politics Archives - thegoodwills.com

Readers guide to Friday on My Mind

Friday-on-My-MInd-Bob-Wilson — “Retired” journalist Bob Wilson with five years’ worth of Friday on My Mind. Photo by She Who Rarely Gets A Mention

A few weeks ago I promised you an overview of the past five years’ worth of Friday on My Mind missives, but the Federal election got in the way. Sorry about that. Today it’s a mostly politics-free zone.

I started this weekly column (it was supposed to be a one-off) with my theory (and not at all an original idea), about taking refugees and asylum seekers off Nauru and Manus Island and resettling them in small Australian towns.

But ‘The Pittsworth Solution’ wasn’t the first to get a run.

Other topics got in the way, like explaining why Morris dancers dance up the sun on the first of May. That was episode No 1; and not only have I written about this pagan ritual since, I have actually participated.

I write on random topics, often mixing subject material so if you have specific interests (solar energy, travel, politics, refugees, media analysis), use the search function to find stories.

We were travelling the outback in 2014 and on many occasions since, so there are many road travel adventures. In my naivety, I wrote about crossing the Nullarbor as if no-one had ever done it (or written about it) before.

Some of the outback posts were popular, including one about people dumping garbage (Kiljoy was here) and the time we met the Black Dog Ride, a gang of motorcyclists circumnavigating the continent to raise awareness about depression and suicide.

Some 264 episodes (316,884 words) later, I’m still FOMMing (the weekly missive is known among hard-core fans as FOMM).

Thanks to my elder sister who lives in New Zealand, I have five ring binders crammed with hard copies of Friday on My Mind. She does not have a computer so every two months or so I print out the latest and mail them off. I got in the habit of printing two copies so now have a filing cabinet drawer full of fat FOMM folders. (Downsizing, dear, remember the promise about de-cluttering. SWTSO (She who throws stuff out)

Those of you adept in the online arts might scoff to learn it took me a couple of years to discover I could insert a search function into the website. This is a very handy way to check if you are about to repeat yourself, which is not hard to do when you’ve been maintaining a blog for a long time. One of Australia’s longest-serving bloggers, economist John Quiggin, had one solution for this, posting at Christmas 2015:

“Here’s a Christmas post from my blog in 2004. The theme is that nothing about Christmas ever changes” (although he does go on to discuss the “war on Christmas”).

This is billed a readers’ guide to FOMM, as at last two thirds of readers receive the weekly email and have no need to visit the website other than out of curiosity or because I have linked an old (but relevant) article. Tip: Links to other articles are coloured blue.

I had occasion to update my curriculum vitae (CV) the other day and found that, yes, you can teach the old dog new tricks, as 107-year-old Swedish blogger Dagny Carlsson put it, after taking her first computer lesson at 99.

Under ‘other skills and experience’ I can now add webmaster, after designing and maintaining two WordPress websites with little outside help.

When you first visit the <bobwords.com.au> website, click on ‘Bio’ in the header. This is where I talk about myself in the third person, which, as any clinical psychologist would tell you, is not a healthy thing.

Nevertheless, here’s a line from my self-penned bio which has been quoted elsewhere. I said I’d started FOMM mainly from a sense of exasperation with the sins and omissions of the daily media.

“ As Bob (that’s me) told a fan: “not that I want to bite the hand that used to feed me, but I think intelligent readers want more than a picture of Kate Middleton’s bum.”

Amen, brothers and sisters.

My Recommended Reading section keeps evolving. The website statistics manager tells me it has had 199 visits of late, so hopefully some of you will also become fans of writers suggested there.

Some recommended blogs disappeared as they fell victim to blogging deficit syndrome. I’m not aware of anyone who keeps actual track of the world’s 500 million blogs, but it’s a fair guess at least half of them were single-use, short-term or, if they started out with ambitions of longevity, fizzled out after a year or two.

I have written a couple of pieces about blogging, including the one when I stumbled upon Dagny Carlsson and explored the wonders of Wikipedia.

In this one, I discovered how blogging in some countries can be a life-threatening activity.

I started off quietly, emailing the weekly rant to a small email list which grew and grew as people shared with their friends. Then, as the list got larger, I enlisted MailChimp, which somehow evades spam catchers and also schedules delivery if you are not going to be home on the day you would normally send the email. MailChimp also tells me how many of you actually opened the email!

