The Best Mouse Tap

Modest Expectations – Box Hill to Port Melbourne

You know if a line was drawn from the Perth GPO to the Sydney GPO to represent the history of the Earth, reptiles would appear in Canberra and intelligent human life would evolve in Balmain – Author Craig Cormick then calculating in the Federal Department of Science Set Square.

More than just a Nuance

Below is a lightly edited extract from The Boston Globe last week. Maybe it is the foretaste of more irritating daleks on benches and mantelpieces with stupid names ostensibly doing my bidding, but who knows.

There’s nothing subtle about Microsoft’s US $19.7 billion, all-cash acquisition of Burlington-based Nuance Communications. It’s a bold statement that Microsoft intends to be the dominant provider of speech-based artificial intelligence systems to the world’s biggest enterprises, particularly in health care.

This acquisition is Microsoft’s biggest since the company paid $26 billion in 2016 to acquire the business-oriented social network LinkedIn. Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion

Nuance, which employs around 7,100 people worldwide, is famous for its artificial-intelligence software that enables computers to recognize human speech. These days, plenty of companies make similar software for consumers. In fact, Apple’s Siri voice system was based on Nuance technology.

Amazon, Google, and even Microsoft have all built their own speech software and virtual assistants for mainstream users. Nuance also used to dabble in consumer markets. But in recent years, the company has specialized in enterprise-grade AI software that understands the meanings behind words, with a particular focus on medical applications.

Today, Nuance makes software smart enough to automatically generate medical records, assist doctors in their diagnoses, and refill patients’ prescriptions. And demand for such software is likely to surge, as millions worldwide replace face-to-face doctor visits with online and remote health care — a process accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The acquisition will enable Microsoft to tap a global health care market worth $500 billion per year, it has been predicted.

And that could be just the beginning. Nuance also makes an array of intelligent programs for customer service and security applications. It makes software that can accurately figure out what a caller wants, even if they don’t use exactly the right words. It even makes a product for financial services companies that can identify fraudulent callers pretending to be someone else. The software can spot crooks not only by analysing their tone of voice, but by tracking which words they use.

And now Microsoft will be able to market all of these capabilities worldwide.

Nuance had net income of $28 million on revenue of $1.48 billion for its fiscal year ended Sept. 30, compared to a net loss of $12.2 million for the previous year.

It has been pointed out that Microsoft’s success with Nuance is by no means assured. IBM’s Watson Health initiative has also tried to apply AI technologies to health care but earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that IBM is considering a sale of the business, which generates annual revenue of $1 billion, but no profits.

Nuance’s artificial-intelligence products are more advanced than IBM’s. Still, doctors and hospitals are often slow to embrace new technology, no matter how good it is because the health care industry itself is a very conservative industry.

The Nuance acquisition is expected to close later this year.

I can’t wait!

Digger’s Rest is now in Oxfordshire

It is interesting that Murdoch’s star is setting in every country apart from his old Digger’s Rest in “my beloved Australia” but, as Google will show, it’s in Oxfordshire.

The migration of News Corporation from Australia to Delaware in 2004 for reincorporation was seen at the time to be ambiguous. While News Corp asserted that the re-incorporation would enhance shareholder value, critics of the proposal claimed that its real purpose was to strengthen managerial power vis-à-vis shareholder power. Now assuming that the move has been the cornerstone of Murdoch family control, presumably it would not have escaped the President’s notice that Murdoch has nestled in his state where the Democrats have massive majorities in both Houses. Far be it from somebody in far off Australia to suggest that the Delaware legislature would be contemplating their version of a “poison pill” to make this old Oxfordshire squire’s life a little harder, but the White House does not seem to have a welcome mat out for Murdoch and Son.

I doubt if Boris Johnson owes the same Squire any favours. either, but Rupert has had this serpentine way of intruding into the political boudoirs of the rich and famous. Boris realises that if you watch the eye movements of a snake, you can very much know when it is about to strike. Pandering to a snake is not the best way to run a government, nevertheless as one source has written:

It may seem extraordinary that the worship of the serpent should ever have been introduced into the world, and it must appear still more remarkable that it should almost universally have prevailed. As mankind are said to have been ruined through the influence of this being, we could little expect that it would, of all other objects, have been adopted as the most sacred and salutary symbol, and rendered the chief object of adoration. Yet so we find it to have been, for in most of the ancient rites there is some allusion to it.

Some of the more uncharitable among us might believe that above is a perfect description of “Dear Rupert” at work. It is worthy to note that ophiolatreia, the worship of snakes, apparently burns out in the colder climes, when the snake is no longer seen an influential symbol.

Yet there is a band of contrarians. I can categorically deny that Hillsong has invited any of them, their many fraternal Pentecostal mates in the Appalachian Mountains, to come to Australia with their rhumba of rattlesnakes. They follow the dictum as expressed in Mark 16:18 which says, “They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them”.

Unfortunately, like many a tabloid newspaper, one verse can always be taken out of context. Being bitten by a snake, according to these believers in the literal translation of the verse, has resulted in many a pastoral death among these Hill people, with the pastors being particular sacrifices. As He may have said “Mark my words!”

But then again Rupert’s version of the rhumba may have caused enough political demise for us not to need any spiritual injection from the Pentecostalist hills of Kentucky and Tennessee.

We Australians are all that is left of the “downsized” Rupert global injection room retreat. Poor us. Son Lachlan has moved back to Australia. Really, do we deserve that? Remember how his brilliance has shone previously in the Australian business world.

Andrew Peacock – Not a Bad Bloke

I saw Andrew Peacock at close quarters when we were both active and ambitious young men. Most people go through life without the privilege that he had and indeed cultivated. He went to a private school, where he coveted being Captain of the School and where he sustained a rivalry for the post with Tony Staley, later to be a less successful politician in same Party. In the end neither of them attained Captain of the School. The captain was a quiet studious chap who played the piano well.

Peacock avoided student politics, while Staley was my successor as President of the Student Representative Council. However, Peacock was along a different trail. After a preliminary tilt at Federal politics unsuccessfully challenging Jim Cairns then inherited the retiring Prime Minister Menzies’ seat of Kooyong, with the appropriate blessing of the incumbent.

Peacock was well suited to the then Liberal Party, especially in Victoria where noblesse oblige played a large part, and he himself was mildly centrist in his views. Nevertheless, there were limits. I well remember the debate in Parliament on abortion, where the Liberal Party then in Opposition were universally supportive, to a man and the few women, of the anti-abortionists. When the matter came to a vote in the House of Representatives Peacock theatrically stood up as though to vote for its legalisation against the wishes of the Party, looked around at the back bench and realised that nobody was following – and promptly sat down.

Peacock performed one particularly lasting service during his relatively short stint as Minister for External Territories in 1972. He befriended the charismatic Michael Somare. Peacock was refreshingly modern, as had followed a series of Ministers who still looked on that emerging nation of Papua New Guinea as a place for the continuation of patrol officer paternalism. Together he and Somare cemented the foundations which led to Papua-New Guinea. The relationship since has not been easy, but Peacock ensured with Somare that it would be ordered and peaceful. That is his legacy, and all the stuff about him being a “ Treasure” will dissolve with the attendant crocodile tears.

Peacock and I fell out, after a savage speech I made directed at what I perceived, rightly or wrongly, as some of his actions. Like many things I have done, I probably regret it, but what does it matter when one old man reflects on the legacy of another old man now gone and who lived most of his last 20 years in Texas. Perhaps his $2.5bn mishap in the Gold Coast hedge fund accelerated that exit.

I believe if he had been given the opportunity Peacock would have made a good Prime Minister, but as he was never one for detail, he would have needed very good staff work. However, he knew how to handle his colleagues, except for Howard. In the end I believe he also got tired of having to deal with Howard, who was assiduous whereas he was not. In effect he was outlasted, even though there were a few interim Party leaders between him hanging up his political boots and Howard eventually gaining complete control of the Liberal Party.

After he left Parliament having never made Prime Minister, the zeal of public life with which he had pursued this Grail probably deserted him as he drifted into the cocktail circuit of diplomacy and mixing with other world “treasures”. Howard was shrewd enough to offer him an official sinecure for such a pursuit. I hope Peacock was happy, because he wasn’t a bad bloke.

Nevertheless, as a wise associate of mine with a dry sense of humour said: “Only children, especially boys, should have ‘only child’ stamped on their foreheads to warn people.” Maybe that would have been a better epitaph for Andrew.

The Shambles is not only a street in York

I have always been a great supporter of the Howard Springs facility in the Northern Territory. However, I understand that at present there are insufficient people with the appropriate qualifications to keep the facility open. Why? Because so many of the regulars are committed to trying to staunch the COVID-19 outbreak in PNG.

Not enough resources. Is it time for that Morrisonian war footing?

Should this war footing the Prime Minister is trumpeting concentrate the attention of Australians – mobilising the country – get rid of all frippery – world surf carnivals and the like, and then truly putting the whole country into vaccination khaki. Does he really mean to emulate John Curtin?

Or Prime Minister, are you just trying to run this country as though we are in the middle of a Mortein ad?

The increasingly erratic Prime Minister has been essentially advocating tossing away the hard-earned gains of lock down and border closure by advocating home quarantine and people being able to in effect freely travel into the pandemic areas, because allegedly some Liberal Party donor has a villa in Tuscany and/or his Hillsong mates want to import singing and clapping in viral bags from all over the world for some Convention. Somebody may have seen the success of such religious festivals in India in spreading the Virus and want to emulate these by mass baptisms in the Hawkesbury River or some such spectacular event where social distancing is perceived as a heathen ritual.

It is slowly becoming clearer about the efficacy of vaccinations, and unfortunately it seems that the Australian Government has plumped for the inferior, if cheaper vaccine. When I see only poor old John Skerrett wearing the pelt of scapegoat, assuring the Australian public about how well the Australian vaccination world is, you know the politicians have lengthened their bargepoles.

Australia has done a remarkable job in suppressing the virus, in preventing variants from gaining a hold and allowing us to live a normal life.

Therefore, for Australians, the words “war footing” either jar or are ignored. What is needed is for the Federal Government to assume its constitutional responsibility and not “tar baby” the States. It should prepare mass vaccination facilities and train enough vaccinators so that when supplies of vaccine become available, they can be manned immediately so the program can start. Part-time vaccinators, trained and ready, should have similar entitlements as if they were a uniformed force reserve, ready to present to their particular vaccine centre when called up. The vaccinations will require military precision.

The question of which vaccine needs to be resolved. Transparency is essential. Thus, as a start, it is important to know how many politicians hold shares in AstraZeneca or CSL or, for that matter, in any suppliers of essential goods. That should be done immediately. Let us get some real transparency into the decision making. Then repeat the justification for such vaccines, slowly identifying also all the consultants, their role and achievements, if any.

Then, continue with the AstraZeneca vaccine for all those over 65 – first and second injection. As with America, weekly totals are placed on public view. If the AstraZeneca can be modified to one injection, that option should be pursued. You are dealing with many elderly people and one injection is easier to remember than two.

It seems that Pfizer and Moderna technology is far superior, and now that they can be stored in a conventional refrigerator without fear of interruption of the cold chain integrity, supplies must be obtained, and a definite timetable set. The new public relations scenario is roping poor old John Shine in for speculation on whether Australia will get into the business of manufacturing the effective mRNA vaccines somewhere sometime in the future. I don’t say it cannot be done, but a timetable for completion and distribution needs to be calculated. In the interim, McKinsey continues to be financially enhanced.

The Prime Minister should be gagged unless his utterances can be confirmed to be true by an independent panel headed by Norman Swan or his equivalent in order to regain lost political credibility.

The unknowns are gradually becoming clear. There will be a need for booster injections to counter the viral variants beyond the first one; there will be a real necessity for Australia to improve its home-based technology. The advances that Pfizer have apparently achieved in reducing the age at which children can be injected should be monitored closely. Increasingly, being unvaccinated at all ages will be a risk when our world opens up to that villa in Tuscany.

Razors – how the land scrape has changed

In my whole life the longest time I have ever gone without a shave after I reached the “age of the bristle” has been three days. That occurred at Easter 1958 which fell in the first week of April that year. I was induced by two fellow medical students to go on a camping trip in the high plains area of Victoria.

I had never been camping before, and instead of a sleeping bag I had an old eiderdown, which proved to be a very comfortable substitute – we were lucky it didn’t rain. The nights were very cold in the high country – the Porepunkah caravan park and the Bruthen tip. I am sure the eiderdown did not conform to the kit of a conventional camper. I forgot to take a razor.

Since that time razor technology has changed to such an extent that the ritual of yesterday with badger brush, to mix the shaving soap in a custom made Wedgewood porcelain bowl for a lather prior to the application of the razor was not a two minute exercise. That was a morning ritual, and many of the professionals in my father’s and grandfather’s generation paid a visit to the barber in the morning before work for a shave, complete with hot towels and all the fragrances that substituted for our modern deodorants – underarm and elsewhere. Presumably a presiding judge never wanted to appear as a Norman Gunston figure – but it would have done wonders for court humour.

When I started to shave, I used to have to screw the razor into the so-called safety razor which took no account of a wrinkly face; you need to tighten the skin to avoid the inevitable cuts as the razor encountered adolescent pimples underneath the softened lathered face. This whole process was interrupted by constantly having to run the shaver under water to remove the facial hair. Often this was not a pretty sight.

The electric razor followed. This was an apparent advance, but it came with a pre-shave conditioner and an aftershave lotion, most of which smelt like a French bordello – well, an imagined French bordello. Brut was the champion odour. Old Spice was equally repugnant. Aramis too was another turnoff among the few young women who ventured near. The problem with the electric razor is that despite the hype, it never gave a close shave; to such an extent that I was accused of presenting for a final year obstetric oral examination as an unshaven and untidy “colt from Carlton”. I well remember I was wearing a very expensive pale grey suit, and these days such a facial presentation would have been considered fashionable. Apparently, I lost marks for neatness, which was the way the senior medical profession operated in those days, especially when they thought one had the mien of a rebel and needed to be sent to an eastern suburban Siberia as an intern.

Facial salvation eventually came with the modern disposable razor, which has been constantly tweaked so that one can shave without any of the former ritual, although it does help to wet your face. And the time taken? Well, if you can’t do it in under two minutes, you must have latent narcissist tendencies trapped by your vision in the mirror of your post-shaven purity.

Seriously, we forget the time saved by the modern razors, and as long as one does not use the same one more than 24 times, then it gives the facies a very close approximation to a member of human race, unlike those who bury their jaws in home grown hedges.

