in its first 100 days. A lot of what was said had been said before – diplomatic forays into the Pacific, the mercy dash to Ukraine, the Quad meeting, mending fences with France and all that. There was the commitment to reducing the impact of climate change, and, if you did not know, the quiet scrapping of the cashless debit card previously imposed on some welfare recipients.

As the Canberra Times pointed out, the first 100 days was not without its challenges. The incoming Labor government was met by a perfect storm – rising interest rates together with high inflation and the subsequent higher prices at the petrol pump and supermarket checkout. Mr Albanese is already flagging budget measures in October to tackle soaring energy prices.

All up, it seems ‘Albo’ is still enjoying a honeymoon, although some of the Opposition’s gainsaying is gaining traction. I’m fairly sure that allowing ex-basketball giant Shaq O’Neill to make a surprise visit to the PM was what young people would call a ‘fail’. The story was that Shaq, a black man from the US, was lending his support to Albo’s campaign for recognition of indigenous Australians. Shaq is these days maybe better known for betting ads than his time with the LA Lakers. Besides, he made the PM look small, and we can’t have that.

It will indeed be interesting to see what kind of funding Albo and his team direct to the arts and entertainment sector. It would be great if organisations like the BPO or talented individuals like Keir and Kate could depend on more of the same. Covid-19 has not gone away and there are still many challenges facing those providing live entertainment.

Anyway, we thought the Brisbane Philharmonic Orchestra’s travelling concert at $20 concession was the bargain of the year. The BPO’s grant application proposed just such a concert series. The aim was a regional tour built around the acquisition of a new Concert Harp. The $102,000 grant was released in July last year. It shows how long it can take for an arts group to plan for and execute a tour like this. As with most arts presentations, the door take was clearly not going to cover tour costs, not to mention wages.

The BPO is Brisbane’s leading community orchestra with up to 200 musicians a year performing a variety of orchestral music. It is sustained by donations, sponsorship and grants.

We looked around Warwick’s beautiful town hall, built in 1887, and were astonished by how many faces we recognised. We’ve only been here two years or so, but somehow seem to have gravitated to the side of town that loves a bit of culture. I hear the famous Birralee children’s choir is coming here later this month. You might have even read it here first.

Today’s FOMM is brought to you by the letter P for patronage. There should be more of it.

Footnote: The RISE scheme has its critics

Celebrating Multicultural Australia

Australian Bureau of Statistics chart shows growth in population of people born elsewhere since the mid-1940s

Australia is more culturally diverse than ever, according to the first results from the 2021 Census. Almost half our population of 25.76 million people have at least one parent born overseas. Almost a quarter of Australians (24.8%) speak a language other than English at home. Just over a quarter (27.6%) report being born overseas (Ed: and that includes him and me – Scotland and Canada’s loss is our gain, we modestly reckon).

In the five years since the last Census, India has become the second-most common overseas country of birth, shifting New Zealand and China down the list. The above chart from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows the shifting demographic.

Dr Sukhmani Khorana, Senior Research Fellow, Western Sydney University, says the growing number of first-generation migrants means Australians’ ancestry will change significantly over the next decade.

“Australia will continue to change and look different, and we must ensure our institutions and policies reflect this,” Dr Khorana wrote in The Conversation.

“That work, by governments and policy makers, should begin now so they can gain trust and maximise the belonging of these communities. Research shows feelings of belonging lead to better socio-economic outcomes”.

Dr Khorana believes there would have been substantially more immigration were it not for the COVID pandemic with its restrictions and lock-downs.

Dr Khorana highlights an important item from the Census data:

the number of people who are either born overseas or have a parent born overseas is greater than half (13.26 million people or 51.5%).

The data shows Australia is as multicultural or even more so than countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Canada’s latest Census (2016) showed that 21.9% of people were immigrants, led by people from South Asia. Similarly, data from the UK’s 2018 Census showed that 14% of the UK population was from a minority ethnic background. In the city of London, this figure was 40%.

Dr Khorana, who conducts research for migrant and refugee-focused organisations in Western Sydney, says Australia would have received more migrants had it not been for the COVID pandemic, which shut borders from early 2020.