FOMM is neither a blog nor a citizen journalism site as it mixes news, research and whimsy with a fair amount of (small l liberal) opinion.

I had a conversation on election day with a former colleague. We bemoaned the absence of what was once the journalist’s mantra – “tell both sides of the story”. Hard to believe there was a time not so long ago when one would never put personal opinion into a news story, or the news pages for that matter.

I regard Friday in My Mind as a newspaper column without the newspaper. Some columns provoke a torrent of emails; other times there is a lamb-like silence. If I make a mistake and SWTSO misses it too (uncommon), I am certain to find out about it from an alert reader, sometimes within minutes. The beauty of being online is you can correct it right away.

Few people post online comments, but those who do are inevitably adding something relevant to the topic. Despite the relative lack of feedback, my website statistics show a fairly consistent readership. Inexplicably, the most-read column of the past five years is this one about bipolare disorder and gout, where I found research that made the connection between one and the other.

Other popular reads were first-person accounts about adverse reactions to paralysis ticks and at least six items dealing with depression and anxiety.

Readers liked my recent take on the Christchurch tragedy and, going back a while, tributes to David Bowie and Gough Whitlam.

So if you have joined the FOMM flock in the last year or two or more recently, there’s quite a trove of documented journalism and comment to explore.

For example, if you enter ‘David Bowie’ in the search window you will be rewarded with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s celestial performance of Space Oddity.

Depending which boxes you ticked below the line on May 17, you may have to take the ‘leftie rubbish’ with a grain of salt, as a few long-term conservative readers apparently do.

We can thank Pliny the Elder for translating addito salis grano. In the modern context it means to view something with scepticism or not to interpret something literally. A good motto for Friday on My Mind, I reckon.

Ten days in Aotearoa

Aotearoa-Te-Urewera — Aotearoa – Te Urewera, looking towards East Cape. Image by Brucieb, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2260517

As the doors swished open at Brisbane International Airport and I walked out into 35 degrees and a dusty, smoky atmosphere, I very briefly wished I hadn’t left Aotearoa behind. How I love the mellifluous way that Maori word trips off the tongue – Ao-tea-ro-a.

The Maori language uses vowels more than we do in English and it also uses them in combinations. The language has fewer consonants, preferring the use of Wh to replace the letter F, for example. The Maori alphabet has 15 letters including two digraphs (Ng and Wh) and five vowels, each of which has a short and Continue reading “Ten days in Aotearoa”

People without lists are listless

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)

Take me to your leader – the quest continues

leader-politics — (Leader image, old man in park taking time out from politics and spin), Bob Wilson circa 1978

Imagine a flying saucer lands in your back yard and an alien (drooling or not) alights.

“Take me to your leader,” it telepathically commands, as it is from an advanced civilisation, intent upon savings ours.

“Aw yeah, mate.” (pointing). “That’s our leader over there, the one in the striped designer shirt, mingling with the homeless folk.”

If you dig around on the Internet long enough you’ll find lists of world leaders people would rather not introduce to their granny, never mind to an alien. The lists are usually described as ‘the 10 or 20 worst world leaders’ and include despots like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir.

Alas Malcolm Turnbull, PM of Australia; the only list I found him on was the ‘hottest heads of state’ leader ladder, languishing in 12^th place behind total spunks like Canada’s Justin Trudeau, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, France’s Emmanuel Macron or Haiti’s Jovenal Moise.

One ought not to touch on politics when striking up conversations at Christmas parties. At one such event, I ventured that the Australian Federal Government was having an ‘Annus Horribilis’ and seemed incapable of making firm and sensible decisions.

I had voiced what I thought was a commonly-held theory, but soon found out what I should have known; on average, at least one-third of people voted for that motley group of indecisive dual citizens who went to work on just 64 days in 2017.

“So what do you think about Turnbull’s piss-weak energy policy?” I began at another Xmas do, when I probably should have said, “Strange weather for this time of year, don’t you think?”

That person moved away, but left me a clean run at the cheese platter.

From my point of view, the LNP in Canberra blundered from one disaster to another in 2017, momentarily making itself look good by introducing marriage equality laws, which in truth should have been enshrined in 1980-something. The poll was estimated to cost the taxpayer $122 million and then we endured weeks of angst while the same-sex marriage law was debated, after 61.6% of the 79.5% of people who voted had told them that’s what they wanted in the first place.