Mouse Whisper

The Minister for Cultural Correctness, Admiral of the Swift, Pedro Dutônão has a issued a twerking ban on the Dill Squadron. Twiggy and his sidetwiglet ScãoMão have been severely reprimanded for their inappropriate antics before the start of the Collingwood clash with the West Coast Eagles. The Admiral was reported as saying that the crowd reaction of booing one of these perpetrators was completely justifiable in view of that earlier disgraceful mass action. The Admiral went on to regret any hurt that may have been caused to any Australian viewing the original performance but failed to mention the level of reparations due to the Australian community.

Modest Expectations – Field Marshall Waldemar Cardoso

Philip was the fifth child, the only brother of four elder sisters who each married titled German Nazis, hence his appearance as a 16 year old at this funeral of his favourite sister Cecilie who had died in a plane crash in 1937. His head is bowed as though grief-stricken, but uneasy in the company of his Nazi relatives as the cortege moved through the Hessian city of Darmstadt.

He was fortunate because in the early 1930s he was placed in a German school run by Kurt Hahn, who was Jewish and forced to flee Germany after the accession of Hitler to power. Hahn in turn established Gordonstoun in Scotland, and Philip followed him there to be one of his pupils. Hahn had been helped by the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald to escape and come to Great Britain and establish himself. Part of the Hahn philosophy was to encourage self-reliance. That the young Philip had in abundance. His early socialisation had also attuned him to survival against everything. After all, even as a small boy he was a target for assassination.

His service in the Royal Navy left him a tall man, with an easy smile, hard searching eyes and a bearing which is found in most British naval officers. I never met him; probably would have had little to say which would have interested him anyway. He had lived his life when a young man; and he spent the rest of his life recuperating with a lady who was obviously besotted with him, as other women were. He was smart enough to realise not to follow the path that his father took “in burning his aristocratic bridges”.

A magnificently calculating man, but so anybody would have been in order to survive that tumultuous childhood he had. Yet he never abandoned his sisters, and his mother eventually moved into Buckingham Palace where she died in 1969.

I must say that I have never watched The Crown, and even if I had, my biases would have been such that any portrayal that did not fit into my view of the House named for a particular knotted tie popularised by that proto-Nazi, Edward VIII, would only be reinforced. Philip wanted the British Royalty to adopt Mountbatten, a far better name.

I have been a Republican since university; the Queen has lived a life which exemplifies the fact that inducing ennui is royalty’s survival grace; she has survived the Diana soap opera by ratcheting up the ennui; her three prince sons are dropkicks (one of whom should read Vanessa Springora’s Consent) – but Philip was something else. I would struggle to think of anything he actually achieved except naming rights on his eponymous Award and the many plaques, cocktail parties and dinners to cover those organisations to which he had provided his benison. And yet view or read his often savage quips; they are the comments of an unsettled person. But surviving his childhood, that was something even if the rage never left him.

A visão melancólica de Portugal

I wished I had started to learn Portuguese years ago. I only started when I did a short course in Traveller’s Portuguese, before going to Brazil and Timor-Leste in the one year. That was 2019 before the pandemic, but we had booked a Ponant cruise from Dakar in Senegal to Lisbon for March last year. On the way, the ship would first berth at a former colony, now the country of Cabo Verde and then after a brief time onto the Canary Islands, which are Spanish, it was on the Portuguese Island of Madeira; thence to Lisbon where we were due to travel around the country for two weeks. The Virus intervened, and therefore a viagem por terra e por mar was on hold for an indefinite period.

However, the language and then the culture started to intrigue me. The language is supposed to be more akin to French than Spanish – as one writer wryly compromised by saying that Portuguese is Spanish spoken with a French accent. Both Portuguese and Spanish have inherited a raft of Arabic words, whereas French has absorbed a number of Germanic words.

Nevertheless, there is a consensus that Portuguese is the most difficult of the four common Romantic languages, but if Romanian is included, then there are some exasperating tricks in its pronunciation. Even though Romanian overlaps to a great extent with Italian, the word for “thank you” in Romanian is mulțumesc, betraying its Slavonic influence and somewhat different from the Italian grazie.

My teacher has complimented me on my Portuguese accent. A major difficulty I have, especially as my hearing is not as acute as it once was, is in comprehension, as does the generous use of accents, the Portuguese tilde and the cedilla keep one on one’s metal. This is especially true when one has to write down a particular word and then pronounce it. My favourite example is avô and avó. The first is muted and means grandfather; the second is said with a flourish, grandmother.

It is such an enticing language, but I am at the crossroads. Have I done enough as the prospect of overseas travel is now remote? Yet, the more I have become involved in Portuguese culture the more it intrigues. Listening to their traditional music, fado, one feels the whole pressure on a people, the Lusitanians maintaining their identity on a peninsula predominantly peopled by the Hispanians, from which they barely separated but squeezed into a narrow strip of land against the Atlantic Ocean.

As they developed their modern Portuguese identity, the Lusitanians became fishermen and seafarers, and venturing out they officially colonised the Azores archipelago in the mid-Atlantic in 1449. Although his expedition circumnavigated the world, Frederic Magellan may have been Portuguese, but the ill-fated expedition was funded by the Spanish monarchy. Magellan was killed in the Phillipines, and there were 18 men left commanded by a Basque who eventually returned to Lisbon.

No, it was Vasco da Gama who was the epic hero – the Portuguese Ulysses, about whose voyage to India the Os Lusíadas was written by Camoens some years after his journey. Camoens was the pseudonym for Luís Vax Camōes, a poet adventurer who, as a Byronic figure, courted danger as he roamed the East. I remembered my father had a copy of his poem in our library, which lay untouched. I suppose it is time to keep on going and be able to revel in the original Portuguese. Bit of work to do, but it does provide an incentive.

Read Os Lusíadas and actually achieve something…talvez.

Optic moonstones

When I was 12, I was given a field cocker spaniel, who was flecked in blue black. He was a blue roan and I called him Smokey. He was supposed to be descended from the aristocratic line of “Ware” which has won more best dog awards in Great Britain than any other breed. Cocker spaniels, as the name implies, are gun dogs with their specialty being to harass woodcock. There are a number of variations in the breed, but I know I had this very energetic, dome-headed dog, who roamed our half acre, outer suburban plot of land burying his bones, avoiding being bitten by snakes and generally, not being neutered, very much the lad about town.

At about six years, he started to develop cloudiness in his eyes which slowly became solid white cataracts. However, he was able to live with his blindness until he was scuttled while I was away at University. Smokey was trying to cross the increasingly busy road to visit his mate, a dog who had cocker spaniel blood but was hardly pure bred.

Presumably this affliction was the result presumably of inbreeding, and today Smokey – at great cost – would have had the cataracts removed and lens inserted.

Yes, as I have had many years later. Cataracts are not a characteristic of either side of my family, and I had no sign of them until I started daily oral cortisone for my auto-immune condition. First, I noticed my vision becoming blurred even with glasses and so, as with so many of my age, I had one cataract done. The second – my right eye – was left, until recently. My sight in that eye was manageable, but one night out of curiosity, I tried to see out of that eye. I was completely blind – all I could see were moving shapes in a dirty yellow fog. This shock of blindness suddenly made me realise how important vision is to me, even though the artificial lens in the other eye enabled me to compensate and apparently have normal vision.

Now the second cataract has been removed, and the inserted lens is gradually settling down, so my vision is almost back to normal in my right eye as well.

The experience of the operation is something in its variety of illusions and hallucinations. Whereas the first operation was sedate in that my vision during the operation was coated with a black background and oval white spots like a severe Marimekko pattern, this time it was something else.

First, I saw an ironbark forest portrayed as though it was a magic forest – clearly defined but a very emerald green fading into a very brown hill that resembled a bear pelt. Then it changed to a village scene, with hints of Brueghel as photographed by Dupain. The curtain came down, and red and black lacunae dotted the lenscape with a sudden outburst of teal marshmallows exploding and then it was over – I felt the final stitch and then the lights of the operating theatre appeared. The entertainment had finished.

My eye was strapped and then I was off to the recovery room. It had been swifter than anybody thought – 20 minutes.

I had a turkey sandwich with cranberry sauce and a juice for a delayed lunch, but no grog for 24 hours. Probably just well. Who knows what I would have seen?

Feminism – A slogan?

I accidentally switched onto a TV program which paraded a selective group of the women who apparently shaped the feminine diaspora during the 1960s and 1970s. One of the major networkers of her time, Gay Davidson, was totally ignored by this documentary. Gay was the Canberra correspondent of The Canberra Times. Gay had contacts across the political spectrum. She was a very generous host, an astute person who had come from New Zealand, marrying Ken Davidson, The Age economic writer of the time. They had two daughters, Tui and Kiri, who were very much part of the Davidson’s life until Kiri’s tragic death from a rare late complication of measles.

Of the women featured, I had met Anne Summers through Gay, and one piece of advice left an everlasting impression on her – as she did on me with her own blunt opinions. Her legacy beside being a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Movement was her book Damned Whores and God’s Police which achieved a certain cult status.

There in this documentary a clutch of elderly women was being interviewed about their reminiscences of that time, which was universally said to be “an exciting period”. Perhaps, but having lived through the same period where there was scant childcare, where abortion was banned, where most women were still consigned to a second class status, it was interesting to listen to the various apologia. Perhaps the most disturbing comments came from Elizabeth Reid, who Whitlam appointed very publicly as his Woman’s Adviser in 1973, and then sent her on her way two years later after the disastrous “Summit” she had convened. The problem with Ms Reid is she smiles a great deal but has no sense of humour – a fatal combination.

The fault with government is that it does not learn. The recent appointment of one of the most “retentive” Ministers as “Prime Minister for Women” does not help. Marise Payne is a woman so stitched up that she burbles rather than talks naturally, and such a damaged woman is set up for an impossible task. Then there is the proposal for a National Summit to discuss women’s problems presumably to be organised by the gaggle of female Ministers delegated this task by Morrison.

If I were a cynic, I would think that the government is expecting every extremist women’s group to turn up and then fire up latent community prejudices around the Alphabet group; presumably Morrison would expect them to treat the Summit as though it were a winter Mardi Gras. In so doing, a perverse government would hope that such activities would undermine the very significant gains women have made in the first part of the year since the initial Brittany Higgins’ accusations. Then after a disastrous Summit, Morrison would have clear air in his narrowly-based constituency for another electoral victory with yet another discredited feminine movement on the sidelines.

I hope this bunch, with Grace Tame at their head, are smarter than Morrison and his misnamed bunch of Liberals thinks they are and can handle the fringe movements.

One tip – ensure that the girls in the forefront of the protest turn up in their school uniforms. An absolute rejection of the Morrison tactics. And if they can induce some of the evangelical “Christian schools” to join in, so much greater the impact.

Consent – A memoir

In a previous blog, I mentioned the above book recently translated from the French, which details the experience Vanessa Springora, the author, had as a 14 year old and onwards as the child lover of a guy, a prominent French author who was 50 at the time. I have now read it, “a gut-punch of a memoir with prose that cuts like a knife”, as one reviewer put it.

His name was Gabriel Matzneff and he actively promoted paedophilia as some form of love. In the seventies, even up to the nineties, he was lauded for his “progressive attitudes” by a wide variety of his contemporaries, both male and female. When you look at photos of him at the time, he looks a fit, tanned, good looking individual with the scrubbed face and bald head of a Yul Bynner. Yet his is the face of a satyr, who purports to be a member of the human race because of his lyrical phrases justifying the destruction of vulnerable young human beings for his own pleasure. He and the author corresponded, and in his array of books he referred to her and her letters to him without any consent even being given.

Twenty years on, he is the same animal, but a more decrepit 83 year old now being pursued by the police. His prurient ideas have long lost currency with his highbrow audience.

The book confronted me with her description of this person having anal sex with her at 14. This act is perpetrated by this middle-aged man who professed his undying love for her. She describes her absent father returning, screaming about Matzneff being a pervert and storming out again. Yet her mother condoned the relationship. Never any support, with fellow school students well aware of what was going on and she, forced into a pattern of sleazy trysts away from their prying eyes.

What is painful is to follow the descent of this young woman, even after she extracted herself from his clutches – although there was always the fear of him stalking her professing his love. This was the same man who regularly went to the Phillipines to satisfy his lust for pubescent boys, all the time crying the purity of his motives. He even offered to take her to show the purity of his motives.

Vanessa did not commit suicide; she habilitated herself and found a husband who she says cares for her. After all, she is in her mid-forties.

She is very matter of fact; no gushing over having found a caring male and having a son. It was her husband who encouraged her to write the book.

Her translator, Natasha Lehrer, writes a very perceptive note.

Even at the age of fourteen, Springora instinctively understands that her abuser is using language to steal her soul. One day he determines to write her assignment for school, an experience she describes as “dispossession”. Throughout their relationship he takes endless notes in his Moleskin notebooks, and uses them later to turn her, barely disguised, into a character in several novels that are published to some acclaim by the most esteemed Parisian publishing houses.

To Matzneff Vanessa was just a character to be followed by other girls while she was erased. She now is a restored character, not erased, having survived that torment.

She is a publisher, and this was her first work. The book deserves to be widely read. It is easy to despise G.M. as she labels him in her book, but he is one of many. Undoubtedly they lurk in Parliament House, but they are not confined to just one feed lot. Ms Springora has shown the power of publication, not to be afraid to identify the oppressor, and hope the community will exact the appropriate penalty on her tormentor.

Meanwhile, I await the arraignment of Brittany Higgins’ rapist.

Mouse Whisper

Not to put too fine a point (or is now jab) on it, Bhutan vaccinated their whole population of 800,000 in a week, after delaying the inoculations for two months because the time was inauspicious according to the governing body, Zhung Dratsang, which is apparently not translated as Minister Hunt.

Modest Expectations – Seaplanes & Submarines

When I was a medical student in the early 1960s, I wrote a novel ostensibly about a day in the life of a medical student. It was not particularly good, but I kept a copy of it. When I revisited it a few years ago, I was amazed at the anger and repressed violence portrayed by the anti-hero who was a reasonable facsimile of myself at that age – rootless, one who read snatches of Salinger, Camus, Kerouac, Orwell, Fanon, Hemingway – anarchic without a clue how to approach women. Boy’s school product without mother or any sisters. I was the heroic anti-hero. Oh, yeah! I shudder to think how I negotiated my late teenage years.

However, reassessing the novel again, it having laid undisturbed for so many years, I was able to do something that was for me unique, look back on how I thought then. Bit of a worry, but it gave me an insight into what I was saying then; and what was clearly locked into my subconscious now became completely plain to the older me.

