Modest Expectations – Place of Caves

Two of Trump’s committees, Save America leadership PAC and the Make America Great Again PAC, spent $55.6 million on legal bills in 2023, including $29.9 million in the second half of the year, according to the new reports released Wednesday. Washington Post.

Robert Hur

The calculated insult that Biden is a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory, apparently appears in the report commissioned to assess the extent and reasons for Biden retaining classified files after leaving the White House. Robert Hur was the author of the comments. Attorney General Merrick Garland had appointed Hur, a former Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Maryland, as Special Counsel in January 2023 after Biden’s aides discovered classified files when they searched his home and office. The problem was that Biden reacted to the Report’s comments like an affronted old man, and his anger caused him to do himself no good; and then to confound his protest about his mental ability, he referred to the Egyptian President as the Mexican. Not a good look!

So as someone has said, the American people are potentially faced with the choice of two old men, neither of which they particularly want.

I would suggest that the first debate be constructed to test the cognitive ability of these old men. After all, it is the talking point. It should be scientifically put together by independent experts. Even floating this possibility and suggesting your use of two younger aspirants as “controls”, would result in the Trump bluster. This would be predictable in terms of his trying to distract and yet in the end it would focus on the dilemma he has, and which he may not comprehend, which is the progressive impact of his failing mental state. And couple that with how he is spending so much of  the money raised  to save his carotene-stained skin by his employment of lawyers. What a look!

Biden would, I predict, be more nuanced; but in the attempt to justify his cognitive abilities, he has shown a lack of insight and judgement by appearing in front of a braying media pack. He is prone to lose his temper and with that he loses the plot. He will be 86 years old at the end of another putative presidency; and I’m afraid another demonstration of a lack of insight, this time driven by his innate vanity will only magnify his flaws as the mental cracks widen. No solace that Trump already lives in such a mental abyss.

But there is one other matter in relation to Biden which some of my colleagues suspect, judging by his stilted demeanour and gait. They all reckon he has Parkinsonism. Presumably he has been checked out, but if he does not have Parkinsonism then Trump does not have dementia.

But nobody is frank. Neither of these guys will see out a four-year period when the potential for the world to catch alight has never been more so for decades.

What a terrible choice for the USA – and ourselves.

How much will you sell me the Harbour Bridge for?

What a great theme for this Year – the Year of Making My Lying Great. But there are other themes in this year when the Olympic Games in Paris will be epitomised by a crew of emaciated dwarfs running the streets of Paris in an increasingly gross spectacle called the Marathon. Look for rhabdomyolysis in the extreme summer heat, where these vulnerable paradoxically highly trained athletes may well become “plats de jour.”

This year then serves to remind us that Brisbane will be the host of the Olympic Games. It is a year when we should not forget John Coates will be 82. He, the Hidden Hand in the award of the 2032 Games to Brisbane, having successfully engineered a change in the rules in awarding the Games, so a small cabal now decides which city would be awarded. Then he recused himself from the actual awarding. Of course he did, being a person within the inner circle for years and being close to the President. He was the Bite for Bach. All those “Coatsian” machinations; and then alas, nobody else wanted it. All in vain?

Six months ago, the Brisbane Times reported: With Brisbane 2032 already having experienced massive cost blowouts – the Gabba rebuild went from $1 billion to $2.7 billion – questions were naturally asked about Queensland’s commitment to host the Olympics. But Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the state was “100 per cent committed” to hosting the Olympics.

The Gabba

Palaszchuk has now gone, but is Coates’ manipulative input diminished? Redevelopment of the “Gabba” has been pronounced dead. Coates, trying to remain in the loop, has agreed. Six months ago, no such judgement; but the new Premier, Stephen Miles, has put the kibosh on the expenditure, and especially rebuilding the Gabba.

My initial pessimism about Brisbane being awarded the Games is rapidly being confirmed. As a teenager I well remember the Melbourne Olympic games with all the bickering and the threats from the then appalling long-term IOC president, Avery Brundage, the American Hitler admirer. In the end, it went ahead, but had some other associated problems. In the latter part of 1956, the northern hemisphere was aflame with the Suez crisis and the Hungarian rebellion. In the end, Melbourne hosted one of the smallest Olympic Games in modern times.

In addition, because of the tough Australian quarantine laws at the time, the equestrian events were held in Stockholm. But let us say, the management of the whole Games, from its award in 1948 almost to the opening by Prince Phillip, was questionable. It had elements of farce mixed with administrative bungling. The Games were held with some stumbles; but there are fond memories and Australia did well. I believe having the Melbourne Cricket Ground and other readymade venues helped a great deal.

There are two important factors between success and failure that I have observed. The first is the profitability. The total cost of staging the Sydney Olympic Games was $6.5 bn. The Federal Government contributed $194 million, and the private sector $1.3 bn, while the NSW State Government contributed $2.3 bn. The profit is always more than a touch fanciful.

In the past three decades, two Olympic Games stand out for their overall net positive results.

Los Angeles was the only city to express interest for the 1984 Olympics. After Munich’s terrorism, Montreal’s cost overruns (it took Montreal 30 years to pay its Olympic Games debt) and the Moscow Games, most countries shied away. It was also the time that Samaranch, a Catalan by birth yet a Spanish Falangist by political affiliation, became IOC President following the hapless Irish peer, Lord Killanin. Samaranch was a very smart operator.

The US city exploited its unique negotiating position: it would host only if it could use existing facilities from 1932’s previous LA Games and house athletes in university dormitories. The city ended the Games with a US$250 million surplus.

Despite exceeding its budget by more than 400 per cent in 1992, Barcelona reaped long-term benefits from the Games. The city wanted to re-invent itself and improve its harbour facilities. Having been to Barcelona when the Olympic stadium was being built in the late 1980s, I remember having a meal on one of the old wharf restaurants, and so the changes wrought obviously due largely to Samaranch’s shrewdness, have been remarkable.

I remember that there was no work being undertaken on La Sagrada Familia, it being fenced off at that time. That neglect changed as Barcelona changed.  The tempo of construction accelerated markedly, and it was partially opened to the public in 2010. The final huge steeple is now under construction, and the finishing date is estimated to be 2026.

It was also a time when the Barcelona football team (“Barca”) started on its winning ways, attracting a huge degree of worldwide support. I have visited Barcelona several times since.  On one of these occasions, the city was out in force when the Barca football team crowded on the top of an open-aired double decker bus being driven through streets after winning the European Cup. Messi was very recognisable at the front of the team holding onto the bus rail.