The great shame, or should I say sham, is that the Turnbull government, deliberately or not, distracted the people from more serious issues (climate change, the Adani coal mine, Manus Island), by turning the same-sex marriage debate into an expensive, non-binding referendum-style exercise. They could have used one of those 64 sitting days to have a free vote. We’d have achieved the same result and deployed the $122 million to more laudable outcomes (like finding emergency accommodation for the 6,000 or so Australians who sleep rough each night).

We’ve seen from recent State elections and Federal by-elections that the people are not happy with the mainstream parties. The drift towards the Greens on one side and One Nation on the other mimics the rise of populism the world over.

Political commentator Michelle Grattan, speaking at the launch of The Conversation Yearbook in Brisbane, said so many people in Australia are disgusted with politics they are ‘‘tuning out”

“People think (politicians) are behaving badly, because they are behaving badly. They (politicians) alienate the public – they are aware of it, but it’s beyond them to regain the people’s trust.”

Grattan said focus groups in north Queensland, ahead of the State elections, saw through Malcolm Turnbull’s ploy to cancel a week’s parliamentary sittings. This was ostensibly to allow the House and the Senate to resolve the citizenship issue and to work through the same sex marriage debate.

But here’s the thing: the NQ focus groups didn’t much like Malcolm Turnbull, but neither did they warm to Bill Shorten as an alternative leader.

The Queensland election continued a national, if not international trend: voters are fed up with mainstream parties and are casting their votes elsewhere.

In Queensland, 30.9% of first preference votes went to minority parties, while the informal vote was higher than average, at 4.58%. In the Bennelong Federal by-election, 10 minor parties grabbed 19.15% of the first preference primary vote, although that did not stop the LNP’s John Alexander (45.05%) taking the seat.

So what else happened in 2017?

While it wasn’t a party political issue, the rise of the social media hashtag #MeToo movement had its high point when Time Magazine chose #MeToo as its influential “Person of the Year”.

If you had been living under a rock, #MeToo is a movement where women who have been harassed, assaulted, bullied and otherwise vilified (primarily by men), came out and stood with their sisters.

The movement started with casting-couch revelations about Hollywood movie producer Harvey Weinstein and flushed out similarly bad behaviour all over the world. The Australia media chimed in, outing former TV gardening host Don Burke for a series of alleged indiscretions. Sydney’s Telegraph made an allegation about Australian actor Geoffrey Rush, who responded with a writ for defamation.

On a more positive note, 2017 turned up an unlikely winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize went to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). The organization received the award for drawing attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons.

There were other examples of positive news in 2017, amid the political scandals, terrorist attacks, humanitarian crises and natural disasters.

A December 19 report by Katrina Sichlau, News Corp Australia Network, found that renewable energy employed 10 million people worldwide.

(Aside – that makes the Queensland Premier’s contested claim that the proposed Adani coal mine would employ 10,000 people look rather sad).

The same article said France and Britain had launched a Clean Air Plan which will make sense to people who have visited either country this year or last. In a year when Queensland’s land-clearing reached Brazil-like proportions, Pakistan planted one billion trees.

If I may add to this optimistic list, New Zealand elected a woman in her 30s as Prime Minister (Jacinda Ardern), largely at the whim of (Queen)-maker Winston Peters, a veteran politician who saw sense in forming an alliance with the savvy young Labour leader.

Probably the less we say about Donald Trump the better, as he seems to thrive on publicity, be it good or bad. Trump continues to use Twitter like a flame-thrower, this year setting diplomatic fires in North Korea, Israel, and Germany and within the US itself.

Trump reportedly plans to go ahead with a visit to the UK in 2018, despite the recent twitter row with UK PM Theresa May. If you’ll recall, Trump retweeted videos posted by radical right group Britain First, inaccurately blaming Muslims in the UK for terrorist attacks.

There has been much misreporting about Trump’s ‘working’ visit to the UK. The White House at one point thanked the Queen for her “gracious invitation” to meet with President Trump at Buckingham Palace. The Guardian Weekly reported on December 15 that a formal state visit was not envisaged. “The Queen is likely to be preoccupied with preparations for a Commonwealth summit.”

As myth-buster Snopes points out, there is a long standing tradition that the Queen does not intervene in political disputes.

We wish you all an ‘annus mirabilis’ in 2018.