The antihero’s attitude to women was appalling. I was the writer. I could not believe that I had written some of the stuff. The plot was OK, if you like idiosyncratic self-absorption. Some of the writing I could now barely understand. Anyway, the rejection note from Rigby’s was very polite. I remember for some reason opening it on a rainy day in Adelaide. Why Adelaide – who knows? One of the mysteries of life. For a long time the rejection destroyed the author in me.

Not that I noticed as the years slipped by. Remembering the oversized cupboard I had for an office in old Parliament House, the relief was palpable when, after a day of claustrophobia, I could escape to the non-members bar.

Perhaps, had I gone back to my flat in the evenings, I would have written my diary and perhaps reflected on the draft novel. However had I done so, I would have missed out on a great deal of gossip relevant for the next day. With the small number we had in the office in those days, there was little time for “hanging out” apart from the bar. It was difficult to go out for dinner, and when you did The Lobby was the most convenient place, but dinner was always rushed. You had to get back to the House by 8.00 pm.

So, the recent proposal to limit alcohol consumption in Parliament House in my time would have received few votes, but then Parliament House was not the widespread prairie it is now and staff numbers were roughly proportional to the workload. Judging by the antics by this expanded fringe that are being reported, there were more of us with an IQ greater than 100. Recruitment should be improved, and “friend of my cousin’s son” should not be the prime criterion for employment. That is more important than any attempt to muzzle the “booze culture”.

The only night I remember going home early was my first night in Parliament House; thereafter on the sitting days it was full on, as was socialising, but in those days the opinion leaders in the non-members bar were all men. That was for sure.

The booze problem seems to be an enduring characteristic of politics. Carrie Nation developed a notoriety by spending many years destroying bars in the Mid-west. Her weapon was a hatchet; she was arrested and fined on countless occasions as she ran this rugged temperance movement. Her activities preceded the disastrous Prohibition Period.

I doubt whether there is a Carrie Nation character willing to metaphorically take an axe to alcohol in Parliament House. Banning alcohol, breath testing and testing for drugs, all knee jerk responses unthought out, will just fade away like so much editorial fluff.

Nevertheless, Carrie Nation did something which could be emulated by these Parliamentary women looking for a project to which they could all contribute. Carrie Nation set up refuges for women who were victims of abuse where alcohol was the major contributing factor.

When I was in charge of a community health program in the 1970s, the Department was intensely conservative; it could be said that members of the Santamaria Curia, laughingly referred to as the Democratic Labour Party, were firmly ensconced in senior levels of the Victorian public service as it was in some of the health funds. My administrative officer had been brought up in a conservative Roman Catholic family. At that time, it was somewhat confronting when the woman running refuges turned up with spiky hair and leather jacket. We did not bother the senior echelons of the Department in funding for these refuges.

Over to you Senator Stoker, learn something about something.

And moreover

Anonymouse

Every time I get in my car – a modest French model – I curse the car designers who don’t seem to be able to manufacture a car that has a seatbelt that fits. The same has applied to previous cars of different brands. The adjustment offered is just sufficient to ensure the seatbelt cuts across my neck and neatly tucks under my left armpit. Is this a problem? Yes, of course it is.

In a recent New York Review article, “Invisible Women: Data bias in a world designed for men”, the problems caused by the data gap are described: seat belts, airbags and wearable electronic devices are designed for the average male and no seat belt has ever been designed to safely accommodate a pregnant woman. In the US, women are 17 per cent more likely than men to die in a car crash and 73 per cent more likely to be injured in a frontal crash despite being involved in fewer accidents … presumably they are being strangled by an ill-fitting seatbelt.

Only now is the first crash test dummy that accurately represents women’s bodies being developed, in Sweden. America only started using female dummies in safety tests in 2011, but these apparently don’t represent average women. Although 50 per cent of drivers are women, the industry standard is based on “male” crash test dummies in the driver’s seat.

Australian car manufacturers made some desultory efforts to acknowledge that women were a growing part of the vehicle market. Remember the make-up mirror behind the sun visor, colours designed especially for “the ladies”, and “nice mats so the high heels aren’t scuffed” that were once promoted? Fortunately, these ridiculous promotions seem to have vanished, but the seat belt problem remains, grounded in the same failure to ensure that data specifically relating to women are included in relevant data.

The data gap doesn’t just exist to make cars uncomfortable (well, downright dangerous actually). Personal protective equipment (PPE) has been a hot topic during the COVID-19 pandemic. PPE is designed to fit the “average man” however the vast majority of nurses are female, as are a significant proportion of emergency department doctors and new medical registrars; they have to work in PPE designed for men. Ninety-five per cent of women in emergency services say their PPE don’t fit, and that includes bullet proof vests as well.

Medical devices have been designed for the male body. For example, the design of the metal-on-metal hip implant, supposedly a gender-neutral medical device, disproportionately injure women, who receive more replacements. The design is too shallow for women’s wider hips leaving it more likely that metal particles will break off the implant, or that it will fail.

The impact of this data bias ends up in court: it is reported that in the US in 2018, 32 per cent of lawsuits pending in the Federal court involved products that exclusively or primarily injured women; at the same time 6.4 per cent of the mass torts involved products exclusively affecting men – Viagra, the male hair-loss drug Propecia and Adrogel, a testosterone replacement therapy. However, a comparison of individual lawsuits starkly illustrates the problem: 9,969 federal lawsuits involved products that exclusively harmed men; contrast 67,085 federal lawsuits were brought by women in relation to pelvic mesh alone.

The Prime Minister has appointed a cadre of female Ministers to improve the appalling culture in Australia’s Parliament House revealed by multiple complaints of sexual assault and bad behaviour. He has an opportunity to be other than reactionary. There is no doubt that the culture of Parliament House must change, just as the broader culture of Australia needs to change. Government must play its part in that but at the same time the Prime Minister has an opportunity to make a mark – time for data bias to be eliminated, time for women to not have to “make do” with things designed for men. Australia was one of the first countries in the world to make seat belts compulsory; time to lead the world and make them as safe for women as for men.

So Grace Tame, you are striving to bring about improvement in the lives of women, how about advocating a technology revolution to design women-friendly devices.

It was no Rainbow

Now that I am firmly on reminiscent road, my second night in Parliament House still sticks in my memory. After the House rose for the evening, I was having a drink with Snedden to celebrate the end of my second day, when two journalists turned up. Snedden had an easy relationship with many in the Press Gallery, and these two senior journalists turned up to see what Snedden had employed as his Principal Private Secretary (PPS), now referred to as the Chief of Staff. In those days, the media cover of staff appointment was perfunctory, but the Press Gallery apparently knew I was a doctor. Incidentally, not being regularly in the media spotlight was a blessing.

The appointment of a doctor to staff was not that unusual. Whitlam’s PPS was also medically qualified. Peter Wilenski had been President of the Sydney Union at about the time I had been President of the University of Melbourne Student Representative Council. Wilenski had branched out of medicine into a career as a diplomat; while I had remained in medicine although I found time to complete the preliminary requirements for a Master of Arts which I never found time to finish the thesis.

Anyway, these two characters arrived – to me, as they entered the room, they projected the imagery of Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre just stepping out of a film noir – one large and lumbering but with a touch of menace and the other slight with the delicately honed syntax of the intellectual. They had combined to write a book on the 1972 election of Gough Whitlam.

I had been prepared to pack up and go back to the motel but their appearance and invitation for a drink put the kibosh on that. Snedden had a particularly close relationship with Oakes at that time; Oakes had the ability of making him relax for he was a different person in private from the public persona which was often appeared stilted and pompous. This easy relationship at that time was demonstrated a few drinks later when Snedden performed his party trick – his standing jump onto the coffee table. Very boys own. At that time, Oakes had a certain presence of honed maturity, which made me forget he was still only 28. When he laughed, it was always suppressed as he tried to keep his response to himself, and to maintain that look which some confused with Buddhic depth – but I always saw Sidney Greenstreet.

Snedden then left me to joust with Oakes and Solomon. About 3am we called it quits, a draw. Laurie Oakes had been a member of the Liberal Club at the University of Sydney, whereas David Solomon was the classic Fabian. Yet it showed the fact that politics circulated around the centre rather than being the preserve of the extremes. Nevertheless, as I have written before, the political centre is like the magnetic pole. It shifts.

I believe reflecting from a long way away but with the benefit of considerable hindsight that if Laurie Oakes had replaced Geoff Allen in the latter part of 1973 as Snedden’s Press Secretary, he would have provided the muscle to dissuade Snedden from precipitating the 1974 Federal election.

I remember being next to Snedden on the flight to Canberra when he read that Whitlam had appointed Vince Gair as Ambassador to Ireland. His immediate visceral reaction was to take Whitlam to the election. In the end, the decision to precipitate the election fractured the relationship between Snedden and Oakes. However, history is littered with the “what could have beens”.

Geoff Allen had been a remarkable Press Secretary with an incomparable ability to reframe people and make people feel good and confident, but after years in the role, he had had enough. The difference being “having enough” and “burn out” is the person recognises the first before the second phase sets in. Being very shrewd, Geoff went on to run a very successful consultancy business. It was a common career progression among those who worked for Billy Snedden.

Cormann – The Golden Point

If there was a more cringeworthy utterance from the Prime Minister it was when Cormann was elected Secretary-General of the OECD. Morrison announced it was as though Australia had won the position by punting Cormann over the black dot to win the rugby league game by a field goal.

Yes, Corman won by a single vote, which means that 18 nations voted against him, and they will be watching him for an even-handed approach, given the activities of his Australian cheer squad – if he really matters in the scheme of things. America put him in the position, changing its initial vote away from the Swedish contender.

This means that Cormann needs to toe the American line if he wants a second six-year term – and with John Kerry calling the shots, Cormann will be expected to echo the Kerry chant, at least for now.

As for the importance of this appointment, I have been scanning the NYT for news of his appointment. It does not seem to have appeared; but maybe I have missed the headline. Nevertheless, a Western Australian did appear in the NYT news this week – a guy being struck in the back by an octopus tentacle in the waters of the coast of that State. I believe his name was not Cormann.

Well done, Us

Over Easter, I sat down to a pub tea in a regional city in NSW. The local football and netball teams had been playing that day, and there was jubilation in air. The tavern was packed; social distancing was nominal; there was no hand sanitiser on the table (although it was at all the entry doors); we had brought our own. It was as though the COVID-19 infection had never happened. I asked those at the table whether anybody had had a cold or flu in the previous year. Nobody had.

Small sample but perhaps it can be postulated that the level of hygiene within the community has changed. We are less tolerant of people at work with contagious diseases, the so-called “cracking hardy”, or being forced to work while sick by unsympathetic bosses. The fact that the States have cracked down when even one community infected case appears has people fearful of being group punished if contracting the Virus.

The only one who seems immune from this is the Premier of NSW who has at times been Pollyanna or Don Quixote. She has been lucky. After the near-death experiences of the Ruby Princess disaster, the Newmarch Nursing Home catastrophe and a Chief Health Officer who, in the early days, talked about a zig-zag approach to the Virus, whatever that meant, NSW was then on the nose.

The Premier had inherited the best contact tracing system in Australia and now has a Health Minister who recognises health is the priority in righting the State and not being undermined by the self-interest of some of the business community. These conjunctions of fortune have helped place NSW in a place where the Premier has reaped the benefit, but there is still the vaccination rollout to be negotiated.

Mouse Whisper

Just as tasteless variations as exemplified by “Schitt’s Creek” (Candian sit-com) or “Up Schipp’s Creek” (AAMI ad).

You know my Cousin Mouse complete with stick and lederhosen climbing out the Bavarian glacial valley gasped:

“Gosh, that place gave me the schist.”

Then there was the tableau of four oblong white fabric figures weaving and then falling onto the stage, and my Cousin Mouse entering off left and declaiming, pointing to prostrate figures with his stick:

“Lo, a pack of dead sheets.”

No, I am not three sheets to the wind.

A glacial valley designed to give you the schist

Modest Expectations – Geneva & Adelaide

The sight of our Prime Minister flailing around, without the wit and with deep-seated prejudices inherited in his childhood, reflects the fact that he is increasingly paralysed by the culture over which he presides. The problem with cultural change is that it takes time, and frequently depends on brutal decisions, not the least of which is to confront the problem head-on and cut away the diseased part.

Taking a medical analogy, once the doctor finds the abscess, it is drained. If the abscesses are miliary, then a general remedy is needed, and even then the disease may overwhelm the system.

All I know is the diseased process of our parliamentary government is not going to be solved by a laying on of hands or an outburst of political glossolalia.

The immediate response of sections of the Liberal Party is to introduce female quotas into the preselection process. Does the preselection procedures in the past give you reason to believe that this system will produce candidates that live within the Bell curve of normal women? And if you decide to select women who lie at least at the extremities of that curve are you sure that their idiosyncratic ways will benefit the community at large and not the tiny, skewed population that preselected them?

Extraordinary women may add colour and may play an important role, but the expectation for all women parliamentarians is that they will generally care and have an innate compassion and respect for other women. The current crop of female Liberal Party politicians (or for that matter National Party) in Canberra do not seem to have these qualities.

There is one female politician in the Liberal Party who has seemed an exception. She is a NSW State politician, Catherine Cusack. She and her husband Chris Crawford represent that remnant of the Liberal Party that used to participate in the then Australian Institute of Political Science, in its latter glory days when it ran a summer school in Canberra and its Board had members from both major political parties. Gough Whitlam unveiled his Medibank initiative at one of the Summer schools, such was their influence. They were able to discuss policy in terms of the financial and social implications. However, whenever Catherine Cusack has put forward genuinely liberal solutions, particularly in relation to conservation issues, she has been demoted, slapped down and unsupported by her colleagues, especially when attacked by the National Party.

Now she has called out the Prime Minister for his behaviour. Is this a single utterance of frustration and will she vanish back into the background of women who wear shapeless clothing, and have a bow in their hair to recognise their traditional inferiority at the time of the “rapture” – their role being in actually tending the hearth?

Cusack has issued herself with a challenge – that is to maintain her very important confrontational position. Otherwise, she will be dismissed as a remnant of a Liberal Party that, in the eyes of the current crop of her colleagues, never existed.

Meanwhile, Morrison recycles his bevy of outliers under the wing of Marise Payne, herself the invisible woman.

I was only 22

Rico Marley walked into a grocery store in midtown Atlanta on Wednesday afternoon carrying a guitar bag.

