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When Rome Counted its Citizens

Census-Romans — Census taker visits a family of Indigenous Dutch Travellers living in a caravan in 1925. Wikipedia CC

You may not immediately deduce from the headline that we are about to embark upon a discourse about the Census, which will happen in Australia on or about August 10, 2021.

I say on or about because the online version of the head count can be filled in electronically on or a few days after August 10. You just have to declare where you actually were on Census night.

As you will recall, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) held its first online census in 2016. There was a major glitch on Census night (August 9) when the ABS website crashed, leaving millions of citizens perplexed. In October 2019, a Census test was held across 100,000 households to assess ‘end-to-end operational readiness’ for the 2021 Census.

In 2016, about 37% of people opted to fill in the paperwork and wait for an official collector to come calling. This time the ABS says it expects a better than 63% online response, given research that shows Australians prefer to complete the census online.

Taking a once in five years snapshot of the country’s population is an expensive exercise, budgeted at $565 million. The ABS is in the process of recruiting 22,456 field staff and managers.

Named after the Latin word ‘censere‘, meaning estimate, the Roman census was the most developed of any in the ancient world. The Romans (Ed: what did they ever do for us?), conducted their census every five years. The Roman Empire used this information to extract duties from its citizens.

An ABS history page says the first known census was taken by the Babylonians in 3,800 BC, nearly 6,000 years ago.

“Records suggest that it was taken every six or seven years and counted the number of people, livestock, quantities of butter, honey, milk, wool and vegetables.”

So yes, there is an historical precedent for the (compulsory) collection of personal data from every household in the country.

You may remember Tony Abbott, who was Prime Minister for two and a half footie seasons (2013-2015), tried to axe the census to save money. It didn’t happen (such change requiring a new Act of Parliament). To be fair to Abbott, both the Fraser and Keating governments sought to abolish the census for the same reason.

Sydney Morning Herald journalist Peter Martin unearthed this little-known fact in 2013 while writing about other countries which had tinkered with changes.

As Martin noted, Britain had for a long time been trying to abolish its census (held once a decade since 1801). The government held an inquiry in 2013 to find ways to update the way the UK collects data. This year’s census will be the last. Thereafter, the UK will ‘harvest the data people generate in their everyday lives’.

Apolitical, a social network for civil servants, observed that other countries are moving in this direction or have already done so, including the US, Norway and Finland.

“Rather than survey citizens, statisticians would collect the data traces left behind by people’s everyday interactions with government. Data is collected from welfare and tax departments, housing and vehicle registrations or our health records.”

Apolitical says statisticians can glean more from the aggregating of all this information (and anonymising it to protect citizens’ privacy).

In 2010, Canada’s Harper government tried to replace its census with a voluntary survey, prompting the shock resignation of Canada’s chief statistician, Munir Sheikh.

Following his resignation, Dr Sheikh, once described by a colleague as ‘the best economist in Canada’, expressed his disapproval of the government’s decision, saying that a voluntary survey could not replace a census.

Following the reinstatement of the mandatory census in 2015, Canada is preparing to hire 32,000 census enumerators and crew leaders to survey its vast country in 2021. Canada, like Australia, uses data from the census to share resources fairly and accurately among its widely-scattered provinces..

New Zealand also considered replacing its census, using data from government departments to determine its population. The country’s last census was in 2018 but it is already gearing up for 2023.

Some governments have encountered deep social opposition to certain questions. Former President Trump wanted a Citizenship question in the 2020 Census. He backed off after a wave of hostilities that included a threatened boycott.

In July 2019, he realised there was no time left to have the question included in the 2020 Census papers. So he issued an executive order calling on agencies to turn over citizenship data to the Commerce Department.

In the first few days of his administration, President Biden rescinded this directive. Litigation about this issue argued that citizenship data could have politically benefited Republicans when voting districts are redrawn.

The other controversial question on census forms is the one about religion. In 2001, the UK re-introduced the question (not asked since 1851), largely as an attempt to calculate the size of the Muslim population. Accordingly, some 390,000 people in England listed their ‘religion’ as Jedi, a response which occurred in Australia too, with 70,000 recorded in 2001. In 2016, 48,000 people entered Jedi as their religion. New Zealand had the highest per capita Jedi response (53,000) in 2001). Statistics New Zealand’s response was: ‘Answer understood but not recorded’.

The US does not ask the question (nor does Scotland), though the US asks about race and ethnicity. In Australia, the religion question has been ‘optional’ since the first Census in 1911. The box ‘no religion’ is a recent addition.

Curiously (well, we think it is curious), the ABS confirmed that 90% of people have answered the question in recent censuses. If your religion is not listed, the form provides space to enter the data. Because of this response, the ABS holds data on 150 religions in Australia.

The idea of trying to run a country without a census horrifies Peter McDonald, Emeritus Professor of Demography at The Australian National University. He thinks scrapping the census would be ‘a nightmare for planners and governments’.

“The problem in Australia is that we have no reasonable alternative to the census,” he told FOMM this week. “From an accuracy (and privacy) perspective, the census is better by a long way than trying to combine various administrative data bases. Without the census, the States would continually claim that their population was larger than it actually was. And every other group that received funding on a population basis would do likewise.”

Statistics is a dry subject, but one we encounter every day of our lives, so let’s leave you with this. Mathematician Joey Scaminaci’s clever rap ‘Statistics’ attempts to teach the basics in three and a half minutes. It impressed one fan who commented:

“From Australia I thank you, this is very helpful! Gonna ace my big exam”.

Farmers Rejoice As Rain Boosts Crops

wheat-barley-queensland — Image by BW: Wheat bunkers at Thallon (see silo at rear for scale)

It wasn’t really Gourmet Farmer Matthew Evans who inspired me to write about wheat and how we so much take the bread of life for granted.

As you may have noticed, we spent last week cruising around the tiny hamlets of Yelarbon, Talwood and Thallon, part of the south-western Downs grain belt. At Talwood and Thallon in particular, the landscape is dominated by man-made mountain ranges of wheat, pinned down under blue tarpaulins.

This takes me back to my grounding as a young-ish journalist, where I was charged with reporting on the fortunes of graingrowers on the Darling Downs. Now and then I’d write about cotton or market gardening, prowling around the Lockyer Valley looking for stories about crops.

The stand-by headline in those days was ‘Rain boosts crops’, because invariably, the Downs would be in drought and crops suffered as a result. Nevertheless, if the rainfall warranted it, a photographer would be dispatched to capture a farmer in gumboots, jumping for joy in sparse puddles.

So this week I find myself back in familiar territory, perusing the detailed reports prepared by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Science (ABARES).

Winter crop production in Australia was indeed boosted by very favourable seasonal conditions during Spring. Most cropping regions in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia were generally in very good condition at the end of winter. ABARES says in its December report that favourable rainfall during September and October increased soil moisture levels during the critical grain development period. Crop prospects in Western Australia and Queensland were lower due to adverse growing conditions. All the same, Queensland graingrowers think it’s great.

Australia is truly the lucky country among grain growing nations, as it harvests two crops – planted in summer and winter. The latter is harvested between November and January. Winter crop production in Australia is forecast to increase by 76% in 2020–21 to 51.5 million tonnes, second only to the record high of 56.7 million tonnes set in 2016–17. Wheat production is forecast to increase by 106% to 31.2 million tonnes,the second highest on record. Barley production is forecast to increase by 33% to 12 million tonnes, also the second highest on record. Other crops including canola, chickpeas and oats are also doing well.