Census data shows the pandemic led to an 80% decrease in the number of overseas visitors, which affected the tourism, hospitality and higher education sectors of the economy.

We also received fewer relatives of overseas-born Australians, for example on family-sponsored visas.

Our local refugee and migrant network organised an event in Warwick last Sunday. Visiting chefs prepared samples of ethnic food from five different countries. There was also music and dancing. About 60 adults and children showed up at St Mark’s Hall including two Hazara Afghan families wearing traditional dress.

Southern Downs Regional Council Mayor Vic Pennisi attended the event and made a short speech. Italian-born Cr Pennisi related his arrival in Australia as a child “with not one word of English”. He grew up in Stanthorpe in a time he acknowledged was not as friendly towards ethnic minorities as Australia is now.

“I left school after Grade 10 and now I’m Mayor of the Southern Downs Regional Council and only in a country like Australia could you do that.”

The event, ‘A Taste of the Southern Downs’, was open to the public, with cooking demonstrations and a chance to sample dishes from South Korea, China, The Philippines, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

Southern Downs Refugee and Migrant Network organized the event with the support of a grant from the Queensland Government and sponsorship from Acciona’s McIntyre Wind Farm Project.

Our contribution to the event was to set up our PA, make a multi-cultural music play list and present a short set of Australian folk songs. Our theme was the Anglo-Saxon immigrant experience. She Who Still Has a Canadian Accent sung ‘Un Canadien Errant’, a traditional French language song about a young Canadian exile forced to leave Quebec.

We learned two new songs, Farewell to old England and The Shores of Botany Bay, and performed my immigration story, Rangitiki.

Earlier, we listened to guest speakers who impressed me with their command of English language. Even though most grew up in Australia, if you are from Asia, knowing what ‘cooking from scratch’ means is quite impressive stuff. Few of us could translate this to any of the many Asian dialects!

Likewise, a Hazara Afghan and friend of our group, related his story coming from Afghanistan as an unaccompanied minor in 2012. Now a confident young man with a good command of English, he gave some insights into the sacrifices refugees make when forced to flee their home countries. After a decade in Australia, he has only recently been re-united with his family.

Donations were raised for a Melbourne group, Hazara Women for Change. This group aims to support the ongoing education of Afghan women. Afghanistan’s rulers, the Taliban, have shut down schools and forbid women from receiving an education. That’s the least of the worries for persecuted minorities like the Hazara trying to survive within Afghanistan.

The United Nations recently released a report voicing concern over the Taliban authorities’ carrying out human rights violations with impunity. This included extra-judicial killings of individuals accused of affiliation with armed groups, but also cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishments, and excessive use of force by Taliban officials.

The report documented a total of 237 extra-judicial killings. Most of them (160), targeted former members of the Afghan military and government.

No matter how uncertain their future may be as refugees in Australia, Afghan citizens who were evacuated last August will be grateful to be here, although lamenting those family members left behind.

I had to do some digging to establish the 2021 population of people born in Afghanistan. As you might expect, given the upheaval in that country since the last Census, the Afghan population here has grown from 46,800 in 2016 to 67,030 in mid-2021. And that was before the Taliban came back and some 4,100 people with Australian visas were evacuated to this country, many of them Afghans. For perspective, there are about eight million Hazaras living in Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan.

While Australia is a multi-cultural country, the population is still dominated by English-speaking people who were either born here or came from countries where English is the first language.

The top five most common places of birth (outside Australia) are led by England (468,465), India (362,187), New Zealand (267,327), China (239,951) and the Philippines (113,035), followed by Vietnam, South Africa, Italy and Malaysia. People who ticked the ‘born elsewhere’ box numbered 364,949 (includes countries not identified individually by the respondent and people born at sea).

People from the UK still rank among the top five sources of ancestry including English (33%), Irish (9.5%) and Scottish (8.6%).

In his election campaign in May, then Opposition leader Anthony Albanese said becoming prime minister with his Italian surname would proves “you can do anything in this country”.

“We’re a diverse country, and the fact that I have a non-Anglo-Celtic name … I think it sends a message out there hopefully to multi-cultural Australia that you can achieve anything in this country,” he said after being elected in May.