He headed for the men’s room, the authorities said, where he strapped on a bulletproof vest. He then donned a jacket, its pockets full of ammunition, and placed two loaded handguns in a left front pocket and two other loaded handguns in a right front pocket. In the guitar bag, he carried a 12-gauge shotgun, an AR-15 military-style rifle and a black ski mask.

Then he walked out into the store.

Police, tipped off by an alarmed shopper in the bathroom, soon stopped him. But the incident, just three miles from the site of one of the shootings last week that left eight people dead and coming two days after a man stormed a grocery store in Boulder, Colo, and killed 10, sent new waves of unease throughout greater Atlanta and also raised nationwide fears of copycat crimes.

It is stated that when the mass shooting season starts, then there is generally a series of massacres, and increasingly it seems that the supermarkets are the killing venues, whereas in the past it was schools.

This report in the NYT is unusual, instead of reporting a massacre, it provided details of the disturbed man before he could kill the innocents – his activities being seen by an observant guy who legitimately wanted to use the toilet; no, not a security guard, not a police officer, not anybody employed to guard the community. One can surmise that the alert was raised early in that the armed gunman was apprehended before he was able to effect mayhem.

In isolation, the 22 year old coloured, poorly educated gunman had a criminal record with relatively minor petty theft – a young man with a troubled mind. It is only newsworthy in that the potential killer was apprehended before the shooting, given that in Georgia, one does not have to conceal one’s weapons. In other words, a casual passerby in a country inured to gun violence may have shrugged seeing a fellow men’s room user donning a flak jacket as just a “normal” incident. In fact, when the observer informed the store attendant of what he had seen, the attendant was initially indeed very casual, but fortunately the vital call for police was made.

Last year in the USA there were about 20,000 gun-related murders and an almost equal number of individuals who committed suicide using a firearm. This was an increase overall, and the rise was attributed to being one endpoint of domestic violence.

On the other hand, mass shootings were absent, even though they constitute only about one per cent in most years. The reason for this is attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools were closed, there were fewer public gatherings. The whole nation was plunged into collective misery so that those potentially homicidal aggrieved were absorbed into the wider community or, as stated above, violence was absorbed within domestic situations.

When the gun control advocates try to define solutions, they rely on the few small-scale attempts to ameliorate the situation, but unless Americans believe that their gun culture is unacceptable and women at all levels of society are considered equal in mutual respect, everything is for nought.

In other words, we are all powerless unless those who make the laws, makes the law. For me, if I were in power in Australia, I would limit the arms being made available to police forces. They are not a militia – not a paramilitary force. When did the police change from a “service” to a “force”? They do not need armoured vehicles and tear gas to protect the community. All police forces should be restricted in the colour they use, so they do not resemble a posh group of “bikies”. Try pink as the colour for their uniforms – why do they have to dress in black or midnight blue? Get rid of the “aviators”. Be more selective in the range of ironmongery with which they adorn their uniforms. It would be such a change to see police showing compassion, on a regular basis, rather than presented as a novelty.

Another consideration would be to extend the principles of averment to all cases involving crimes of a sexual nature. I would turn the whole matter of proof over to the alleged assailant to prove he or she did not do it. Presumption of innocence in these cases does not work, first because of the trauma of the episode being cast out of the memory bank and then the unappetising prospect of ongoing harassment, being carried out in a court of law by an essentially misogynistic legal profession. Well, Gentlemen you only have to disprove that which has been so averred.

A consumer’s view of vaccination – albeit with the disadvantage of a medical degree

But infectious-disease experts are worried the pace needs to be faster to reach the high levels of immunity needed to slow the virus, especially as more transmissible variants spread throughout the country. To reach the level of protection needed, about 80 percent of the population has to be immunised, meaning that about 260 million people need to get vaccinated. That would require 3 million to 3.5 million shots being administered each day until April 30.

The Washington Post concludes an optimistic article about the efficacy of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in health workers with a muted warning. America has not embraced the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, which has been the subject of a number of caveats resulting in the temporary halt to its use in a number of countries. When these questions are answered and the world-wide juggernaut resumes, with the difficulties that entails to get momentum, another caveat is issued, currently surrounding some of the mutant strains of the virus and the ineffectiveness of that vaccine against these strains.

At the same time in Australia a great number of people who are not doctors are spruiking the virus vaccines, as if there were no doubt about their efficacy, their availability and the “Jab Program” being on time. As a result, there is the unedifying spectacle of political squabbling, and I as a customer has given up trying to make an appointment. The general practice phones are always busy; in fact, the general practitioners are not geared for mass vaccinations.

Again, I am told that the Pfizer vaccine needs to be stored at -70 degrees Centigrade, and given the shemozzle for a consumer, how can I be assured that the cold chain integrity has been assured? The questions then begin to flood out – for instance, how long will immunity last?

Clinical trials suggest that vaccine-induced protection should last a minimum of about three months. That does not mean protective immunity will expire after 90 days; it may last longer. However, that is still one unanswered question.

The other one, given the problems with the rollout, if I was able to secure a first dose, how long shall I have to wait for the second dose, and then more importantly, for the booster? It does not seem clear to me, whether (or more optimistically, when that will occur). That is why the J&J vaccine appeals to me more because it is single dose; but will it ever be registered in Australia? Questions, questions everywhere, but only opinions to imbibe. That is my reaction as an elderly consumer eligible for the injection. I am confused, and so will hold back. In the Australian climate it seems the best option is to wait and see.

I am very pro-vaccination, and unless it is caught up in this COVID mess I intend to get my inoculation against the flu as soon as possible My only worry is that the puerile political agendas will get in the way of the program, lending ammunition for the anti-vaxxers.

And a final question. Who was the bright spark who suggested “Jab”, with all the violent connotations of the word? It is more correctly “inoculation” or “vaccination” – injected into the muscle. “Jab” is variously to poke or thrust abruptly as jabbing a knife into a body; to stab or pierce as in jabbed the steak with a fork; or lastly to punch somebody with short straight blows.

I, the frightened old person, seeing a uniformed person with a syringe saying that “I am going to jab you – just a little jab – it won’t hurt you.” Violence follows me at the point of a needle.

I thus remain a watcher. There are just too many unknowns.

It may be raining here, but this just came from the Boston Globe

Workers at a Baltimore plant manufacturing two coronavirus vaccines accidentally conflated the vaccines’ ingredients several weeks ago, ruining about 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine and forcing regulators to delay authorization of the plant’s production lines.

It does not affect Johnson & Johnson doses that are currently being delivered and used nationwide. All those doses were produced in the Netherlands, where operations have been fully approved by federal regulators.

But all further shipments of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — projected to total tens of millions of doses in the next month — were supposed to come from the massive Baltimore plant.

Those shipments are now in question while the quality control issues are sorted out, according to people familiar with the matter.

Federal officials still expect to have enough doses to meet President Biden’s commitment to provide enough vaccine by the end of May to immunize every adult. The two other federally authorized manufacturers, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, are continuing to deliver as expected.

Pfizer is shipping its doses ahead of schedule, and Moderna is on the verge of winning approval to deliver vials of vaccine packed with up to 15 doses instead of 10, further boosting the nation’s stock.

It is a pity Biden was not President a year earlier – when I was at my most skeptical – he seemed so ill equipped. But that is the nature of pontificatory error. It can be lost in the cushions of mea cathedra. I shall wait until his Presidency reaches 100 days before deciding the nature of my humble pie.

Food and Drink for the Memory

This past week has been a time of eating out in Melbourne – almost the first indulgence as such since the Virus struck last year.

There were two occasions during the week, when I experienced two tastes that reminded me of a couple of meals – one about a decade ago in New York and one in Manaus in 2019.

The first was when I asked for a gin martini in this restaurant near the Jolimont station. The best martini I have ever drunk was in the Morgan Library and Museum on Madison Ave on the west side. We had ambled into this place, not knowing that it originally housed Pierpont Morgan’s and found that there was a restaurant situated in the middle of a library.

The ornate chamber was lined with bookcases and the filtered light gave us a gauze covering. Now I thought this is going to be one of those tea cake places with delicate cups of Assam tea and dainty neatly-shaved cucumber sandwiches. No way, the only cucumber was infused into the martini. Cucumber and martini when balanced is a superb drink. It is still my benchmark as the best martini I have ever tasted. It helps if you have a cucumber infused gin at the outset.

Some years ago I managed to corner the only remaining bottles of Gordon’s cucumber gin in the distinctive green-labelled bottles available in Australia. It seems that the only gin now available with a passing nuance of cucumber is the Scottish gin, Hendricks. So was I surprised when I ordered the martini last week, and the only gin I recognised was Hendricks, not being familiar with all these boutique gins popping up all over the place.

I was thus pleasantly surprised when the Hendrick’s martini was presented to me with a generous ribbon of cucumber in what could have passed for a sherry glass. Immediately I thought I was being short changed, and yet the martini was brilliantly balanced to highlight the cucumber infusion. There was one shortcoming, with which I confronted the martinista, and that was water in the martini. It is a bit of a conceit to pour you a gin straight from the freezer in the glass wetted with dry vermouth, in so doing limiting the water content and in a commercial world increasing the cost. The other problem is that gin watered down or inferior gin coming out of the freezer half frozen is not a good look for the martinista.

But back to the Morgan – we had the meal, but as we knew nothing about the place, we left without looking around this ornate building. It was just another place to have a feed. Pity we missed the Gutenberg Bible and the only remaining first edition of Paradise Lost. Mr Morgan had a great deal of money.

The other memory last week was when ordering kingfish ceviche at a Spanish restaurant in Richmond. It brought back memories of that morning in Manaus two years ago when I remembered the ceviche I had ordered. As background, we had arrived there around 2am after a five-hour flight from Rio de Janeiro and gone straight to bed.

In the mid morning, we had woken up to one of those overcast tropical humid days. It had been raining. Food was being served on the same level as our room in an open eating area overlooking the courtyard. It is somewhat disconcerting arriving into a city so far up the Amazon, knowing that we had to board the ship to take us up the river in a few hours, but not knowing quite when.

The only option was to have a meal, before being scheduled to be picked up. There was a tropical fruit collection to start. Ceviche was on the menu, in big white chunks marinated in a lemon marinade with red onions. The fish used in Manaus was tambaqui, an Amazon freshwater fish with a passing resemblance to the piranha; tambaqui has been overfished, and its future depends now on aquaculture.

It was a very memorable feast upon the ceviche. Nevertheless, we have moved on, as we do, even though this blog is somewhat wistful for a world that has gone.

Maundy Thursday – The Lavage of Feet

As I finish this blog in preparation for it being published, tomorrow is Good Friday. Now, it is the night that Judas Betrayed Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. When I was younger, attending a midnight vigil, where the whole church is draped in black, was one of my most compelling involvements. As a Christian, I was brought up with a belief that this was the one day of the year that we should collectively mourn with the day completely closed. However, this religious quirk has been the victim of multi-culturalism; it is no longer a national expression. However, for someone who was brought up to believe in the sanctity of this day, I cannot help being uncomfortable with this change.

Maundy Thursday as the name is thus described, is the day when Jesus after the Passover supper washed his disciples’ feet as a sign of his humility. The British Monarchy has its own interpretation of acknowledgement of the poor. Rather than washing feet, the Queen hands out Maundy money, with the number of coin sets equal by gender; the actual number determined by the age of the monarch – in 2021, 94 sets for women and 94 sets for men.

I have a 1902 Maundy money set featuring Edward VII – a silver one penny, twopenny, threepence and fourpence laid out on blue velvet in a small red box. Given the size of the coins, it literally is a miracle that this small box given to my mother, who had nursed this very widely-travelled lady who gave her these coins, has survived intact. I remember seeing it first as a very small boy.

As my Cypriot doctor friend said: “Jesus is the reason for the season”. Especially appropriate comment, given I don’t remember any rabbits hopping around the Cross with baskets of eggs.

Mouse Whisper

President Biden pledged to have 200 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered by the end of his first 100 days in office. That’s double the goal he set in December and reached earlier this month before his 60th day in office.

The mausmeister, who was so critical of Biden in the lead up to the election, grudgingly backing him to win, is holding back judgement, but has been pleasantly surprised. However, he was worried when the President stumbled three times on Air Force One stairs. He will have to realise rather than trying to appear decades younger by jauntily approaching the red carpet, that his behaviour will need to be modified. Fortunately, the last steps up to the plane entrance showed no evidence of a barked shin – no sign of limping. Good sign, but as my mausmeister found out, never be ashamed to use a cane – or hold onto the railing.

Modest Expectations – Ohotata Kore

I once had a Welsh friend, the navigator who sat beside the driver in those car rallies where the object seems to be to charge along tracks in the bush, often at night, at terrifying speeds. The navigator’s job was to keep his eyes on the map under torchlight and bark at the driver the instructions in regard to what the road in front was about to do. In other words, he did not look at the road; his only instrument was the map. Therefore, his accurate reading of the map was crucial to survival. Year after year he did this. Then one day, in mid rally, he told the driver to stop. He folded the map, got out of the car and never rallied again. In his case, he had lost his nerve.

In my case, I am writing my 105^th blog – 105 being the non-emergency contact number for the police in New Zealand, and “non-emergency” at the head of this piece in Maori. In my case, have I lost the inclination to keep writing? Mine is not writer’s block. I know what “writer’s block” is. I have stopped writing for months while I have wrestled with not being able to see the logical or credible path forward. It is not that I have run out of ideas; it is just that there is a spaghetti junction in my mind, and which strand is the best to follow is not immediately clear.

I always admired Alistair Cooke. I listened to his “Letter from America” for years until his death. Yet when I re-read them, many are covered in the crustiness of age. Not all; some remain very relevant. Nevertheless, I always wished to emulate Cooke. There is always in him the adventurous, curious, cultivated mind. There is always something or somebody you wish to emulate at any point of time. That is the nature of civilisation, and dare I say, democracy.

This is a soliloquy in working out whether by writing this blog, I have said all I have to say to myself. After all, a blog to me is an aide-memoire before old age murders my facility not only to remember but also to make some sense of the trail that has twisted and turned in front of me for so many years. Generally, it depends on whether your map has coincided with that in front of you – and whether, if ever, you lose your nerve. However, unlike my friend, the navigator, you need a clear rear vision mirror and not one clouded in bulldust.

Our St Patrick’s Day

I have Irish ancestry; in fact, since my grandfather was born in Ireland, I am eligible for Irish citizenship. I looked at what is involved some years ago and said why would I do that at my age? I am Australian; I do not need a dual nationality, irrespective of what ephemeral advantages that might bring, such as the national anthem. The Irish national anthem is one forged by fire in 1911; Australia’s doggerel was composed for a concert of the Highland Society of New South Wales in 1878.