At times like these I sympathise with relatives of She Who Was Born on the Prairies. Canadian grain growers have a once-a-year opportunity to grow wheat and barley and the crop can too easily fail due to late frost or snow, or if crop diseases like rust drift across the US border.

While the Australian summer and winter grain crops of 2020-2021 are being heralded as ‘the big comeback’, you still need a reliable export market. There has been speculation for months that China will enforce a ban on imported Australian wheat.

The rumours are of course driven by China’s decision to impose harsh tariffs on Australian barley. Bad timing too, with Australian barley production peaking at 11.96 million tonnes, China’s 80.5% tariffs effectively stopped a billion-dollar trade in its tracks. Australia’s barley market was worth $1.5 billion in 2018. But the effects of drought and an effort to diversify into other markets has seen this fall to $600 million in 2019.

Western Australian farmers, who represent almost 90% of Australia’s barley market, did not take long to respond to China’s ban. CBH Group, a farmer-owned grain marketing business, last week sent a 35,000 tonne shipment of malting barley to a new client in Mexico, shipped from the West Australian port of Albany,

Graingrowers president Brett Hosking went to town to buy some fencing materials and also picked up a six-pack of Mexican beer.

He made a video for Twitter to celebrate the deal, which he said came about because of “a lot of work by people in the industry and a lot of coordination”.

“I won’t say it’s the first shipment of malting barley to go to Mexico, but not too many people can remember a cargo going there, so it’s pretty exciting.”

Hosking welcomed the recent $72 million Federal Government export aid package, but said it should be used to address short term concerns for Australian malt barley as well as increasing feed grain opportunities in the region.

“We look forward to working with Government in 2021 to ensure farmers don’t carry the burden of foreign trade matters.”

Rumours of a ban on wheat are less of a worry as China imports only a small fraction of Australia’s $5.3 billion wheat exports. China’s domestic grain growing industry is the world’s largest. It tops the international list of wheat producers, at 131 million tonnes a year. Australia ranks ninth on this list at 20.4 million tonnes.

As any agronomist could tell you, wheat was first cultivated 10,000 years ago and the mortar and pestle method of milling dates back just as far. Clearly, the loaf of white bread you buy in a supermarket for a few dollars is the end product of a highly mechanised and adulterated food chain.

The contrasting example can be found in episode nine of Gourmet Farmer, when host Matthew Evans and agronomist friend Andrew Cook harvested their first crop of home-grown wheat.

Evans said he will probably get 450 grams of flour from every kilogram of wheat, with Cook estimating “about 12 kilos per row”. It’s a small field.

They took the old school approach to separating chaff from wheat (letting the wind blow the chaff away as they transferred the wheat from one large bowl to another). From there, the hand-grown and milled wheat emerged as a 700 gram loaf of artisan bread.

Evans freely admitted to a couple of onlookers that the first loaf of Fat Pig Farm bread cost $200 to produce. They looked suitably shocked.

Meanwhile back in Thallon (between Mungindi and St George), the silos are full and bulk handler GrainCorp is following the long-practiced art of storing wheat in ‘bunkers’. We camped at Thallon’s recreation ground, across the road from the ‘bunker tarps’. Grain is stored on carefully prepared beds on the ground and covered with bright blue tarpaulins. When the time is right, mobile conveyers transfer the grain into rail wagons bound for Fisherman Islands port in Brisbane.

Thallon’s rows of bunkers are so large that from a distance they look like a faraway mountain range (see image above). A spokeswoman for GrainCorp told FOMM the Thallon depot received 273,000 tonnes this season, with its Goondiwindi cluster hiring an additional 40 people at Thallon and Talwood to to help handle the harvest. Currently GrainCorp has a train booked every day for the next fortnight, hauling 1600 tonnes per day.

The Department of Agriculture says Australian wheat exports are forecast to reach around 21 million tonnes in 2020–21, more than double 2019–20 exports. Grains account for about 20% of Australia’s agricultural exports, a $48 billion market. So you can see why the industry would be nervous about the diplomatic spat with China and the trade bans that could follow.

It is especially ironic at a time when growers are getting record prices for grain. And more luck to them – it’s been a long time between (Mexican) beers.

(For an interesting insight into Australian Aborigines’ development of agriculture, read Bruce Pascoe’s book ‘Dark Emu’. Ed)

Clean Jobs Plan Tackles Climate Change

climate-clean-jobs — Image by enriquelopezgarre, Pixabay

Three big topics of 2021 – Covid-19, Climate Change and Job Creation, are inextricably linked to the future of the planet.

The official climate report is in for 2020, with global temperatures tying with 2016 as the hottest ever recorded.

Although Australians sweltered through an early November heatwave, the summer so far has not been too hard to endure.(except SA,Victoria and NSW are likely to see temperatures exceeding 40C this weekend. Ed

The data cited by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service seemed at odds with images of Madrid enduring its worst snowfall in 50 years. The mercury in Madrid plunged to -10, compared with the January average of 3 degrees.

The New York Times said the heavy snowstorm presented complications for the Spanish government, still struggling with a rising Coronavirus caseload, more than 499,000 in Madrid alone. Spain’s Covid-19 death toll, more than 51,000, is one of the highest in Europe. The government warned residents to stay home, well aware of the temptation for people to venture outdoors.

That’s the nature of climate change, however; extremes in summer and winter and shifting weather patterns in the autumn and spring.

Spain is also struggling with the impact of Covid-19 on its workforce. More than one million jobs were lost during the worst months of the pandemic. Despite short-time work schemes and a third quarter rebound, Spain’s unemployment rate is still around 13%.

Youth unemployment (under 25’s) is 40%.

While Australia’s latest unemployment rate of 6.6% (December) looks good by comparison, the short-term nature of Spain’s jobs policy sounds depressingly familiar.

The International Monetary Fund estimated that in April and May up to a fifth of Spain’s workers were on short-term contracts. Possibly in an attempt to sway the government towards ‘green’ job creation, the IMF revealed that Spain’s housing sector is one of the most energy inefficient in the EU. It accounts for about 16% of Spain’s Emissions Trading System emissions.

“Residential housing would benefit from labor-intensive, climate-compatible public investment,” an IMF report said.

As the IMF observes, a focus on green buildings can provide a demand boost to support recovery, while closing gaps in green infrastructure and human capital.

“This will accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy and strengthen the economy,” the IMF’s report on Spain said.

It’s no different Down Under, with the built environment said to account for 25% of Australia’s CO2 emissions. Attempts to regulate the building industry to make buildings more energy efficient have been inadequate.

The Climate Council listed energy efficient buildings and urban green spaces as part of its ‘Clean Jobs’ policy paper.

The Climate Council commissioned AlphaBeta, a consultancy specialising in advanced data analysis, resulting in a plan to create 76,000 ‘clean’ jobs.

The 68-page document (with four pages of references), sets out 12 opportunities to put Australians back to work, restart the economy and tackle climate change. The jobs include 15,000 installing utility-scale renewable energy (solar and wind farms, transmission infrastructure and utility-scale batteries). The plan also includes 12,000 jobs in targeted ecosystem restoration, and 12,000 in public and active transport constructions. Another 37,000 jobs are projected to be created in other projects across Australia, including in organic waste, energy efficiency in buildings, urban green spaces and community-scale storage.

