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Modest Expectations – Bungsberg

Doppelgänger? How Bill Shorten may look at 71 when, under the alias of Bill Belichick, he has come to the end of his tenure as one the most successful managers in American football. He coached the New England Patriots to six Superbowl victories. Well done Bill whoever you are!

The Rise of the Lumpenproletariat

Rick Wilson’s recent experience is reminiscent of Germany just before 1933. Hindenburg, the President, was 87 years old and soft in the head. Hitler was 43 verging on madness. Biden is 81 years old verging on something, but watch this space grow; Trump is not twice Hitler’s age, but certainly as soft in the head, having substituted speech for spewage.

As a resulting of leaking spewage, Rick Wilson, one of the architects of the anti-Trump Republican Lincoln project, has been subject to gross harassment, even a trap being set for him to be destroyed by “friendly fire”.

The related worry is the growth of the sniper culture as epitomised by the Israeli Army, where the expert sniper can target the influential without the messiness of the bomb. The rogue sniper has always existed, but the systematic endorsement by government of a sniper whose role is simply to kill the person who disagrees with you, under the cover of a manufactured war, is yet another example of the hypocrisy of those who bleat about law and order while doing the reverse.

Journalists – beware of walking through canyons of ostensibly underused buildings, which now house the consulates of diplomatic immunity with panoramic views of the city, short-term leases, and persons who are very accurate with the telescopic sight.

Now here is what Rick Wilson has related:

As I write this email, I’m tired. Why? Well, it’s not because I ran a marathon yesterday. It’s because I woke up to a SWAT team pounding on my door at 3:00 am.

It was alarming to say the least, but it wasn’t my first rodeo. After slipping out of the classic jump-scare panic, I knew exactly what was going on. Some MAGA terrorists had placed a fake 911 call claiming there had been a murder at my home.

The goal? Besides scaring the hell out of my family at 3:00 AM, it was to get me killed.

The terrorists set up these calls hoping that I’ll think my house is under attack and run outside with a gun just to find a SWAT team ready to shoot me dead.

I’ve been dealing with stunts like this since 2015. It’s nothing new. I know better than to roll out the door with a weapon. Besides, I could see a caravan of 10+ SWAT vehicles on the street.

So there I was, at 3:00 am, walking onto my porch in boxers and a t-shirt with my hands in the sky (it’s not as sexy as it sounds). Once it became clear to officers that this was a swatting call, they were courteous and helpful.

This was also not their first time responding to a swatting call at the Wilson residence. So, to the MAGA terrorists who will seemingly never stop in their quest to kill me, I’m sorry to let you down. I’m still alive. And I’m still not going to hold back in my fight against Trump.

A Strange View of Tasmania

An American travel writer, Nora Walsh, has written an article under the rubric of Tourism:

Venture outside and help protect vulnerable species in Tasmania, Australia’s southernmost state, with several new guided walks. Tasmanian Walking Company, in partnership with the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, offers a three-day trek across rugged Bruny Island to map flora and collect seeds for the garden’s seed bank.

To get a taste of the island’s Indigenous culture, join members of the local Palawa community on multiday treks through the powder white sands of Wukalina (Mount William National Park) and orange-lichen-covered rocks of Larapuna (Bay of Fires). Or to get an actual taste of the island, forage for ingredients like wattle seeds and pepperberries with guides from Palawa Kipli, a company that is Indigenous-owned and operated – the experience ends with a tasting menu that includes smoked payathanima (wallaby).

Locavore menus are the norm throughout Tasmania, and the chef Analiese Gregory, a wild-cooking expert, will be showcasing ingredients like hand-gathered abalone and sea urchin at her yet-to-be-named restaurant set to open early this year.

I was intrigued as everybody, with the inbuilt naivete that I have, when, the NYT listed Tasmania and Brisbane as preferred destinations to visit in 2024.

I am also very fortunate to have a facsimile edition of “The Aborigines of Tasmania” by H. Ling Roth, first printed in 1899.

I also know a bit about Tasmania, having a property there.

I turned to read this piece. First of all, the writer has obviously not visited Tasmania. This is becoming increasingly common where travel writers just rewrite public relations blurbs from afar. If that is what the American market wants, well this article gives it to them in spades.

Walking Bruny Island is just one of many rambles, and there is no doubt Bruny Island has its charms, but there are many others, because the Island is a walker’s paradise. Tasmania is an essence of where Nature has resuscitated itself from the 19^th century European invasion.

In the course of the invasion, the Tasmanian Aborigines were exterminated. There was a European called George Robinson, who herded the remaining Aborigines onto Flinders Islands, an archipelago off the North-east coast of Tasmania on the edge of Bass Strait. Here there was a degree of miscegenation with passing American and European sealers and whalers. Hence the blue-eyed Palawa of today. The walk around the beaches of north-east Tasmania feeding on lemon myrtle, pepperberry and saltbush flavoured wallaby, of having a go at eating the oily mutton bird is just about this group trying to reconstruct what has been lost.

As for recommending a restaurant yet to open, just confirmed the pitfalls when an author writes from a distance- even if the proposed restaurant is locavore.

Tanya Gentle, who actually walked the Palawa trail, and stayed in the lighthouse keeper’s quarters and drank Tasmanian wines, saw no artifacts except for what sounded like a very difficult to sustain description of a midden. Middens tend to be predominantly mussel shell dumps of Aboriginal detritus. They are not found on open beaches where the storms would have washed away any pile of detritus very quickly. Having seen middens where the predominant component is mussel shells, located beyond the highwater line, I would suggest if you wish to undertake such a confected walk, that’s fine as long as you take all the Aboriginal backgrounding with a grain of salt.

The interesting fact is that along this trail there is no mention of any Aboriginal artifacts – not even peckings which the Tasmanian aborigines carved to indicate some site with special significance.

The maireener, commonly known as the rainbow kelp shell, was originally the only shell traditionally used to thread into necklaces. Yet there is no mention in the article of the unique marieener necklaces, the shells with their iridescence displayed by the laborious scaping of the shell covering.

The manufacture of these shell necklaces is unique to the Flinders Island, the seat of the Palawa people. Why no mention? The walk is probably a male interpretation of the Palawa culture. Women make the necklaces, of which my wife and I have two as treasured possessions.

And for food, I would suggest the Aboriginals rebuilding their culture turn to page reference 95ff of “The Aborigines of Tasmania”. Unfortunately there is not a mention of saltbush, pepperberry or lemon myrtle in the cooking in this history – but many other greens, tubers and seaweed are mentioned, as well as edible fungi as part of the food cooked or eaten raw.