I have been registered to practise medicine in the Republic for years and like all good unionists joined the Irish Medical Organisation and even attended some of their conferences. I am shedding membership in Irish organisations of which I am a member. I have done courses in Irish, both contemporary and Old – and nothing has stuck. Except I can pronounce Niamh and Saiose.

Thus, what is left to us is acknowledgement of St Patrick’s Day. Gone are the days of faux leprechauns decked out in four-leaf clover (I was reminded this week that the world record for a stalk of clover is 56 leaves). However, blarney is what those blessed with Irish genes are contained in each Bushmill drop.

Why is it that on one day of the year Irish whiskey becomes palatable, but that is a trifle harsh, especially when it is 10 years’ old malt. The Irish drink Guinness; the elderly elsewhere call it stout. To me they are equally to be avoided. I dislike the creaminess, which spills over to many of the other Irish beers. Yet after the first two pints, it does become more tolerable.

Now Irish cuisine is another matter. It has the breadth of experience of a mashed potato abetted by cuts of meat, including mince, a step up from offal – some of which incidentally I like, as long as it is not brains, heart, lungs or sweetbreads.

In any event, we sat down to a meal of shepherd’s pie with red cabbage and apples. We did have enough potato not to add colcannon and enough cabbage not to need corned beef – other staples of Irish cuisine! Potato bread was piled up on a separate plate.

As it coincided with my Portuguese language class, I offered a toast to the class with green coloured water. You see, the Portuguese have a variety of wine which they called vinho verde. Actually, it is not green, it is straw-coloured. In fact, it is a white wine from that eponymous region of Portugal along the River Douro. I don’t think my teacher got the joke.

My celebration of my Irish heritage thus is reduced to an annual meal of modest proportions and a certain latter-day sparseness in my quaffing.

I am not one for Bloomsday, although at one of those pub celebrations, I once saw across the bar somebody who in profile uncannily resembled Katherine Mansfield. She is one of several women in history who have always fascinated me and whom I wished that I could have met.

I have shivered in the Celtic Twilight and stood in homage of William Butler Yeats and his wife, George, at their grave in Drumcliff Co Sligo. As the Irish Times reported at his final interment in 1948, he having died in France in early 1939 and his remains transferred after WWII to Ireland.

THERE WAS a veil of mist over the bare head of Ben Bulben yesterday afternoon when the remains of William Butler Yeats were buried in Irish soil. Soft grey rain swept in from the sea, soaking the Irish tricolour that lay upon the plain wooden coffin, as the body of the poet was laid at last in the churchyard of Drumcliffe.

But strangest of all my experiences in the Emerald Isle was the day I was striding across the Burren in Co Clare and I began to run because it had started to rain. I then had the strongest feeling I have ever had of déjà vu. A small boy also running, a boy in shreds and patches. No, I’m not completely mad; just Irish.

Let me fish off Cape St Mary’s

It is just a matter of my association of St Patrick’s day and the Western Australian election. It is tortuous but let me explain.

Western Australia has just witnessed the biggest rejection of being an Australian that one could ever imagine. I immediately thought of the landslide elections which have taken place in Queensland in 1974 and then in 2012. It was a matter of personalities, and if Queenslanders take a set against you then it’s “good night nurse”, as multiple “Mexicans” have found out.

However, the genesis of the Western Australian terramoto is different. The population has embraced secession with an unbridled intensity.

While the victory may partially be attributed to the current strength of the Western Australian economy, with the iron ore prices being high and Brazil being a “basket case”, the root cause lies in secessionist sentiments. Premier McGowan has been able to pull off what his State tried to do by legislative changes in the 1930s. He has seceded from the rest of Australia by just closing the borders when the Virus appeared, continuing it well after it was justified on public health reasons, thus thumbing his nose at the Prime Minister. His course of action was endorsed by the Liberal Party wipeout at the recent election.

Yet if there was one incident that set McGowan off, it was the Ruby Princess affair. He was incensed by the NSW Government’s cavalier handling of that incident, and he has used Premier Berejiklian as a punching bag ever since when it has suited him. Berejiklian seems to evoke this visceral response from other Premiers. They see through her “goodie-two-shoes teacher’s pet” persona.

The border issue made some sense when Australia was working out the adversary Virus and NSW was allowing the Virus to rip through Australia via the Ruby Princess debacle. Then progressively as Australia worked out a uniform public health response, it made less and less sense in any public health interpretation and more to political animosities to keep the borders closed. The pain in developing this uniform strategy should not be underestimated nevertheless.

Border closure became an overt political device by the less populous States, none better manipulated than by McGowan.

It is interesting to note that during the 1890s the group that pushed Western Australia towards Federation were Eastern Goldfield miners around Kalgoorlie. Given that gold had not been discovered until a few years before, it showed how quickly a mining group could gain an influential position. Western Australia then had a small population located in a huge land mass, where cattle occupied grass castles; grain was been grown in fertile south-west; whaling was concentrated around Albany; a pearling industry had been started around Broome; and for a time, sandalwood was the major export.

Some voices suggested that New Zealand would be more relevant within the nascent Federation, but in the end by 1901, Western Australia had joined but New Zealand had declined.

Nevertheless, secessionism always close to the surface. If the Federal Government had paid heed to the history of the Western Australian secessionist movements, it would have recognised the dangerous course McGowan has pursued. It is extremely difficult now to achieve actual secession constitutionally, as the path to this was effectively closed during the 1930s. The border closure issue remains and will persist as long as the Federal Government fails to confront the situation.

Now why would I connect this secessionist movement with St Patrick’s Day?

Whenever I think of the Irish, apart from my Australo-Irish heritage, I think of Newfoundland. When one goes to Newfoundland, one realises that Mother Nature is Irish. In the St John’s harbour on the first day of summer, there are icebergs still. Well, actually summer begins on 16 June when the trees have burst into foliage, and then there is a two-week moratorium before the mosquitos emerge, and the battle is joined.

The other factor in my memory was how Irish Newfoundland felt for me. The “Newfie” accent has more than a hint of the brogue, but it was the music which confirmed that Newfoundland was part of Irish diaspora. To hear the group, the Irish Descendants, singing Let me Fish Off Cape St Mary’s is to hear the heart of the diaspora. The cliffs from which this fishing port overlooks the Atlantic Ocean could be part of the West Coast of Ireland. It was ironic when I was there that fishing for cod, once the mainstay of the fishing industry, was prohibited so far had the fish stocks fallen. The ban came in 1992, and it was 20 years before the cod returned in numbers. One could still get cod’s tongue, a local delicacy but then it came from “aways”. I think somebody might have said Iceland.

And what the hell has this to do with Western Australia? Well, Newfoundland had been created a separate dominion apart from Canada in 1907. In effect it was a separate country. At the same time in 1934, while certain elements in Western Australia were agitating for secession, the Newfoundlanders were doing the opposite. The Great Depression had sent them perilously close to the financial wall, and so they joined the Canadian Federation giving up their self-governing status and adding Mainland Labrador to form the present province. The fact that Newfoundland is much the same distance to Dublin as to Ottawa did not influence the “Newfie” intent, but then it is not in their makeup to calibrate distance as a sign of loyalty.

Both in Australia and Canada shift in status has depended on constitutional recognition. In the past when there are concerns of disease spread, the methods of quarantine including border closure are constitutionally the responsibility of the Federal Government. Setting up a public relations manoeuvre and calling it a “national cabinet” in the end showed that the Federal Government was just shifting its constitutional responsibility to the States so they could cop the blame if matters went wrong as they did in Victoria.

McGowan is in the favourable position of being able to have the same advantageous GST position, as heading a State of the Commonwealth of Australia.

However, he is perceived as having had a landslide electoral victory when he shook the secessionist tambourine for all its worth, Western Australia the de facto nation holding as hostages many of the electoral Federal foes including the controversial duo of Porter and Reynolds. Moreover, Western Australia in all likelihood will lose one of the seats in coming redistribution, and therefore the already nervous Liberal Party will be forced to play “musical seats”. Thus, an already factionalised Liberal Party has all the ingredients to tear itself apart

McGowan now knows that if the Federal Government holds back GST money from Western Australia or take any other perceived discriminatory action, it will be beaten up electorally there.

McGowan knows that the Federal Government is not willing to stop him meddling with the borders. He does not need any constitutional change to effect secession without metaphorically “leaving the building”. He has effectively done so, and any arcane legal processes were brushed aside when he effectively usurped the quarantine power of the Commonwealth, which unequivocally is a constitutional power of the Federal Government.

Therefore, the Prime Minister is faced with this situation, first enunciated by Bishop Morton, of Morton’s fork.

Ironically, one of the Prime Minister’s strongest acolytes is named Morton, a Pentecostal blow-in from NSW who was in charge of the WA Liberal Party, who inherited Tangney, a very safe Liberal seat along the Swan River. No longer if the recent State election is any guide.

What happened in the 1930s was because the Federal Government of both Australia and Canada held the cards. The constitutional barriers were too great in Australia once the deed had been done in 1901; and Newfoundland simply could not afford being a separate nation.

But as they say in the native argot, McGowan is “giving it a red hot go” to create his own nation.

Oh, not another transparent bureaucrat

“At ASIO, we’re conscious that the names and labels we use are important,” he said. “Words matter. They can be very powerful in how they frame an issue and how they make people think about issue.”

Thus, spake Mr Burgess, the head of the Australian academy of spooks. He is “friendly” Mike to us punters. In a recent media interview, we get the full story of the poor boy from a migrant family who was the first in his family to go the University and moreover to undertake electrical engineering. Before the image of the “log cabin” childhood is further invoked, he outs himself as being a cyber nut, and thus he lives in a world where his simulacra in other jurisdictions try to out-hack one another.

Nevertheless, there is a cloaked anecdote about the “nest of spies” that his outfit has been able to quash or whatever – there is no detail; just an enticing tit-bit for the writer. Spooks must invoke mystery and plot right back to Walsingham.

One of the most concerning situations is when somebody in the spook business embarks on this sort of exercise, because those who run the organisation can try and present themselves as an ordinary person, you know the football team follower, has a dog et cetera and that – at the same time at budget time invokes all sorts of horror befalling the nation if the “Spook Budget” is not increased.

The security services exist to keep their rival services at bay, foiling disablers of major computer networks, and preventing such anti-community activities such as the recent Neo-Nazi gathering at Hall’s Gap.

The essential ingredient is to have a critical evaluation of the effectiveness of such activities. Burgess in the comments quoted above also maintains that no longer will they reveal whether the dangers are from the extremist right or left wing groups or delineating whether the terrorist groups are linked to ISIS or whatever. He said that his service will restrict itself to saying that such activities will be characterised as being “belief or ideologically based”. It is subtle, but in fact he is saying he will be further constricting information, but generalising the threat.

I wonder, as I pass through the airport screening how useful testing for explosives has been, because some mad guy tried to detonate explosives in the heels of his shoes on a Miami bound flight in 2001. How many copycats have been detected at Australian airports, at what cost, given also that there is a large group that is not tested anyway?

The January episode in Washington showed how useful security is when a crowd is determined to riot to the point of insurrection. Mostly not at all.

I want to be assured that our security services don’t spend their money on profiling their operatives. I would like to believe that given the Australian security service has a history of conservative political association, this has dissipated and been replaced by a politically neutral service. Parliamentary surveillance needs to include people able to contain the secretive authoritarian technocrat that Burgess embodies.

Brigadier Sir Charles Chambers Fowell Spry CBE, DSO

Attempts were made to recruit me when ASIO, under Brigadier Spry, was a political action committee for the Menzies Government concerned with “reds under the bed”; and riddled with proto-fascist operatives such as elements of Moral Re-Armament, the leader of which Frank Buchman openly praised Hitler.

Charles Spry himself was an affable chap, with a penchant for Scotch whisky which he shared with the Prime Minister. However, behind that persona was a very determined anti-communist and where scruples could be left on the dressing table as if they were cuff links.

Whitlam set up the Hope Royal Commission in 1974, the report from which has formed the basis for the modern-day intelligence services. A raid on ASIO as ordered by Lionel Murphy, then the Commonwealth Attorney-General in 1973, would today be unimaginable.

In a very perceptive thesis on the organisation published in 2018, Coventry concluded:

Intelligence and security have become second nature to Australians and anyone else in the US ‘hub and spokes’ system. To argue for the abolition of ASIO in the present time is unpalatable; for good reason. The neoliberal phenomenon of globalisation means that targets of terrorism are, as Nixon feared, ubiquitous. Any citizen or corporation or NGO located overseas can be seen as an extension of a targeted government; all it takes is a careless comment by a public official. It is often overlooked that governments have a clear role in provoking terrorism, including within in society, though many may wish to believe this threat comes purely from the mental illness, barbarity and jealousy of others.

In 2010, the former director general of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, told the Chilcot Inquiry that she had warned the Blair Government (1997-2007) that involvement in the Iraq War would result in higher levels of home-grown terrorism. She was of course vindicated. It must be said that ASIO has done well so far to keep the Australian Government and citizenry from the kind of harm exhibited overseas.

That last comment is reassuring, but that was written before Burgess became the ASIO Director-General in 2019, and he is running the line of foreign interference and espionage being the paramount dangers (rather than terrorism) which suits his technologically-driven agenda. He reminds me of the old “cold war warriors”, himself ideologically driven as far as his background has given meaning to that word (or words).

Australia needs an Attorney-General to withstand Burgess’ undoubtedly very powerful personality coupled with his wide access to information. To believe that Australia’s security organisation does not actively participate in cyber warfare would be incredibly naïve.

I am now an avid watcher of the activities of Mike Burgess. I look forward to his first interview with Crikey.

Mouse Whisper

I never did like that skunk Pepe Le Pew. His characterisation gave rodents a bad name, but he is the latest casualty in the war against the predatory male. Looney Tunes have shown him the door. The comedian, David Chappelle, who once said that the famous can always become infamous but not unfamous, says of the skunk: Pepe, whom he laughed at as a kid, later through an adult lens makes him realise: “What kind of … rapist is this guy?”

Wait a minute! I stand corrected. Skunks are not rodents; they are of the same ilk as Tim Wilson’s cabal of wolverines.

Modest Expectations – The Armstead

I suppose when you follow the Woody Allen trail of filmic apologia for his fascination with young women, the lens settles on the troubled mind. The pursuit of the younger woman by the older man is not only the preserve of Mr Allen. Try Mr Polanski. The seventies seemed to be a time when the world was cluttered with these creeps “outing themselves” – a pride of predators – so to speak.