This alternative solution to the 840,000 jobs lost to Covid-19 requires less than 0.5% of GDP. Every dollar of public spending is estimated to attract $1.10 in private investment.

The Climate Council’s paper was widely reported in alternative energy circles, but few mainstream media outlets covered the story. This is despite the Climate Council claims it would help people and industries that have been hit hardest by the COVID-19 crisis, especially in regional Australia.

“One in three job openings would require minimal training, meaning that displaced workers, from hospitality workers in Victoria to tourism operators in Cairns, could be rapidly employed.”

The Climate Council ran Clean Jobs briefing sessions with State government representatives after its launch in July. A spokeswoman told FOMM that meaningful actions were taken and worked into State budget announcements.

“We are in the midst of strategising for how we will revitalise the report for 2021, ensuring maximum impact and continuing on its success.”

The latest Australian employment data released yesterday shows an improvement in both the unemployment rate (down -0.2%) and the labour participation rate. Nevertheless, youth unemployment is still up 2.3% for the calendar year, at 13.9%.

Youth unemployment is as high as 25% in some parts of regional Australia. While the under-25’s are being propped up by the Jobseeker scheme, which effectively doubled the NewStart payment, this funding will end on March 21.

An ACTU submission to the Jobs for the future in Regional Australia Inquiry canvassed Australia’s rate of underemployment (8.5% from 9.4% in November). This far outstrips the OECD average, with ANZ describing the underemployment crisis as “widespread” throughout the country.

“Precarious work is increasingly becoming the norm, which makes it more difficult for workers to argue for fair pay and conditions.”

Underemployed workers are more likely to exhibit lower job satisfaction, higher job turnover, poorer mental and physical health and persistently lower income.

The Climate Council’s Clean Jobs paper reminds us that the Australian economy is vulnerable to escalating climate risks.

Property prices are liable to fall up to $571 billion and agricultural and labour productivity by $19 billion in the next decade. Flow-on effects will be felt across the country, and will worsen unless emissions are lowered.

These claims are corroborated by the Reserve Bank of Australia, which has stated that more severe, persistent climate-related shocks could threaten the stability of the Australian economy. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has labelled climate change a “systemic risk” and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has said the financial risks of climate change are “foreseeable, material and actionable now”.

While Australia’s unemployment rate is trending down after hitting 7.5% in July, we should remember that a third of the labour force works less than 40 hours a week. The latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows the share of part-time employment rose to 32.1% for the year to December (4.149 million).

The Federal Government is pinning its hopes on improving the lot of young Australians through its JobMaker subsidy.

The JobMaker Hiring Credit will be available to employers for each new job they create over the next 12 months for eligible young people aged 16 to 35. The scheme started on October 7, 2020, with eligible employers able to claim $200 a week for each additional eligible employee they hire (aged 16 to 29) and $100 a week for employees aged 30 to 35.

Much noise has been made by and on behalf of the over-35 cohort, arguing discrimination, predicting the JobMaker scheme will further marginalise the long-term unemployed.

Ah well, at least young people who are hired on this basis will be able to afford a portable air conditioner. And here’s hoping everyone, including those hired under JobMaker, will be able to take paid sick leave if they are ill or are quarantining owing to Covid-19 testing

Down the rabbit hole, looking for trouble

The phrase ‘going down the rabbit hole’ could well apply to my activities earlier this week, as I set out to research ‘alternative’ social media networks including those adopted by the right wing.

Before I disappeared down the burrow, I had some idea what I would encounter, having last year researched 4Chan and 8Chan.

My research was thwarted right at the start by Amazon’s reported move to ban Parler from its web-hosting network.

Apple and Google have also removed the Parler App from its app stores. Not surprisingly, www.parler.com has been off-line since Monday.

Parler (pronounced par-lay), at last count had 15 million members, including a significant number of Trump supporters. Parler has been cited as the source of posts inciting violence before last week’s storming of Washington’s Capitol Building. Amazon terminated the app’s internet access at the weekend, having previously warned the social media operator about breaching its moderation rules (deciding which comments to let through).

While Parler went off-line, looking for another web host, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took to his own forum to explain why Trump has been denied access. Twitter had already blocked Mr Trump’s account after earlier labelling some of his tweets as disputed or false claims.

Amazon (and Parler) have not made official comments about the ban, not surprising given the potential for litigation. This piece by the Washington Post (owned, as the article declares, by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos), should suffice as a summary.

The fallout from last week’s rioting at the Capitol Building includes internet giants Facebook and Twitter banning soon to be ex-President Trump from commenting. This could be construed to mean they figure the riots happened because Trump encouraged it (and social media gave the angry mob a place to vent, plan, organise and schedule).

Authorities seemed slow to lay arrest and lay charges, (the FBI today says more than 100 arrested). Those charged include those accused of bringing bombs and weapons into the building. Others, whose faces were caught on video, have so far escaped the link between that and their actual identities. If it had been in CCTV-dominated London, they’d all be nicked by now.

On Tuesday, US authorities announced new arrests and charges including Jacob Anthony Chansley, also known as Jake Angeli. They also charged Derrick Evans, a recently-elected member of the West Virginia House of Delegates. The US Attorney’s office said Mr Evans was identified on a video, shouting as he crossed the threshold into the Capitol, “We’re in, we’re in! Derrick Evans is in the Capitol!”

The pair and one other man were charged in Federal Court in connection with the violent incursion into the Capitol.

Chansley, the most identifiable of those captured on video or security cameras was hard to miss, with his red white and blue face paint, tattooed chest, horned helmet and bearskin toupee.

He was charged with “knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.”

On Tuesday I clicked ‘like’ on multiple Facebook posts condemning Australia’s acting Prime Minister Michael McCormack for seemingly taking ex-president Trump’s side over the Twitter ban. The debate, free speech vs consequences. rumbles on.

McCormack’s attempts to compare the riots with last year’s Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice were described by Amnesty International as “deeply offensive”.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who is on leave, last week condemned the rioters over the “terribly distressing” violence and called for a peaceful transfer of power.

But unlike many other world leaders, he refused to acknowledge Trump’s role in inciting the mob that gate-crashed the US Capitol building.

Just in case you think things like that only happen ‘over there’, there are stridently right-wing politicians in our own parliament saying provocative things. The Guardian reported that government backbencher George Christensen said over the weekend he would push for laws to “stop media platforms from censoring any and all lawful content created by their users”.

Further to Parler’s ban, social media posts have appeared claiming that ‘ultra left-wing radicals’ have downloaded Parler profiles aplenty and a mass ‘doxxing’ is feared.

Doxxing in this context means a deliberate dumping of publicly available data with the aim of ‘outing’ people who express strong views on social media. Apparently it (the gleaning), has been going on for some time.

At this point, like my friend Mr Shiraz, who finished his daily rant on Facebook and went outside to prune trees, I turned my mind to substantive issues in Australia.

It seems the combined media coverage of Covid-19 and life in Trumpistan* has pushed Australia’s refugee issues off the news agenda.

Since I recently joined a local refugee support group which aims to help refugees in a positive way, I thought I should play my part.

I started by writing to the Southern Downs Regional Council, asking Mayor Vic Pennisi to join the 168 local governments in Australia who have designated their regions a ‘Refugee Welcome Zone.’

Our near neighbour, Toowoomba Regional Council, declared the city as such back in 2013 – before it was even a ‘thing’.

