The Goodwills with Helen Rowe (centre), photo by Paul Brandon
Hello friends of The Goodwills, it is almost November and we have a gig coming up in Brisbane! On Wednesday November 14 we (Bob, Laurel and Helen Rowe), are the featured acts at Red Hill Folk. This weekly institution in the Brisbane folk scene is held at the Red Hill Bowls Club, Fulcher Street. The music is unplugged and starts at 7.30pm. Admission is $2.
This follows on from appearances at Macca’s outdoor broadcast from Toowoomba, Neurum Creek Festival and Maleny Music Festival, all in September.
In other news, Bob is writing new songs and plans to put a highly topical tune out there any day now.
Self-service checkout, photo by eltpics https://flic.kr/p/p57BLf
You may call me a peevish old man, but these self-service supermarket checkouts give me the pip. I only encounter them when venturing out of the village, as our service-oriented IGA does not as yet have automated check-outs.
Not so a certain Brisbane supermarket which, around 5pm, seems to have nobody staffing its numerous checkouts and only one person ‘helping’ people scan their own groceries. I usually ignore the self-service corner and will wait an inordinate time to be served by a human being. Last time I was in the 12 items or less line at the same supermarket, the poor woman was switching back and forth between checkout customers and those at the cigarette counter.
Management textbooks would tell you this is successful multi-tasking and making efficient use of a staff member over what is probably a meal break. Decency would say put two people on at this location.
American Facebook page Union Thugs has a bit of a campaign going against self-service, observing that the machines (a) they kill jobs (b) they do not contribute to payroll tax and (c) they are really not that convenient.
The latter was certainly true when I returned from shopping in the city a few weeks back to find I’d charged myself twice for the same item. So back I went, burning more fossil fuel, to queue up at the lightly staffed counter where one person was multi-tasking between selling cigarettes and dealing with complaints like mine.
IGA Maleny director Rob Outridge knows the downsides of self-service checkouts but can see a time when he may be forced to introduce them. Supermarkets operate on skinny margins and the biggest fixed cost is wages, which keep on rising. So while Maleny IGA still exclusively hires people to serve at the checkouts, there may be a time when competition and the bottom line force his hand.
“The problem is your labour costs keep going up and there is no increase in productivity.”
I suspect Rob Outridge knew I was going to take a Bolshevik approach to the subject of automation doing people out of jobs. Nevertheless, he handed me his card and in that pleasant, management-by-walking-around way of his said: “Just let me know if you have any other questions.”
It’s not just that a machine replaces a worker. You (the customer) are doing the checkout job yourself – for nothing. Of course it does not stop there; we do the job of a retail employee at the ATM, the fuel pump, at toll points and just about anything someone would help you with offline is now done (by you) online.
The online world has transformed the way businesses interact with customers. In the online world there are myriad stories of businesses getting our enterprise for a bargain, as they con us into signing up for electronic bus and train cards, gadgets on your windshield which go ‘ping’ when you pass through the toll gates and so on. Last time I parked under the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition and Centre, I had to go to a machine and pay for the parking then pop it in the slot at the boom gate. There were no attendants to be seen.
It hardly seems like nine years since the toll booths closed on the Gateway Bridge and Logan Motorway. There was something refreshing about that brief interaction when you paused at the collection point and tossed your coins into the tub. When the electronic toll system Go Via was introduced in 2009, 100 toll collectors were made redundant, with 22 moving into management jobs within Go Via. Former toll collector Sharmaine Phelan told the Brisbane Times she had a tear in her eye on the last day.
“Over the years I have been here I’ve met some lovely people, some that I’ve kept in touch with who have come through the toll.”
Tolls were collected manually on the Gateway Bridge for 23 years. As a motorist, you always had to be sure to have a pile of coins ready in the console, but that was all you needed. Today, you need a beeping gadget on your windshield and an online account that has to be kept topped up or you will get a letter in the post demanding payment. Along the way, a system of debt-collecting was invented to deal with people who either didn’t have a bleeping thing on their windshield or kept forgetting to top up their account. If they are people who also ignore mail and such, then eventually the Department of Transport gets involved and pings you for non-payment of tolls.
How is that an improvement on making Sharmaine Phelan’s day, then?
Fuel stations have been exploiting their customers in this fashion for decades. Self-service fuel stations began to spread in the US and Australia in the 1970s, although at a faster rate in America. Mind you, there is still one state (New Jersey) that refuses to allow customers to pump their own gas.
Australia caught on to automated fuel service in the 1970s and the reach has been pervasive. Even in the remote outback you have to pump your own fuel and, between the hours of 9pm and 5am, you often have to go in and pay for it first. One of the downsides of self-service fuel (from the fuel retail owner’s perspective), is the minority of motorists who fill up and just drive away.
Imagine my surprise earlier this year when driving into Longreach (at night) in an urgent search for a fuel station. The only place open was not actually open but had a bowser where you could use your credit card to (a) enter how much fuel you wanted and (b) press the Pay Now button.
You might remember the rockabilly song Harold’s Super Service made popular by Merle Haggard in 1970. I suspect the writer (Bobby Wayne) was perhaps taking a dig at the about to be modernised industry with his song, in which the owner of an old Model A drives in to Harold’s Super Service and insists on getting his money’s worth.
“Gimme 50 cents worth of regular (pronounced ‘reglar’)
Check my oil too if you don’t mind.