Indeed. We also have a Senate leader named Wong.

It wasn’t always like that.

FOMM back pages (2018)

Multiculturalism under siege

The People’s Bank and Privatisation

privatisation-peoples-bank — Bank of Bob

My first reaction to the news that the Commonwealth Bank had made a $9.67 billion profit was a typical champagne socialist rant.

“What social justice reforms could we achieve with that kind of money?” I fumed (something non-smokers rarely do). For perspective, CommBank’s profit is more than double the $4 billion allocated to the Federal Media, Arts and Sporting industries in the March budget.

It’s also twice the amount the Federal Government allocated to affordable housing in the same Budget. What I’m implying by these comparisons will matter not a jot to most of CommBank’s 800,000 shareholders. They are the ones who benefit most from the bank’s 4% dividend and its unrelenting capital growth.

If you’d accumulated 10,000 shares in the 1990s you’d be a millionaire now on that shareholding alone.

Almost all fund managers and investment advisers will tell you everyone should have at least one and preferably two major banks in their portfolios. Generous franked dividends, seemingly endless capital growth and ‘government-guaranteed-too-big-to-fail status’: reasons enough for most. All of the banks indulge in risky derivatives and hedge fund trading and support organisations that ethical investors avoid (mining, oil and gas, alcohol, tobacco, arms, gambling to name a few). But there’s no law against it.

Let’s climb into the DeLorean then and return not to the future but the past – 1991, an era that gave us “the recession we had to have” and which ushered in a cavalcade of high-profile privatisations. Great Scott, Marty!

The Hawke/Keating Labor governments decided to offer government-owned institutions to the private investment market. CommBank, Telstra, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratory (CSL) and what we now know as Australia Post were among the biggest. At the time, the Commonwealth Bank was listed on the Australian share market and those who got in on the public float bought shares at an issue price of $5.40.

Last time I looked, CBA shares were trading at $100 and they have been as high as $110 in the past 12 months. The most recent dividend was $2.10, a yield of 4%, fully franked, which means investors get a tax rebate.

CommBank’s website offers a large slice of the institution’s history, from establishment in 1912 to present day. It’s a big number to get your head around, but what was once the People’s Bank has a market capitalisation of $172.64 billion. It employs 52,000 people.

Like all four of major banks (and some smaller ones) CommBank has not escaped scandal and opprobrium.

The Hayne Royal Commission into the banking sector in 2017 found widespread failures of governance and compliance in banks and other financial institutions. These lapses led to failures to detect and address misconduct, failures to report misconduct to the regulators in a timely manner, or even failing to report it at all.

Last year CommBank exited the discredited financial advice business, a sector which attracted a lot of the criticism within the banking inquiry.

The Australian Financial Review’s ‘wealth editor’ Alek Vicovich reported in October 2021 that CBA was closing down the last of its financial advice operations. CBA had previously operated its own financial planning subsidiary, Commonwealth Financial Planning, which employed full-time advisory and call centre staff. Other banks operated under the ‘dealer group’ model, which meant licensing self-employed companies to give advice. .

During the financial scandal-plagued 1980s, CommBank, like many others, lent money to entrepreneurs it should have been keeping a better eye on. As is always the case, large losses from bad loans are ‘written down’ and disappear forever from the balance sheet. Investigative financial journalist Michael West has written reams on the banking sector if you want to go down that particular rabbit hole.

The curious thing about a bank is that in its raw form it is simply a vault where customers keep their money. In the pre-privatisation era, the bank paid its customers interest on the money it safeguarded for them. Not a generous amount, mind you, but enough for generations to learn the value of thrift and establish savings habits. Then came privatisation. The bank still paid interest (as it also charged interest to customers who borrowed money to buy a house or build a business). Along the way (the Reserve Bank started keeping track of it in 1997), banks started charging a fee for service. In 2021 the total fees charged to household customers by all banks exceeded $1 billion.

As the RBA says, privatisation in Australia started in earnest with the sale of the first tranche of the Commonwealth Bank in 1991.

“The factor supporting its privatisation was the newly introduced capital adequacy guidelines for the banking industry. These meant that expansion by the bank would require increases in its equity base, which in turn would probably involve continuing calls on the Commonwealth budget.”