But these Games were a long time ago, and the Brisbane Games appear to be a hollow tribute to one man’s ego. This current situation reminds me of the Melbourne troubles. The bickering has started, and there are so many sports now crowded into the games, each demanding their own venue, and cost is beginning to become a major issue. The other major issue is the management.

The strength of management is critical. Sandy Holloway is widely credited with successful management of the Sydney Games and, having experienced the Games first-hand, given the crowds and the logistic problem of clearing venues of people, he did a good job – if that was the major criterion of success. He keeps bouncing around with his views on display. He welcomed the appointment of Cindy Hook as the Brisbane Olympic Games CEO. She headed Deloitte in Australia previously, but Holloway was critical of her accompanying “megaboard” as he termed it.

The Chair, an expatriate Australian chemical engineer who headed Dow was appointed President of the Games Committee, as reported to be one of the last actions agreed by the Morrison Government. Andrew Liveris has an illustrious, if speckled, career. One of his contributions was floating the use of nuclear power. Last year, he was reported in the AFR as saying the Games were forecast to cost taxpayers $7.1 billion over the next decade.

Liveris said that the share of the broadcast rights, sponsorship opportunities, attendance (in person and virtual) and the better utilisation of existing venues provides a different model and that 84 per cent of our venues are already in place.

Moreover, the major new projects – $2.7 billion to redevelop the Gabba as the main Olympic stadium and the building of the Brisbane Arena at a cost of $2.5 billion – will create an “urban spine for Brisbane which will bring it into the 21st century in terms of entertainment, restaurants, museums and art galleries to make the city vibrant with the two big sports arenas… If we do see cost escalations, here’s what we will do, we’ll find more revenue”.

That was last year, said at the time Melbourne withdrew its sponsorship of the Commonwealth Games which created a “one-day” furore and now has been forgotten except by those who know it was just an expensive cynical exercise to shore up Labor-held seats outside Melbourne.

The Liveris solution – improve the revenue stream in the face of the inevitable cost blow-out – is not the way the Queensland authorities operate. Cut costs is more the flavour.

More ominously, recent reports suggest Coates is throwing his weight around. Probably fears a case of sudden infant games death syndrome. But the last thing the organisation needs is an interfering old man trying to call the shots without any formal responsibility.

But let us see. It is only a matter of time before all will be revealed. Cities will jack up against the increasing burdens imposed by the IOC, who skim their take, without doing anything but pick the “sucker” city. Gone is the canniness of Samaranch – all that is left is residual rapacity.

The thought of having to assume management and financial responsibility must send shudders through the plush halls of Lausanne. But then to paraphrase those famous words uttered by Humphrey Bogart: “We’ll always have Saudi Arabia.”

But wait, don’t forget Qatar. Who would  have thought it … favourite for the 2036 Games already.

Bird of Paradise

Whatever industry the Chinese have attacked they have captured; whatever they have attempted they have mastered; whenever there has been an encounter between them and our own people they have come off victorious. And these are said to be the very offscouring of the Chinese ports. – San Francisco Chronicle 1875

I have only been to Papua New Guinea once, in 1973, when Papua was in the throes of transitioning from an Australian protectorate / colony to eventual independence in 1975. I remember dinner with a number of up-and-coming politicians and bureaucrats in Port Moresby. It was a boozy affair. John Knight, later Senator for the ACT, was with me that night and provided a degree of DFAT dignity to the proceedings. But it was not a time when there was much vision of the future emerging from the bottom of wine and beer glasses. The world would take care of itself. Michael Somare was their hero; and his friendship with Andrew Peacock was a symptom of how attitudes were changing between our two countries. John Knight got on well with Peacock.

I remember flying up to Lae, a distance of 325 km to the north-east of Port Moresby, to see a friend of mine with whom I had worked in the research laboratory. I had not seen her for a few years, and in that time she had married and had a child.

However, the lasting memory of Lae, and probably my strongest recollection as I have lost my notes of that visit, was visiting the war cemetery there, carved from the jungle, with its neat array of white crosses.  So many Australians are interred there. There was nobody else in the cemetery, but I skirted the graves making sure I did not walk on any of them. I stayed there for a long time until I realised that I had to catch the plane back to Port Moresby. When I got there to check in, even though I had been allocated a seat, there was no seat. I had my first lesson in Melanesian bureaucracy but somehow, through both cajoling and “pulling rank”, I got on the flight. The rest of the return home was uneventful. It was the last day TAA flew into Papua New Guinea.

I have known many doctors who have done stints in New Guinea back in the 60’s and much later. They have always been pessimistic about the quality of the care, even in the larger centres. When I organised a meeting of the South Pacific public health physicians as part of the anti-Mururoa nuclear testing project, with the support of the Australian Government, many of these nations sent representatives, but not PNG.

At the end of school in the 50s, PNG offered careers as patrol officers. One of the Cadet Under Officers at school went off to become one, and I never heard of him again. Well, that is not true. Mick was a very good hockey player and it was reported in the 1958 Pacific Island Monthly that he was best and fairest playing for Rabaul, although beaten by Port Moresby in the final. Ah, the days of patrol officers sipping Pimms No. I after the game. But thereafter?

Fuzzy-wuzzy angel

It was just New Guinea then, with the wartime stories of the brave fuzzy-wuzzy angels and the march down the Kokoda trail and the victory over the Japanese at Milne Bay, Australia triumphant. WWII thrust this second biggest island in the world into one of great relevance to Australia.

PNG was shown to be a buffer, in addition to its underlying mineral wealth and its varied cultures. Like so much of the world in the nineteenth century, New Guinea was subject to being sliced up by European powers. New Guinea was notionally Dutch, until the British prised the Eastern part of the Island away in 1824. The British hold on this part of the island was flimsy and the Germans, in consolidating their place in the Pacific, had originally centred on Samoa. However, in 1884 they established German New Guinea, incorporating the Bismarck archipelago, and the next year, the northern Solomon Islands, Bougainville and Buka. The British government annexed the remaining Papua in 1888, and then in formal terms:

The possession was placed under the authority of the Commonwealth Australia in 1902. Following the passage of the Papua Act of 1905, British of New Guinea became the Territory of Papua, and formal Australian administration began in 1906.