Put some air in my tires won’t you mister,
Clean my windows too if you have time”
The National Advanced Convenience and Fuel Retailing magazine (NACS) explains how automation gained the upper hand in the US. In 1969, self-service gasoline accounted for only 16% of sales in the US. By 1982, 72% of gas sold in the US was self-service and it had climbed to 90% by 2011.
I was amazed to find, amidst the proliferating supermarket-owned and franchise outlets, that there are still a handful of petrol stations in Australia offering old-fashioned driveway service. You’ll have to read Mandy Turner’s article to find out where they are, though.
Maybe it’s just that I’m approaching a certain age, but I secretly yearn for that era when the petrol station attendant filled your tank, checked your oil and washed the windscreen at the same time – just like the song.
Harold’s Super Service, Merle Haggard and band (listener warning – it’s an earworm).
Bob’s list: “Sorry dear, there was no kale (or cabbage).”
Someone (possibly one of my lecturers), once said: ‘People without lists are listless’ – perhaps an observation on my then lack of motivation.
Decades later, I went in search of the origins of this quote and came up empty, although there are many other pithy quotes about the universal ‘to-do’ list.
Author Mary Roach, who has many opinions about lists, says that by making a list of things to be done, she loses “that vague, nagging sense that there are an overwhelming number of things to be done, all of which are on the brink of being forgotten”.
Alan Cohen, author of 24 popular inspirational books says “The only thing more important than your to-do list is your to-be list. The only thing more important than your to-be list is to be”.
I’ve been enslaved to The List since realising, as I tackled university at the ripe old age of 30, that if I wasn’t organised, it would not happen.
I‘d read a few time management books, back in the days when I aspired to be a supermarket manager, but later, embarking upon a three-year Arts degree, I made up my own system. This included hand-written term calendars posted on big sheets of butchers’ paper on the study wall. I had a diary with all lectures, tutorials and assignment deadlines colour-coded and a daily to-do list. The chief instrument of production was a huge old Olympia typewriter I bought from a Toowoomba police office sale. I decorated a large pin board with cartoons and illustrations which had something to say about productivity.
My thoughts on list-making were sharpened on a week-long trek to Gympie’s Heart of Gold film festival, followed by a spot of whale-watching. We have three one-page spreadsheets on which we tick off items every time we pack the caravan for a trip.
For reasons not easily explained, we departed from this time-honoured system and subsequently left home without a dozen items, including bath towels, phone charger, camera charger, SD card (from the camera), video camera (whale-watching, right?), a bottle of olive oil, my favourite pillow, oatmeal soap and a water bottle. Replacing the last two items was a cinch and we bought two towels from a discount department store (wash before using, the label hopefully said). The moral is, if you keep lists, actually look at them.
The three most common types of lists are (1) shopping (2) domestic chores and (3) motivational.
Motivational types will tell you it is not the items on your to-do list that matter, it is the prioritisation. People in general, but mild-mannered, non-assertive people most of all, consistently leave the most urgent and stress-inducing items for last. (Crikey, Mavis, we must talk to Jimmy (16) about his marijuana breath).
Since computers, tablets and smart phones became commonplace in homes and workplaces, the list story has taken precedence. The majority are ‘click bait’, which means whoever invented the list is getting paid for every click that takes you to an ad-festooned page. The worst of these show only one item per page, forcing you to click through if you really want to read about the 10 most successful bandy-legged men.
Some lists are, well, just way over the top. Like the one Franky’s Dad found, a list of the top 34,000 albums of all time. No, M, you don’t have time for this!
Journalist and bloggers have found that the quickest way to write a compulsive article is to turn your topic into a 10-point list. If you write a couple of paragraphs about each item you’ll quickly get to your deadline.
Lists pop up on social media all the time – ten ways to tame a wombat, 25 things you never knew about armpit hair, the top 17 crazy tattoos and so on.
Trivia aside, the shabby state of leadership and lack of sensible policy in this country suggests we all make a short list of important issues about which we feel outraged.
If you come up with more than three major items involving bad policy, prevarication, procrastination or short-term-ism, we need a change of government.
1/ #KidsoffNauru: This has become such a crisis doctors are signing an open letter to the PM; a coalition of humanitarian organisations have given the Federal Government a deadline to get 80 kids (and their parents) off Nauru. About a third of the child refugees left on Nauru are showing signs of Traumatic Withdrawal Syndrome. It is no longer OK to say it is a matter for the Nauruan government and its contractors. Whether these children are brought to Australia by November 20 or not, this has been an appalling outcome of the Federal Government’s refugee policy and should be judged so at the ballot box.
2/ Climate Change: A panel of 91 scientists has definitively told countries what they need to do by mid-century to avert the worst effects of global warming. Our Federal Government’s response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (which recommends phasing out coal power by 2050), was predictable. Deputy PM Michael McCormack (who may one day rue uttering these words), claimed that renewable energy could not replace baseload coal power. He said Australia should “absolutely” continue to use and exploit its coal reserves, despite the IPCC’s dire warnings the world has just 12 years to avoid climate change catastrophe. The Guardian quoted Mr McCormack as also saying that the government would not change policy “just because somebody might suggest that some sort of report is the way we need to follow and everything that we should do”.
3/ Homelessness and the cost of housing: You might dimly recall Bob Hawke’s rash promise in 1987 that no Australian child would live in poverty by 1990. Three decades later the goal is as unattainable now as it was then. Even when you take into account that Hawke mis-spoke (the script said no Australian child need live in poverty), it was an empty promise. Nine prime ministers later, close to 731,000 Australian children are living in poverty.