Finally, the oysters. Were these wild oysters carved off the rocks by the Aboriginal guides, or purchased from a nearby commercial oyster farm? Tasmanian oysters, essentially Pacific oysters, are as good as found elsewhere. Australians in general are spoiled by the variety of oysters, so long as they can afford them. In the Ling book, crawfish, oysters, mussels and crabs are mentioned as part of the diet. The Tasmania Aborigines did not fish.

As for wallaby, it can be bought in the Tasmanian supermarkets.

This article is a distortion for any reason to visit Tasmania. Not that I have any quarrel with the description of the scenery, which like so much of Tasmania is amazing in its diversity. As for the restored Aboriginal culture, do a bit more work, Puganna or are you, Weiba.

In the next blog, I’ll write of why I love Tasmania, even though I am a Mainlander by birth.

By the way, I think I will miss the Brisbane piece extolling it as one of the other NYT most favoured destinations for 2024. I’m sure it is as persuasive as this one above is about trudging the beaches of remote Tasmania.

Moscow Nights

This intriguing article, which I have partially reprinted from The Economist was written by Kate de Pury, a journalist who lives in Moscow and who has reported on Russia for thirty years.

What I find interesting is her description of the playgrounds of the Russian rich that are not being disturbed by modern warfare. Russia is allowed to devastate Ukraine while those ostensibly NATO Ukrainian supporters have intervened; but not to the extent that would disturb the caviar and champagne set’s lifestyle.

There is thus no such entity as total war if you are the powerful invaders and can bomb and destroy with impunity. There may be food and utility shortages to be borne by the ordinary Russian citizens, but the wealthy and well-connected and those that service their needs remain largely unaffected. That is the message which emanates from the Pury article. War can be waged so long as it does not materially affect the ruling class. Yes, inconvenience can be borne, but these days can one not ski in Dubai?

After all, supporting Ukraine does have limits. One cannot have any ripples in the eggnog.

“They know they won’t be allowed back to the French Alps for 25 years. Until then they can go to Dubai or party here – it’s pretty wild.”

Winter in Moscow is a time for parties. A friend told me recently about a particularly lavish one he went to in a nightclub. DJs played hypnotic psychedelic trance, champagne flowed and red lights strobed across the heaving dancefloor. Nearly two years into the war in Ukraine, Muscovites seem to be recovering their capacity for hedonism.

As Russia enters 2024, and the campaign for President Vladimir Putin’s inevitable re-election heats up, the regime is keen to tell a good story about the country’s ability to withstand the war. It can muster a surprising amount of evidence to support this case.

Through such elaborate manoeuvres, Moscow elites have succeeded in keeping life reasonably comfortable for themselves. Not long ago I went to a party in a penthouse. It was a picture-postcard Russian scene: a blizzard swirled outside huge windows and Prokofiev swelled through the speakers. The guests sipped French and Italian wine, filling their plates with Russian caviar from the buffet.

The atmosphere among this posh group could be characterised as patriotic-lite. Some of them were old enough to remember Soviet times and instinctively avoided any talk of politics. Those who didn’t used a tacit code. They wouldn’t criticise the government but, unlike some of the crowd in the nightclubs, they didn’t speak in jingoistic slogans either. No one mentioned the war, though it was implicit every time one of them referred to the arduous flight connections they have to make these days to visit grown-up children in Italy and Britain.

This is a constituency Putin has to keep on side for the long haul, and not all of the guests were happy with his vision of Russia’s future. “I am trying to decide if my kids will be educated in the UK or the US,” said one executive. “It definitely won’t be China or Russia.”

Parrots

Australia has fifty-five species of parrot. My grandfather for a time had a farm at King Parrot Creek in Victoria until he was “eaten out by rabbits”. The King Parrot is nevertheless a very pensive parrot – green wings and red face and belly – not as common as it once was.

The rainbow lorikeet is a brightly coloured chatterer that has found city living very congenial, and they are where the trees provide suitable food. They are known to push other birds off the balconies where food for birds has been placed. Therefore, a glimpse of parrots is not uncommon for any Australian, living anywhere on the continent. These lorikeets were introduced into New Zealand and have threatened to become an exotic species which has got out of control and thus has needed to be managed.

There are supposed to be eight species of native parrots in New Zealand, one of which is the grass parrot, the kakapo is my wife’s favourite parrot, and also once a favourite item on the rat menu. She is unlikely to see any of the 200 kakapos which are now nurtured on a rat-free island off New Zealand. The parrot that I have actually seen in NZ mountainous regions is the kea, more a raptor than a conventional parrot.

Back in Australia, in rural areas there are the grey wing, pink belly galahs, the sulphur crested cockatoos (parrots with a quiff) and the pink-eyed corellas all snacking on seeds of all varieties, the scourge of farmers who have just planted their crop.

Closing in on the deserts are the Major Mitchell cockatoos, crested red flecked argumentative additions on a land where saltbush dots the red and ochre landscape of Sturt’s Desert Varnish.

Then, going into the desert and especially after it has just rained, there are the flocks of budgerigars. As they exist in vast numbers in captivity, most people do not realise they are birds of the outback, beyond the proverbial Black Stump.

Then in the morning in the Tasmania forests, in the early morning, there are the distinctive cries of the yellow-tailed black cockatoos, and the sight of these large birds framed against the sky is a wonderful waking experience for me.

There are others, which I could describe, all magnificent in their own right.

Nevertheless, my favourite parrot is the macaw, a bird of the Americas. The experience of standing under palms in Costa Rica with a flock of scarlet macaws bombarding us with half eaten nuts is not forgotten.

Such was the level of falling missiles a discreet withdrawal was required to a place where one could observe these birds feeding without danger of being hit on the head. The birds hold the nut in their claw and break it open with their formidably curved beaks.

I have read that parrots have an upside-down sense of taste, which is one of their fascinating characteristics. Although they have taste glands at the back of their necks, the bulk of their taste buds are on the roof of their mouths.

Macaws are a bird too often kept in captivity. There is a picture of a blue-yellow macaw perched on my shoulder attacking my glasses. Such birds are used by an itinerant gypsy, in this case not unsurprisingly a guy dressed as a pirate complete with bandana and gold earring. This happened in Dubrovnik, and I forget how much was paid by my companion for me to be so immortalised.

But it was the flock of macaws high in the tropical canopy of Costa Rica that did it for me.