This suggests that the British government was only too happy to have their fledging dominion look after “British New Guinea”. With the outbreak of WWI, it did not take the Australians long to defeat the Germans and take over German New Guinea. In December 1920, Australia was granted the mandate of all German possessions South of the equator except Samoa and Nauru by the League of Nations. It was not the happiest time, with continuing conflict with the League of Nations. Billy Hughes, Prime Minister at the time of the Treaty of Versailles, set the scene for our relationship with his truculence and the attempts to apply the White Australia policy to New Guinea. Hughes loathed the League of Nations, but then he did not like much anyway – miserable little man. In all, Australia did not handle the Mandate well; starved it for funding and did very little in providing education and social support in New Guinea, leaving that to the Christian missions.

Geography didn’t help. The Owen Stanley Mountain Range was a significant barrier to travel, and the people lived in tribes, often at war with their neighbours in the next valley. So, granting independence was always going to be problematical.

Michael Somare in East Sepik tribal ceremony

Fortunately, Michael Somare, the classical charismatic leader, was there at the right time. Born in 1936 in Rabaul, he grew up in the East Sepik district, where his father, Ludwig, was a policeman. His early schooling was provided in a Japanese-run school during wartime. He eventually became a teacher, having reached the equivalent of Year 11 education. He formed a close relationship with Andrew Peacock when the latter was Minister for Territories in the Coalition Government. What Peacock did with his relationship with Somare was to break down colonial patronising attitudes. Somare promised so much at the time.  Such a relationship has never been repeated, more’s the pity.

Japan ostensibly had little interest pre-war in New Guinea, Japanese sampans zipping around the Pacific more a pest than a threat. Japanese pearl divers were located throughout the area, where there were significant amounts of mother-of-pearl. However, as a demonstration of the White Australia policy, Australia removed all Japanese from New Guinea.

Japan in 1914 had occupied the Caroline Islands, the southernmost islands of Micronesia, and built a naval base on the island of Truk. Japan achieved a sort of revenge by occupying the old New Guinea Mandate area during WWII, so much so that in the Allied battle to regain its lost Pacific, the Americans bypassed Rabaul because it had been so fortified by the Japanese. They a feared that a hostile base there could be a springboard for bombing Truk by the then new Flying Fortresses. Papua was never occupied by the Japanese, although they inflicted significant damage on Port Moresby.

This demonstrated so clearly the importance of the island as this buffer to the North, without bothering to demonise “the yellow peril” as pre-war Australia labelled the Chinese and Japanese. The problem which, even now, Australia must deal with is the level of corruption in PNG, as instanced by the administration of offshore detention centres – the spectacle of private consulting firms ripping off the Australian Government, with obvious internal corruption here and among people in the PNG administration. And for what?

Australia has provided direct assistance when asked — handing over more than a billion dollars in low-interest loans to support PNG’s budget since 2019. Australia tolerated the PNG Government when it pegged the kina to the Australian dollar so the “elite” could afford to buy property in Australia and educate their children in private schools; and then expected us to bail them out.

The Dutch annexed the island as a single entity. Then from 1824 the disaster started, as the Europeans “sliced and diced” the Island. In 1962, as the Indonesians inherited the Dutch East Indies territory, as eventually the Dutch, who were awful colonists anyway just gave in and the Javanese dominated Indonesians swarmed into a Melanesian culture with their normal cultural sensitivity. Thus, West Irian is a festering sore, which the World conveniently ignores. PNG does not have the power to affect what is happening in West Irian to their Melanesian cousins.

The Chinese have offered to bring in a so-called team to train police and the military. The level of lawlessness is out of control if one can believe the media reports, and the spectacle of buildings burning in Port Moresby. I remember the “rascals” – Chimbu tribesmen who had descended on Port Moresby, and found it was far from El Dorado formed criminal gangs. If the PNG accepts the Chinese “law and order offer” it will be a Faustian bargain.

As for the future of PNG, there is talk about a Free Trade Agreement as there also is with China. PNG depends heavily on agriculture for export income. If nothing else the biosecurity measures imposed by Australia makes this difficult; and the major export to Australia is minerals, most of which have significant Australian ownership of the mines.

China is now a factor in funding PNG; the Americans are issuing warnings to us about this, but what have they done for the Island? And what of our legacy, a bodgie exercise to maintain asylum seekers from entering Australia because they had the temerity to come to Australia by boat.

That is the story of the last 50 years. Just provide annual funding – has that been a good investment? Especially now that the Chinese have appeared on the scene (just wait for them wanting to build a harbour). Our investment has gone sour; and what with Bougainville to be sorted through, not to mention the other countries of the South Pacific, Australia may pay a price which we were not expecting. Australia had funded PNG as a security buffer.  The buffer is in danger of disintegrating, as the Solomon Islands government have shown recently despite our involvement through RAMS (Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands) of restoring the country after a period of civilian anarchy in the early 2000s.

Just because the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea travels to Canberra and gives a talk to Parliament, did anything material occur? Was there any free trade agreement finalised? The answer of course is no.

There may be smiles all round, soaring rhetoric, promises litter the Statement by Albanese and Marape released on February 8. But the failed State to our North just rumbles on, and now with China well and truly in the mix.

Prime Minister James Marape

The visit of Prime Minister Marape has made me think.  Here, we have a country, which I remember coming towards independence nearly 50 years ago. A brief association: I never returned. I’ve been to many Islands in the Pacific, but never have been back to PNG. Why? I think I did not want to be disappointed.

Yet how different the actuality of the present from the optimism of 1973. Nevertheless, as part of the 50th celebration next year, a memorial to our patrol officers will be built. My schoolmate of so long ago, Mick, would be pleased.

Mouse whisper

Talking of additional sports being added to the Olympic Games. Gliding was a demonstration sport at the Berlin Games. It was so popular, that it was included among the scheduled 1940 Games events for Tokyo. The Games were cancelled, and therefore gliding was the Olympic sport which never was.

Modest Expectations – Stereo on the Mountain

I have written this story before, but the proposal to increase the travel allowances of patients living in country areas of NSW reminds me of a story which appeared in my 1988 book “Portraits in Australian Health” released in the Bicentenary year, to my knowledge the only book which the Federal Department of Community Services and Health sponsored to honour this occasion.

It related to a long time general practitioner in a northern country town in NSW who, among his diverse interests and skills, was an expert in diseases of the eyes. On one occasion, one of his patients came to see him for advice. Apparently, the advice did not suit this person, and so he sought a second opinion. This meant travelling to Sydney by train, which took about eight hours, in order to consult the eye specialist.  This meant no mean effort.

Days later, he arrives at the specialist’s rooms in Macquarie Street only to find, as he entered the consulting room, there was his own country doctor who, at the time, was undertaking a locum for the specialist.