The official homeless figure at the 2016 Census was 116,000, with about 7% (about 8,000 people) said to be ‘sleeping rough’, defined as on the street, on a park bench, under bridges and overpasses, in their cars or in makeshift shelters. These statistics damn all sides of politics, worsening through a period in which there has been no meaningful increase in unemployment benefits or disability pensions.
Meanwhile, property investors continue to borrow money and claim expenses (notably interest payments) against rental income. In 2014-2015, 1.27 million property investors (12% of taxpayers), reduced their personal income tax through negative gearing. No government has yet had the guts to scrap negative gearing or change it in any way.
Economist Greg Jericho analysed a huge Tax Office data dump to glean a few insights – most importantly, 27% of taxpayers claiming on rental properties are in the $80k to $180k tax bracket (and another 8% earn more than that). Furthermore, just over 3% of taxpayers own six or more rental properties. The proportion that own more than one house has been on the increase in recent years.
It’s all too easy to raise other concerns, such as: Adani, Great Barrier Reef, Fracking, the threat to job security for gay teachers and even the Opera House furore (smokescreen that it is).
(Wow, that sure puts my forgetting the towels into perspective. Ed)
Odd socks for mental health, photo supplied by www.grow.org.au
My choice to wear a matchless pair of socks today was a deliberate tribute to Mental Health Week. Odd Socks Day is just one of the many events sponsored through October to remind us that one in five Australians suffer a mental health disorder in any 12-month period.
I’d never heard of Odd Socks Day, but spotted a flyer in a café somewhere and tucked it away for future reference. It’s a national anti-stigma mental health campaign now in its fourth year, using odd socks as a metaphor that anyone can have an off day.
Despite the fact that the majority of people visiting GPs are consulting them about mental health or psychological issues, those with physical ailments are not confronted with the same level of discrimination, stigma and social shame.
Young people are particularly vulnerable to stigma. Research in 2016 uncovered some alarming facts about stigma and what an obstacle it is to people trying to recover from a mental illness. Headspace found that 26% of young people aged 12-25 would not tell anyone if they had a mental health problem and 22% would be unlikely/very unlikely to discuss it with their family doctor.
Fifty-two percent of young people (12-25) identified with having a mental health problem would be embarrassed to discuss the problem with anyone and 49% would be afraid of what others think.
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners recently found that 62% of people (via the traditional 10-minute consultation), were seeking support for mental health disorders.
The most common mental health ailments likely to afflict people are depression, anxiety and substance abuse. Sadly, many people struggling with depression use drugs and/or alcohol to self-medicate, often with negative results.
In my former work life, the notion of taking a ‘mental health day’ was anathema to your average hard-bitten journalist, for whom the deadline reigns supreme. But in recent years the previously taboo subjects of depression and suicide are now being freely publicised and debated. The hidden cost of not properly dealing with workplace mental health problems is now an $11 billion problem for Australian commerce. There is now an argument that $1 spent on mental health services equates to a ROI (return on investment) of $2.30. So why aren’t we spending?
If there is one indicator to show how stigma and mental health ratio is shifting, it is the NRL ‘casualty ward’, which lists rugby league players and their injuries. Through the season I recall at least six players said to be having counselling for ‘psychological’ or ‘personal’ issues, the latter covering a range of non-physical traumas. Dragons half Ben Hunt spoke candidly to the media this year about seeing someone to help overcome a slump in confidence. Armchair critics (virtual bullies) did not help Ben’s situation, with a steady stream of vitriol posted on social media.
Suicide is often the end-game for people fighting ongoing battles with mental health disorders. Australia’s standardised statistics on suicide are not as high as some (11.7 per 100,000 people). Lithuania (28.6) and South Korea (26.3) head the World Health Organisation list, but Australia is nonetheless in the list of 10 countries with a suicide rate in double figures and has been for a decade.
In Australia, men are three times more likely to commit suicide (17.8 deaths per 100,000 people) than women (5.8 deaths per 100,000 people). More than 75% of all severe mental illnesses occur prior to the age of 25, and youth suicide is at its highest level in a decade.
The telling statistics revealed by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners clearly show that the system is under untenable strain.
Author Jill Stark wrote about it in a Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece – ‘What happens when the answer to R.U.O.K is no and there’s nowhere to go?’
Stark wrote from a first person perspective, after fronting up to a GP with what she suspected was an acute recurrence of anxiety and depression. She was handed a form to fill in – a routine step in such a consultation, so the GP can make a more objective assessment of the patient’s mental health state. As Stark related, she scored 25 ‘mild to moderately depressed’ and was prescribed medication (after first being asked if she was suicidal).
The answer was no, but on the way home Stark reflected that should she indeed want to kill herself, she’d been prescribed with something well-equipped for the job.
As Stark bluntly pointed out, the time for wristbands and hashtags has passed. Doctors need the financial support Medicare can bring by allowing longer consultations for patients with complex psychological problems.
“As a matter of urgency we must stop rationing psychological services to 10 subsidised sessions per year,” she wrote.
So that was Jill Stark, wearing her odd socks in public. Bravo.
People like Jill who are having an acute mental health crisis need expert support at least once a week for as long as the crisis lasts.
The Black Dog Institute reminds us that 45% of Australians will experience a mental illness in their lifetime. One in five mothers with children younger than two will be diagnosed with depression. At 13%, depression has the third highest burden of all diseases in Australia (burden of diseases refers to financial cost, mortality, morbidity etc).