The Refugee Council of Australia definition of a ‘Refugee Welcome Zone’ is: ‘a Local Government Area which has made a commitment in spirit to welcoming refugees into the community. The aim is to uphold the human rights of refugees, demonstrate compassion for refugees and enhance cultural and religious diversity in the community’.

There’s a bit of a precedent, with participants widespread throughout Australia including the City of Sydney (NSW), Brisbane City Council (Qld), the City of Subiaco (WA), Clarence City Council (Tasmania) and Port Macquarie-Hastings Council (NSW).

There are eight local governments in Queensland who have rolled out the welcome mat for refugees, including Brisbane, Gold Coast, Logan, Townsville, Toowoomba and Noosa Council.

In applying myself to letter writing, I broke the cycle of ‘doom-scrolling’ which is a catch-phrase to describe the act of constantly updating news and social media feeds on one’s mobile phone. They say it makes anxious people grind their teeth at night.

This insidious condition worsens for every day the US inauguration grows closer; for every day we endure live press conferences updating our region’s Covid status.

In what must surely now be recognised as a classic FOMM digression, the phrase ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ has been nabbed by an enterprising South Australian winemaker.

Down the Rabbit Hole Wines is clever marketing in an industry that seems switched on to it. I should also tell you about a Victorian winemaker whose label is Goodwill Wine. I don’t imbibe, but She Who Does tells me the red is worthy of their loose adaptation of our band name (www.thegoodwills,com).

Brand names aside, ‘going down the rabbit hole’ is defined by dictionary.com as a metaphor for something that transports someone into a wonderfully (or troublingly), surreal state or situation.

I rest my case.

Last week: One of my readers (a beekeeper) chided me for calling the bee disease ‘Fowlbrood’. I’m blaming the spellchecker, as I already knew it was ‘American foulbrood’ or AFB.

*Trumpistan: a term for the parts of the USA which support Donald Trump

Why borders are important

border-controls — Image courtesy of Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (WA)

Breaking events in Washington tempted me to change course, but when wise people like Barack Obama and Jacinda Ardern have already had their say, I’m staying with today’s topic.

Before Covid-19, restrictions at Australian border crossings were limited to bio-security controls, primarily on carrying fresh fruit and vegetables and plant materials from one State to another.

Travellers, particularly those who take their households with them (camper trailers, caravans and RVs), should download this detailed booklet.

You’d be as surprised as I was to learn of the many items banned in particular states. The objective is to prevent the spread of pests like fruit fly and plant diseases such as banana bunchy top virus, potato cyst nematode or grape phyloxera.

Pests, diseases and weeds can be spread from one part of Australia to another through the movement of many items, including plant or plant products, fruit and vegetables, animals or animal products, soil and agricultural machinery.

It is probably dangerous to generalise about what’s OK and what’s not, but transporting honey, bananas, live plants and soil between States is a bit of a no-no. If in doubt, ask. And, if you’ve been working on a farm, make sure your boots are free of imported soil.

I do recall tossing some fresh fruit into a quarantine bin before entering Western Australia, which has some of the strictest bio-security measures in the country. Throwing away perfectly good fruit seemed a small price to pay when you understand the risks.

The reason for the zealotry over honey is probably because WA is the only Australian state relatively free of bee diseases, including European foul brood disease (a bee killer). So, that jar of raw honey you bought at a market in country Victoria should be binned at the border, in case there are spores lurking in the untreated honey.

My point is that fair-minded Australians would probably do the right thing to help States safeguard agricultural industries against imported diseases.

So why then are people trying to subvert the border controls imposed to stop the spread of Coronavirus?

Before Christmas, Queensland police turned away more than 100 people who attempted to travel into the State from NSW virus hot spots. Police had ramped up border security on the State’s road crossings and increased compliance checks on travellers undergoing home quarantine.

Chief Superintendent Mark Wheeler told the ABC that 57 vehicles containing 115 people had so far been turned around at the Queensland-New South Wales border since the restrictions were reimposed.

“People who are trying to game the system — we will catch you,” he said.

This week Queensland police commissioner Katarina Carroll branded a tweet by conservative lobbyist Lyle Sheldon as a waste of police resources.

Mr Sheldon posted a tweet, which he later said was meant as a joke, about his “sneaky run across the border and back” and “avoided the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] virus police” in the process.

Police visited Mr Sheldon’s home to question him about the tweet (about his beach run from Coolangatta to Point Danger and back), and left soon after.

The Brisbane Times quoted Commissioner Carroll, who said the tweet was “disappointing” because it involved valuable resources to investigate and clear Mr Shelton.

“He can cross the border because I understand he has a G-Pass. So it was just a funny tweet that, in the end, all it did was take away resources that needed to be in other places.”

Bees in a bottle aside, there have been serious attempts throughout 2020 by people determined to defy Queensland’s border rules. The border has been closed since mid-March, (albeit with a brief re-opening), allowing access only to people with border exemption passes.

Between March and the end of September, Queensland police issued fines totalling $3.5 million to 2,296 people. Fines averaging $1,500 were imposed for breaching a range of Covid-security health directions.

Gold Coast lawyer Bill Potts told 9News it was not surprising that so few people had paid their fines.

“The reality is if you’re prepared to breach the laws there for public safety and the health of the community, you’re exactly the person who won’t pay a fine.“

Commissioner Carroll said “quite a high percentage” of people are also failing to pay their bills for hotel quarantine.

Under Queensland’s COVID regulations, people generate a SPER (State Penalties Enforcement Registry) debt if they do not pay their fines. These will be added to the latest tally, which is significant. According to Queensland Treasury, 1.32 million people owing $376 million are paying off their fines through a repayment arrangement or unpaid community service.

There is also the case of the so-called ‘Logan Trio’, three women who allegedly lied on their Covid paperwork to avoid quarantine after entering Queensland from a Melbourne hotspot. The three have been charged with fraud, with their case set to be heard on January 20.

Meanwhile, many citizens will have found themselves stranded on the wrong side of the border. As it stands, Victorians who have been visiting Queensland for Christmas are able to return to Victoria by a direct flight between Queensland and Melbourne. I should add that if they were still in Melbourne on December 21 they have to be Covid-tested and wait for a negative result before flying home.

For those who came by road, the options are limited, as they cannot drive via New South Wales without applying for a border exemption and risking an expensive hotel quarantine stay on arrival. The alternative is a sprawling detour by road via Camooweal, the Northern Territory and South Australia (to Adelaide) then to Melbourne. The distance is about 5,100kms, compared with 1,766 direct Brisbane to Melbourne by road. Or the 4WD short-cut via Birdsville to Adelaide. Bear in mind there is paperwork involved at all border crossings and rules can change overnight.

These are pesky (and expensive) inconveniences, but where we would you rather be? Our daily cases are considerably less than 1% of those reported in England, the US, Brazil, India, Mexico and dozens of other countries.

Many of us have friends or relatives in England where the new strain of Coronavirus is spiralling out of control. The severe lockdown is at odds with border controls during the first six months of the pandemic, when Brits routinely took holidays to the continent. Non-essential travel between England and Europe has been banned since late October,

Meanwhile, Greater Brisbane is going into a three day lockdown from 6pm tonight to curb the spread of the mutant UK strain. While there was only one new locally acquired case in the past 24 hours (Queensland), New South Wales has 196 active cases including 6 acquired overseas. Victoria has 38 cases (which may explain why they are keeping the border closed to NSW).