This is highly unlikely to happen today, but emphasised that just because one may prefer to practise medicine in a rural setting it is in any way different from practising in the city, apart from the technology. It just means getting the skill sets and the incentives right. But I admit that technology has in some areas supplanted a need for the same level of clinical skills, but that generality hides a much deeper discussion on its truth.

The doctor in the anecdote never lost his links with the city. When a doctor practises in a country town, he or she does so as an everyday member of the community and as the repository of the knowledge of the community’s health status, each person by person.  In attracting a doctor to country practice, the community must realise that the doctor must have his or her own space, his or her own privacy – the interaction between the doctor and community, which I once termed “tolerance” – a recognition of the importance of both sides of this interaction played out beyond the doctor’s rooms.

In so doing, another element of potential dysfunction is broached – that of professional isolation. Post graduate education is offered but availability is not the same as uptake. What worried me when I served as Director of Clinical Training was to get the professionals to interact with one another, even within the one practice. I have found collegiality helps in diminishing isolation, because sometimes I think many of my colleagues would prefer a sub-specialty of one.

Over years working in rural areas, it is tragic that I have seen the same mistakes being repeated over and over again. The classic conundrum is that of the doctor who complains about his workload, but when offered another doctor, recoils because of an unsubstantiated threat to income and as a threat to the power structure these long term doctors have created in their town. As a result there is a dearth of succession planning.

The other cultural problem, for which doctors are not to blame, is that the closer one town is to another the greater the rivalry and animosity, often demonstrated in the regional sporting rivalries

Awareness of the dysfunctions of rural life is papered over by the vision of an Acadian life, but despite the attempts at regionalisation, it is always the major regional city which collects the spoils and the rest of the region is left to its own devices. There are success stories; but always it seems there is a time when former patterns of dysfunctional behaviour re-emerge.

Having the will of successive generations of administration to maintain an open co-operative system requires the steely resolve of people like the Mayo Brothers, and how they achieved their success should be studied in every institution where health administration is taught.

“Tasting the winds, that are footless,
Waist-deep in history.”
 

I love trees as obviously does Sylvia Plath from this above quote.

One of my most enjoyable times was driving between Bourke and Goodooga in Northern NSW with Stuart Gordon and Nick Mersiades. Stuart Gordon then was moving from growing cotton into the community services sector. He asked whether he could cadge a lift to Brewarrina, as Nick and I were going onto Goodooga to stay the night before proceeding to Hebel just over the NSW border in Queensland the next day.

Brigalow trees

What was unforgettable about this drive was the level of knowledge of the countryside those two blokes had. The bush was varied. At one point we would be driving through predominantly brigalow scrub but at other times gidgee scrub.

Gidgee trees are stockier than brigalow and have dark trunks, which, when they are cut, yield a yellow sapwood corona surrounding an umber core. Brigalow trees are taller. In the dry area, the green brigalow foliage becomes increasingly silvery, and in a breeze I thought it to be almost feathery like giant dowager boas.

Gidgee trees
Leopard gum

Interspersed among these stands of acacia were mallee eucalypts, and the incredibly beautiful leopard and salmon gum trees. The trunks of the latter were smooth salmon in colour and the leopard gum mimicked the spotted hide of the eponymous carnivore.

To me, crushing a gum leaf and smelling the eucalyptus oil is the most tangible reminder of who I am. Although I have been eligible for both British and Irish citizenship, however tempted, I can only be loyal to one country – Australia. Sometimes over the past decade it has been very difficult to assert such loyalty, but the sun always rises.

Some years ago, Thomas Pakenham, who is incidentally the 8th Earl of Longford, a disestablished Irish peerage, authored a number of books, among them extravagant pictorials highlighting the trees of greatest significance to the author. In the first of these, “Remarkable Trees” was an impressive arboreal array, including the oldest tree in the world, a bristlecone pine about 4,600 years old growing at an altitude of 3,000 metres in the White Mountains in California among other aged trunks in the aptly named Methuselah Grove.

Apparently there was an even older tree in which an enthusiastic geography student inserted and then broke a tree corer in trying to ascertain the age of a similar tree. The corer was valuable enough for the tree to be cut down to rescue the corer. The tree turned out to be 4,900 years old at the time of its axing.  It could be said that these trees have been dying for two thousand years, but none had been beheaded in search of an instrument. Two thousand dollars for the oldest tree – a question of priorities.

Yet there were Australian trees among his remarkable trees. One was the famous prison baobab near Derby in the Kimberley.  Another was the bunya pine next to a grand castle in Northern Portugal.  The height of this pine is comparable to the castle’s campanile tower. In our garden here in Sydney we have had a number of bunya pines which we once bought in the Bunya Mountains south-west of the Queensland town of Kingaroy.

Fortunately the remaining one still grows in a pot, saving us from worrying about a putative 45 metre tree overshadowing the whole of our front garden. Australia is thought of as being gum and wattle trees, but Australia is also home to many of the Araucaria relatives of the bunya pine, the most recent member of this genus being the Wollemi pine, named for the wilderness area in the Blue Mountains where it was first discovered.

This book was followed by “Australia’s Remarkable Trees” – another impressive pictorial. I once wrote to its authors Richard Allen and Kimbal Baker, pointing out that there was this remarkable tree at the corner of Punt Road and Alexandra Avenue in Melbourne. It is a huge golden elm at the intersection of these two very busy roads on the banks of the Yarra River.

The amazing element which I found as I entered the dense canopy, seeking an unmarked specimen of leaf, at a time when I was collecting the various glabrous leaves of these trees, was that when you were under the canopy your vision was only of the foliage. The outside world was blotted out. Branches nearly touch the ground, and others are propped up. Here, there was a tranquillity, and even though close by, the traffic noise was muted, although the smell of the dusty, dirty city does penetrate through the foliage.

Most of the foliage bore the scars of insects – it was mid-summer and cool under the foliage. Close up the imperfections in the leaves were very evident. But that is life. The tree appears in the book, and the authors suggest the best time to view the tree is in spring when the foliage is unmarked, a lighter shade of green than its companion elms. Given in Europe that the English elm has been almost wiped out by Dutch elm disease, Melbourne and also other places like Ballarat are major remaining strongholds on Earth of this remarkable tree.

All such books as I describe are based on informed subjectivity. However there is one thing binding all these trees and that is of a deep appreciation, if not awe, of the permanent diverse planet upon which we move about. Thus, when one hears of destruction, it is often a time when I mourn for this lost heritage, as if one has lost a member of the family.