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that depression will be the number one health concerned in both developed and developing nations by 2030.
That gloomy prediction was no doubt behind the WHO’s decision in 2013 to introduce an eight-year plan to change the direction of mental health in its 194 member states. The plan’s main objectives are to:
strengthen effective leadership and governance for mental health;
provide comprehensive, integrated and responsive mental health and social care services in community-based settings;
implement strategies for promotion and prevention;
strengthen information systems, evidence and research.
Global targets and indicators were agreed upon as a way to monitor implementation, progress, and impact. The targets include a 20% increase in service coverage for severe mental disorders and a 10% reduction of the suicide rate in member countries by 2020.
These are noble aims, but as the WHO observes, it requires effective leadership and governance to implement meaningful change.
Odd Socks Day is one of the rare light-hearted efforts to raise awareness of mental health. Grow, the organisation behind the campaign, runs an in-school peer program that helps young people support each other through their issues.
The overall cost of unmanaged or mismanaged mental health in the Australian workplace is approximately $11 billion a year, according to Dr Samuel Harvey. Dr Harvey, a Black Dog Institute consultant, leads the workplace mental health research program at the school of psychiatry for the University of New South Wales. He was the lead author for research published in The Lancet which found that workplaces that reduce job strain could prevent up to 14% of new cases of common mental illness from occurring.
Quite clearly, we all need to pull up our socks, odd or not, and change our attitude. If only 35% of Australians in need are actively using mental health services, we need to do more than ask R.U.O.K.
Photo: Macca amongst the people at the Toowoomba carnival of flowers – by Bob Wilson
So there we were at the unaccustomed early hour of 7am in Laurel Bank Park, Toowoomba, trying to catch Macca’s eye to say, “Mate, we’re here.”
Ian McNamara,* the host of Australia all Over, who sometimes plays music by our band, The Goodwills, had invited us to attend his second OB (outside broadcast) of the year.
Laurel Bank Park was pretty as a picture, thanks to a big team of gardeners and a decision by the Toowoomba Regional Council to water the town parks, despite the drought. It makes little sense to have a famous Carnival of Flowers without making some attempt to preserve the gardens.
The Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers has been going for 69 years, attracting ever-larger crowds each year to take tours of the prize-winning gardens, watch the grand parade and dine out in the city’s eclectic ‘Eat Street’. It was sentimentally appropriate that we were in Laurel Bank Park, where rumour has it we (She and Me) once had a re-affirmation of vows ceremony, cunningly disguised as a bush dance. We lived in Toowoomba in the 1980s (and my how this sprawling country town has grown).
Last weekend, we stayed with old friends at Highfields, now a satellite suburb 10 kms north-west. Our friends bought an acre of land and a house there when it was still in the bush. Now there’s a service station on the corner (and traffic lights). We drove into town to watch the Grand Parade on Saturday, parking in a secret place known only to locals. On the way we detoured up Bridge Street, past what used to be the Toowoomba Foundry, now home to the biggest Bunnings store I’ve seen for a long time. The Foundry facade on Ruthven Street has been left standing, along with remnants of the old saw-tooth factory roof, which you don’t see much of in this era of tilt-slab concrete industrial sheds.
Toowoomba has certainly become not only bigger but more multicultural since we lived there. Walking past St James Anglican Church on Russell Street, we saw many Sudanese people gathered outside. They had just returned from the funeral of the Rev James Ajak, a respected priest and community leader among Toowoomba’s large South Sudanese community. A thousand people, some who came from as far away as Western Australia, attended his funeral at the Centenary Heights State High School Assembly Hall.
Multicultural Toowoomba carnival
Multicultural groups were well represented in the grand parade of floats, bands, vintage cars and dancing schools. Our host told us an amusing story about a grand parade from years gone by when it rained relentlessly. There were two elephants on a flat-bed truck, he said, and one of them heeded nature’s call, leaving a wet pile of dung for the people following behind to negotiate.
It wasn’t really the right mental picture for a lovely Spring day with a big crowd of good-natured people enjoying the hour-long parade, led by the Toowoomba Caledonian Pipe Band. I was never very good at estimating crowds, even though I was given a few tips by Toowoomba police back in the day when I worked at The Chronicle as a general reporter and columnist.
Thousands, let’s say, drifting down Margaret Street to Queens Park where floats were lined up for inspection (and judging). Our host’s grandkids cunningly detoured Pop to sideshow alley, while we strolled hand in hand through one of our special places. If Queens Park had been watered lately, it was still thirsty, not surprising given the city has had only 70mm of rain in the past six months. Only one of those rainy days amounted to much (20.8mm). As gardeners would know, this is when you have to think about what to water and when.
Nonetheless, Laurel Bank Park, with its topiary, flower beds, scented garden, flowering peach trees and bowling green lawns was at its showcase best. We did catch Macca’s eye, as he roamed among the 600 or so people who showed up to listen to his four and a half hour live Sunday morning broadcast.
We sang a couple of songs and listened with admiration to local duo Kay Sullivan (accordion) & Peter Freeman (double bass) accompany Mimosa, a gypsy jazz duo from Terrigal, with Toowoomba trombone player Ian Craig chiming in as required. Macca sang a couple of songs and the band played along – as if they’d all had rehearsals. It was impressive.