Need I say anything? Apart from Disgusting

Data collected by government contract analysts Tussell shows 197 public sector contracts have been awarded to Fujitsu since 2012, and it is hard to find an arm of the British state in which it is not involved: the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, HM Revenue & Customs, Transport for London, HS2, Scottish Water, Thames Valley Police, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Land Registry, NHS England, local authorities across the country – the list goes on and on. The Conservatives, for all their talk of a small state, have overseen a historic increase in spending on private companies, from £64bn in 2010 to £222bn last year.

From the New Statesman.

It was Fujitsu which created the defective computer program that saw the prosecution of more than 900 workers falsely accused of stealing money from post offices. This disgraceful episode which has resulted in legislation being brought in by the UK Parliament to overturn the convictions, was brought to light by a TV program, not government investigation.

Simon Blagden, who is a prominent Tory donor and former director of Fujitsu was appointed chair of the Government agency for delivering the government’s broadband rollout in 2022.

His generous contributions to the Tory party included a £350 hamper to Boris Johnson. He was non-executive director at Fujitsu UK during the evolution of the scandal. He should exchange notes with our fiasco of Ministers Morrison, Payne, Turnbull, Robert and Tudge who concocted and implemented the robo-debt scheme to see how he has emerged seemingly in a pristine toga while these others skulk awaiting appropriate retribution.

Come to think of it, why is Blagden still a commoner? He has certainly contributed enough to be a peer.

Mouse Whisper

Giovani Botero, the 16^th century Savoyard Savant, wrote:

The Prince not only lays his hands on the people and draws blood from them… having drawn their blood with taxes he destroys their spirit by taking from them every chance of profit which might enable them to pay their taxes.

This quote from Botero’s major work (The Reason for the State) in which he disputes the Machiavellian description of the Prince was on the white board in the Boss’s office for years. Sounds that he was a bit of a Bolshie. Botero that is.

Modest Expectations – SXM

Here we are in Mungo National Park. The power is off. My computer needs re-charging. Thus, after this sentence, there will be a lull. Transmission will resume after we get to Balranald.

When you write something as disconnected as that, there must be what they call in the trade a prequel, and there must be a postscript as well.

But first, the scene should be set for both.

Mungo National Park was the site of an ancient lake, Lake Willandra, dry saltbush expanse disappearing into the horizon. On one side of this lake is a long stretch of dunes caused by the winds blowing the sand and grit into have termed “The Walls of China”. There has been differential erosion across these dunes leaving a series of obelisks in the sand. They are a small version of the famous Pinnacles in Western Australia.

I first drove around Mungo National Park 30 years ago. The Park had been given WHO Heritage status in 1981, the remains of the modern Indigenous Australian man, at least 40,000 years old, were discovered in the Willandra Lakes in 1974, with the remains of a perhaps equally ancient female having been discovered in 1968. They were labelled Mungo Man and Mungo Lady.

The bones have languished in Canberra, until Mungo Lady was returned “to country”, and is kept under lock and key in the Visitor Centre while a suitable burial site could be designated. Thirty years have passed. The then Minister of the Environment in May this year gave permission for reburial. Having been given the gravedigger role, the NSW Government has baulked.

Meanwhile Mungo Man’s remains await, to be interred in an ancient river red gum box.

The Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa share the land, saying their people have effectively been there forever – well for at least 40,000 years, but when I first went to Mungo, there was not much evidence of their occupation. One could freely drive around the Walls of China; you could walk around the ancient site without the benefit of an Aboriginal guide. Sensitivity towards these lands did not require a boardwalk. The country was full of kangaroos; this time there was not one to be seen.

Then there was a seasonal Lodge at the entry to the Park, where you could stay, except during the summer months, and water was at a premium. Today, there is a renovated Lodge, well set up with cabins clustered around the administrative and dining facilities. The highlight of the evening meal was the rack of lamb; after all, in the land of sheep in the saltbush, how glorious was the taste of a very generous serving. We agreed that it was the best lamb we had eaten since one memorable meal at Wanaka in the altoplano area of the South Island of New Zealand, where Canterbury lamb is raised, and until this Mungo experience was the most succulent lamb meal.

Strange, in search of an Aboriginal masterpiece, it was the product of imported fauna which provided the most memorable experience, apart from the cold which, although not unexpected, when combined with a wind chill factor pushed the thermometer well below zero.

As the reader may discern, I was disappointed being locked out of the self-drive tour, and there were suggestions that a sunset tour with two adults and two children at $200 was expensive, but then life is not cheap when you stay in the Park.

Although it is stated that there is no need for a four-wheel drive, some parts of the road to Balranald were, as they say, challenging, especially as it seemed not to have been graded after the floods, and deep dried ruts dotted the roads and in the sandy areas, the bull dust concealed potholes in the road. On the other side of the coin, the asphalt roads are creeping outwards, especially where mining interests are concerned. On reaching the junction with the Balranald-Ivanhoe road, I was surprised by this newly sealed road.

Why? Mining means improved access.

Mineral sands mines had been opened 175km south–west of Ivanhoe. The heavy mineral concentrate (HMC) from the mine is trucked to a new rail siding just outside of Ivanhoe, then transported to Broken Hill for further processing. Unsealed roads used to go in all directions from Ivanhoe, which existed as a place where the rail fettlers lived and where once the Indian Pacific stopped at 3am to let me get off. If you want to emulate that feat just remember the station is approximately a mile from town – and there are no taxis.

There you are, the future of the NSW Far West, tourism and mining, not forgetting the traditional overlay of cattle and sheep. Just setting the scene.

The Prequel

We had been invited to a farewell of Professor David Lyle who, for the past 27 years, has headed the first University Department of Rural Health (URDH) created in Broken Hill. The concept was bitterly opposed at first by some elements of the Federal Department of Health and certain then influential general practitioners. The brainchild of these university departments of rural health was Dr Sue Morey, then the NSW Chief Health Officer, who believed that teaching of medical students should be available in a structured rural facility and should have a strong public health component with equally robust community involvement. Sue delegated me to sort out the structural barriers and importantly secure local involvement. As it turned out, Clyde Thomson, the remarkable CEO of the local Royal Flying Doctor Service, was that person. I have written extensively about Clyde elsewhere and it is about time that his status of being a “national treasure” is fully recognised.

Clyde trained as a pilot, but he grasped very clearly what we were about and how an air transport facility, an almost untouchable icon delivering emergency medical care to the outback, could be further broadened to be an integral part of the clinical life of the community, including most tellingly of the Aboriginal people. Clyde embraced the ideas and demonstrated very clearly the essential need for a “local champion” to work in the planning and implementation.