Public Trading Enterprises (PTEs), have been sold at both the State and Federal levels of Government in Australia. Sales since 1990 of former Commonwealth assets totalled about $30 billion (including the first stage of the Telstra privatisation). State Government sell-offs raised a similar amount.

It’s a bit bewildering when you consider that this rampant capitalism was ushered in by a Federal Labor government and was oft-repeated at a State level, by Labor and Tory-led governments alike.

The market success of the Commonwealth Bank was replicated and then outdone by the public sale of the Commonwealth Serum Laboratory. In 2020, economist and prolific blogger Professor John Quiggin aired the latest instalment of what he calls “The strange case of CSL – paying for what we used to own”.

Prof Quiggin makes the point that the Federal Government was about to shell out more than $1 billion to a company it used to own. The deal with a CSL subsidiary, Seqeris, involved building a new vaccine manufacturing plant in Melbourne to produce vaccines for influenza and Q Fever, as well as anti-venenes for snake and spider bites. (It would have been kind of handy to have a government entity researching a vaccine for Covid, wouldn’t it? Ed.)

When the Keating Government privatised Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in 1994, the share price of $2.30 was a ‘spectacular bargain’, Prof Quiggin wrote. Investors got their money back 500 times over. That beat even the Commonwealth Bank float, where investors got about 50 times their money back.

The reason the price was so low was, in part, that CSL was not a household name. Prof Quiggin and Independent Australia colleague Clive Hamilton investigated this float, concluding it was “one of the worst privatisations entered into by the government”.

Socialist rhetoric aside (not that it’s a bad thing), those who bought CSL shares at $2.30 and acquired more as the price improved are now sitting on a pharmaceutical gold mine. The shares are currently worth $295 and earlier this year almost cracked $320. CSL pays a paltry dividend (0.90% yield) but I doubt it would bother anyone who bought 2000 CSL shares at $2.30 (now worth about $220,000).

There you have it, dear reader, a brief time travel experience back to the heady days of privatisations, done so governments could reduce debt and avoid future financial liability.

I clearly recall banking sixpence a week (half my pocket money), clutching my passbook as if it was a passport to the future. Maybe you had one too.

Disclaimer: The author is a customer of on-line broker Commsec, a CommBank subsidiary, from which a lot of the research was derived.

How many bloggers to change a lightbulb?

blog-bloggers-blogging — Image by Tanja-Denise Schantz www.pixabay.com

The question should be – is FOMM a blog, a topical weekly essay, Citizen journalism or the random musings of a flawed human being who craves attention?

When posting it on the WordPress website, I am reminded that FOMM is not a conventional blog. It’s those endless reminders from the SEO plug-in. For those who have no idea what that means, Search Engine Optimisation is the key to more hits and making it further up the tree of Google rankings. SEO is a nag machine – you already used this keyword – don’t do that. Almost every week it gives my screed a low score for readability. You reckon?

If you are engaged to write short, entertaining blog posts for a company, SEO is essential. If you are being asked to post 10 to 20 times a week you need SEO to penetrate the on-line miasma of ‘Content’.

The way I was brought up, content meant happy with your lot in life. What it means in blog marketing terms is to write entertainingly and splatter keywords throughout your Content. The more times you say ‘widget’ when writing about a widget the higher you will be ranked by Google’s search engines. It’s an insane marketplace.

There are 600 million blogs and 1.7 billion websites out there. They write about anything from Taiwan’s right to independence from China to why the bristles always fall out of shaving brushes. This is not counting the untold numbers of communiques from people who bypass the whole process and just send an email to a list of readers.

Joy, an environmental activist, starting emailing friends about five years ago when the Adani coal project and climate change deniers were unfortunate bedfellows. Joy tells me her missives are sometimes known by readers as ‘Joy’s blog’.

Joe Dolce, who wrote the novelty song ‘Shaddup Your Face’, wrote a weekly letter for years. I know this because a friend shared one of his long, eccentric emails with me and I subscribed.