However, it was 20 years before in the early 1950s that I first encountered this syndrome in the film Baby Doll. I was a teenager and older men chasing young teenage women confused me, but then I had the naivety of no sexual experience.

There was this societal response of averting one’s eyes from such behaviour. At school, there was never an open forum to discuss what was happening in contemporary society. Looking back at the trailer of the film, the voice over has a dark, oleaginous, lascivious tone. While there was widespread “tut-tutting” about the film, what was the long-lasting effect? The creation of short revealing nightwear for young women. Yes, a life lived constantly with Women Objectification.

A new book entitled “Consentement” has been published as reported by the Guardian Weekly. The author is Vanessa Springora, who was abused by one Gabriel Matzneff, another writer who preyed on the underaged. When he was interviewed on a talk show in 1990 in Paris, Matzinoff is reported to have responded to a question about his penchant for women under 20 by saying the older woman has known “disillusionment” whereas the “not yet hardened” are nice to sleep with. This statement enraged a Canadian author, Denise Bombardier, who called out his actions. For her action the Paris male-dominated intelligentsia mocked her; called her bitch.

Twenty years later, same location, Paris, Ms Springora releases the book, described as a memoir of being abused by Matzinoff when she was 15 and he three times her age. This time, his casual insouciance has been replaced by his flight from Paris and a trial set down for September this year.

As the Washington Post reminded us this week, France prohibits sexual relations between an adult and a minor under the age of 15 but has no minimum age of consent. The French government has said it will “act quickly” to amend statutes so that an adult who engages in sex with someone younger than 15 would be charged with rape.

I have placed an order for the book.

Machias Seal Island and the Improbability of Puffins

I was reminded of a trip to Machias Seal Island when I read about the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine to the remote islands off the Maine Coast. But the ownership of one of these islands has been disputed between Canada and the United States.

I have previously written about the Canada and Denmark dispute over the Hans Island between Greenland and Canada.

This is another of those anomalous situations that is the subject of an ongoing dispute between Canada and USA.

In 1783, the Treaty of Paris settled the Revolutionary War, but it left unanswered questions about the Maine–New Brunswick border. In 1820, when Maine became a state, its government defined its boundary as far north as it could. The so-called Aroostook War ensued, with militia mobilisation on each side and cross-border arrests eventually leading to a solution brokered by diplomacy rather than force. The resulting treaty, signed 175 years ago, determined the current crooked shape of northern Maine and should have solved the cross-border tensions, except that it failed to account for Machias Seal Island and the smaller adjacent North Rock.

Our American friend who owned a house in Maine knew that the only way to get to this island was to take a boat from the Maine port of Cutler.

The reason was that Anonymouse wanted to see the puffins, which nest every year on Machias Seal Island in late spring. During the nesting season these crazy looking little birds have flaming orange beaks.

The North Atlantic Ocean can be a very rough journey for a small, converted fishing boat. However, this day, the swell was tolerable. This was essential because alighting from the boat on the slipway can be too dangerous to land safely and you can go there for nought, not being able to land.

This day we landed and were led by a grumpy Canadian marine scientist up to the lighthouse. This lighthouse was built by the New Brunswickers in 1832 and has been manned by the Canadian coast guard or its former equivalent ever since. We sheltered against the lighthouse and in pairs we were led to a hide. There were several small hides in the middle of the puffin colony. The puffins clustered around and all over the slightly undulating and rocky surrounding area. The puffins used the roof of the hide as a landing strip, and repeatedly there was a crash as they landed hard. They then hopped away off the “runway” to allow the next bird to land.

Normally a hide is a place which allows you to wait and wait until the bird turns up for a brief sighting. Not in this case – the puffins were in their hundreds nearby, they waddled, they posed, they are an unforgettable little auk, each with an individuality known only to each other’s partner. These birds are completely unknown in southern waters just as penguins are unknown north of the Equator.

After about half an hour, the experience is ended, one is escorted back down the boardwalk and as we were about the last pair to visit the birds, it was not long before we were boarding the boat and heading back to the American mainland. No, we did not need a passport, nor on the other hand were we allowed to roam the Island.

The puffin had been an emblem on a series of books in my childhood, and this was the first time I had been up close – if not personal – with an improbability of puffins. A remarkable experience capped off by the extraordinary return when the Ocean was a millpond, a gentle end to a long day.

Mathias Made it – Freed from Morrison

“Cecilia Malmström consistently received broad support from the Member countries, and the outcome was close. We are grateful for all of the support throughout the process. Sweden will now join the consensus behind the Australian candidate” says Minister for Foreign Trade and Nordic Affairs Anna Hallberg.

In commenting about his bid to run for this position, I was biased because of his political antics in Australia, but then he became more recognisable as a chameleon – a very clever one, who has used Australia as his stepping stone back to Europe. He is the ultimate mercenary, and there is no doubt in my mind that it was the United States as the deciding factor. Biden’s staff recognised that he was not bound to any ideology but is very smart and any indiscretions like being “outed” as one of the puerile “big, swinging dicks” was only his attempt to acclimatise to the maturity of Australian culture.

While being supported by Australia was essential, I suspect that the Americans may have been lukewarm towards Malmström and in the end I suspect the US needed Australia more than Sweden at this time. It would not have escaped Biden’s attention that Australia has had an excellent record in containing the COVID-19 virus and Sweden not so much.

Let’s face it, Cormann is a German, being born in the German-speaking sliver of Belgium. As I have stated, he has a good working relationship with the German Government, and as it became increasingly clear, he was only using Australia as a temporary watering stop. His charm, his fluency in the influential languages enabled him to gradually gain traction from a perceived “no hoper” position. This only reinforced the fact that he had maintained his own counsel and had sounded out his potential allies among the German-Benelux mob. Possibly the attempted intervention of certain local political figures to try and stop his appointment may have brought a transitory shadow, but political feather dusters tend to be blown away rather than have any lasting effect.

Remember the OECD is the successor to the Marshall Plan. For the past 16 years, the Secretary General has been a Mexican; for the previous 12 years a Canadian – one just South; the other just North. Very close for comfort. Also note the time these guys held office. Cormann may still be there when Morrison is just a Johannes Leak painting in some distant alcove of Parliament House.

I have been scanning both the New York Times and Washington Post for news of the Cormann appointment. Nothing. I am nevertheless reminded of the late Jim Wolfensohn, who grew up in Australia to become an international banker. He set his sights on becoming the President of the World Bank. To further this ambition, he became an American citizen. Some 15 years later his long game was rewarded, and he headed the World Bank from 1995 for 10 years. There was no chauvinistic roar as I remember it when he got the job. In 2010 he quietly reclaimed his Australian citizenship.

Cormann has been underrated; but he was the European who wanted to return there and get Morrison to back him. Very smart, but if not for this personal armoury, it is doubtful whether he would have won. Despite the so-called public relations propensity of the Prime Minister (and those “puff pieces” from DFAT through their Shield mouthpiece) to try and get the credit, it was Cormann himself who convinced the panel.

Congratulations; and thus I know where you will be in six years’ time unless there is a skeleton whose rattling has yet to be heard or that your youth doesn’t assure against your mortality. I am not so sure about Mr Morrison or Cormann, your successor in the role of Minister of Finance in six years’ time.

And talking about political timing, there would have been a problem if he had remained a Liberal strategist after the annihilation of the Liberal party last Saturday. But he had long since gone. Now he can stride to work from June along the Seine in the 16^th Arrondissement with an independent air.

And for your successor as Minister for Finance, two questions: How much this circus cost Australia? And for what purpose?

But in the words of those McCain ads, ah Mathias, you’ve done it again.

A Violent Society ready to be Tamed?

Ever since Cain killed Abel, human beings have killed one another, and those closest to the person with the weapon are often the least immune.

I watched the gun culture of the United States grow and remembered that decades ago I penned a piece on the Hoddle Street massacre. It took another massacre at Port Arthur for most of this country to wake up to itself. Therefore, the anonymous random murders of those who are a victim of one person’s accumulated hatred were laid to rest by the incoming Prime Minister, John Howard, an unremarkable man achieved a remarkable outcome.

The country has been ravaged by criminal gangs killing one another in order to control the dark side of our economy. A multicultural society admits those who have been brutalised as young children, whether Lebanese, Iraqis, Sudanese to name a few – who have come to accept death on the street as part of everyday life. In contrast, our children can stroll through a shopping mall where there are no gun-toting security people at every corner, but on returning home are able to retreat into a virtual world of cyber violence. Cyberspace is full of it. Aggression and violence underlie the promotion of sport. Then have we addressed the acceptable level of violence. Can it be zero ever?

When my then teenage sons were working through the pentathlon sports, they then had to learn how to shoot with a centre fire pistol at a stationery target 10 metres away. Owning these pistols required me to be fingerprinted and to have a secure pistol safe. What struck me about the pistol club crowd was how normal, almost introspective they were. They never paraded around in combat uniforms. They treasured their pistols; they would come to the range and fire repeatedly at the one set of targets. Walk down the range, check how they had done, replace the target, walk back up the range, confer with their fellow members and start again. They were quiet, and frowned upon any activity that could be interpreted as aggressive. It was important to be calm as firing the pistol was synchronous with your heartbeat, and the slower that was, the more time to get your aim correct. My sons never pursued pistol shooting, but they learnt the etiquette. Technology for pentathlon now allows the pistols to be simulated with laser weapons and live ammunition is no longer required.

John Howard’s response to the gun culture was immediate. After he made his stand, for a time he wore a bullet proof vest when addressing crowds. As you watch Morrison, you just get the feeling that he would not emulate John Howard. He would just be over-run by the Shooters and Fishers sympathisers for a start. They were not as organised in the 1990s and probably the mood following Port Arthur would not have given them much oxygen. The West Australian family massacre in 2018 is the only mass shooting in Australia since Port Arthur. In fact, both suicide and homicide by guns have fallen since the 1980s and this fall was not interrupted by the COVID-19 virus outbreak. Therefore, the gun mob now have gained some more oxygen, especially as the need to get rid of feral animals is looming as another battleground to justify the wider use of firearms.

The Christchurch massacre two years ago in New Zealand was particularly vile. Perpetrated by an Australian, the mosque massacre showed that the New Zealand gun restrictions needed to be tightened. However, the terrorism in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq, plus 9/11 maybe have had a desensitising effect on all of us.

While there is a great deal of talk of Muslims being part of the community, especially after the Christchurch massacre, much of that empathy is as superficial as green drought. How can a Society increasingly brought up in an egalitarian world not be affronted to see the blokes in casual wear being trailed by women in complete shapeless black clothing from top to toe? Publicly we are affronted by the antics of One Nation, but much of the racism just as publicly identifies deeply held biases. Yet why am I not affronted by the Christian sects that insist on the women wearing bows in their hair so Christ can recognise when he, enraptured, comes again. I just dismiss it as “quaint”. Yet why do we tolerate Scientologists to exist despite their repressive tactics? They are not a quaint group. As we single out groups our biases just hop around.

Most of us keep our biases to ourselves and the ballot box is where we can unleash them – at least somewhat. It leads to the appearance of civilisation. Nevertheless, ongoing violence is often rooted in differences in belief, which is ever present in a so-called multicultural society.

This country is a long way from resolving its problem with systemic violence. I thought that once the use of weaponry has been put in its rack, Australia could now concentrate on violence abatement. For in the USA this question has not been resolved because the right to bear arms is an excuse for violence as recently shown in Washington. The Constitutional mantra begins: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state…” – however, those January 6 images just evoke a hollow laugh. The one thing Trump exposed was the fact that America is at heart a violent society, obsessed with firearms and which treats women like dirt.

Women’s movements seem to flame up and then the gender mismatch resumes, with a few male sacrifices, but nothing really changes.

Here in Australia, the knife has replaced the gun as the instrument of choice when the fist and the rape are not enough. There are now young women who do not need fancy plumage to attract attention. They have existed but they have been pushed aside to be a voluble fringe, living your life on talk shows being very clever but totally irrelevant.

Ms Tame, beware the elements of sleeplessness, isolation, burnout and boredom. Fortunately, Grace Tame has been given a year to continue her quest, but her challenge is to destroy the novelty of being just a young articulate woman and lead a well-resourced crusade to displace the male and female misfits and rent-seekers who dominate the parliaments – especially those who have formed cute gangs called “wolverines” (I suggest Ms Kitching ditch the group) and the like.

The ballot box is Ms Tame’s ongoing relevance. I am sure she does not need any help in identifying the targets, but make sure that those who stand and may be pre-selected be assessed by someone like Cathy McGowan, who engineered a remarkable outcome in her seat of Indi – orderly non-dynastic succession planning by an Independent.

My epilogue to Meekness

Remember, children, particularly those of you dressed in pink.

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child;
Pity my simplicity,
Suffer me to come to Thee.

Lamb of God, I look to Thee;
Thou shalt my Example be;
Thou art gentle, meek, and mild;
Thou wast once a little child.

Lord, I would be as Thou art;
Give me Thine obedient heart;
Thou art pitiful and kind,
Let me have Thy loving mind.

As a child I recited the first verse before bed. But I always had difficulty with the word “simplicity”. Still have.

Needless to say, these verses by that great feminist irony, Charles Wesley are sung often by all girl choirs.

Mouse Whisper

An alternate view of Big Swinging Dicks as said to me in Fred Brophy’s pub in Cracow is that they were in fact metroGnomes. It depends on your way of assessing these things.

Modest Expectations – The Size of the Universe

Is Australia an ochlocracy?

The Ancient Greek historian, Polybius drew on the traditional theory of the three constitutions: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, which may decay into their perverted versions becoming respectively, despotism, oligarchy and “rule of violence”.

Okhlos is Greek for “mob”. Its potential was seen briefly in the storming of the US Capitol on January 6. It goes to show how rattled the Prime Minister continues to be when he invoked the spectre of mob rule such as that; and substitutes an irritating mantra of “the rule of law” (or does he mean lore and he has not bothered to read the evidence – but then he admits he never reads anything any time).

Morrison’s retreat behind a line of feeble excuses, backed invariably by people of privilege in the end is unsustainable. One transformation occurring in Australian culture which has probably been an important undercurrent in this societal change has been the appearance of the articulate young women who have had enough of the brutal misogyny, which hides behind the veil of Australian “mateship”.

This rise in the women voicing their experience of the underbelly of Australian social life is far from mob rule; it shows the best aspects of democracy, thriving on freedom of speech and the actions of a new leadership led by at least three young women – and presumably more of them to come.

Yet another Liberal Woman?