Although Clyde was Chair of the Hospital Board at the time and a university department of rural health being attached to the local hospital seemed an attractive option – in this case we avoided the danger of parochialism in that even if it were considered successful, there would always be a number of reasons advanced that a “Broken Hill Department of Rural Health” would not be a generalisable model.

Also, medical education at an undergraduate level is the preserve of universities in Australia. We decided that despite a locational problem, the University of Sydney should be invited to participate in the project. At the time university medical school thinking about having a rural component was to have it located on a campus on the outskirts of Sydney, not 1,200 kilometres away in a mining town which was closer to Adelaide.

Crucially, Broken Hill was located in NSW. As time went by, the rural involvement of the University of Sydney moved towards Sydney to Dubbo, then to Orange, over a number of years. This would have been impossible if Broken Hill had been linked to one of South Australian Medical schools, which initially appeared to be the easy option given Broken Hill’s medical relationship with Adelaide, but would have assured failure. There was some academic resistance in University of Sydney Medical School; it was overcome. The Dean, Steve Leeder, helped – a crucial ally.

I was asked to do a Rural Stocktake across Australia by the Department of Health in 1999, and I reported early in 2000.

There is no doubt that Minister Michael Wooldridge’s dedication to rural health improvement drove implementation, in particular securing funding for the program in the 2000 Federal Budget, which was distributed to universities with medical schools, with the proviso that the Universities could not skim any of the funding for “administrative expenses”. All the funding went to the various programs.

The final keystone for this Broken Hill project was David Lyle. He is a public health physician who had been involved, even before his appointment, in determining the extent of lead poisoning in the children of Broken Hill. He has always had a reputation as a great teacher, and ensured that his URDH was expanded to embrace other health professionals, including Aboriginal Health workers.

He oversaw the conversion of disused wards at the back of the hospital into a tangible Department and attracted a significant amount of research funding. There are now 19 UDRHs across the country, and the fact that David, until now, has been the unmovable champion and therefore crucial in the growth of rural training of health professionals, including public health.

His replacement has yet to be named and the University of Sydney advertisement suggested that the office would be based in Camden, where apparently the university has some agricultural facility, such is the systemic idiocy in the university bureaucracy. There is a problem among medical deans where there is an obsession about ranking, largely determined by research citations. Most of the medical deans have had professional careers within academic cloisters where the sun of rural Australia doesn’t shine. It is alleged that rural health money is taken and strewn around the city campuses.

This response by the University of Sydney indicates the bane on any program – lack of corporate memory without a record of the genesis of the program.

David Lyle must leave a written legacy or podcasts to ensure that 27 years of experience is not lost, given he is the last of the original heads of the URDHs.

The Postscript – What’s in a Name!

Years ago, I was asked to review an alleged problem in the delivery of medical care at Hopetoun. Hopetoun is a small township just South of Wyperfield National Park – an area of mallee desert country which lies in the far north-west of Victoria. During my time there, a case of a pregnant woman with no access to ante-natal care, was raised with me.

It was an anecdote raised in passing as an example of the general lack of access to medical care. Strangely over the years the name of this tiny place, Lascelles, has stuck in my mind.

This week we were returning from Broken Hill and decided to go across to Victorian border to visit the pink lake, Lake Tyrrell. Because of its colour, it has become a destination for Chinese tourists because of their association of pink with luck. When we visited the wind was blowing and sun was reflected from the water against a cloudless sky. You could pick out fragmentary pink colours in the shaded areas of the lake, but there is a far better pink lake in the South Australian Coorong. Anyway, Lake Tyrrell has put the Mallee town of Sea Lake on the map, but also on the map has been inserted the Silo Art Trail. Many of the silos in the district have murals painted on them. One of these silos was at Lascelles and at Sea Lake there was a signpost to Lascelles.

The signpost evoked my memory of the name. I thought that it was a speck even further into the bush than Hopetoun, but for the first time I could put a face on this hamlet, where the major medical centres of Mildura and Bendigo were about two hours away. Lascelles is a pub and a few homes and on the silo wall there were beautifully painted, in sepia tones, portraits of a farming couple, the Hormans.

That is the endemic problem of small settlements, so small they do not merit any shops, but most do have a pub, a hangover from the time the trains stopped there and now a place for the locals to come and have a drink. The pub is often the only community resource and would be a perfect place for regular clinic by a visiting medical team. As a model, the flying doctor provides the excitement in community by arriving by air. I remember in the 90s flying with the RFDS when they provided medical care at the Noccundra rodeo; and boy is Noccundra remote! Yet a plane on a gibber plain air strip indicates that the doctors and flight nurses have arrived.

Noccundra in Far West Queensland had a permanent population of four, but there was a pub made of stone. The RFDS provides a model for a visiting service, with provision of a regular clinical schedule and being available for outback events such as the rodeos where inevitably there will be injuries, some of which may require evacuation, either to Broken Hill or Adelaide.

There is much discussion about the lack of doctors in the bush. I believe the root cause is that there is no coherent succession planning, but for such planning there needs to be a facility which can appropriately both monitor and supply a regular flow of doctors.

To me all programs of clinical care must have a teaching component to assure the flow, as occurs in teaching hospitals.

Therefore a university facility, whether it be a university department of rural health, rural clinical school or a rural medical school, could provide a regular means of servicing the small communities with clinicians and providing two elements – one: clinical experience and two: continuity.

Much of these ideas have sprung from my own personal experience of providing a visiting medical service. For a number of years when I was newly graduated I would do evening consultations by visiting patients who, for one reason or another, could not present at the rooms for ongoing care. I did it twice a week, and if I encountered any deterioration, I would let the general practitioner know. Here the General practitioner was my educational resource and I went out on my visits -five or six patients generally had to be seen each evening.

The principle is simple – a travelling medical team connected to a teaching centre, where public health is an essential ingredient. As I have found out, if you provide a mixture of collegiality, teaching, recognition and succession planning, then you can build a coherent team of health workers.

Such a concept where you use colourful cars in lieu of aircraft to attract attention as the means of providing a regular service to remote settlements need to have a David Lyle to implement such a simple but obvious concept. But make sure that the travelling band arrives in each township with panache and always come when they said they would -punctually.

Incidentally, there was no problem with the medical care in Hopetoun, but that is another story, but instructive in trusting your on-site observations to strip away the hearsay and gossip.