Obviously this is a fast-moving story, but we should try to keep up with the news, even when we think we are ‘safe’; for example, this week’s discovery of Coronavirus traces in sewage at locations including Warwick and Stanthorpe.

I read about that in Australia’s first new independent regional daily since 1955, the Warwick-based Daily Journal. The first edition on Monday contained a Covid update, including a checklist of conditions prior to entering the State.

All that aside, if you are coming into Queensland from elsewhere, the entire state is a biosecurity zone for bananas, grape plants, mangoes and sugarcane.

But you knew that, eh?

Polio – an ever-present risk

polio-risk-covid — An iron lung, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London: a patient inside a Drinker respirator, attended to by a nurse and a doctor. Photograph, ca. 1930. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Polio is my counter-cyclical topic to kick of a new year that everyone hopes will see the Covid-19 global pandemic kicked in the arse. That’s Australian lingo for vanquished, eradicated, snuffed out. Despite hopes that the Covid-19 respiratory virus will be globally defeated through a programme of vaccinations, it is unlikely to cover everyone who needs it, this year or even next. So let’s be informed by history.

My generation will recall the arrival of the polio immunisation team at their local primary school in the 1950s. ‘The Jab’ was administered to all children as part of a mandatory scheme to eradicate poliomyelitis (polio) from New Zealand (where I grew up). NZ, like Australia, had virus outbreaks in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

Polio is a viral disease that affects the spinal cord and nervous system, primarily in children and adolescents. Globally, the disease has been 99% eradicated, after an immunisation programme started in 1955. Yet, as health authorities warn, even though the disease has not been seen in the US since 1988, it would take just one live case to be imported to re-start the viral cycle.

I warmed to this as a FOMM topic after reading a few chapters of Alan Alda’s charming biography ‘Never have your dog stuffed’. Alda, who contracted polio as a child in the 1940s recalled, “The country was in the throes of an epidemic. People were afraid to go to public swimming pools or theatres for fear of contagion.”

His parents utilised a controversial treatment advocated by Australian nurse, Sister Elizabeth Kenny. The treatment involved application of heat packs and manual stretching of limbs. Though controversial at the time, the Kenny methods were absorbed into what we now know as rehabilitation medicine.

Despite Alda’s graphic description of the painful application of heat packs, he credits the Kenny treatment with not developing paralysis or the characteristic withered leg common in polio victims.

Even though his doctor had declared him no longer contagious, young Alda had few visitors. He related how one child came to visit for a short while, sitting across the room on a wooden chair.

“Over the next couple of weeks, I thought about this, how kind he was to visit me. I also noticed he didn’t come back.”

Serious polio cases were often subjected to lengthy periods in an ‘iron lung’. An iron lung was a bed inside a metal box with a cushioned opening where the patient’s head protruded. The machine helped patients breathe mechanically until such time as the virus subsided and they could breathe on their own.

Survivors who were left with a withered leg were fitted with a caliper to help them walk. Serious cases ended up in a wheelchair.

It is estimated that about 30% of those affected by paralytic polio could be vulnerable to Post-Polio Syndrome in later life. Occurring about 30 years after the initial infection, PPS causes progressively worsening muscle weakness in limbs affected by the disease.

To demonstrate that polio (like Covid-19) can affect anyone, many famous people were affected by the disease:

Actor and humorist Michael Flanders (of the duo Flanders and Swan) spent much of his life in a wheelchair after contracting polio in 1942. As you can tell by this splendid parody of Mozart’s horn concerto, Flanders did not let polio dominate his life, short as it was (he died in 1975 aged 53). Given the dire nature of this topic, I recommend this performance of “Ill Wind” as light relief.

My favourite songwriter, Joni Mitchell, developed polio and spent much of her childhood at home, where she discovered a talent for art and music. Joni developed her distinctive range of open tunings on guitar and dulcimer to compensate for an arm weakened by the disease. Polio might also explain her friendship with another Canadian songwriter, Neil Young, also a victim.

Australian songwriter Joy Mckean has worn a caliper since developing polio in childhood. In the documentary Slim and I, she tells the story of how she came to write Lights on the Hill, one of her husband Slim Dusty’s enduring songs. As Joy tells it, in the days when she and Slim criss-crossed the continent, the dip switch of most cars was located on the floor, to the left of the brake pedal. As her left leg was paralyzed, Joy had developed a method of moving her right leg across to dip the lights and back to the accelerator. It puts lines like these sharply into context:

These rough old hands are a-glued to the wheel
My eyes full of sand from the way they feel
And the lights comin’ over the hill are a-blindin’ me

Many other well-known Australians were struck down with polio as children, including the late media tycoon Kerry Packer, radio presenter John Laws and former Deputy PM Kim Beazley.

Packer was at boarding school in 1945, aged six, when, as he recalls, “one morning I got out of bed and just fell flat on my face.

“I had polio and rheumatic fever and was sent straight down to Sydney. They put me in hospital there for about nine months in an iron lung.”

Although there has not been a locally acquired case in Australia since 1972, the country has a polio response plan in place. The ever-present risk of the disease being imported could trigger the plan. Although wild poliovirus-associated paralytic poliomyelitis has not been reported in Australia since 1977, an imported case was reported in a man who had traveled from Pakistan to Australia in 2007.

British new wave rocker Ian Drury was a polio survivor. The disease left him with a withered leg and arm and other disabilities. That did not stop him forming a band (The Blockheads) and penning pithy songs like Sex’n Drugs’n Rock’n Roll, Hit me with Your Rhythm Stick and Reasons to be Cheerful.

Drury, a disabled man with a poor opinion of the International Year of Disabled Persons, wrote Spasticus Autisticus in 1981. The lyrics are directed at the campaign, which he saw as patronising and counter-productive.

“So place your hard-earned peanuts in my tin
    And thank the Creator you’re not in the state I’m in
    So long have I been languished on the shelf
    I must give all proceedings to myself.”

This could be loosely adapted to a post-Covid scenario; someone lamenting how Covid has left them with weird after effects, or how the world’s way of dealing with the pandemic has dealt them a bitter economic blow.

It’s not hard to imagine Australian health authorities developing a long-term Covid response plan, as they did with polio.

As we know, all it takes is one case, imported from somewhere else, and the contagion starts all over again.

Happy New Year, then!

Lyric extracts from www.lyrics.com

Note from the Editor- don’t blame me – I said: “Why don’t you write something fluffy for the start of the year?”

Christmas Lights and Pachelbel’s Canon

It’s Christmas Day so I’m posting this early and directing you to whatever device you listen to when playing a Spotify playlist.

If you do not have an account for this music streaming app, it is free to join up.

I have curated this in the true Christian spirit of peace and goodwill to all people (and dogs), with the inclusion of a few modern songs which have become known for their festive topicality.

I had the idea to do this while seated in the front row of St Mark’s cathedral in Warwick, as our choir waited to perform..“Ah, hard pews,’ I groaned to my fellow tenor as we rose to sing, “That takes me back.”

“What’s your background then?” he replied and I only had time to say “Methodist” before we queued up in the vestry for our first number, Ring Christmas Bells.

I have sat on many a hard church pew for many an hour. Our parents believed we should all attend ‘kirk’ as a family every week. Mum played the church organ, so it was a given that we’d end up knowing all the words of all the songs.