Famous songwriter Eric Bogle writes a kind of a blog which he simply puts out there on his Facebook page. Sometimes they are, as he’ll say, grumpy old man rants. Other times, Bogle writes with great sensitivity and hits a nerve the way his best songs do.

This is the goal of bloggers – to grab the reader’s attention and hold it to the last word, Alluring headlines have their role to play and I must confess this is not my strong point as a writer. My strength (if indeed I have one) is that I post every Friday, no matter what else is going on in our lives (even on holidays, says ED, somewhat testily).

Daffodil-loving Ange is what I’d call a sporadic blog writer – the best of hers are when she and hubby hit the road and share the trials and travails and lovely images of their travel. I think they are still missing luggage from a trip to the Red Heart (but the daffies are out). My favourite Ange quote comes from a late 2021 Australian road trip.

“I’m so excited about travelling again I even ironed my Lorna Jane cargo pants.”

Australia’s oldest regular blogger Everald Compton, 90+, posts most weeks. Everald’s election-eve analysis of the state of politics and forecasts of things to come was almost 100% on the money and worth re-reading.

Everald, whose CV includes professional fundraiser, inland rail promoter and National Seniors chief executive, has a few favourite causes. In his latest blog he (again) calls for the inclusion of our indigenous people in Australia’s constitution.

Let’s be clear when distinguishing blogs and bloggers from writers who share their opinions about politics, sport, culture, indigenous affairs, climate change, the environment et al.

A blogger in the commercial sense of the word writes interesting (short) articles for companies that are trying to grow their on-line businesses. Let’s say you have a micro-business that makes useful but not indispensable tools. You’ve invented the perfect toenail cutter and employ a blogger to write enticing copy.

“The Toejam fits snugly into the palm, its laser-guided cutting blades fitting beneath the curviest toenail. Its in-built sensors sound an alarm if you are about to engage with flesh. The Toejam comes with a tiny vacuum attachment so you don’t leave toenail parings all over the bedroom floor. The wife really likes it!”

The deputy director of On-line Engagement (OE) fires back a terse email to the contract blogger.

“You only mention Toejam twice – for text of this length you should use the brand keyword at least six times. Also, the brief asked for 150 words so you are 95 words short. Try again and please, what does your wife have to do with anything?”

You can find on-line copy of this ilk designed to sell everything from green tea to rocket launchers. Yeh nah, FOMM is not a blog of that ilk.

Oberlo’s research reveals that micro blogging platform Tumbler is the king of Content, home to 488 million blogs. Its closest competitor, WordPress, hosts 78 million new posts on its platform every month. Four or sometimes five of these are mine.

Nine out of ten Content generators use blogs to sell stuff. Businesses with a blog receive 55% more visitors to their website than those that don’t. They also produce 67% more leads every month.

I decided back in 2014 if I was going to write a newspaper-style opinion column I’d need to write at least 800 words and settled on 1200. The on-line wisdom at the time was that short and fluffy works.

One of my early unsubscribers informed me: “Sorry, Bob. It’s TMTR.” I had to Google that and found it was slang for Too Much To Read.

For those who wish to write blogs that aren’t merely advertising avenues, experts like Databox now recommend writing blog posts of between 1,500 and 2000 words, as the average blog post length has increased over the past seven years from 800 to 1,200 words.

It’s hard to find an objective list of top blogs and when you do, many are mainstream media blogs, ranked by audience size rather than by content.

There are a few independent blogs in this Top 50 list from Feedly that cross over into my own list of recommended blogs (Pearls & Irritations, The Conversation, John Quiggan, Michael West).

The best blogs start as a simple on-line diary, usually generated when the writer is visiting new places. There are many great travel blogs including Nomadic Matt, The Blonde Abroad, Salt in our Hair, Little Aussie Travellers and Ange’s Around the World in 99 Days.

Last time I wrote about blogs and bloggers I mentioned the famous Swedish centenarian Dagny Carlsson, who recently died at the age of 109. She started blogging age 100 under the name Bojan after becoming “bored with retirement”. Her posts were short, to the point and often cheeky. At 106 she advised people to “stop whining and get a grip”. Dagny’s last blog post was on January 28 when she wrote: “like a cat, I have at least nine lives, but I do not know what I should use so much of life for.”