Fire is an ever-present risk to our forests. For some slow growing trees like snow gums it is a ghastly fate, but for others such as banksia it is important for the generation of new stock. The greater danger is overlogging, which has dogged Australia throughout our history. It seems that if you are born Tasmanian, you are born an instinctive forester. A forester is OK; but an indiscriminate logger is a vandal. The stories abound of such destruction in Tasmania, which continually change the undoubted resilience of trees such as the trio of its indigenous pines – the Huon, king billy and celery.

Trees deserve our attention. They are part of us. The introduction of the deciduous exotica, which provide Australia with all the autumnal colour, is probably one of the positive contributions from the colonial Heritage.

Thus, many of us take trees for granted, and when we talk about trees, the appreciation of diversity is unfortunately limited to whether the tree is obstructing my view or not.

 A Virus in the Sand

At a time when the rise in the number of cases of Covid in Australia has been dramatic, the following article from the NYR shows a thoughtful perspective as it describes what the new medical graduate must expect. Much of the clinical experience of all these young health professional graduates would have been in a period when the COVID-19 pandemic dominated health care and the resultant priorities arising. I have read these thoughts, and the stark manner in which ICU practice has been affected in modern medical practice with the advent of a contagious disease dominating the acute patient load.

At the same time, there are the challenges presented by its persistence as the chronic disease in all its manifestations; such as the phenomena of active long COVID or dormant COVID reappearing decades later.

This is a virus which is both deadly and seemingly innocuous, depending on the particular individual response. Whether it creates a deep ravine in medical practice, between infectious and non-infectious disease will ultimately depend on how the organisation of the health care system changes both now and after the pandemic has waned– the resurrection of infectious disease hospitals for instance.

An illustration of the growth in COVID cases

Paradoxically, Australia has spent a considerable amount of money on health institutions, often driven by clever marketing of sub-specialities, with an advocacy group of those affected by the particular condition and their relatives, especially if the affected person has a strong public profile.

The level of sub-specialisation and the disproportionate incentives for this to occur only serves to magnify the cost of health care. Children are an irresistible magnet for funding; and beware any attempt to interfere. Try a review of funding for childhood cancer – impossible to review objectively as to cost effectiveness because of the emotional halo.

A subspecialty exists because, through skill or advocacy, it has carved itself away from a perceived drudgery of general practice. This view has been increasingly encouraged by the various deans of health sciences in universities, where excellence is determined by the amount of research funding and by the number of citations, notoriously subject to gaming.

This obsession with rankings based on the alleged quality of research has been increasingly dissociated from the prime reason for universities to exist – and that is to teach each generation of students in the best available environment. Plus, may I add, not to have half the Faculty away on overseas conferences, on sabbaticals and/or time spent in private practice and outside consultancy work. This state of affairs is hardly conducive to healthy pedagogy.

The doctors who are finishing residency now have completed most of their training in a world without robust family presence. They learned to become doctors to patients who are intubated and under deep sedation, behind closed doors, in a world of masks and alongside the fear that if they are not careful, their patients could make them sick.

Back in my own training, we used deep sedation and paralysing medications infrequently, as we knew that these decisions came with a cost: delirium, long-term brain dysfunction, profound weakness. But today’s doctors in training have learned on Covid patients. When we were uncertain what to do, particularly early on, we reflexively jumped to deep sedation as the answer for them. These are patterns that are hard to unlearn.

And beneath it all is the continued spectre of the virus. Though I did not have a single patient with Covid-19 during my recent weeks in the unit, from time to time, we would receive a message alerting us that one of our patients had a Covid exposure from a staff member who had tested positive and would have to be on precautions as a result. Patients and families were once terrified by this news, but now they are largely used to it and seem reassured that the staff are masked and so any meaningful exposure is unlikely. This is another aspect of our new reality.

To think that a possible Covid exposure would not cause panic is itself a sign of great progress. But at the same time, we are so far from where we thought we might be by now. When I walked through the halls of the Covid intensive care unit back in the spring of 2020, I told myself, as did so many of us in health care, that we would improve care for those who were disproportionately impacted by this virus. The systems to which we had become accustomed would be dismantled, and we would find ourselves somewhere better.

But those sorts of promises are naïve and empty without a plan for how to make and sustain real change to protect the vulnerable among us. So here I am, back in the unit, caring for a patient with severe cerebral palsy, who had aspirated his own secretions and developed a life-threatening pneumonia. His aging parents had done the best they could despite limited resources, making sure to turn their adult son on his side multiple times a day to help him cough, but his muscles were too weak. And now he would require a tracheotomy tube for the rest of his life. I know, talking to his parents, that it is possible that their adult son will not go home, that they will not be able to afford the kinds of services he needs. When and if another virus comes, the son they cared for at home for three decades might be living in precisely the kind of nursing facility that will be decimated by it. It’s easy to feel that the tragedy only repeats.

But then again, in just a few weeks, a group of newly minted doctors begin their internships. Medicine is strange like that, a new generation every three years, and with it a chance for reinvention. They will find themselves in a hospital in transition, in a country that has suffered more than a million deaths. We will teach them about all of it, about how to manage sepsis and heart failure and trauma, about the pandemic and how it was before. And for a moment, maybe, we can step back and see it all through their eyes — the nervousness and the excitement and, more than anything, the hope for what is to come.

Oolong or Earl Grey?

In a previous blog, I worried about the many deficiencies in our approach to the other nations of the South Pacific.

The Chinese might have the money, but Australia has the advantage of Foreign Minister, Senator Penny Wong, who has turned disdain to genuine respect for our South Pacific community. This has been coupled with a change in the Government’s attitude to climate change, to make it easier for the Australian government to adopt a primus inter pares role in the South Pacific area.

Every nation in the South Pacific has been victim of colonisation. China in its entry into the South Pacific is just another coloniser, although the gunboat may be muted, the offered funding comes clutched in a mailed fist.

Therefore, the European countries have been a major factor in the sometimes idiotic distribution of their colonies. Does it make sense that the Western part of New Guinea has been hived off into Indonesia just because it was once the furthest outpost of Dutch colonisation.

One remnant of Portugal’s worldwide speckled colonisation is the Republic of Timor-Leste, whose isolation in a region of muted hostility makes it not unexpectedly seek a powerful ally, such as China. Previously East Timor, as it was before Independence, has always presented an anomaly. Whitlam was worried that East Timor, if it received such independence, would present a risk of an Arafura Cuba.