The traditional Christmas ones stay with you, even if in later years if you are one of those who once did and now no longer do.

I don’t mind listening to or singing Christmas music, but I detest being force-fed through the speakers in shopping malls and other public places.

Typically, whoever chooses the playlists for these locations goes with the hackneyed, inappropriate Northern hemisphere ones, or songs that embellish the commercial Christmas myth of Santa as we are all streamed into stores to buy gifts that in truth we rarely want or need.

I will put The Grinch back in his box now and proceed to the playlist, which you can listen to while sweating over a Christmas stove, peeling prawns or sitting with your feet up having a coldie.

1/ I’d never heard The First Noel sung to the tune of Pachelbel’s Canon. Our choir, East Street Singers, obviously knew it, and after two weeks’ rehearsal, so did I. If you’ve never heard it before, there is a 12-bar instrumental before the singing begins. The First Noel is a Cornish song from the early 1800s, lyrics inspired by Luke, Chapter 2.

2/ Ring Christmas Bells, sung by Dublin’s gay and lesbian choir. They sing it a good deal faster than we did, as we slow-marched into the cathedral, carrying candles.

3/ Next up is Mary Did You Know? by Mark Lowry and Buddy Green. We sing the arrangement by Fred Bock, unlike acapella group Pentatonix, who usually make up their own.

4/ Then come The Civil Wars with a sensitive rendition of I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. Sadly, this duo broke up after recording two sublime albums of originals.

5/ Let’s jump into some contemporary songs of the Christmas season and the emotions it stirs up. The late John Lennon, killed outside his home in New York on December 8, 1980, starts Happy Xmas/War is Over with: ‘And so it is Christmas and what have we done?’ He rolls the traditional song into a refrain: ‘War is over, if you want it’, sung by 35 children of the Harlem Community Choir (who would all be between 50 and 60 years old today).

6/ I’ve previously included Joni Mitchell’s plaintive River in Christmas playlists. Feeling sad at a supposedly happy time, she wishes she had a river to skate away on, introducing and closing the song with Jingle Bells in a minor key.

7/ Following on from that is Paul Kelly’s recipe for gravy, instructions dictated to his brother while he (the writer) languishes in jail.

8/ Macca, host of Australia all Over, prompted me to include the Beach Boys’ ‘Little Saint Nick’ when he aired its cheerful harmonies and danceable tune last Sunday.

9/ I remember being introduced to the songs of Taylor Swift by a couple of young teenage girls who sang one after the other at a karaoke night. This is Swift’s ‘Christmas Must be Something More’ with lyrics worth a second listen.

10/ Switching back to carols, here’s an Australian one (The Silver Stars) intepreted by the stellar vocal group, Ideas of North.

11-13/ Did I warn you this was an eclectic list? Now we have Harry Belafonte with Mary’s Boy Child, followed by Paul Robeson (Ode to Joy – including a verse in German), and Wassail Song, performed by the Choir of Magdalene College. 14/ Closing out the celestial segment, Enya sings the timeless carol Silent Night in Gaelic.

15/ Changing the mood, Norah Jones sings pleadingly ‘It’s Not Christmas until you Come Home’. 16/ KT Tunstall pursues the theme with ‘Lonely This Christmas’.

17/ For the Parrotheads out there, Jimmy Buffett brings a little laconic escapism (and steel drums) in ‘Christmas Island’. No doubt in my mind Jimmy was not referencing our own Pacific gulag, where we lock up refugees and bill the tax payer.

18/ Canadian songwriter Dar Williams intended her 1996 song,The Christians and the Pagans, as a ‘humorous respite from tortured holiday gatherings’. The theme was controversial in its day, a Solstice-celebrating lesbian couple joining their devout family for Christmas.

“The food was great, the tree plugged in, the meal had gone without a hitch, Till Timmy turned to Amber and said, ‘Is it true that you’re a witch?’ ”

As Slate reviewer Karen Tucker observes, although Williams said it was intended as witty social comment, the song nevertheless “evokes rumination on fractured families and societal ills in listeners, some of whom drill deeply into the psychology of the lyric”.

19/ The penultimate song is also an Australian carol, ‘Carol of the Birds’, sometimes called Orana, sung here by the Sir Peter Chanel Choir.

20/ And to take us out, Coldplay’s Christmas Lights is a reminder to cut the guide out of the free newspaper and go for a drive this evening.

She Who Bought Solar Christmas Lights From The Big Green Shed And Strung Them Along The Fence is joining in this enterprise, in a small way.One has to make a gesture in this town, where there are some truly splendid, even lavish displays.

The best way to appreciate this playlist is to play it in the car while taking the (grand) kids around to see the neighbourhood Christmas lights.

Later, when the kids have gone to bed and the dog is gnawing his Yuletide bone, check out East Street Singers performing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. https://www.facebook.com/eaststreetsingers/posts/3787100911353311

All the best for Christmas and see you in 2021

Bob and SWBSCLFTBGSASTATF (aka Laurel)

Strolling Through an Historical Village

A sure sign of advancing years is just how quickly you can identify household objects when visiting a local historical village. In my case, this is particularly so when an historic house has preserved its original laundry – twin concrete tubs, a mangle, a copper, a metal baby’s bath hung on a nail and a flat iron (designed to be heated up on a wood stove). Not to mention wire washing lines, strung between the outhouse and a sturdy tree, held in place by heavy timber clothes props.

We have a passion for visiting historical villages and museums, especially in the outback. I mean the ones in small communities, primarily run by volunteers. Not that there’s anything wrong with The Stockman’s Hall of Fame, Sovereign Hill (the gold rush town at Ballarat), or what used to be Old Sydney Town, But they are more theme parks than keepsakes of communities past.

Today’s photo, which I’ve shared on Facebook before, is my Dad, re-creating his days as an apprentice baker in Scotland. He is seen here in the replica bakery at Miles Historical Village in western Queensland, circa 1984.

The Miles museum, celebrating 50 years in 2021, is an outdoor historical village consisting of a 1900s streetscape, with 36 buildings. They include a bakery, a post office, chemist and general store. The re-launched Artesian Basin Centre houses information on artesian water, Aboriginal history, and land care. There’s a War Museum with displays from all World Wars. The historical village is operated by the Miles Historical Society. Its collections comprise memorabilia donated by families in the district. While the museum was closed for 56 days during the worst of Covid-19, plans are afoot to celebrate its 50^th birthday as part of the Miles Back to the Bush festival in September.

Wherever you journey around Australia, you will find (mainly European) regional history, preserved in historical villages, museums and outdoor displays. An example of the latter is the Machinery and Heritage display at Ilfracombe, between Barcaldine and Longreach. If you have an interest in old farm machinery and the like, it can take an hour or two to stroll along the highway stretch. If it’s a hot day, you can repair to the Wellshot Hotel afterwards for a chilled libation.

There are also few buildings along “Machinery Mile” which house items of local history that would not last in the outdoors.

Further west, in Winton, a visit to the rebuilt Matilda Centre includes admission to the original history museum, which includes a well-preserved settler’s cottage. Like most such houses, where rooms have been set up as they were in the 19^th century, wire grilles keep us from really appreciating the atmosphere. They do safeguard the memorabilia, however.

On the other side of town, Winton has its Diamantina Truck and Machinery Heritage Centre, most of it under roof. We visited on a rare rainy day, so it was a good reprieve from the windy conditions.