Frivolity aside, if you live in a country with a repressive regime, writing a blog is one (dangerous) way of keeping the world informed. I discovered (in 2017) the word blog in Farsi looks like this – وبلاگ. Iranians who didn’t like the way things were going in their country started وبلاگ’ing (blogging) like crazy after the 2000 crackdown on Iranian media. Although they are taking risks, rebel bloggers living in autocratic countries know their story will be picked up by libertarian journalists in democratic countries.

It’s the Internet, eh.

FOMM Back Pages

Covid causing travel hesitancy

covid-travel-hesitancy — Overseas travellers 2012 to 2022 Source ABS

Some of my friends and family have decided to head off overseas (Covid be damned), and I’m just a tad jealous. Despite making plans to visit family in New Zealand in February next year, our last international adventures are now more than a decade ago. Anecdotes and photos have faded, alas.

It’s probably ‘normal’ for avid travellers to do less of it as they age, for financial and health reasons. In addition, as illustrated in this graph from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) website, the advent of Covid-19 and its aftermath certainly put paid to our collective travel ambitions.

A late 2021 study found that Australians were ‘lukewarm’ about travelling, ahead of international borders opening in February 2022.

The University of Queensland study found that only 51% of those surveyed were planning international travel, with New Zealand and Europe as key destinations. The research showed that 33% of respondents preferred to holiday in Australia, and 16% were going to stay home. Nevertheless, it has been five years since our last trip to New Zealand to visit whanua. There are new grandchildren – great-grandchildren, even. And my siblings are ageing, as am I.

As you will note from today’s chart, there has been a surge in overseas traveller numbers (inbound and outbound), but it’s a long way off the 2019 highs.

One outcome of the Covid pandemic and the lifting of travel bans is a dramatic shift in the way people plan overseas travel. A recent ABC segment found that hesitancy has changed the way Australians travel, with shorter lead times between bookings and departures. Pre-Covid, a large proportion of travellers made their own travel and accommodation bookings. But COVID-19 restrictions have led to a renewed interest in travel agencies.

Many people are nervous about what could happen should they catch Covid while travelling abroad. There are a couple of key flaws in Covid-tracking, and one is that sometimes people have Covid but don’t know it (asymptomatic). Then there are people (there would have to be some), that suspect they have Covid but keep on travelling regardless.

They might give it to a thousand other people, but as they might say in their own defence, our own chief health officer has said, it is “inevitable” most of us will catch Covid.

A friend who once swore she’d never visit Europe for all those reasons and more has just left for a six-week tour of the UK. In part, it is an organised tour and the rest independent travel. Our local friend, who we shall refer to as Zee, related a typical 2022 travel anecdote from the transit lounge in Vancouver.

“I never saw the person involved, but I gather he was a young man who had travelled via Alaska Airlines to Portland and then Air Canada to Vancouver. He had checked two bags with all his worldly possessions through to Korea. However, apparently, they never made it on to the Air Canada flight and nobody has any idea where they are. I know all this because he explained it in exhaustive detail several times to different people on a very long phone call. He was obviously distressed, and I felt very sorry for him. And I will never know if he ever got them back.”

Zee has since landed at Heathrow and boarded a tour bus bound for Oxford (Ed: The Perfect Comma Tour?). After seeing stories in the media about airline passengers losing luggage, Zee opted for carry-on only. I suspect UK charity shops will be the beneficiaries of that decision.

We have all heard about or seen media coverage of people trying in vain to find lost luggage, waiting for hours in queues or being repeatedly bumped off flights. During its 18-month hiatus, the airline industry, despite attempts to revisit glory days running decades-old commercials, appears to have serious organisational issues. It comes down to a shortage of staff and trying to make old bookings systems work in a post-Covid world. Not that we are anywhere near a post-Covid world.

It may surprise you to know there are 28 countries which are not open to international visitors. They include a few countries most of us would never have on our destination bucket list. A few have onerous travel restrictions which would probably deter most visitors. Hong Kong, for example, requires you to return a negative Covid test and then go into quarantine.

