This question may be seen as a bit odd for those who don’t have a father who was a young man in the 1930s, and I say father not mother – not to be disrespectful to women – but as a sign of the times in the 1930s.
“Which side were you on during the Spanish Civil War?” Did you back the republican government or Franco? It is a double-barrelled question, because that war can be interpreted as a battle between fascism and communism for two reasons. Hitler was testing out his military might, not only on the Republican army but also the Spanish citizens and Stalin was making sure, in the guise of supporting the Republican cause that he sacrificed socialists and anarchists to his form of authoritarianism, laughingly described as communism. However, the Republic was the legitimate government.
The Spanish Roman Catholic Church supported the Franco insurgency as also did the Church in Ireland. An Irish brigade was formed to fight for Franco. It was so ill-disciplined that Franco sent them home. However, the Irish connection is a recurring theme.
Most of those men from other democratic countries, including Australia, who went to fight were on the Republic side. The only recorded Australian who actually went to fight for Franco had a change of mind and he was killed while flying for the RAF in 1940.
However, it is a textured question. The cloth for the Spanish Civil War was woven years before. The Italian Futurist movement, which glorified war and dismissed history as bunk, was hidden beneath its paintings and poetry that provided the warp for the rise of Mussolini. Disaffection and perceived decay of the Weimar republic among other factors led to the rise of Hitler in Germany.
This was manifest not only in Australia, but as the New York Times noted this week in an editorial: In the 1930s and the 1940s, The Times was largely silent as anti-Semitism rose up and bathed the world in blood. That failure still haunts this newspaper.
A young Sydneysider, Phillip Morey, experienced its rise in the early 1930s, when he recognised the Fascists with that expressive word “rodomontade”. Below is taken from a memoir written about Philip’s experience:
He loathed the fascist New Guard that had been cavorting around New South Wales at the time. He considered the rhetoric of Eric Campbell, its leader, to be a “bombastic rodomontade”.
Philip remembered Campbell from two years before when the antics of Captain De Groot on Saturday 19 March in 1932 had initiated a confrontation with the Lang Government. Not that Philip had much sympathy with Jack Lang …
Francis De Groot was an Irish fascist who lived on his own bravado. Campbell was the populist Fascist — organiser of clandestine training for his New Guard for whom Mussolini in Italy and this new fellow Hitler in Germany seemed to have some answers to the world disorder.
Philip was determined that he was not going back to this world where the colour of the shirt seem to dominate — whether they were “black shirts” or “ white shirts” — Philip had thought Campbell’s posturing all very puerile — playing soldiers with his band of followers in various parts of Sydney. He had heard just before he’d left that they had been drilling in Killara, further up on the North Shore. Campbell had even issued a directive on street fighting — how to march with fixed bayonets and how to clear buildings with grenade, tear gas and rifle.
The text rings true when you see the antics of the extreme right today. The current mob has the ethnic hatred of Eric Campbell and later Eric Butler with his League of Rights. Then the target were Jews, and there is still residual anti-Semitism, but Muslims are now the prime target, and unlike the pathetic followers of Eric Campbell, their spiritual descendants have access to murderous weaponry.
How more insidious are the inheritors of Bartholemew Augustine Santamaria, in the 1930s, a rising intellectual within the Labour movement and protégé of Archbishop Mannix, once an avowed member of Sinn Fein? Santamaria was an avowed admirer of Franco, the only difference between Franco and Mussolini was that Franco stayed neutral during World War II and died in bed.
The Santamaria playbook mimicked his perceived communist foe in the union movement. He created industrial “Groups” within trade unions, backed by a secretive “Movement” designed to plant Catholic operatives in key positions throughout the Australian Labor Party – only now they are embedded in the Liberal Party.
But back to the question of 1936, how many of those who now support the heir to the Movement in the Sydney Institute would have voted Franco if they had been in the time of my father? However, I do not want to limit that question only to that select few – anybody can answer.
And the relevance? Franco was a tyrant who clothed himself in the Roman Catholic Church – currently in the western world, we would have one would-be tyrant, who clothes himself in fundamentalist creationism and another in the Orthodox Church. They are most prominent but not potentially the only ones. Franco is their shroud.
The “textured” metaphor is apt.
And my father? I believe he would have voted for the Republic, but then I never asked and he was unpredictable.
Fanfare for the Common Man – A Reflection on Anzac Day
Across the water from the small township of Lubec, Maine is Campobello Island in Canada. I have crossed the bridge to the island. Campobello Island is synonymous with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt smiled. Roosevelt exuded optimism. He was also a cripple, struck down by poliomyelitis one morning on this most beautiful of islands. Yet he strove for independence.
Until the ghastly event in Christchurch, I thought I came from a country where to “bare arms” is to get down to work with my fellow citizens. Yet I live a country where our major commemoration is a World War One disaster at Gallipoli and our national day is called by some “Invasion Day,” when Great Britain dumped a bunch of their unwanted – convicts and marines – in a desolate place called Botany Bay in 1788. Despite its apparent vigour, Australia is a country rooted in pessimism.
By contrast, the USA national day celebrates something more than putting a British foot on a distant shore.
Australia has a dirge for a national anthem. That of the USA was forged as the smoke from the British bombardment of Fort McHenry cleared and the American flag was still flying. Francis Scott Key was inspired to write the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Today Fort McHenry is one of two places in the United States where the fifteen-star flag still flies. The other is at the end of the Oregon Trail.
I have seen much of Australia.