This museum costs just $5 to enter. We’re told that most of the prime movers, trucks, fire engines and tractors kept under roof are in going order. All they need (perhaps in 2021), is a street parade, a regional show, a rodeo or camp-draft to show themselves to the public.

Included in the display is a 1976 London cab. Museum secretary Robyn Stevens told me it was acquired and imported by a local donor who has loaned it to the museum. As befits such a rare vehicle, some 20,000kms from its original home, it is kept in an air-conditioned room.

Likewise another prized item – a fully restored, 1910 Talbot fruit and vegetable delivery truck, on loan from the Cassimatis family of Muttaburra. While browsing, I found a Bedford cattle truck made the year I was born (and possibly in better condition!).

The Dawson Folk Museum in Theodore was also a good find, as it is tucked away behind the main street. The museum is housed in a former power station and has a large collection of photographs covering pioneer families, Aborigines, ex-servicemen from World Wars I and II, and modern photographs – all tracing Theodore’s development. Displays include the history of early station families, a pioneer kitchen and bedroom and farm machinery.

Curiously, we could not find one mention of the State’s only Labor Premier of that era, ‘Red Ted’ Theodore,after whom the town is named.

One of the more comprehensive historical villages can be found near the Calliope River park south of Gladstone. We camped beside the river and set off for a look, admittedly a bit late in the day. The volunteers who locked up at 5.30 said we were welcome to come back and finish the tour the next day, which we did.

The Calliope River Historical Village, originally a cattle property, is located on 1.12ha of riverside land.

The village comprises a large number of original buildings, all of which have been relocated over a 40-year period from within a 60km radius.

historical-villages — The Clyde Hotel, Calliope

Buildings include several large country homesteads, a pioneer cottage, the Clyde Hotel (with a current liquor licence), an old school house, a jail, a church (hired out for weddings,) and a woolshed full of machinery and memorabilia. There is also a vintage steam train and carriages to explore.

Secretary Mary Lou Wright told FOMM the land is owned by Council and leased to the Port Curtis Historical Society Inc.

The village holds monthly markets which were put on hold for much of 2020. Mary Lou said that now the markets had resumed, they have been well patronised and everyone had co-operated with the Covid 19 rules. The markets attract many stallholders and big crowds and the revenue is vital to the ongoing upkeep of the village.

A large building on-site is home to the Gladstone Model Rail Group, which maintains an elaborate model railway village. The model rail is operational and open to the public on market days. The group also meets on Tuesday nights for its weekly get-togethers.

If visiting community-run historical villages is something that interests you, open your wallets and purses wide. Admission fees are usually modest (Theodore’s museum was just $2), so make time for afternoon tea, buy a drink, an ice-cream or a postcard. Go for broke – make a donation.

Speaking of donations, I just sent a few dollars to Wikimedia, which is on its annual fund-raising quest. Some 98% of Wikipedia’s readers use this on-line resource without ever contributing to its upkeep. I often use Wikipedia as a source for general information, (e.g.) background on the Miles Historical Village and Museum. Some people help Wikipedia by updating and editing existing pages. Or you can just send them (they suggest $2.75), a modest donation. It’s worth thinking about.

More reading:

I won’t be home for Christmas

Christmas-expats-covid19 — Image: ThePixelman, www.pixabay.com.au

Every year at this time, Australians who live and work overseas are making plans to visit their families for Christmas. When you live and work in places like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Auckland, Hong Kong or Singapore, three weeks at the beach in Oz is the perfect escape from chilly winters.

But not this year, dear reader, as the second, or is it third wave of Covid 19 has sent cities in Europe and the UK in particular into lock-down.

The above destinations are where Aussie ex-pats are most likely to live and work, according to employment agency Apply Direct. Using figures from the Department of Home Affairs, Apply Direct singled out the top destinations where many of our ex-pats live. Figures are hard to pin down, but it is estimated that of the eight million Aussies who travel abroad looking for adventure, one million or so will decide to stay and work.

The United Kingdom hosts by far the largest ex-pat population (160,000). Many young Australians can claim parents or grandparents who were born in the UK, which gives them an automatic right to live and work there.

Our extended family is no exception, with family members living in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Canada, the US and elsewhere.

Many young Australians head for the UK when making their first trip abroad. It is easy enough to base yourself in London, find some kind of job (ex-pats often take the casual jobs the Brits won’t do), and make forays to Europe whenever possible.

As often happens when you are in your 20s and single, matches are made and romance sometimes blooms.

Morocco-based ex-pat Suzanna Clarke uses technology to keep in touch with her siblings.

“My sister is in Adelaide, my brother in Oxford and me in Morocco. (Our parents died a few years ago.) We also have a catch up video call via Skype on Sundays, although sometimes we use the video function on WhatsApp. I love the ease of communication these days. I have kept letters between my great-grandmother and my grandmother, who were living in Brazil and England respectively from the 1930s to 1950s. The letters have two to three month gaps, as they were transported by ship. Even when I was travelling in India and Europe in my 20s, the lag was at least a couple of weeks. We are so fortunate these days!”

Meanwhile, in the worst-hit country by far (the USA), some of the 90,000 Aussie ex-pats, and like-minded Americans, will be self-isolating over Christmas. Most Australians congregate in just three cities – Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. Fair to say that many of them are people with a talent in some aspect of music production or movie-making. We know a few musicians who have had periodic flirtations with the country music capital, Nashville. We also know one or two who came to visit and stayed.

Musician George Jackson, who lives outside of Nashville with his wife Rachel, says he is keeping a low profile at Yuletide.

“We just cancelled all Christmas plans with any of Rachel’s family and are now planning to basically have it at home by ourselves. Obviously the virus is surging pretty badly here in the US and we decided it was best for everyone if we didn’t risk any gatherings for Christmas this year, particularly to protect the health of Rachel’s parents.

“I’ve been keeping in touch with friends and family back in Australia. I saw my parents in January last year, so it’s coming up a year since seeing them and I know they are missing being able to be with me and my brother, who’s living in France. So that’s tough, but we’re sticking it out and waiting for that vaccine to get approved and distributed and looking forward to perhaps a mid-summer Christmas in July next year with family.”

.It is beginning to sound as if the vaccine will be a prerequisite for people wishing to fly from one country to another. Australia’s major airline Qantas flagged this requirement in an announcement that made headlines around the world.

Forbes magazine reported that Qantas CEO Alan Joyce said his airline would eventually only allow vaccinated travellers to board its flights. The move would essentially allow travellers to move around the globe unhindered by quarantines.

The ready adoption of video streaming technologies has helped families with relatives living abroad (or even on opposite sides of the continent), to connect or re-connect.

A Sydney-based Kiwi friend has planned a holiday in Melbourne, knowing that a visit home would involve a 14-day quarantine stay. She usually travels to New Zealand at Christmas to spend time with family. The only way to do that now is to go into quarantine for two weeks, at a cost of $2,000 on top of the airfare. Like so many others, she is relying on digital connections. Fortunately her family has gravitated to a weekly chat on WhatsApp.

Irish Joe Lynch, a performance poet who lives in Maleny, spoke of the unexpected constraints on travel to visit family members.

“Taking my freedom completely for granted, I returned to Ireland many times over the past 40–odd years, visiting family and friends. I still have five ageing siblings overseas whom I would dearly love to visit, but of course that is not available to me now ever since the outbreak of Covid19. What is most distressing is the knowledge that most of my family are currently undergoing Stage 4 and Stage 5 lock-down restrictions, and are terribly frustrated and lonely.”