A useful website (Kayak) tells us there are 163 countries that are open to visitors, and which do not require Covid-testing or quarantining. Another 33 countries require Covid testing before they will let you in and three that also require you to go into quarantine. The 28 countries that are open only to returning citizens or those under ‘special circumstances’ include China, Taiwan and Russia.

Kayak, an on-line travel agency, maintains a web page which keeps track of where you can go and what restrictions there are (if any). Despite Australia requiring all people travelling to and from the country to be double vaccinated, some countries (like Ireland) have an open-door policy. I would caution anyone with travel plans to check and double-check the entry (and exit) requirements as they change all the time.

The Kayak web page is also a one-stop place to check out how other countries are going with their vaccination rates. They range from Samoa (100%), Singapore (92%) and Germany (75%) to scarily low numbers in countries like Somalia (16%) and PNG (3.4%).

Our research into travel to New Zealand in six months’ time has thus far revealed it will be costly for comprehensive insurance. This is more to do with being 70+ than any other factor. Even though it is six months’ away, hire car companies seem to be short of vehicles. Of more pressing concern is planning ahead to avoid catching Covid and giving it to other people, namely elderly family members. We are fortunate to have an extended family in NZ who would find ways of accommodating us should we need to go into isolation (a bach at the beach, Cuz?). But it is best to make sure you factor another $1000 or so into your travel budget to cover contingencies.

As readers may have gathered over the eight years we have been communing on Fridays, I’ve done a fair bit of travelling in my youth. We also had some adventures later in life – in 2004 exchanging houses for six months with an English couple who lived in Godalming (Surrey). That was a great way to see Greece, France, Belgium, Italy, Scotland, Wales and other places, three weeks at a time then back to base to live the suburban life for a while. We visited relatives in Canada on the way over and re-visited Canada in 2010 for a family reunion. This seems to be the year for the Canadians to visit us. Brother Jon was here in May, making the most of the wet winter. Cousin Glen and his wife will be here in our Spring. They intended to travel in 2020 but we all know how that went down. There’s talk of a cousins’ reunion (probably in Seattle) in 2023. .

As readers may recall from recent essays about our trip to Tasmania, we found there’s a fair difference between taking on a 10km bush walk at 64 and 10 years on. .

Let’s see how we pull up after a month in New Zealand.

FOMM flashback

Rental crisis raises risk of homelessness

rental-crisis-homelessness — A roof over your head (eventually). Image by www.pixabay.com,

This topic was sparked by news from a near-neighbour who had received the dreaded ‘landlord requires vacant possession’ letter.

All tenants go into a lease today knowing that the landlord can decide to sell the property, at which point they will be evicted. A lot of landlords have been doing that over the last two years, taking a profit as property prices spiralled.

The rental vacancy figures in this town and just about everywhere else would suggest that once a rental property is sold, it disappears from the rental pool – at least for a while. The national rental vacancy is 1.2% – at a time when analysis of Census housing data suggests that 700,000 private dwellings are locked up and uninhabited. More on that later.

We all know people who are renting and finding it increasingly difficult to feed their families. In recent months, there have been many stories in the media about families struggling to find a place to live. Those who find themselves at the end of a lease with no new home in the pipeline are at risk of becoming homeless.

Even when we are told the reasons for the shortage of housing, solutions are less obvious. Mostly due to self-belief and a strong self-image, some people caught between a lapsing rental and a tight vacancy rate will find their way round it.

It isn’t hard to find caravan parks, farm-stays and outback tourism ventures that need residential caretakers. The successful candidates get to park their vans for free and quite possibly pick up a small stipend as well.

People in these circumstances (a) do not regard themselves as homeless and (b) they can enjoy the luxuries afforded by a 22 ft caravan and an annexe.

June quarter data from CoreLogic shows that Australia’s rental market continues to tighten as low supply levels cause national vacancy rates to dive. Rents continued to rise across all capital cities and property types over the past three months.

Dwelling rents in the June quarter were 9.1% higher across the capital cities and up 10.8% in regional areas, compared to June 2021.

CoreLogic report author Kaytlin Ezzy said the recent upwards trend in rents has occurred mostly in the absence of overseas migration.