I watched Kate Jenkins’ underwhelming performance last Sunday morning on television. She is the Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner, having jumped ship in 2016 from her role as the Victorian counterpart which she held for less than three years. Her successor in Victoria, Kristen Hilton, is about to finish a five years’ stint and is a female lawyer who came to the position from Legal Aid and community advocacy. Jenkins was from a different legal background and was a controversial appointment by the then Victorian Attorney-General, who happened then to be Liberal. She was appointed despite the selection committee unanimously recommending someone else, and indeed a number of the selection panel resigned in protest. After all, Jenkins had form, having worked for 20 years for Freehills, which was a law firm aligned to the employers in work disputes.

There was a change of Government in Victoria late in 2014, and despite her saying that the manner of appointment had been smoothed over, nevertheless when the opportunity arose to move back to a similar position under a Liberal government it is not surprising that she did.

It is somewhat of a dejà vu situation when, as Kate Jenkins was reported saying in 2018 after some Liberal Party MPs raised concerns about bullying inside the party, she suggested the community response would prompt conservative politicians to push for change. Her comments came at the same time one West Australian Liberal Senator, Linda Reynolds said it was time for Liberal MPs to stop talking about themselves and allow the party to deal with the bullying issue internally – the rule of lore methinks.

Now Kate Jenkins has been entrusted to look at the dysfunctionality of the Parliament House workplace, encouraging people to tell all but with no authority to name names. Initially, the Prime Minister had assigned one of his female colleagues, but after all what do you have a sex discrimination commissioner for? It seemed somewhat of an afterthought, but in the blokey culture in which the Prime Minister finds himself comfortable, it is unsurprising. After all, in this culture Kate Jenkins has to examine, the Office of Women has barely been heard. She has to report by November.

However, one suggestion that the office appointment be made by some independent body is ludicrous. Most ministerial offices have departmental liaison officers in any event. In many workplaces, one needs a police check. The problem lies in the fact that there are just too many parliamentary staff, the employing Minister needs to be confident of their loyalty and their moral compass. Cut back on staff numbers and get rid of the condottiere culture – 95 per cent of the time hanging out and five per cent ultimate brutality in the case of the Mafia. Applying that to the parliamentary office is boredom, gossiping and bullying – in varying degrees. Occasionally, they may contribute a snippet of relevance to portfolio deliberations.

As for the percentage of sexual harassment and assault admixed, that is surely the major task for Kate Jenkins. In her favour is that she seems to have been involved in sport, in particular the Carlton Football club. That probably has given her an insight into the blokey culture which, fuelled by alcohol and drugs, can become a very unpleasant scene.

However, the most obvious recommendations are that all cases of sexual harassment and assault they be immediately referred to the police and that Parliament House have a 24-hour counselling service on hand for the victim. The first harasser charged should be refused bail and have the case held over for a few months. This would be somewhat of a deterrent, as well as the name being on the public record instead of appearing nowhere but everywhere on social media – a case of “porterisation”.

Insurrection

When I was a medical student, there was only one medical school in Victoria. It was a traditional medical course, which had its roots in the Great Britain “honorary” system and Nightingale wards.

There was a vision of medical students in the mould of the 1950s series of “Doctor in the House” books, which were popular and vaguely true of a vanishing world.

We “fresher” students had a term of botany to start us in the world of human biochemistry, physiology and anatomy and then moving on to years in clinical medicine where we were introduced to our human pathology. However, that pathology included an introduction to the world of the medical hierarchy, enmeshed in a different pathology. It was a world of innate privilege. For instance, from my boys only private school about ten per cent of the students in my first year were old boys from my school; and most of those had been with me at school the previous year. Therefore, there was an easy familiarity when we all gathered for our first term. None of the guys then from my school were more than acquaintances, as the friends that I had at school tended to be on the “arty fringe”, not on the treadmill of a year 12 two maths, physics and chemistry.

Despite having a headmaster enlightened for his time, having a factory to ensure a stream of first class honours and the academic superiority of the school, in the end, the school encouraged privilege and misogyny. After all, it was still a school where the boarders were banned from playing hockey, because it was a sport played by girls. Then there was the cruelty, both physical and mental. Until just before I entered the senior school, the prefects were allowed to cane, which some have reported did it with relish.

The masters – note male – were allowed to cane. I remember one time when I was framed as the instigator of a class riot and was caned in front of the class with a large wooden compass. This old boy had played tennis at championship level and his backhand was still a powerful weapon. Oh, such a wondrous time. And there we all were on the threshold of a career of caring and compassion.

There were few women then doing medicine, about 25 per cent at that time. One of them was a feisty blonde who as child had migrated with her parents and elder sister to Australia from Central Europe after the war. She attracted attention because she was always impeccably dressed, even down to her use of Mitsouko as a trademark, very good looking with a strong sense of morality, and willingness to engage men as equals. This frank engagement was often misinterpreted. Because she was a fraction over 160cm, there was tendency by some to see her as a doll, unable to resist the fragrance of the male pheromones. Nothing was further from the truth. One professor, who had the reputation as a Lothario tried it on, got nowhere very quickly and punished her with a supplementary examination in his subject, which she ultimately passed. The professor wisely absented himself from this further examination.

There was the instance in one of those crowded raucous medical student parties, when a drunken male lifted her up and tried to sling her over his shoulder. Others intervened and he dropped her. In a flash she had flattened him with a fist which travelled from below knee level and he, helped by an inebriated lurch forward, copped the full intensity of the blow. She never gave any quarter; a remarkable woman (in the 1960s she was a pioneer in and passionate advocate also of early childhood education) who followed up with a successful career until she suddenly decided that she had had enough of a male-dominated world and retired. It was a pity.

The white shoe brigade

In our fifth year we had to undertake 10 weeks in the Women’s Hospital where during that period were to do twenty deliveries on our own, including two instrumental deliveries. That was one roster; the other was the episiotomy roster, where we had to go and sew up the incision made in the perineum when extracting the baby to avoid a tear. In those days it was a regular occurrence and we medical students had to do the suturing repair. It was an introduction to being on-call at night.

We were not to leave the premises without permission over the ten weeks and to compound this imprisonment, we had to wear all white – all white short coats, white shirt, white tie, white pullover, white trousers or skirt, white socks, white shoes. The one luxury we afforded ourselves when we were far enough down each list not to be immediately bothered being called was to go over the road to the Martini Bar at about eleven o’clock, have a veal parmigiana and watch a TV Western called The Rebel-Johnny Yuma.

The Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology was an owlish misogynist who had crawled up the pole of success by judicious naval service, membership of the Masons, a fortuitous lack of interest in the professorial post when he applied, allowing him to slide into academia without much, if any academic qualification. Then there he was, a graduate who had needed supplementary examinations to pass and was forced to undertake his first post graduate year at Tennant Creek, on the brink of a stellar career. He had a ruthless streak which, coupled with a few shrewd appointments, provided him with an aura of success. However, his most memorable utterances related to a distressed pregnant woman who came to him threatening suicide. His response – as recounted by him to us fifth year medical students – was that he showed her the window of his office and invited her to jump. The fact that she did not just proved triumphantly his insight into women. To our shame we just absorbed what he said and did nothing.

However the atmosphere, because of the activities of his lieutenants called “First assistants”, became so repressive with them singling out a Malayan Chinese student for special punishment. That was the trigger point. We students declared that enough was enough and petitioned the Professor in a written document signed by all but one of the cohort. We thought it an impressive display of solidarity, and the First Assistants were clearly rattled. Nothing happened immediately and then we felt the full force of the Professor; he isolated those he thought were the leaders and suddenly the rebellion melted away. After all, this guy could have a serious effect on careers. He enforced the punishment, “gating” the whole student cohort. This was eased as it gave the First assistants a “humane role” in releasing us from our imprisonment.

In the end a few of us, but particularly myself as I was by then Chair of The Medical Students Society, had a rough time, even though it was almost 18 months later before we faced the examiners. That is another story, but I evaded the trap – and passed, admittedly near the bottom of the year.

As to the fate of the petition, it was never seen again, except there was a second copy – signed similarly by the same set of students. I have it in my possession as an example of what he probably thought was an attempt at mob rule, but a useful document that can be added to his “in memoriam”.

After all, he was not the only disgraceful example of this disrespect for women. It was rife among obstetricians back then, but now change has occurred, especially with more female role models in the field with exemplary professional behaviour.

Then, as students, we accepted the mores, such as lining up to do an internal examination on a woman who had supposedly consented to the invasion. Some of those in my cohort, who signed the petition, became well-respected obstetricians and gynaecologists.

As for the Professor, he was knighted and acquired a trail of honorary academic degrees from all over the world, had a building named after him at one of the teaching hospitals in Melbourne and died as a revered misogynist in 1983.

IVF – Great Expectations?

The role of IVF as a ‘cure’ for infertility was crucial to the discursive construct of law as a barrier. ‘If medical advancements can help these people, it is not the role of Parliament to prevent it. Science was posited as a progressive force, aligned with nature, or perhaps with natural progress, which parliament should not impede. Paradoxically, then, law becomes both the problem and the solution as it ushers in a new era of reform.

In April 1988, my team reported to the then Commonwealth Department of Community Services and Health on the status of in vitro fertilisation (IVF). The Department prepared a summary report because some of the data we collected was confidential. The Departmental summary made the comment that the good data collected by my team “cannot be matched with good output data collected by the National Perinatal Statistics Unit (NPSU). (I use the term IVF, although ART, assisted reproductive technology, of which IVF is one, may now be more commonly used.)

To put our consultancy into perspective, the first in Australia and when 2503 pregnancies had occurred with 1851 live born infants. That was the raw statistic, and we looked at data from 1986 onwards from 15 units across Australia.

It was a time when the tabloids would pounce on any multiple pregnancy as though non-viable octuplets were in some way a blessing from God, a scenario which some members of the Roman Catholic Church applauded. It was just an instance of appalling practices, loading the woman up with fertilised eggs, on the grounds it was more likely one would be implanted.

I entered this review in a very positive frame of mind, because I knew Professor Carl Wood, who was part of the vanguard in the introduction of IVF.

The one invariable feature when we arrived at any of the units was the pictures of beaming bonny babies, so even from the early days the public relation teams were in the picture, so to speak.

Then our team confronted reality. The processes involved in IVF mean that the woman goes through a harrowing experience to conceive. Then there was the waiting period to know that the process was successful. There was some difficulty initially in finding the actual success rate. The success rate was a live baby in the basket – and multiple pregnancies counted as one. Full stop.

It was a problem in the early days and in one State where there was an “IVF cowboy” at the helm, because of his propensity to place multiple eggs into the uterus for implantation. Of the 55 live births following IVF, 27 per cent were multiple births compared to 0.01 per cent of the total. There were 15 multiple births due to IVF of a total of 264 multiple pregnancies. Five sets were triplets born from IVF pregnancies during the time when there were only a total of 15 sets of triplets born across Australia.

The problem in assessing the “live baby in basket” against the number of IVF cycles was not made easy, because those who ran the IVF clinics were not the same team as those who delivered the women. There was thus no uniform data collection. This presented a difficulty since there were a number who might have been assessed as pregnant but who actually had a chemical pregnancy that did not progress. This was another practice uncovered at the time – to count a rise in the hormone bHCG as a “successful IVF treatment” – a fancy bit of data manipulation since many never got beyond this stage. In the absence of any reliable data collection, it was left to us to make the best estimate.

We noted that even at that time of our review four women had already undergone 13 treatment cycles without becoming pregnant. Considering the stress that one IVF cycle entailed, failure was a nightmarish experience – and 13 times! Added to this was a cohort of infertile men whose failure to acknowledge their own infertility created other problems. With the intracytoplasmic injection of one spermocyte into one oocyte, it always seemed to me the height of arrogance that a scientist could pick the right sperm for the right oocyte – a form of cellular eugenics. Yet in one way what could one expect. IVF was the product of veterinary medicine.

I came out of the experience of our consultancy rather differently from the person who was commissioned to undertake this review. Our reports received a mixed reception. For the most part of the succeeding 33 years, I have written nothing. Nevertheless, I have been disturbed by commercialisation of the expectations of women increasingly delaying their families – for many reasons. There is an increasing number of women in their forties seeking IVF treatment when they have certainly reached the fertility savannah if not the desert.

I was prompted to write by the following comment:

Going through IVF is the worst thing that has ever happened to me physically and emotionally. The financial costs made the whole thing far more stressful and limited how many attempts we could have. I know of people who have sold their houses and given up everything to pay for cycle after cycle to have the child they always dreamed of. What’s so infuriating, though, is that it absolutely does not have to be this expensive. This is what happens when medical care is run for private profit instead of public good.

At the time we undertook the review it was well before IVF became a hedge fund commodity like so much of health care now. One of the major reasons for the 1988 review was to understand the costs, and the report was inter alia a masterpiece in cost accounting (because of the involvement of Dr Robert Wilson).

IVF is now big business. It would be a brave politician or Department to establish an independent review as ours was. It is very difficult to work out the real success rate; it is in the interest of the industry to conflate the success rate. But the more important issue is that this is an industry that is in a position to prey on those who are so willing to give up so much for “a baby in the basket”.

The problem I have is “what is truth?” I could not believe this nonsense written by one of IVF specialists. His thesis that increasing IVF could replace falling migration levels is backed by this following burble:

Arguments based on a sense that IVF is futile for women in their 40s also hold little water these days. Twenty years ago, when I first began training in IVF, pregnancies in older women were a rarity. Yet 2017 data from Australia show that, for women aged between 40 and 44 using their own eggs, the cumulative live birth rate is well over 10% for the first cycle of IVF treatment and runs to as high as 40% by their eighth cycle of treatment.

The eighth cycle of treatment, I ask you! The cumulative live birth rate is simply, “if I keep going, what are my chances of pregnancy if I have another cycle, or another two cycles, or another three …”. Dangling a 40% success rate in front of a desperate person who is prepared to sell the house …. those who are running IVF clinics are in a position of power -the sort of power men use to manipulate women.

Has the misogyny which once burned bright among obstetricians and gynaecology not been extinguished? Anybody making statements as airily as that suggests that it has not. Statements as that above should be tested urgently by another independent review.

I remember one piece of data that stuck in my mind. It was an early study that compared women who had undergone at least one IVF cycle and then gone back to conventional ways of procreation as those who had persisted and delivered an IVF baby. It was about the same – nine per cent.

This is another statistic that would be worth reviewing now.

Any advances on that?

Mouse Whisper

Witnesses under cross examination, however mighty their stature outside the courtroom, very soon became meek and mild and well-behaved in his hands. If they did not—if they paltered with him, or evaded his questions, or did not do justice to their testimonial responsibilities— the smell and sight of cordite smoke soon drifted into the courtroom.