Later I was reminded of the column I once wrote for the Toowoomba Chronicle in the 1980s. It started life prosaically as This Week with Bob Wilson and later became Friday on My Mind. We were reminiscing about the time our local folk club built a scale model of the Glenrowan Pub on the back of a truck and entered it into the grand parade with a bush ranger theme. I satirised this in one of my old columns (September 1984). Such fun to quote yourself:
“The float-building gang were having a right old bludge. There was Bluey swarming all over the back of his smash repair truck pulling ropes and lugging hay bales while the gang of nine procrastinated beneath a tree where someone had thoughtfully erected a makeshift bar, keg and 10 seven ounce glasses. Ted and Hughie arrived with their contribution to the float – a four-metre high model of the Ryebuck Shearer complete with black singlet, hand shears and a big placard which read “One out, all out”. Bluey inspected the newcomer and tapped its 44-gallon drum chest.
“Good welding job. Thing must weigh a ton.”
“He used to shear 100 sheep a day, mate,” said Molly.
Ben turned up in his bright green Ute with two sheep in the back. Hollering things like ‘Bewdy’ and ‘Have a go’, Ben carted the bewildered animals (one under each arm like Colin Meads), and plonked them on the back of the truck.
“I’ll bet we need a permit to transport live sheep on an open truck during a street parade,” said Cautious Col.
By midnight the day before the grand parade, the Ryebuck Shearer had been bolted to the back of the truck cab, a sheep chained to each of his formidable legs.
“You’re not going to leave them sheep here all night are you?” Bluey said. “They could clean up my back yard before tomorrow.
“It is tomorrow,” said Molly, “And I’m going home.”
Later, about noon, the Rybebuck Shearer was disqualified from the parade because stewards ruled that neither he nor his placard could pass safely beneath overhead power lines. Ben’s sheep (Banjo and Henry), were also pulled out of the race. Rain fell on the parade and the bloke who’d lent the hay bales said they weren’t worth a pinch of sheep now and charged them $2 a bale. Bluey’s truck got a flat tyre as he tried to turn it round in the marshalling yards. Molly started crying into her rum and coke and the barmaid from across the road came over and said anyone with pub glasses please take them back or she’d lose her job.
“I told you so,” said Col.
*Rebecca Levingston interviews Ian McNamara on South Bank’s Ferris wheel, August 2017 (log in to Facebook first).
Our friend Paul Brandon took this happy photo of us with guest musician Helen Rowe in the green room at Neurum Creek Festival. Laurel and I will be travelling to our old stamping ground (Toowoomba) today to attend Macca’s outside broadcast (OB) in Laurel Bank Park (tomorrow, Sunday September 23). Australia all Over has been a great supporter of our music over the years so it’s good to give something back when we can. Come over and say g’day.
We played back to back festivals in Maleny and at Neurum Creek (near Woodford) over the past month. It’s great to be among musician friends and audiences who actually sit and listen. The trio will be back together on Wednesday November 14 as guests at Red Hill Folk (Red Hill Bowls Club, Fulcher Street for a 7.30 start.
Refugee child ‘Roze’ on Nauru, provided by World Vision Australia
I could count on the toes of my feet the number of petitions I have signed in this life, but I could not refuse the Kids off Nauru campaign. More than 100 human rights groups, churches, charities and organisations, including World Vision, Amnesty International and the Australian Lawyers Alliance are behind Kids off Nauru.
The e-petition to Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten leaves no room for negotiation. Children in detention on Nauru, about 40 of who were born on the island, have witnessed lip stitching, self-immolation and other suicide attempts. Many have developed traumatic withdrawal syndrome, characterised by resigning from all activities that support a normal life. The Australian Medical Association has called for immediate action to assure the health and wellbeing of those on Nauru.
As one of the NGOs involved in the campaign, Plan International says, “This can’t continue, not on our watch”.
“We’ve seen report after report of children who are in such despair, for whom life in detention is so miserable, that they have withdrawn socially, stopped eating and even attempted suicide,” Plan International said. “In August a 12-year-old girl tried to set herself on fire.”
The petitioners want all 120* children and their families off Nauru by November 20, 2018. The date is not random – it is Universal Children’s Day.
You all know this shameful story, where the Australian Government re-invented an offshore processing solution for people who’d mostly arrived without permission by boat, seeking refuge in the big open country they had heard was egalitarian and tolerant.
Nauru, a small island north-east of PNG and the Solomon Islands, was once known for extracting and selling phosphate for fertiliser. The resource is exhausted, so the Nauruan government could hardly refuse the lucrative offer from the Australian Government.
It’s difficult to get an accurate count* of children on Nauru, quoted variously as between 106 and 126. Meanwhile the official number from the Australian Government is 22. But wait, the fine print refers only to children in the Nauru Regional Processing Centre (Australia’s responsibility). Other refugee children are accommodated in centres run by the Nauruan Government. The latter is not at all transparent about the welfare of refugee children and their parents. A New Zealand TV reporter was detained briefly when reporting from the Pacific Forum because she went ‘off reservation’ to talk to refugees “without going through proper channels”.
I’d go and see for myself but they want $8,000 for a journalist visa.
Anglican Bishop Phillip Huggins wrote to then Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton seeking clarification of numbers published on the department’s website.
The (eventual) reply from Mr Dutton and Huggins’s interpretation of the answers is worth reading to get a perspective.
Bishop Huggins concluded that the harsh reality is that there were (in August 2018), 120 refugee children in Nauru (some have been resettled in the last month). Some are being assessed for resettlement in America; some may eventually be resettled in New Zealand.