Sarah Jane Halton and her Stomach Knot

Jane Halton has bobbed up again. The incoming Health Minister, Mark Butler, has asked her to review the existing vaccine contracts and whether the country had a regular source of vaccine supply – a guaranteed pipeline.

The background is the dilemma being posed by the surge in the number of cases of the virus and the fact that the new variants seem to be more contagious. The fact that the level of vaccination including boosters has declined and there seems to be a growing complacency in the community with the removal of public health safeguards presumably is driving the review.

His action follows on from a national surge in case numbers, with health department estimates showing around 200,000 people are actively infected. He also confirmed that COVID-19 vaccines for children aged between six months and five years, which have already been approved in the United States, are progressing towards approval in Australia. Pfizer has been granted provisional approval to put in an application to provide a paediatric COVID-19 vaccine.

At the same time the impact of the transmissibility of the new variants BA.4 and BA.5 has introduced another variable, because of the unknown factor around the virulence and the effectiveness of current mRNA vaccines against these variants. That is the problem with mRNA viruses – they are fickle, mutating regularly.

Reading between the lines, Butler wants a “quick and dirty”. Despite what has been provided in the media release, and a comment that he was only interested in the future, the lessons come from the past.

Butler’s appointment of Halton is a shrewd one. She is a Howard-Abbott warrior. Therefore, her appointment has a “Teflon” quality. As a Deputy Secretary in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Halton was convener of the People Smuggling Taskforce in the Children Overboard Affair. This was a convenient vehicle for Howard’s scare tactics in relation to the “Boat People”. She was the dummy in believing false claims, but she was rewarded with the post of Department of Health Secretary, where the then Minister, Abbott obviously saw her as a person in his own image and when he became Prime Minister Halton moved upwards into a central agency – that of Finance.

She became a member of the ill-fated Executive Board of the Australian National COVID-19 Coordination Commission in March 2020. That would suggest that she was engaged in the whole sorry process from the start, the entrails of which she has been asked to examine. Maybe she will be able to airbrush any involvement of Sarah Jane Halton from her report to Minister Butler.

After all, the Chair of the Commission, Neville Powers was convicted of breaches of COVID-19 rules. Maybe the activities of this Commission will figure in her solution. So far, the only public contribution by Halton as a result of this association was an indifferent report on hotel quarantine.

However, there is no doubt that Halton is an expert on integrity having been a member of the Board of the Crown Casino which presided over a raft of corrupt practices, the criminality of which has not been tested in the Courts. Nevertheless, the former judge Patricia “Paddy” Bergin, who ran the Inquiry on Crown, noted that despite her involvement in some of the deceptive practices, her integrity emerged intact.

James Packer had a business model which relied on an ongoing river of Chinese money replete with all the attendant malfeasance connected with the movement of large amounts of money, including junket tours and money laundering. It seems that ASIC is not prepared to take the matter further – “too big to fail” is the mantra.

Halton is a beneficiary in that the level of her involvement in the shenanigans will not be tested in court. Nor unsurprisingly, this involvement was not mentioned in the Butler media release, where she is described as “a vaccine expert” and Chair of an international organisation – the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI) based in Oslo, which is the brainchild of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Government of India. Given the generous description of her as a vaccine expert by the Minister, the published description of the CEPI Board, acknowledges her starkly by a single word “Chair”, a position to which she was re-appointed last year for a further five years. Yet others on the Board are clearly defined as vaccine experts. It is as though the authors of the CEPI Report were unsure why she was there.

I therefore was surprised with the Ministerial comment: “I make no judgment about the existing arrangements. I think it’s entirely appropriate for us to have some independent advice about incredibly important arrangements that we have inherited.”

Excuse me for gagging on “independent”.

Now that ex-Minister Hunt has retired, also excuse me by speculating if there is now one remaining person with a target on his chest. Also let’s hope that she does not get that knot in her stomach – her own shorthand for the times she has stuffed up.

Climate Change

Ravenserodd – site of sunken Medieval town

The worst manifestation of this deteriorating climate was the Grote Mandrenke (Great Drowning of Men) of 1362, the greatest North Sea disaster in history which saw up to thirty thousand dead and almost half the population of the marshland districts along the Jutland coast drowned, not to mention the inundation of substantial chunks of the city of Dunwich and the port of Ravenserodd on the North Sea coast of England.

This above excerpt from a newly-published examination of ancient Britain settlement, Shadowlands by Matthew Green describes the changes in the British coastline because of climate change in the early part of the last Millennium. There is the description of Old Winchelsea where, over a period of a hundred years, this settlement – an important port on the Kent coast – was washed away. The intervention of King Edward 1 in acquiring land in the hills above Winchelsea was not without controversy because it meant a shift of Winchelsea being superimposed on existing settlements on this higher land.

These were turbulent times as the Northern Hemisphere moved from a calm Mediaeval Warm Period (c. 900-1200) into the turbulent Little Ice Age (c.1300-1900). During this time, hundreds of settlements on both sides of the Channel were inundated with extensive loss of life.

As Green says, this period was instructive for our time, when climate change is very much in the hands of manmade intervention, which as he says, it is probably much worse than the thirteenth or fourteenth century “ever dreamed up.”

May I suggest that the inhabitants of Lismore and other places that were once ports and which are now being repeatedly flooded, read what happened to this mediaeval port of Winchelsea. It took time but, in the end, the once thriving port of Winchelsea was no more, death from repeated flooding.

Mouse Whisper

My Bushrat relative, Rafferty, turned up the other day. He had hitched a ride on a number of trucks around the southern part of the Far West of NSW with a mate, Jack Kerourat. Anyway, he said that the Hay Plain was so flat you could see the curvature of the Earth’s surface.

The other thing he mentioned was in the bar of the Penarie pub where he heard one of locals say, “Look mate, you know what a remote place is in Australia. It’s where there’s no TAB betting agency.”

Modest Expectations – Leyland Sprinter

Near the end of last year, we decided to decamp to Tasmania for February because we reckoned then that February was the worst time to be in Sydney – always so humid and oppressive. Hopefully we would be climate-wise. Little did we think what would eventuate.

I have jokingly said that having a place in Tasmania is an insurance against climate change. Macquarie Harbour is on the West Coast and is six times the size of Sydney Harbour. Unlike Sydney Harbour, the number of people living in the rim of the Harbour is minuscular – there being one permanent settlement, that of Strahan, which is home to both a fishing and a tourist industry. Salmon farms dot the Harbour.