However any hidden intervention then has been well and truly trumped by the disgraceful behaviour of the Australian Government, as described in the Crikey newsletter namely the bugging of the Timor-Leste cabinet, the motives of the Howard government in its tactics towards the fledgling state, the subsequent decisions of the then foreign minister and then DFAT secretary to take jobs with the biggest beneficiary, the abuse of intelligence agencies for corporate espionage, the attempts to cover up the truth of the bugging and the vexatious attempts to punish those who exposed that truth, amount to the greatest scandal of recent decades.

Cristo Rei, Dili, Timor-Leste

Successive Australian governments have concealed such chicanery that will make any long term relationship between the Republic and ourselves very shaky. Australia has a substantial Timorese population in Darwin, and having been there just before the pandemic, it was to me clear how much the Chinese were investing in the Timor-Leste infrastructure. While the Republic shares the island with Indonesia, it is also a short boat ride from Dili across to the Indonesian island of Alor, part of the extended archipelago of the Southern Sunda islands, one of which Bali is 1,600 kilometres to the west of Alor.

Setting Timor-Leste aside for a moment is not to ignore its importance in a cohesive Australian South Pacific strategy lacking up to now.

Apart from a perception of the Chinese being a new colonial power, one of the points of differentiation is for Australian government ministers to cease to act as colonial masters. The Chinese have difficulty in hiding their sense of superiority, which grates, and in the end makes their presence in the South Pacific unpalatable. Nevertheless, mate, money takes away any distaste.

As I wrote about Andrew Peacock’s actions when he inherited the Ministry of External Territories, he immediately treated the New Guineans as equals, so evident in his relationship with Michael Somare. His predecessor was an old school Country Party politician, who viewed coloured people as inferior. After all, we’ve lived through a long term White Australia policy, and it is testimony to countervailing factors which have assured our role among out neighbours – not the least of which was our generation in speaking out against such a policy.

One of these factors binding us together undoubtedly is rugby; and with that New Zealand and its indigenous Maori population provide a vital bridge to Polynesia. This the Chinese do not have,

Our mutual Anglo-Celtic background provides a deceptive similarity of Australia with New Zealand. Yet it is in part mirage. As one who has headed a hybrid Australian and New Zealand organisation, I found the countries to be very different; the two nations respond differently to external stimuli. As with all neighbours, there is an accumulation of negative factors, which will intrude into all the positive aspects, unless we both recognise and deal with the differences immediately. Recently in her new role, Penny Wong has ably demonstrated with her embrace of the NZ Foreign Minister, Nanaia Mahuta, with her facial moko, her ability to confront the cultural differences. Whatever may be unstated, facial tattoos are confrontational for a country not steeped in Polynesian culture as New Zealand is.

Melanesia, as shown by the Solomon Islands treaty with China, exhibits our vulnerability; this is intertwined in our relationship with Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea is a nation borne out of strong colonial links with Australia, both direct with Papua and by the acquisition of a mandate of the German colony of New Guinea after WW1.

Our indigenous Aboriginal people are represented in some of the Southern Sunda islands but more as an anthropological curiosity than as any cohesive force.

There are the Torres Strait People and here the Australian border with PNG provides a problematic divide. Then there is the collection of South Seas islanders – the descendants from the nineteenth century kanaka trade. Predominantly men from Vanuatu, they were press-ganged to work the cane fields of Northern Queensland, and Mackay is where many of the descendants remain. They have their identity, their flag but are not recognised in the same way Torres Strait Islanders are recognised. Only a small fraction of white Australia has ever met a Torres Strait islander. Yet some of the greatest rugby league players have come from both Torres Strait and South Seas Islanders.

On the other hand, the Solomon Islands were always a British colony before independence in 1978; and the Republic of Vanuatu was born from the New Hebrides condominium arrangement between Britain and France in 1980.

France remains the only European power left in the South Pacific and there is no indication that it will leave soon. One of the lessons was our ability to mobilise against the common enemy – this was the French when they were conducting nuclear testing in the South Pacific. We ran a meticulous campaign against the French and, given its modest funding, was very successful if judged by its impact among some of the South Pacific nations, remembering I was fronting an Australian and New Zealand organisation.

One area of which both our nations are guilty is still the magnetism  of Great Britain, even though despite some Whitehall protestations, Britain has long since vacated the South Pacific. The AUKUS arrangement  is redolent of a backward looking, nostalgic stream of thought.

Hopefully  as an early priority Wong will not rush over to the “old Country” to tug the forelock or have tea at Windsor. Fortunately, she seems to have left that to the emissary of the old huntin’ and shootin’ brigade, garbed as an Edwardian remnant of Albion humankind, a man whose name conveniently rhymes with dandy. Leave the UK to these people and let’s get on with dealing with the actual challenges of our region.

We marshalled the forces against one form of climate change 25 years ago. The challenge presented by climate change is far more serious and instead of AUKUS, how about a South Pacific alliance against the great polluter, China. Unfair characterisation? Fairness is not a major constituent in Chinese foreign policy. I am sure that matter is foremost in the Penny Wong mind.

Some are advocating Australia enact a form of the Monroe Doctrine. Next blog I shall discuss this proposal, given it seems to have some currency.

Mouse Whisper

Have you noted those advertisements, where the dentist has his back to the viewer, brandishing what is ostensibly a tooth brush. If you look in the mirror, there is no reflection of the dentist.

Now what a subtle advertisement. Toothbrushes and garlic toothpaste?

As some other rodent has said: “Real vampires do exist – they are life sucking people that are narcissistic, greedy, selfish and vain. They take from you as much as they can. They “seem” to be friends and offer you pleasure and beauty but they take your life. They cannot see their reflections because they portray someone other than their true self.”

In the end, as they say, this is no reflection on anybody.

Modest Expectations Doze

Welcome to the 12th edition of The Best Mouse Tap. For the first time we have two guest bloggers who introduce some interesting diversity:  traditional bush cooking and why Australia’s Pacific aid should be built on ferries, together with your weekly dose of politics.  Guest Editor: The Pangolin

How to Cook a Kangaroo – Part 1

Recollections of Charlie

I saw first hand how desert aborigines cook kangaroo at a place called Tjiterong, 500 km due west of Alice Springs, where the east west running MacDonnell Ranges begin to peter out to a series of red quartzite hills rising to about 50 metres above the surrounding plains with the water runoff making for the relatively lush arid mulga and native grass land that can support the red kangaroo of the inland.

To the north the Tanami and Great Sandy Deserts are the lands of the Warlpiri, Pintubi and Mardu respectively while the south has the Great Victoria and Gibson Deserts of the Pitjantjatjara, Ngatajara and too many others to mention here. Precisely it is the meridian 129’ which forms the border of WA and NT; funny how Australian borders follow post-enlightenment Cartesian geometry devoid of the human history goings-on that usually define boundaries.