Let’s ask the obvious question: New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and her coalition partner Winston Peters have offered to take up to 150 refugees from Nauru. Former Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull rejected the offer to resettle the Nauru refugees, making the woolly argument that this would only make New Zealand attractive to people smugglers. It may surprise readers to know that the New Zealand offer to resettle refugees goes back to the administration of former PM John Key (2008-2016).
The transfer of asylum seekers to offshore processing centres in the Pacific was first introduced by the Howard (Coalition) Government in 2001.Here’s an edited summary of what followed.
Seven months after Kevin Rudd was sworn in as Prime Minister in 2008, the last remaining asylum seekers on Nauru were transferred to Australia, ending the Howard Government’s controversial ‘Pacific Solution’.
In July 2010, then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard revealed that the Government had begun having discussions about establishing a regional processing centre for the purpose of receiving and processing irregular entrants to the region. Importantly, only 25 asylum seekers had travelled by boat to Australia to seek asylum in the 2007–08 financial year. By the time Gillard made her announcement in July 2010, more than 5,000 people had come by boat to Australia to seek asylum.
Gillard acknowledged that the number of asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia was ‘very, very minor’ but she identified a number of reasons why the processing of asylum seekers in other countries was considered necessary, including:
to remove the financial incentive for the people smugglers to send boats to Australia;
to ensure that those arriving by boat do not get an unfair advantage over others;
to prevent people embarking on a voyage across dangerous seas with the ever present risk of death;
to prevent overcrowding in detention facilities in Australia.
Though it took another two years to secure arrangements, people began to be transferred to Nauru and PNG in the last quarter of 2012.
Two months before the 2013 federal election amidst growing support for the Opposition’s tougher border protection policies, newly appointed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced that Australia had entered into a Regional Resettlement Arrangement with PNG. Under the arrangement, all(not just some) asylum seekers who arrived by boat would be transferred to PNG for processing and settlement in PNG and in any other participating regional State. Mr Rudd subsequently made a similar arrangement with Nauru.
Mr Rudd now says this was meant to be a temporary arrangement.
So he we are with a humanitarian crisis on our back door and as per usual, those clinging to slender majorities do not want to make brave, decent decisions which might cost them their seat at the next election.
Petitions are a form of protest known to exert moral authority; that is, they have no legal force. But the sheer weight of numbers can force social change. One example was the millions of signatures on a petition calling for the release of Nelson Mandela.
Before e-petitions and ‘clicktivism’ became the norm, government clerks charged with the receipt and storage of paper petitions had a job for life.
The Australian government receives on average 120 petitions a year, a large proportion of which are e-petitions. Activist group, change.org, (https://www.change.org), the biggest generator of e-petitions, has 50 million subscribers world-wide.
Nigel Gladstone, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, says 32,728 Australian petitions were started on the change.org website since 2014. More than 3.5 million people signed their name to support campaigns such as reduced parking fees at NSW hospitals and marriage equality.
Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Sydney, Ariadne Vromen and Professor Darren Halpin of ANU collected data from change.org to study online petitions over a four-year period.
“This form of political engagement is both mainstream and important,” Professor Vromen told the SMH. “In Australia Get-up were really the pioneers of using online petitions and that was a bit of a shock to the system, but politicians quickly became cynical.
“Change.org is different because citizens can start their own thing, so it is different to an advocacy group starting something.”
So will the advocacy groups behind Kids off Nauru succeed in their mission to force the government to act by November 20? Let’s revisit this in a couple of months’ time.
As we settled into our ballet seats at the Lyric Theatre for Sunday’s matinee of Queensland Ballet’s Cinderella, two kilometres away another group of elite athletes were preparing for their own performance.
It wasn’t much of a decision, whether to take up our pre-booked $100 matinee seats or go to the last-minute NRL home game between the Brisbane Broncos and St George Illawarra Dragons.
“At least nobody spills beer on you at the ballet,” I jested, as She Who Also Goes to The Ballet ironed my suit. I’d have done it myself but she’d already hogged the ironing board.
The performance – the timeless story of Cinderella, a fable of class warfare and how goodness and generosity should always prevail, did not disappoint. It was another flawless piece of work from the Queensland Ballet company and the Queensland Festival Philharmonic orchestra. The audience was dominated by children and parents/grandparents and the usual gang of gangly girls whose curious splay-footed stance gives them away as ballet students.
The choreographer (Ben Stephenson) played it for laughs, casting Vito Bernasconi and Camilo Ramos as the ugly sisters. Tradition requires that the ugly sisters be played by men. Bernasconi and Ramos tried their best to look ungainly and uncoordinated, somehow falling on their faces without injuring themselves. Stephenson laid on the magic tricks, with the old woman transformed, with a minor explosion and cloud of smoke, into a svelte fairy godmother. Later SWAGTTB nudged me: “Did I miss the part when she changed the pumpkin into a coach?” Feed two old people lunch outdoors in the Queensland sun and then put them in a stuffy dark room for a few hours – someone’s bound to nod off.
During one of two intervals, SWAGTTB demonstrated her classical education by recounting the gruesome Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, where the ugly sisters, in failed bids to fit into the glass slipper (and thereby become an idle rich Queen), mutilate their own feet.
I mentioned a favourite radio comedy skit from my childhood where the fairy story is told in spoonerisms – Rindercella and the Pransome Hince. It has an opaque provenance, this sketch, with some attributing it to Ronnie Barker. The latter may have performed it, but this much-recycled skit dates back to the 1930s. I’m sure Barker didn’t write it, as he was much funnier than Rindercella, which quickly becomes tedious and predictable. Eight year old boys find it hysterical, though.