In my blog I have written twice about my view as a lover of Tasmania. In a blog I wrote about a year ago, inter alia, I mocked the pitiful amount being allocated to bushfire control. The West Coast of Tasmania has been thought immunised against bushfires, because it rains on average every second day of even the driest month, February, and thus having about 160cm rain annually has been some insurance. Bushfires have ravaged the area, but mostly in the mining area around Zeehan to the north where fire erupts from the Savage River iron ore mines.

This was the case in 1982 when a fire was sufficiently worrying for there to be some evacuation of Strahan. The fire had apparently been started by some mutton birders trying to smoke the bird nests in the Ocean Beach dunes, as a preventative measure against any tiger snakes that might be in the burrows. Somewhat exciting if you put your hand into a burrow and you grasp a tiger snake rather than a mutton bird. Anyway, the resultant fire spread through the scrub and nearly burnt the township down.

Nevertheless, while we have been here, there has been a small bushfire near Tullah, which I mentioned earlier in my blog – and another in a more remote area, threatening the Truchanas Huon Pine Forest reserve; a fire in that area would have been equally as devastating as if the bushfire in NSW in the summer of 2019-20 had not been halted before it reached the Wollemi Pine habitat in the Blue Mountains.

The latest news on this bushfire in the south-west is that “as a result of concentrated ground works and co-ordinated water bombing, the fire had downgraded from Going to Under Control with aerial firefighting resources and remote area fire crews continuing to work their way around the boundary edge identifying and extinguishing hotspots with continued aerial support.” That report was a week ago, and there is no evidence that local circumstances have changed.

But worldwide, circumstances have changed. Climate change is now an entity which governments are freely blaming for the conditions which have caused the extreme flooding events that have occurred in both New South Wales and Queensland recently. Terms like “one in a thousand years” calamity is meaningless when it is clear that there has been a change in the environment in which we are living.

The solution to repeated fire and flood is to provide the defence, especially when in this neoliberal world designed to value exploitation rather than conservation, building on flood plains or in the areas liable to engulfed in by bushfire seems to have been acceptable.

Clearing our own property is one thing, but when your land is hemmed in by plots of land that are neglected, with local government unwilling or unable to enforce the clearance presents a problem, as we do, then we do have a problem. The owners of the neglected plots are lost in the fog of the titles office; so we have cleared most of an adjacent plot, taking out eucalypts which threatened to fall or were already leaning over our house, which the previous owners had built close to the boundary of the property. To complicate matters two of the blocks of land now don’t have any access to a road, since the road which exists on the town plan has not nor will ever be built.

We have probably dodged the bullet as we go into autumn, but in fire prevention there is still much to do, irrespective of how complicated the situation is.

Governments have spent money to ensure that most parts of urban Australia have clean water – this is already a matter which we take for granted, but it spares a flooded community from cholera or other waterborne diseases which are endemic in less fortunate communities.

I remember those stories, apocryphal or not, of unscrupulous developers who used to subdivide land which only was visible at low tide; but in regard to flood plains, the lack of scruples is only a matter of degree. The cry of “caveat emptor” applies even when the information is symmetric, which is not the case in this world of hustlers and grifters, some of whom graduate into government, as we have seen. Australia has yet another big clean up job ahead of us, because the stinking mud is not only on the streets of Atlantis, which used to be called Brisbane, but all across this land so strikingly described by Dorothea Mackellar.

Vera Putina’s little boy

“Greetings to Ukraine. Once upon a time Finland too fought the Russian Army with everything we had and was able to hold on to our freedom and independence. That’s what we wish for you as well. The whole Europe stands with you.” – A message from a Finn who fought against the Soviet Union in the 1939-41 War who is still alive at 98.

In one way, the number of options for the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian War are diminishing. They all revolve around Putin’s mental state, now that it has been determined that the Ukrainians are not a pushover. Even in those areas where it would be expected that the people would be little different from the Crimeans, there seems to be vicious fighting. The Ukrainians are not rolling over.”Those Neville Chamberlains” in the US State Department who offered Zelensky asylum did not appreciate his strength. If Zelensky had accepted, that would have been the end; but Zelensky has ditched appeasement in the face of the appeasers.

For Putin, this is very inconvenient. Everybody talks about his unpredictability; but I believe he has the predictability of the tyrant. Thus, it was not long before he sent in his thugs to assassinate Zelensky. How many times he will try to repeat it, who knows! Yet when people become unhinged, as he apparently has, then do we observers put everything down to unpredictability?

While he is using the usual modern warfare device of bombarding the civilians by missiles and bombing, he must break Ukrainian morale to have any chance of winning. The Russians must husband their very finite resources. They are not endless, a very important variable now that the Ukrainians are putting up such resistance. The cost of Putin’s war should be soon, if not already, affecting the Russian population, given the sanctions and the strength of the opposition. The Russians have tried to compensate with mastery of the cyberworld, which did not have a major “combatant role” in their attempted conquest of Afghanistan. I suggest that with NATO and others supplying both military hardware and essential food and other commodities, the war will be won once the USA can reliably control cyberspace. It would be interesting to know what is the cyber surrender equivalent of the white flag.

If Putin did not have a nuclear arsenal, then life for NATO would be less complicated. NATO will just continue to use Ukraine as a surrogate to do the fighting – and eventually exhaust Russia. Obviously, a mad Putin could make good on turning his nuclear preparedness into an all or nothing nuclear winter – at least in the Northern Hemisphere. What the Chinese decide to do will ultimately decide the length of the War.

The fact that the world is experiencing climate change is one good reason why the Russians should dispose of Putin, but he has learnt the tactics of previous Russian despots, where Russia has not only survived but thrived. The only hiccough occurred in the late 1980s when Russia had a rational leader in Gorbachev.

One clue to future action is how the Russians deal with the Ukrainian nuclear reactors. They could continue the boneheaded initial bombardment or think that by doing so the World will watch a new phenomenon, namely the deliberate destruction of nuclear reactors with all the consequences that will entail. Maybe there is a playbook for such an occurrence, learnt from the Chernobyl disaster (when there was once peaceful co-operation). If the nuclear reactors were to be seriously damaged that would be an excuse for any sane person to seek an armistice, I would think.

Anyway, it would give the Orators of Davos something to think about as, having hurriedly packed their Louis Vuitton luggage and checked the time on their diamond encrusted Rolexes, they headed out into the nuclear cloud in their luxury Gulfstreams.

“A stray orange hair to be flicked off the nation’s sleeve.”