But then I have been privileged to roam the United States too. I have sponsored two musk oxen called Amethyst and Pixie Stix in Alaska. I have sat in the South San Franciscan courtyard of Genentech just after it had started listening to the late Bob Swanson’s aspirations and then writing about it. I have eaten king salmon in Salem, Oregon, and crab in Sabine Pass, Texas – both sublime experiences. I have stood at the door of that miracle of Minnesota, Mayo. I have gazed at Mount Rushmore and know now why those four presidents were carved. I have wept at Shiloh. I have stood in the wheel ruts of the Oregon Trail in Douglas, Wyoming. I have joined in a march to the San Francisco Tenderloin on January 15 to honour Martin Luther King. And oh, so much more!
The United States in all its diversity has been my energiser from the first time I ever went. Even in adversity, this country has always exuded optimism, irrespective of Trump.
“Make America great again!”
What rubbish! America remains great so long as it never lose its Smile, it never loses its Optimism; but above all it never loses July the Fourth and its Constitution.
If we want to replace January 26 as Australia Day…
“The first celebration of Wattle Day was held on 1 September 1910 in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. Plans in 1913 to proclaim the wattle as a national emblem and to celebrate Wattle Day nationally were interrupted by World War I, but wattle remained a strong symbol of patriotism during the war years.”
This Google entry sums up Wattle Day succinctly.
One can only be struck by the colours of the Australian countryside in early spring. The yellow displayed is not only because of the wattle but also because of the canola in the broad acres and broom along the roads – there are so many yellow wildflowers but elsewhere it is the yellow of the prickly gorse scourge. So every symbol has its downside.
Intermingled with these patches of yellow is the eucalyptus green countryside – the wattles themselves, the gum trees and then there are the green pastures and cereal crops yet to ripen.
And when the land is so green and yellow should this be the time to remember our country with a national day? After all, the Argentinians, whose national day is May 25 say you can look up into the sky and see their flag. In September we would have the option of both looking up to see the Southern Cross but also to see our national colours across the land.
Even D.H. Lawrence in his rather dismissive novel about Australia, Kangaroo, wrote: In spring, the most delicate feathery yellow of plumes and plumes and plumes and trees and bushes of wattle, as if angels had flown right down out of the softest gold regions of heaven to settle here, in the Australian bush.
And what a time of the year! September is the gateway to the football finals; the cricketers are emerging from their chrysalides; and the festival finishes on the first Tuesday in November. A September 1 Australia Day would be a time of rebirth and not one stained by the metaphors surrounding colonisation and invasion.
Leave January 26 to New South Wales to work through those first years of the Rum Rebellion – and with climate change the temperature will probably be the same in September as it is now in January.
The Doctors’ Dilemma
In 1946 the Australian Constitution was amended to include the provision of health benefits for medical treatment, dental treatment, hospital and pharmaceutical benefits. Very specifically defined. In 1946 when this question was asked of the people of Australia, there was not the diversity of health professionals operating outside an institutional framework.
Therefore whenever any other professional group (apart from the dentists) wants access to Medicare, they have been blocked by the Constitution. Except that there have been a number of instances where the Constitution has been sidestepped, notably in the 1970s when optometrist benefits were introduced. It so happened that at that time there were a number of optometrists who were politicians on both sides of the House – and bingo, benefits were introduced because optometrists in the provision of these services were deemed “medical”.
In fact, many areas of medicine could not operate without the inclusion of the cost of the nurses, technicians and scientists, as occurs in pathology, radiotherapy and diagnostic imaging. The fee for Medicare benefit can incorporate a professional component (the doctor moiety) the technical moiety (including the non-medical staff) and a capital component (for the machinery). This is best exemplified in the structure of radiotherapy benefits.
However with the expansion of the Medicare Benefits Schedule after 2000, payments were made to a whole variety of health professionals through the Medicare Benefits Schedule but all were contained within or linked to medical care.
This interplay with doctors is shown by the midwife eligibility criteria:
A collaborative arrangement is an arrangement between an eligible midwife and a specified medical practitioner that must provide for:
(a) consultation with an obstetric specified medical practitioner;
(b) referral of a patient to a specified medical practitioner; and
(c) transfer of the patient’s care to an obstetric specified medical practitioner, as clinically relevant to ensure safe, high quality maternity care.
There is no independent set of benefits. “Collaborative” is the closest the government legal advice has allowed given that “deeming” would be a red rag to the bull for the present generation.
However, this cute sidestepping trying to avoid the Constitutional restrictions only survives unless there is a High Court challenge.
Currently this manoeuvring does not threaten the doctor’s livelihood, but once the threat of another health professional group threatening general practice incomes then it is not only the politicians who will hit the fan.
Obviously if your basic income is government guaranteed who would not want that? The AMA is reported as being opposed to nurse practitioners obtaining Medicare benefits for their patients as with the independent stream of allied health professionals. If the government were to do so, would nursing be deemed “medical” or would the Government have to put nursing benefits as a Constitutional amendment to a referendum? With the backing of powerful nursing unions in an atmosphere ignited by the MeToo movement, any referendum would be a forgone conclusion.
Getting an amendment into the Constitution would be one achievement; it would then be a case of setting the scale of benefits. All the arguments about relativity would explode both between professions and within the nursing profession and each of the other professions included in the Constitutional amendment.
Talk about Pandora’s Box. In amongst this mayhem the central agency boffins would be tearing their hair out over the fiscal consequences of all this.
And compounding all this political noise is the proposal put forward by Shorten to set up a universal dental scheme – I shall deal with that in my next blog. Ah, the joys of policy formulation.
Mouse Whisper
The owner of the Dry Dock pub on the Finke River was heard to say to the customer in white:
“Son, when are six feet eighteen hands? Not too difficult to fathom the answer.”