Later, driving home and resisting the urge to listen to the rugby league ‘sudden death’ semi-final, we marvelled that QB could finance lavish productions like this, with top-level dancers and an orchestra. We’ve been subscribers for a long time and have seen this world-class company grow and prosper. QB’s annual report shows it made a net operating profit of $1.64 million in 2017. They did this with the help of some $5.38 million in ticket sales and $7.25 million from sponsors and State Government grants.
Not for nothing do I make comparisons between Queensland Ballet’s company of dancers and the injury-depleted Brisbane Broncos squad. Those of you familiar with arts productions will know about ‘notes’ – the after-performance meeting when the producer/director goes through the things that worked and the things that could have been better. I can’t imagine QB”s ballet master having too much to say except maybe chide someone for raising the curtain a few seconds before everyone was in place for the third curtain-call.
Post the 48-18 drubbing by the Dragons, I imagine Broncos coach Wayne Bennett had a few terse things to say to his squad who, well, just didn’t cut it. In the spirit of Rindercella, the Sisty Uglers (all Dragons forwards) bullied Rindercella (Broncos forwards and halves) into submission. There was no Gairy Fodmother to save the day. The final whistle blew and the Broncos turned into pumpkins and field mice and retreated to the sheds.
As Wayne Bennett said later, the squad was decimated by injuries all year including losing three top players for the season.
Now here’s something: you never hear a ballet company complain about the inevitable stress fractures or knee, ankle and back injuries. While dancers’ rarely suffer the traumatic torque injuries common among rugby players, the cumulative effect of injuries can be serious.
When key footie players are injured, there are constant media updates. For example, when Broncos playmaker Andrew McCullough was taken from the field on a stretcher a few weeks back with serious concussion, the updates and speculation on his welfare were continuous.
Rugby league players can all have a month or two off now before the pre-season training begins in November. All the while they are pulling in salaries which range from the minimum ($80,000) to $1 million a year for top players like Cameron Smith or Johnathan Thurston. The average NRL salary is $371,000.
After Cinderella finishes on September 16, Queensland Ballet dancers will be straight into rehearsals for The Nutcracker, which starts its season on December 8. It’s a big deal, being appointed principal dancer of a ballet company, but it’s not something you’d do for the money. Averages are suspect in such a small field, but it seems principal dancers in Australia can earn around $75k-$85k. The average salary for a company dancer is about $48k.
Budding footie players and ballet dancers start working on their craft at an early age. Their parents foot the bill and the time to take children to dance lessons or footie training. Both disciplines require intense training and perseverance, particularly through injury and rehabilitation.
Then there’s the ongoing expense of buying ballet flats ($25 a pair) or pointe shoes (up to $100 a pair). You could argue that parents of footie-mad kids are up for a new pair of boots every time Junior moves up a size. That’s around $200-$250 a pair for the best, or they can browse Gumtree for second-hand boots.
A hard-working ballet dancer, however, can go through 50 to 80 pairs of pointe shoes ($5,000 – $8,000) a year. Some companies buy dancers’ shoes, others can’t. Professional dancers and aspirants may have to factor it into their personal budgets. If you wondered why pointe shoes wear out so quickly, every time a dancer jumps on pointe, three times her body weight is carried on the tip of her big toe. QB has a donation page where you can help out with this inevitable expense.
In arts as in sport, many have expectations, but only a small percentage make the grade to top billing. The difference in sport – and this is particularly noticeable in soccer and American basketball’s NBL – the top-level salaries can be huge.
Contact sports like rugby union or rugby league attract the support and big dollars from television broadcast rights and sponsorship and, more recently, from betting agencies.
Meanwhile, it is up to supporters of the arts to make sure superb creative companies like Queensland Ballet can cover their costs each and every year. I can’t see anyone promoting a televised State of Origin dance-off between State ballets anytime soon, even though it’s not a bad idea.
Fresh from well-received gigs at Maleny Music Festival, The Goodwills and guest Helen Rowe are performing this weekend at Neurum Creek Festival. We always enjoy this camping weekend, whether we’re performing or not, so it is an added pleasure to join the list of talented musicians playing under the big tent.
We’re performing on Saturday morning, after Brisbane folk legend Anne Infante. We’ll have CDs at the shop or come up and say G’day after the gig. Bob has been writing songs again so is likely to perform at least one new song in the set.
All roads lead to Canberra – at least that’s what most politicians think. This week we’re having a break from politics, the plight of refugees and why Australia’s asylum seeker policies are on the nose. Today guest writer Laurel Wilson (aka She Who Also Writes) looks at the hazards of the highway for travellers. This post contains 21 images. – Ed.
Definitely NOT our next road rig..
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, I’m feeling quite refreshed after our 6 week, 6,000 kilometre road trip around Queensland in our trusty 12ft caravan (despite the occasional mishap, chronicled elsewhere).
Not this one, either
One of the positives in travelling is that it can give you the opportunity and inclination to study the ever-changing surroundings. Unlike those who object to outback travel because “you can drive for ages and not see anything”, I’ve always found there’s something new to experience as you drive along. Some of these experiences, such as the pungent stink of Gidgee in humid weather, are perhaps not ‘must does’, but it was a relief to find the source of that odour, when I was beginning to think that we had a leak in the caravan’s gas cylinder or the car had developed some nameless fault.
Having a naturally curious nature (unlike the woman living in Dingo, who neither knew nor cared how that small town got its unique name), I was intrigued by the extent and variety of roads we travelled on during our latest trip.