In my travels I was gratified to learn that the desert clans occupying about a third of the Australian continent are not as diverse as the 50-odd different ‘tribes’ illustrated on the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) map. They all have the same kinship names like Tjpangarti, Nampitjinpa from the Great Australian Bight to the Kimberley with the same core words like marlu (kangaroo) warru (fire) and watti (man).

This is background. What I write about Pintubi is based on my experience and may be contrary to the ethnographic record.

We were at Tjiterong to get a truck tray load of gravel to make concrete splash pads beneath the taps on the water pipeline being made for the new community of Kintore. With me was Henry Tjapaltjarri – about my then age 30, Tony Tjupurrula about 15, a son of the fearsome Freddy West Tjakamarra, jovial Pinta Pinta (meaning butterfly) with his child Matthew. Adam “King Kong” Gibson who had the manly stature of his father the noble Yala Yala Gibson Tjungarrayi, and the “poor bugger” Frankie Tjungarrayi who everyone called Tjina Bompa owing to his awkward spastic walk and mental disorder.

Pinta Pinta was the elder, aged perhaps 37, spoke little English and had met “white fellas” in about 1965 when the western Pintubi were induced by declining numbers and an easier life to move to missions and government run settlements. The hole through his septum marked him as an enthusiast for traditional lore. Circumcision and some chest scars and maybe a front tooth knocked out (as Henry had) were the initiation pain for manhood but only the keen went for having a hot kangaroo bone pierce their septum. I had seen in general company how Pinta Pinta had the kind of face that smiled easily, was not taken too seriously in general company, and so lived up to his name “butterfly”, but with the men at ceremony he was accorded great respect saying a lot with great enthusiasm. He also was ngangkarri (medicine spirit).

Well before the creek, Pinta Pinta and Henry simultaneously sighted a pair of red roos that bounded off. The hunt was on. We had to stop to tie up my dog Danger who would have bolted after them and to get my 22 magnum rifle from behind the Land Cruiser seat and then ride on the back tray with the rest of the crew. Finding the roo track Henry drove at a good pace till he sighted the roos again and accelerated after them. Holding onto the ute tray bar with my hook arm and the loaded rifle in my good hand was fraught to say the least. The ute swerved between mulga trees and crunching over dead fallen ones with exposed spiked mace-like roots that looked like they would impale a tyre at any moment. Staying on board with loaded gun was difficult enough, let alone taking a shot and it seemed that Henry was intent on running the roo down with the bull bar anyway. But I started to worry less about a crash as it became apparent Henry was an exceptional off road driver, way better than me and the HJ 45 diesel Land Cruiser was the hardiest 4 x 4 ever made. There was no chance of shooting anything in the rumble of the chase and I lowered myself to squat on the “ute” tray to wait hopefully for the end to the mad chase.

Frankie, Tony and Allan were having the time of their lives shouting out suggestions on tactics and direction. There were perhaps six roos in the mob and we would lose sight of a couple only to find another lot again in the thin mulga. After about 15 minutes it became calm as Henry slowed to driving steady and slow, taking wide sweeps of the terrain then pulled up, diesel engine idling “clunk clunk.” There was something there judging by the talking, quiet but eager up front, and “hush hush” tone of the fellas on the back of the ute with me. (to be continued)

Charlie McMahon is the bush polymath, leading exponent of didgeridoo, inventor of the Didgeribone and co-founder of internationally acclaimed band Gondwanaland. 

Safer ferries for the Pacific islands:  A politically valuable aid export opportunity in Oceania

Neil Baird

The very obvious fact that Prime Minister Scott Morrison chose the Solomon Islands as his first destination following his re-election last month confirmed the importance of our Pacific island neighbours in the minds of many aware Australians.

Numerous recent ferry tragedies in Indonesia, the DR Congo and Hungary (reported dramatically in The Australian) and, earlier last year, another in Kiribati, the second in nine years in that tiny country, reminded me of the obvious opportunity that exists for Australia to contribute to the elimination of such distressing events.

In mid-2018, I wrote to the then Minister for International Development and the Pacific, Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, outlining the following proposal. I received no reply from her but I am not discouraged. I continue to believe that it is an excellent and very practical idea.

Our overseas aid organisation, AUSAID, is involved with numerous assistance programmes in many of the “Happy isles of Oceania”, as Paul Theroux ironically called them. I’m sure that many of them are very worthy. However, from my observation of some of them, I note that most of the money involved, apart from the usual large slice that goes to Canberra, is spent beyond both the islands themselves and Australia. I suspect that Toyota, for example, is a major beneficiary of our aid.

While, rather than being “happy”, many of the isles of Oceania and to our “near north” appear more likely to be as impoverished and dysfunctional as Kiribati unfortunately is. And, worse, most of the aid programs aimed at them appear to be “finger in the dyke” exercises of little lasting economic benefit. I am sure we could do much better.

All of Oceania is extremely archipelagic in terms of geography. In other words, the only practical way to get around is by boat, more specifically by ferry. Here lies a major problem. Many of the ferries operated in such countries are unsafe. Indeed, over the past fifteen years there have been at least five significant fatal ferry accidents in the Oceania region and many, many more in south and east Asia that we know about. In Oceania alone, those accidents have resulted in more than 500 fatalities, a big slice of the small local populations. In Asia, of course, the toll is dramatically higher.

There are three main causes of those safety deficiencies. They are all, obviously, driven by poverty. The islanders cannot afford to buy and maintain safe vessels or to have them competently crewed.

We will probably never really know precisely why the most recent (2018) Kiribati tragedy occurred but, given the similarity of the vessels concerned and their common ownership, with that in the last such event in 2009, it is a fair bet that an unsafe, badly maintained, overloaded, incompetently crewed vessel proceeded to sea in unsuitable conditions. Most such accidents in developing countries occur for one or more of those human error based reasons. The numerous Indonesian disasters of the past twelve months will undoubtedly prove to have had similar causes.

From my travels and observation in the area, as well as the recorded facts, I have learnt that such problems are endemic. I also know that far superior solutions to the latest Fijian one are readily available in Australia. To explain: a Fijian company recently purchased a more than 65 year old monohull Ro-Pax ferry from BC Ferries of Canada. Can you imagine buying a 65 year old aircraft? That ferry was designed for the sheltered waters of British Columbia, not the trade wind exposed seas of Fiji. It also happened to be un-saleable in North America because it is riddled with asbestos. However, it was cheap. So too were the Princess Ashika and Rabaul Queen that sank in 2009 and 2012 in Tonga and PNG respectively, with at least 400 fatalities between them. It is rumoured that the same Fijian company has tried to purchase a further two similar vessels from Canada!