You may not know that the UK, one of the worst affected by Covid 19, appointed its first Minister for Loneliness in 2016.

Loneliness is a big deal in Britain, where 45% of people polled in 2016-2017 admitted to feeling lonely “occasionally, often or always”, One in 20 adults felt lonely often or always, which equates to 1.4 million people, a 49% increase on the same survey in 2006-2007.

A mental health survey during the UK’s lock-down in April found that one in four (24%) had feelings of loneliness in the “previous two weeks”. This was more than double the response before lock-down. One in three females (34%) and one in five males (20%) reported suffering from loneliness while working from home during the COVID-19 social restrictions period.

On Sunday, I had my first-ever video chat with my sister, who does not have a computer or mobile phone. We usually talk on her landline (equipped for the hearing impaired). On Sunday, we chatted via a relative who was visiting and who rang me on Messenger. It was good to be face to face again and realise (with some shock) how we have both aged since I was there in 2017. I made a note on the calendar to ring my other sister (who does have a mobile phone) at Christmas, although she has told me she prefers ‘ear-to-ear’.

But as Suzanne said, in the 1950s people wrote letters to loved ones overseas, patiently waiting months for a response. Since we have the technology to simulate face to face communications, we really ought to use it, eh.

Australia’s flawed human rights record

australia-human-rights — Christmas Island immigration detention centre – cc wikimedia

There’s not too much coincidence about the timing of China’s social media campaign, accusing Australia of human rights abuses.

The photo-shopped meme which has outraged all sides of the Australian government targets alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

Timely, given that next Thursday (the 10^th), is International Human Rights Day.

China, of course, is campaigning from a blood-stained corner, its long record of human rights abuses and accusations thereof, lurking in the shadows. I mention the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the persecution of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities and so-called ‘re-education’ camps as examples of China’s human rights transgressions. The scary website below depicts the world’s human rights record in a series of charts.

The United Nations lists the main tenets of human rights as:

the right to life and liberty;
freedom from slavery and torture;
freedom of opinion and expressionand the right to work and education;

Everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination.

The Cato Institute ranks countries for their adherence to human rights principles. It will surprise no-one this side of the Tasman that New Zealand is at No 1. However, Australia has a strong human rights records, ranked, in 2018, as fourth in the world behind New Zealand, Switzerland and Hong Kong (the latter has no doubt dropped a few rankings since then).

An important indicator of a country’s attitude to human rights is its intake of refugees. New Zealand lifted its annual refugee quota from 750 (unchanged since the 1950s) to 1,000 then in July this year to 1,500. Australia ranks well in the number of refugees accepted – over 12,700 in 2018 (although Canada, with a population of 10million more than Australia accepted more than double that number).

But the issue that won’t go away is Australia’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers and refugees who have arrived by boat. Australia’s long-held position (set by John Howard in 2012 and upheld by Kevin Rudd), is that no-one who has arrived here by boat will ever be resettled in Australia. The Morrison government would like to set its policy in legislative stone. The Labor Opposition, in weakly supporting this egregious position, said it would only do so if refugees in detention were able to re-settle in New Zealand.

The global scale of the refugee problem understandably allows Australia to sink below the footlights. Our numbers are comparatively tiny, so they warrant little attention on the global stage.

While Australia has re-settled a comparatively high number of refugees, its human rights record is blighted by an offshore detention regime that the International Criminal Court described as “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” and “unlawful under international law”. But as The Guardian reported, Independent MP Andrew Wilkie’s campaign to bring Australia to justice on this issue fell short.

The office of the ICC prosecutor said that while the imprisonment of refugees and asylum seekers formed the basis of a crime against humanity, the violations did not rise to the level to warrant further investigation.

The one glaring example which fits all of those criticisms and more is the incarceration of a family of five Sri Lankan refugees.

They are the ‘Bilo’ family, adopted by people in Biloela in 2014, where they lived until forcibly removed by immigration officers in 2018. They have been held in the detention facility at Christmas Island since August 2019. They are reportedly the only detainees on the island. Various articles on this subject have speculated that this is costing between $20m and $40m a year.

This timeline by MP Josh Burns charts this sad tale over the past 20 years.

Meanwhile, 1,534 people are being held in Australian-controlled detention centres. Of these, 615 refugees are in Alternative Places of Detention (APOD) or Immigration Transit Accommodation (ITA). Some have been there a long, long time.

The latest Office of Home Affairs report shows that 502 people had been held for between 92 and 365 days. Another 743 have been held longer than a year and 229 held for longer than two years.

From these damning statistics, refugee support groups derive social media hashtags like #7yearstoolong. The latter is a reference to the 99 people the department admit have been in (domestic) detention for ‘more than 1825 days’ (6.5% of the total).

Since January this year, the Office of Home Affairs has been publishing key statistics on the ‘transitory’ refugee population in Nauru and PNG. As of October 31, there were 146 people held on Nauru and 145 in Papua New Guinea (total 291). The department resettled 212 people in 2020.

These statistics show that an unacceptable number of people have had their lives put on hold, indefinitely.

NZ’s leader Jacinda Ardern has tried to show Australia the proper path for fair treatment of refugees. A year ago, Ms Ardern told Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison New Zealand was open to accepting refugees from Nauru and PNG. Along the way, the country offered safe haven to the distinguished writer and refugee martyr, Behrouz Boochani.

You will see a lot of campaigns surface and re-surface next week as refugee support groups roll out their collection of hashtags and petitions. Rural Australians for Refugees (RAR) has started a campaign to lobby the Australian Government to enshrine a charter of human rights.

As RAR notes, “The ACT, Victoria and Queensland all have Human Rights Charters which cover their States. But because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not Australian law, the Australian Government is not bound by it.”

The RAR has produced a discussion paper for interested groups to lobby for what is only fair and right.

To personalise the issue, just imagine for a minute that there has been a bloody coup in Australia and the White Australia junta has decreed that 7.25 million people born somewhere else must go back to their country of origin. Already there is a vast convoy heading for the backroads of Queensland and NSW, fleeing persecution. As you’d expect, they do so with dogged Aussie determination, flying their Aussie flags, with an attitude best summed up in the words of Darryl Kerrigan in the iconic Aussie film, The Castle: “Tell them they’re dreamin”).

So, dear reader, your mission on next week’s International Human Rights Day (December 10), should you choose to accept it, is to spend a few hours digesting these numbers. If we accept the position that a forcibly removed refugee is the subject of human rights abuses, these statistics from the UNHCR from December 2019 underline the magnitude of the global problem. At that time there were 79.5 million forcibly displaced people, 45.7m of whom were displaced internally. The UNHCR counted 26 million as refugees under its mandate. Comparatively few find a safe haven. Only 100,400 were resettled in other countries in 2019, with 5.4m returned to their country of origin.

And yet we (the Australian Government and others), campaigned strongly to free one of our own citizens being held in detention in Iran.

Given the Season, I’m ending on a lighter note. A reader submitted this, in response to my whimsical piece on ‘shoe trees’.

Speaking of readers, thanks to those who have responded so warmly to my modest subscriber request. Keep those cards and letters coming. Also, if you feel so moved, buy a Christmas card from RAR and send it to your local MP. #hometobilo