I began to wonder just how many kilometres of designated roads there are in Queensland. According to a Department of Main Roads factsheet, as of 2013-14 there were over 33,000 kilometres of State controlled roads (which includes over 5,000 kilometres of the National network). In addition, Queensland Local Governments are responsible for almost 155,000 kilometres of roads in their respective areas.
In our latest trip around Queensland, we travelled on all but one of the designated ‘National Highways’, the only exception being the Barkly Highway, which runs westward from Cloncurry. In all of our trip around Queensland, we managed to stay off the highway called ‘Bruce’, except for the 400 or so kilometres from Cairns to Townsville, where we had tickets to watch a North Queensland Cowboys Rugby League game – one of Johnathan Thurston’s last games (I realise that the bulk of readers neither know or care, but I don’t get to write this blog very often, so thought I’d take the opportunity…).
This time, our most westerly destination was Winton, where we spent four fascinating days at ‘The Vision Splendid – Outback Film Festival’.
The Not So Mighty Bruce Highway, North Queensland
What constitutes a ‘National Highway’ seems to be open to some interpretation, but I’ve used a list supplied by Wikipedia (I know, I know, not necessarily the best source, but should be adequate for this purpose).
Two lanes and well-maintained –west of Charleville.
Whether the roads we travelled on were ‘National’, ‘State’ or ‘local’ wasn’t always possible to tell. (Apparently the various tiers of government have a similar problem when deciding which tier is responsible for building and maintaining them.) And we really didn’t care who was ‘responsible’; we were more interested in their state of repair (or disrepair). To be fair, of the 6,000 kilometres we travelled, the great majority of the roads were at least two lanes wide, bitumen and either in very good repair or quite adequate.
Give the road-trains a wide berth – they ain’t stoppingOnly a couple were gravel or ‘dirt’ and gave us (and the poor old caravan) a rough ride for our money. And one of those we can blame on the GPS, which decided to take us on a trip from Glenmorgan to Surat via the most circuitous route it could find.
Hmm, wish we had a better mapDo you guys know where we are?
The other was the ‘shortcut’ from Hughenden to ‘The Lynd’, some 250km to the North. We chose this road (The Kennedy Developmental Road) because it went past Porcupine Gorge National Park, which we wanted to visit, and was much shorter than the alternative route to our next destination. And after all, most of the lines on the map were solid red (indicating bitumen) rather than the dotted line for ‘dirt road’.
Porcupine GorgeThe author and editor (after the 1600 steps down and back)You can get to Porcupine Gorge on the bitument, a longer way around
As it turned out, the accent should have been on ‘developmental’, rather than ‘road’. There were frequent patches of the dreaded ‘corrugations’, in which the road surface consists of a series of ruts which run at right angles to the direction of travel. This is a phenomenon common to ‘dirt’ roads and apparently results mainly from the numerous vehicles travelling over the moveable surface of such roads. Regular grading of the road helps smooth out the corrugations, so it’s worthwhile trying to find out whether an unsurfaced road has been recently graded before you travel on it. Being of fairly ‘senior’ years, I’m quite used to travelling ‘off the bitumen’ and have met corrugations before. The general wisdom about negotiating corrugations is to drive at a reasonable speed (not necessarily too slowly, but not highway speeds either) and to drop the tyre pressures a bit if you usually run to higher pressures- though not really worth the hassle unless you’re stuck with a long stretch of ‘corro’.
The Kennedy Developmental Road was the site of one of our minor mishaps this trip. The continual bouncing of travelling across corrugations was eventually too much for the 30year old+ hinges on the wardrobe door, and we arrived at ‘The Lynd’ with the wardrobe door lying on the floor of the van. Interestingly enough, the clothes remained in the wardrobe! (Finding new hinges to fit, putting them on and getting the door to shut properly was a small triumph for ‘Handy Mandy’ and her trusty sidekick.)
Right- No-one’s looking- let’s drive on the smooth side…
This time next year the road will probably be a much more comfortable drive, as there was plenty of roadwork going on as we drove this stretch.
The dreaded corrugations on the way to The Lynd
We met these International travellers at ‘The Lynd’ – It’s a 1915 Model ‘T’ Ford. They prefer the dirt roads (see below) and avoid highways in their world travels. They have travelled to over 50 countries, raising money for the charity SOS Children’s Villages International. http://www.tfordworldtour.org/
original Queensland outback road
As you would expect, most sealed roads are black or grey, but we do come across some which, to my eye, are a rather fetching shade of pink. Some may see it as ‘tan’, but the idea of pink roads somehow appeals to me. I haven’t been able to find out why they are ‘pink’, but my theory is that it has something to do with the roadbase containing a fair proportion of the red dirt/sand common in many parts of Queensland.
The pink brick roadPink’, don’t you think?
One of my pastimes while travelling is to take pictures while we are inside the car (and I promise I only do this when I’m the passenger). Most of the photos in this ‘blog’ are of that type. And a few shots of the roads more or less travelled:
The road not travelled – near WintonOn the straight and narrow to GeorgetownThe road to Dingo
Fresh from well-received gigs at Maleny Music Festival, The Goodwills and guest Helen Rowe are performing this weekend at 
We met these International travellers at ‘The Lynd’ – It’s a 1915 Model ‘T’ Ford. They prefer the dirt roads (see below) and avoid highways in their world travels. They have travelled to over 50 countries, raising money for the charity SOS Children’s Villages International. 