I first became acquainted with George Will through the New York Review of Books as a very astute and perceptive critic. I have never met him, but he is of the same vintage as myself. An Oakeshott conservative, but with an insight not dulled by ideology. He has been a Republican, but now writes regularly for the more Democratically aligned Washington Post.

In many ways Will serves as a policy digestif, enabling the unpalatable to be analysed rather than immediately disposed of.

Presuming that as a senior member of the media and as also a student of history, he can make links that may not be immediately apparent. He has depth of experience able to fathom what have the been the quotient of all his senses over his 80 years. Thus, George Will has both literary subtlety and savagery.

This piece below should help you assess whether this veteran has more than a fine use of words or a sentence that Trump should indeed experience at some stage, when his “sin taxes” become too much to accommodate and a “prigioni lifestyle” threatens.

Floundering in his attempts to wield political power while lacking a political office, Donald Trump looks increasingly like a stray orange hair to be flicked off the nation’s sleeve. His residual power, which he must use or lose, is to influence his party’s selection of candidates for state and federal offices. This is, however, perilous because he has the power of influence only if he is perceived to have it. That perception will dissipate if his interventions in Republican primaries continue to be unimpressive.

So, Trump must try to emulate the protagonist of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”. In Mark Twain’s novel, a 19th-century American is transported back in time to Britain in the year 528. He gets in trouble, is condemned to death, but remembers that a solar eclipse occurred on the date of his scheduled execution. He saves himself by vowing to extinguish the sun but promising to let it shine again if his demands are met.

Trump is faltering at the business of commanding outcomes that are, like Twain’s eclipse, independent of his interventions. Consider the dilemma of David Perdue. He is a former Republican senator because Trump, harping on the cosmic injustice of his November loss in 2020, confused and demoralized Georgia Republicans enough to cause Perdue’s defeat by 1.2 percentage points in the January 2021 runoff. Nevertheless, Trump talked Perdue into running in this year’s gubernatorial primary against Georgia’s Republican incumbent, Brian Kemp, whom Trump loathes.

In a February poll, Kemp led Perdue by 10 points. Trump failed in his attempt to boost his preferred Senate candidate in North Carolina, Rep. Ted Budd, by pressuring a rival out of the race. As of mid-January, Budd was trailing in the polls. Trump reportedly might endorse a second Senate candidate in Alabama, his first endorsement, of Rep. Mo Brooks, having been less than earthshaking. Trump has endorsed Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin in the gubernatorial primary against Gov. Brad Little. A poll published in January: Little 59 percent, McGeachin 18 percent. During Trump’s presidency, a majority of Republicans said they were more supporters of Trump than of the GOP. That has now reversed.

Trump is an open book who has been reading himself to the nation for 40 years. In that time, he has changed just one important word in his torrent of talk: He has replaced “Japan” with “China” in assigning blame for our nation’s supposed anaemia. He is an entertainer whose repertoire is stale.

A European war is unhelpful for Trump because it reminds voters that Longfellow was right: Life is real, life is earnest. Trump’s strut through presidential politics was made possible by an American reverie; war in Europe has reminded people that politics is serious.

From Capitol Hill to city halls, Democrats have presided over surges of debt, inflation, crime, pandemic authoritarianism and educational intolerance. Public schools, a point of friction between citizens and government, are hostages of Democratic-aligned teachers unions that have positioned K-12 education in an increasingly adversarial relationship with parents. The most lethal threat to Democrats, however, is the message Americans are hearing from the party’s media-magnified progressive minority: You should be ashamed of your country.

Trump’s message is similar. He says this country is saturated with corruption, from the top, where dimwits represent the evidently dimwitted voters who elected them, down to municipalities that conduct rigged elections. Progressives say the nation’s past is squalid and not really past; Trump says the nation’s present is a disgrace.

Speaking of embarrassments: We are the sum of our choices, and Vladimir Putin has provoked some Trump poodles to make illuminating ones. Their limitless capacity for canine loyalty now encompasses the Kremlin war criminal. For example, the vaudevillian-as-journalist Tucker Carlson, who never lapses into logic, speaks like an arrested-development adolescent: Putin has never called me a racist, so there.

Forgotten Ohio Ukrainians rallying against Putin’s war

One Ohio aspirant, grovelling for Trump’s benediction two weeks ago said: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” Apparently upon discovering that Ohio has 43,000 Ukrainian Americans, this man Vance underwent a conviction transplant, saying, “Russia’s assault on Ukraine is unquestionably a tragedy,” and emitting clouds of idolatry for Trump’s supposedly Metternichian diplomacy regarding Putin.

For Trump, the suppurating wound on American life, and for those who share his curdled venom, war is a hellacious distraction from their self-absorption. Fortunately, their ability to be major distractions is waning.

Albored Part IV – No Longer Unready?

I have admitted that Albanese is probably not unready, but he is unsteady. He strikes me as a guy who has grown up in the kindergarten of factional politics, but really does not communicate well outside that factional circle.

He is fortunate to have some bloody good women who have shown the guts to stand the incompetents up, and hopefully, on a change of government if that occurs, they will team with some of the aspirants running for ostensibly safe Liberal seats as successful candidates.

I was worried by the absence of Penny Wong and the short statement that she has been ill has been left at that after she turned up on the Insiders program. The problem with presenting the Albanese foreign affairs approach is to work out what it is. Wong’s comment on Insiders:

Working with partners in the region to build our collective security, to diversify our export markets, secure supply chains, provide renewable energy and climate solutions, avert coercion, and respond to natural disasters. By investing financially and intellectually in the security and stability of our region – because defence capability on its own won’t achieve this. We share with ASEAN states an abiding interest in averting hegemony by any single power – so this is where our energy must be applied.

In responsibility terms does the distribution of Ministerial Portfolios need to be reviewed – Foreign Affairs, Home Affairs, Defence, Environment Protection? In Government, the responsibility for legislation, both future and existing, needs to be clearly defined; and yet the intrinsic danger of having exclusive enclaves centred around such legislative responsibility makes talk of co-operative government nothing more than meaningless waffle. The question is whether Albanese will have the innate skills, intelligence and authority to assure his Ministers work together.

The obvious question is if you, Albanese, get into office, what do you do on day one, because if you dissect this paragraph above, it is an overwhelming agenda – so large it leads to policy paralysis. The policy drought is evident with so much discussion on nuclear submarines, which are of no immediate relevance – and given the lead time, how relevant ever, except to continue to create for the huge hole in the Budget. If Albanese stepped back and thought that nuclear submarines are the panacea, then he is as blinkered as our supremely unintelligent Prime Minister.