“This sustained period of strong rental growth has seen national dwellings record the highest annual growth in rental values since December 2008, when rental demand was supported by record levels of international migration,” Ms Ezzy said.

Vacancy rates across national dwellings fell to a record low of 1.2%, down from 2.2% this time last year.

In March, CoreLogic contributed to a report in The Guardian that found rents in Queensland had risen by as much as $200 a week over the previous two years.

The report found that steep rent rises in parts of Queensland forced people into caravans, sheds and poverty – even before widespread flooding displaced thousands more people.

While the ABS has released 2021 Census housing data, it will be “early to mid-2023” until we see the homelessness data. The most recent official data was collected in 2016 and released a year later. The homeless tally then was 116,427.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) estimates that in 2020–21, around 278,300 people received assistance from Specialised Homelessness Services (SHS). Around 111,100 clients were homeless when they first began support.

There are different categories of homelessness, apart from those who literally have nowhere to go and end up sleeping rough or in a charitable shelter. Then there are people living in sheds, garages and other unconventional buildings, couch surfing (staying with friends), hostels and unsuitable temporary accommodation.

Since late 2019, the onset of the Covid pandemic, the escalating price of real estate and an ever-increasing scarcity of rental properties has unquestionably added more individuals and families to the homeless tally. There is an increasing cohort of ‘hidden homeless’, that is people who are either not eligible to apply for support or feel they do not need it.

In Australia, some of these people head for the great outdoors. Accommodation demand driven by ‘Grey Nomads’ has produced hundreds of free camps and low-priced camp-grounds run by local show societies. The free roadside reserves, which may nor may not have a toilet/and or shower, usually have rules about how long you can stay. In Tasmania, many free camps allow you to stay for up to a month.

.Everyone’s circumstances are different, but we have met many people who had sold their house and bought a road rig. Many of the so-called Grey Nomads are retired tradies and public servants who can afford a $200,000 self-contained rig and go on the road for months at a time.

But if you travel the country and stay in free camps, you are just as likely to see a couple living in a 30-year-old caravan towed by an equally ancient car.

The big problem waiting for Australia’s new Prime Minister to tackle (after he has settled down our Pacific neighbours), is the housing crisis.

Believe me – it is a crisis. There are simply not enough houses to go around. This is particularly so in Queensland, where interstate migration has put the housing sector under massive strain.

There are reasons for the dire shortage of housing and they include delays in building new homes amid adverse weather in 2022. Then there are homes destroyed by floods or bushfires.

But as residential property analyst Michael Matusik discovered, the housing shortage is in part due to some 700,000 private dwellings that are “deliberately left vacant”.

Matusik reached this conclusion after analysing 2021 Census housing data, which showed there were one million unoccupied dwellings in Australia (about 10% of the country’s private residential accommodation).

The ABS defines unoccupied dwellings as: holiday homes (for owner’s use or rented out); investment properties without a tenant; newly built but vacant dwellings; habitable dwellings being renovated and/or vacant dwellings for sale or lease.

Matusik wrestled with those categories and calculated that after discounting the latter, 700,000 unoccupied dwellings were investment properties that were locked up rather than tenanted.

“Many of the unoccupied dwellings are in capital cities, especially Sydney and Melbourne where more apartments are in the dwelling mix,” Matusik wrote in his regular subscriber bulletin, Matusik Missive. “In these cities the proportion of overseas buyers, especially from Asia, and particularly from China, is the highest in the country.

“It is somewhat safe to say that something like 70% of the unoccupied dwellings across Australia are deliberately locked up.

“Assuming past immigration levels return, then there is a need to build some 150,000 new dwellings across Australia each year.

“If we could unlock these 700,000 empty homes, we would not need to build a new home for 4.5 years.”

While admitting this is ‘fantasy land’, Matusik says that any move to open up these dwellings would go a long way to improving short-term dwelling supply.

As we approach National Homelessness Week (August 1-7), some agencies will no doubt be calling for an earlier release of Census data on the homeless.

I asked the peak body, Homelessness Australia, for a comment; but remembered it was de-funded by the Federal Government in 2014. When one of their volunteers gets back to me, I’ll include their comment.

For now I’ll say that however bad the news is, it is better that we know sooner than later.