Therein lies part of the problem; the others are maintenance and crew training. All are areas where Australia has considerable expertise and resources. We are renowned for designing, building and maintaining safe, economical ferries, mostly catamarans. We also have a number of excellent maritime training organisations including the Australian Maritime Academy and the Australian Maritime College.

So, we do have excellent potential solutions. But, as obviously the islanders cannot afford to purchase Australian vessels and training themselves, that gap must be bridged by aid. Such aid would benefit both the islanders and the Australian maritime industry, rather than Toyota. I raised this suggestion early last year at a regional maritime safety conference in Port Moresby. It was warmly welcomed by the maritime safety authority directors of all the Pacific island nations who participated.

We have numerous naval architects and ship builders for whom the design and construction of simple, strong, safe, low-maintenance and comparatively cheap ferries would be straight-forward. Our maritime schools are already training islanders, just not enough of them. We already supply many of the island nations with Pacific Patrol Boats and their trained crews. Why not do something similar with ferries? An aid programme based on the Pacific Patrol Boat template would be simple to implement. Ferries would be much cheaper than patrol boats and, arguably, more effective. For the same money as we spend on patrol boats we could supply many more ferries.

Australian-built 35m catamaran – an ideal ferry for Pacific island operations

I realise that the patrol boats have their uses. They have improved the island nations’ incomes by ensuring the payment of fishing access fees and they have rescued lost fishermen and helped in disaster relief operations. However, new safe ferries could help prevent significant loss of life and also assist in rescues, poacher pursuit and disaster relief. A Pacific Ferry Programme could be developed using the patrol boat programme as a model although, hopefully, with less chaotic and expensive Canberra input.

Rather than funding cultural centres and basket weaving classes that have little or no economic or social benefit, how about we renew our aid programme focus to something more practical and valuable? Something, co-incidentally, that has more direct benefit to Australia and not Japan, China or Korea?

Neil Baird PhD is non-executive Chairman of Baird Maritime, a leading global maritime trade publisher. Neil has expert knowledge on fatal ferry accidents, their causes and how to prevent them. He is a former chairman of the World Ocean Council and the Australian Marine Environment Protection Association; a director of the Australian Shipbuilders Association; a member of the Domestic Ferry Safety Committee of INTERFERRY, the international association of ferry owners; and co-convenor of that organisation’s FerrySafe programme, sponsored by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation.

Chisholm – My last rumination on the Lessons from 2019 Election

I grew up the electorate of Chisholm as it is now. It was outer suburban, white and Anglo-Celtic. When I first voted it was Bruce, then a safe Coalition seat. Over the years as the population has grown, electoral boundaries have shifted and Bruce a long way away in suburban terms, from where I first voted, to Dandenong.

The biggest population centre in Chisholm, Box Hill, has grown to be a major transport hub and the whole immediate area around the train station resembles a suburban Chinatown.

In the last election in 2016, Julia Banks won the seat against the swing to the Labor party unexpectedly. Her Greek heritage never seemed to be raised as her reason for her election although there is a sizeable population of Greek heritage in the community.

This time the two major parties pitted two women of Chinese extraction against one another. The Liberal Party held the seat although there have been rumblings about a poster in Mandarin, which it is alleged gave the impression that it came from the Australian Electoral Commission, ostensibly favouring the Coalition candidate. There is no accompanying English translation.

What was not emphasised was that the redistribution of the electorate favoured the Coalition to the same degree almost as much as the final margin. In other words, although a marginal seat, it was notionally distributed to more a Liberal seat. There was a swing to Labor of 2.2 per cent – close but no cigar!

The psephologists will be at work trying to work the Chinese voting pattern. However, the controversial poster started me wondering about the local Chinese language newspapers. I cannot remember any of the mainstream press regularly summarising the stories which appear in Mandarin and any commentary and opinion which accompanies any reports.

There is increasing academic activity in determining how the Chinese population receive their media. A survey of 500 people of Chinese extraction was undertaken by an UTS academic, who stated the following summary of his findings:

Our findings suggest that to reach the majority of Australia’s Mandarin-speaking media consumers, stories need to be:

  • picked up by local Chinese-language digital media outlets
  • delivered via a WeChat public subscription account (which individuals access using a mobile phone app)
  • directly relevant to the interests of Chinese migrant communities.

I can read the English version of the Chinese government opinion if I want to, but I have no idea whether the Mandarin version says the same thing.

Not that I am paranoid but the election poster written in Mandarin without any English version I find disturbing if it purports to represent AEC policy. There was no translation readily available on election day, and in a way I am surprised the AEC did not order its removal, even though the AEC is widely reported as having said the posters had been properly authorised, no laws had been breached and anyway the AEC didn’t “own the colour purple”.

Everybody bangs on about a multicultural society, but for better or for worse English is our national language, and therefore it becomes a matter of judgement how far we press for English sub-titles in public matters.

In a free and open society English is most spoken and read, and society should conform to this language as the major form of public communication. This is not to denigrate maintaining cultural diversity in private, the need for interpreters, and public displays of multi-cultural harmony.

In summary, matters of public importance should be clearly displayed in English. Thus, the Chisholm poster should be subject to a formal review so we can get our rules clear. In so doing clear advice can be provided to countries who may be tempted to bypass the English language in order to seek an advantage, even if it is only a poster in the colours of the AEC on election day.

Mouse Whisper

My learned friend has queried polling and the voting patterns among voters of Chinese extraction. Before the Bennelong by-election in 2017, Bennelong was said to be the most “Chinese” Federal electorate, and the Fairfax media reported:

An online poll of the Chinese community seen on Monday by Fairfax Media indicates Labor’s candidate, former NSW premier Kristina Keneally, holds a large lead over the Liberals’ John Alexander, drawing 66 per cent of the votes.

The ongoing poll is being circulated on the popular Chinese social media app WeChat by Sing Tao Daily, the largest Chinese newspaper in Sydney, and ends on Thursday.”

In fact, John Alexander retained the seat 55 to 45 per cent at the by-election. The Chinese must be different, some say in defence of the poll. Which leg do you want to pull?

Nevertheless, this disparity may say something, but then I am only a mouse with a murine brain. Does that not say something about polls? You know the ones that repeatedly put one radio performer at the top of the radio ratings in Sydney – and how many polls did the Federal Coalition lose in a row? As I said, all too much for my murine brain to handle.