I believe that the defence of Australia, as is the case everywhere, is yet to move from a traditional discussion of muskets and cannon balls. As Putin is demonstrating, it is all about killing more civilians of the “Away Team” than the “Home Team”. The Russian armed forces are seeing the people as the real target. Just look at the Ukraine. It is the war which confirms that the most vulnerable are this target. Children and mothers are the prime target, with the latest atrocity being the bombing of a children’s hospital, irrespective of what the propaganda says to the contrary. Putin may claim that everyone has been evacuated; but tell that to the mothers in labour inside the hospital as the bombs fell.

Unlike the countries which have constituted the battlefield over the past 20 years, Ukraine does have a network of underground bunkers, formerly called train stations (which were an important bulwark in the bombing of Britain 80 years ago). The lessons of the Ukraine War are and will continue to be relevant, rather than government solely succumbing to the blandishments of the armaments manufacturers for more and more lethal toys, which if used will destroy us all.

In one way, just the vastness of a very dry continent with a dispersed population, yet with areas that are intensely populated, provides a defence for Australia, the strength of which needs to be exploited in any future conflict. Albanese seems to have succumbed to the one scenario of invasion, given how much sinophobia has framed the foreign and defence policy of the current government.

Just one simple question? How quickly could our underground accommodate our population, how many of them and how strong would our underground need to be to withstand a missile assault?

The other critical area is cybersecurity – far more important than a few pieces of military or naval hardware. Is the arrangement of the current capacity, in all its diverse acronyms, the right way to conduct our national security? I well remember the Hope Inquiry which Whitlam instituted in 1974. It did not help prevent his dismissal the next year.

While much has changed, Hope’s biographer, Peter Edwards, has written that the principles Hope outlined then remain fundamentally important today: effectiveness must be matched by accountability; intelligence assessment must be separated from policymaking. Intelligence and law enforcement should also be kept separate. Most importantly, both intelligence assessment and national security policymaking must be whole-of-government processes, based in the Prime Minister and Cabinet portfolio, with no single department or minister to have undue influence.

The first decision on day one is more pragmatic. What do they do with Mr Pezzullo, given the number of strings that he has pulled under the Coalition? Presumably Albanese believes it is essential that he is removed and neutralised in his ability to have any influence.

The next decision on day one of a new Government is to review the head of the Australian Federal Police, Reece Kershaw. The danger of authoritarian governments is that they crave a secret police to enact their vengeance; and unfortunately signs are that that is occurring in a complacent Australia.

The problem is this drive towards a police state, whether it is called plutocracy, oligarchy or just plain dictatorship, is muddied with cyber security. I have not seen this matter explicitly addressed by Albanese. As someone who studied Georges Sorel, I am well aware that a secret police is the result of the authoritarian mind, whether extreme right or left wing. Australia should not underestimate this scenario, given the example of Witness K and his lawyer, Bernard Collaery, who were not allowed to release information about our underhand dealings over oil with Timor-Leste. The Guardian did not hold back in a report of the matter where Howard and Downer were described as “shills for the corporations”. Albanese has not disclosed his position, because the whole conduct of the Australian Government in this case reeks of secret police.

Maeslant storm surge barrier near Rotterdam

Climate change is the other enemy, against which it has been shown that Australia has almost no defence. Flood mitigation by the Dutch has been going on since the 13^th century. The Netherlands, built on a series of sandy outcrops primarily that of the Rhine, had suffered from the ravages of the North Sea well before “climate change” came into the lexicon. The flooding of the Netherlands in 1953 was the biggest wake-up call. As one writer put it:

The greatest lesson to be learned from the Dutch is perhaps less about engineering and more about mindset and culture. “It’s easy just to talk about technological and engineering solutions, but a lot of the problems surrounding sea-level rise are legal and political. The Dutch have a legal and political system that is united around dealing with water issues; they’ve been doing it for a thousand years.”

As a result, their technology provides an avenue for combating floods, which has been used in attempting to waterproof New Orleans. Yet here, the only discussion about flood mitigation seems to be around raising walls of dams.

Bushfires present the problem of occurring in isolated forested areas under a hot sun and strong north winds, lit by a lightning strikes. In this country, the approach to bushfires should be inculcated from childhood; bushfire prevention and the community response to fire should be part of the school curriculum. As we age, so increases our responsibility and skill at dealing with probably the greatest enemy of all – fire – particularly when lightning is man made such as by a missile attack. Not sure how this has been discussed by Albanese in his quest to be Number One.

It is a curse that when war flares, conservation of the planet in the long term is replaced by survival in the short term. All the fossil fuel villains of peace time are now life savers. That is the Putin legacy, trying to maintain an order different from that which only exists in the mind of a madman.

That is one lesson of history at this time, for Albanese – John Curtin.

I may not have said that several weeks ago, but just how much times change has been shown by the events of the past two weeks. Remember the instability of the previous United Australia Party leadership in the events leading up to the entry of Japan in WWII; the touching of the forelock to a useless ally before Curtin won Prime Ministership. Would any of our current leaders have stood up to Churchill and brought our troops back from North Africa as Curtin did in 1942? (Remember Menzies had previously committed Australian troops to the ill-fated Crete campaign under the thrall of Churchill.)

Since Curtin, there is no Australian Prime Minister except Whitlam who has put Australian policy in the world first and refused to send our young men and women as cannon fodder as an excuse to defend freedom. Will Albanese be the next?

Rupert’s Quote of the Geek

The alleged comment of the Australian General, explaining the delayed deployment of the Army to the NSW floods because it was initially too dangerous.

Try Ukraine, Buster!

The Armed Forces are said to spend $40 million annually on advertising, which seems to suggest the war preparation is a succession of jolly japes, with imagery reminiscent of Coke ads in camouflage. Even Sportsbet has joined in trivialising military imagery to sell gambling. Often in such imagery there is a grain of truth.

Mouse Whisper

There is a photograph under spotlight of eight Russian soldiers in an elevator – all looking as they were escapees from a KAL cartoon – well allegedly these heroes of the Putin special operations decided to take an elevator up to the roof of a Ukrainian building, and the Ukrainians just turned off the power to the lift.

Could the Russian soldiers be that stupid? But whether true or not, the lift occupants do look a little bewildered apart from the one with his balaclava drawn over his head where only the eyes can be seen – it has that black humour which accompanies tragedy.