I have never read a more flower-encrusted definition of bullying – in this case a description of the late Tom Hughes’ court antics.

These words are by Dyson Heydon, in a book review of Tom Hughes’ biography, in turn authored by one of those guys my mousemeister knew at school.

Attorney General Porter or his successor should not palter over the Dyson Heydon sexual harassment report in the wake of the Chief Justice’s condemnation last year of him. Porter received a separate Departmental report on 25 February; and to all intents and purposes it is unsurprising he has done nothing since.

Modest Expectations – Tunisia

Some years ago I wrote a short story about a serial killer who is killed by a woman who has cause for vengeance, but lulls the killer into a false state of security. Set against a background of Carnarvon and Gascoyne Junction, the killer is a very good looking man, who carefully grooms himself – and the woman, his killer, the impossibly beautiful woman. Prey becomes the stalker. It was part of a series of short stories that I wrote after a trip to the Kimberley, before it became a tourist destination. Whether allegorical or not, it has given me the thought that the woman was a journalist who acted as bait to trap the predator into revealing himself. But maybe that is another story – the journalist who endures contumely as the girlfriend so that her probings cause the sociopath to betray himself in front of his peers.

Rape is an act of violence and control. The violence is given a context -sexual assault. However, if the police were informed that a serial killer was loose, there would not be any hesitation. But violent rape, a close relative of murder, seems to invoke legal hesitation. The Federal Parliament situation needs a change in behaviour to complement attitudinal change to stop the disgusting spectacle.

The refuge for this situation about “Pick the Minister”; the betting firms would have been running a book, except there were too many in the know for any realistic odds on who it was. The accused cabinet minister was known to a large number of people, but the name was withheld until Wednesday. “After all, why should I acknowledge something which did not allegedly occur in 1988, and anyway I was different person then. I am now a Cabinet minister!” Not quite the actual words finally uttered but consistent with the eventual lachrymose performance.

Twitter has been alive about the non-allegations in relation to this Cabinet Minister. Disgusting is a mild way to put some of them, but if they are true, the highest level of disgust should be accorded to the now Cabinet Minister.

However, truth in this case is an elusive beast, especially when waiting in the wings of your staged performance is one of the best defamation lawyers in the country.

Given the seriousness of the case, before I knew his name, I would have thought it timely for the Prime Minister to consult with the Attorney-General. He is, after all, the senior judicial officer in Australia, and the Prime Minister was faced with a systemic problem of law enforcement penetrating even his Cabinet. I reflected in an earlier draft that the Attorney-General hopefully will have a solution to the problem. How ironic!

The problem is that the government is in denial, the more the cover up, the more people exposed with inside knowledge; it is just the sort of scenario that any sociopath would delight in. Sociopaths lie. Along the primrose pathway that such men have trodden to get to where they are now, there may well be a number of dark areas from which somebody could emerge, or not. At present, many of such dark areas seem to be coming to light.

It was inevitable as the uproar increased, that this person would be named under Parliamentary privilege. As I wrote early in the week, my hope was that it would be a male who outed him, preferably being the accused himself. Christian Porter has done that. He recognised to his credit that the problem is that if this non-naming had gone on much longer, with increasingly everybody knowing he was the accused, then the Parliament itself becomes a protector of this man and hence compromised. Therefore, someone would have named him in Parliament.

My view has always been to tackle the negative quickly; fallout is inevitable. So what better action than to excise the poison by now setting up an independent inquiry. In particular, for the Prime Minister, if unresolved, the situation becomes a form of political hemlock.

The one matter that troubles me is that a female senator who should know better has resurfaced a claim against a senior Labor member. Unless she knows something others don’t know, why has she surfaced with an old allegation which actually was reviewed by the police and refuted. Just now! Why? Surely this woman would not indulge in an infantile diversionary tactic? Porter in his appearance before the Press then sympathised with Shorten’s plight. So much for Senator Henderson.

There is something in the culture among the Liberal Party women which seems to be toxic to the furtherance of gender equality. I have known many, and some, like former Senator Judith Troeth, were exemplary, but they were closed down; the pressure of being cooped up in Parliament House is not that much different from boarding school bullying.

Christian Porter – no matter how the imbroglio is sliced and however innocent ,while in public life he will be a target, especially in the year of Grace Tame.

Blue Book

Just in case you have not seen the blue book Growing a Strong and Resilient Regional Australia which was published with the Budget papers, it starts optimistically. “Australia’s regions – despite all that’s been thrown at them, are not only still standing but are on the cusp of a great future.”

I am not going to parse the whole report, but even this first sentence, with its recourse to a metaphorical flourish, begs a number of questions.

Even one sentence. It seems “regions” mean any place outside the capital cities, as though the capital cities are apparently a separate entity; in fact they are a diversity held together by being the seat of a government.

The next sentence provides a crude definition of what Australia is beyond the capital cities, and I have always disputed the integrity of a “Capital” as if it is a walled city with a peasantry milling around outside.

I recognised when reporting to Government on rural health that there was “inner rural” and “outer rural”. I had never thought of subdividing coastal settlements in that way. On reflection, coastal settlement has been shown after the bush fires last year as having specific characteristics, particularly in relation to accessibility. When I made this classification, I did it on the basis of an urban development which sprawls and engulfs what were autonomous mostly rural settlements.

I once identified a ring of what broadly could be identified as similar settlements about 100 kilometres from Melbourne in which there was a substantial number of procedural general practitioners who lived in or near the township. As urbanisation approached, the general practitioners became progressively deskilled; the practices became “lock-up” since the doctors no longer lived in the community; after hours care was the locum wasteland and the community ill, a referred burden to the nearest big hospital with an emergency department.

The other comment I would make was that during the time of my investigation, I set myself an exercise to drive from Colac to Warragul. All of the towns along the way were about the same distance from Melbourne, along highways which radiated from Melbourne. If you followed these radial roads, accessibility to the cities was manageable. When I drove the circumferential routes between the towns to assess the accessibility of each to the other, it was more tortuous, but the roads were asphalted until I drove into the Great Dividing Range. Here the road became gravel and the accessibility factor showed how isolated this area was, even to Melbourne, remembering my approximate route at all times was equidistant from the Centre of Melbourne. This inaccessibility was later so clearly shown up in the 2009 bushfires which spread across outer Melbourne, and where the problem of accessibility proved to be catastrophic.

Tackling infrastructure challenges is being able to differentiate communities of interest and then attend to them appropriately. I have always believed that in Australia local governments are the best surrogate, unless otherwise demonstrated, for consultation. I once instructed the bureaucrats under my aegis to visit every municipality in Victoria to get their views on an initiative with which I had been entrusted. There then were 210 municipalities and only one refused to meet with us to discuss the initiative. My bureaucrats were put in a position where they could explain to people who did not know much about the proposed investment, who were then mostly male and who had no idea about the importance of early childhood education.

I have been involved in working closely with communities for most of my career. I enjoy it because I enjoy the diversity of Australia. It has meant that there are very few areas of settlement in Australia that I have not been to in my long public service.

However, it is an attitude which has set me against Bureaucracy.

This limitation of Bureaucracy is shown clearly in this Blue book of Government largesse apportioned essentially by Ministerial portfolio. There are thus multiple pots of government money without any reference to one another or any indication what the expected end product will be.

This addendum to the budget papers requires close reading, because the document is drafted as if the Federal Government is the Cornucopia and Minister McCormack the Goddess, Abundantia.

To me, this is the McCormack pork barrel. Reading the Ministerial statement, you can almost smell the crackling. However, it can be argued that aroma is less pronounced than that of the Sports Rorts. Special interest groups want something; one of the specialties of any portfolio that the National Party holds is the titration of funding against the electoral advantage.

Moreover, Berejiklian has given the practice her benediction last November. “All governments and all oppositions make commitments to the community in order to curry favour. The term pork barrelling is common parlance. It is not something that I know the community is comfortable with. If that’s the accusation made on this occasion …. then I’m happy to accept that commentary. It’s not an illegal practice. Unfortunately, it does happen from time to time by every government.”

God knows, why she contaminated her defiance with “unfortunately”? Joke!

I looked at the proposed Blue Book largesse in regard to “post- bushfires.” A couple of line items attracted my interest. The first among all the grants was $31million allocated specifically to apple growers to “help re-establish” apple orchards, with an individual maximum of $120,000 per hectare to be allocated over one financial year. This is very generous, even if the tree planting is concentrated. It should be recognised that apples and pears are grown together, so there is a definitional problem as only apple growers are mentioned as eligible. There were three apple growing areas affected – Adelaide Hills, Bilpin and Batlow – the last of which lies within the Wagga Wagga State electorate.

From reports there was some damage to the orchards, but that damage seemed to be minor; one producer with 200,000 trees at Batlow lost less than 5,000.

Then about six months after the bushfire in 2020, an industry source reported” … some are choosing to let crops rot on their trees rather than accept farmgate prices set by the big supermarkets at as little as 90 cents per kilogram for a fruit that costs at least $2 a kilogram to produce.

At the same time, Australians are eating 12 per cent fewer apples since 2015; apple exports have fallen 19 per cent since 2016, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Then there’s the drought and its impact on the size and number of apples produced. Australian farmers grew 14 per cent fewer tonnes last year compared to 2017”.

There was no mention of bushfires. So, I’m only on P17 of this 189 page Blue Book, but I wonder what the hell is going on. Turn the page and there is the second line item of interest – Pratt received $10m for his Tumut paper mill.

The problem is that nobody tries to develop a picture where government financing will produce any lasting benefit for Australia. There are pots of money to tap into if one knows one’s way around Canberra.

This is a form of central planning perverted to become a gigantic slush fund; Australia has been blessed indeed as the Land of the Cornucopia – but then I have never watched the Hunger Games.

Over there; Just not yet.

This country has been spectacularly successful at suppressing the Virus, but the problem with success is complacency, when all about have succumbed to the Virus through political pigheadedness in the main plus a basic lack of discipline when confronted with a universal enemy. Given the number of disaster and alien films, excluding “Contagion”, it is ironic in this case that the invader is unseen. The whole axiom-out of sight; out of mind – should be remembered.

Australia has dealt with this change of circumstances after an uncertain start, by locking the country away from the rest of the world. To get into Castle Australis is difficult, but there are still normative judgements about who can enter the country or cannot, although it seems to be common practice to insist on 14 days quarantine. The fact, like so many other things in this public-relations’ obsessed country, we were faced with border closures ostensibly due to health concerns but clearly political considerations. At the outset, it was understandable that restriction in movement should be uniformly applied, but it was not. This stemmed from a basic mistrust in the Commonwealth Government. Here there was pressure from the Prime Minister’s business circle not to impose restrictions, which would have led to a US-style situation. If sources are to be believed, it was a very close thing. After all, Morrison found an unsanitary affinity with Trump.

However, once they were imposed and the longer they went, border closures became a political weapon more than a health reason. When border closures clearly became a complete nonsense, at least Berekjlian, who, from many of her actions has often showed herself to be a rolled-gold guaranteed “dropkick”, was so right. Once it was clear from the NSW public health response that the COVID-19 cases could be gathered into clusters, then as she reasoned rightly, why indulge in group punishment by closing borders indiscriminately.

However, it has bred in the populace more than a risk adverse sentiment –fear – especially as the spectre of lockdown is constantly held over it.

For many years Australians have been used to being able to holiday both at home and overseas. As someone old enough to have grown up when overseas travel was a luxury and generally linked to overseas employment, it is a return to the old days of my youth.

I was one of those who went overseas in 1971, admittedly for the second time, 14 years after my first. Then, apart from a couple of years, I went overseas at least once each year until last year. In 2020, the Virus intervened. Now there is an uncertain future for overseas travel; the success Australia has had in ridding itself from the Virus has made most Australians value a COVID-19-free environment at the expense of overseas tourism.

Vaccination has introduced a new variable, but the vaccines development has been accelerated in a way that the mid-term to long term effect is yet unknown. The community knows that hygiene, masks and isolation (social distancing), works. However, community compliance is a factor which has been one of the reasons for the Australian success.

Within the borders the sense in confidence of moving about is growing, but the country has endured a harrowing time to see what works. Therefore, tourism will only return on the back of a confident people – confident that it can occur within a world where the virus is controlled.

The only way that this border issue can be addressed in the short term is for Australia and New Zealand to open up their orders to strictly Trans-Tasman Travel, and work from there. After all, there is confidence building so that the States do not instinctively close their borders. The Governments are increasingly confident that they can control clusters into hot spots.

Look at the situation in New Zealand – one case in Auckland and the city goes into lockdown. Therefore the “outbreak fear” level approximates that here in Australia, unlike the USA where any fall in the prevalence of the Virus is almost invariably followed by a premature relaxation of restrictions. As was reported this week in the Washington Post “the downward trend in new coronavirus infections had plateaued, perhaps because officials relaxed public health restrictions too soon and more contagious virus variants were becoming more widespread. Experts say a vigorous vaccination effort is key to stamping them out.”

Australia and New Zealand should bite the bullet and enter into an arrangement whereby people can travel between the two countries, leaving details of their destination on arrival. Thus, mutual trust needs to exist, otherwise both countries will be caught in a Western Australian bind of unreasoned defiance, which fortunately is abating as the Premier sees electoral victory this month.

Then we can move into the Pacific to help our neighbours who need our tourism but need to attain the same public health level as Australia and New Zealand. It is a wondrous thing to think that a Virus can assure a common effective response beginning in the Pacific. But then I am always the romantic, believing that advances come the quality of the response to adversity. Australia needs a different government I’m afraid.

In the Pink

Anonymouse

What does it take to get Sydneysiders to flock to the Blue Mountains? Well, me at least. I was thinking as I drove around the rim of the Blue Mountains what an impossible terrain it is, but without its escarpments and jagged pinnacles there would not be the unparalled views. I could be excused for thinking that when William Wentworth, one of three adventurers who first crossed the Blue Mountains to stand on one of pinnacles, the landscape below revealing what Thomas Mitchell later called Australia Felix, confessed that “his love of Australia was the ‘master passion’ of his life.” I could only agree. Yet here was plain the devastating effect of the bushfires which spread though the area early last year and left in their wake a bare blackened landscape.

Yet Australia Felix is never far away. I had gone looking for nature’s compensation for the terrible destruction, a special tapestry of tiny pink and white flowers. For a few short weeks, a year after devastating bushfires in the Blue Mountains and other areas of eastern Australia, the bush has regenerated and a profusion of pink flannel flowers has appeared.

These tiny flowers appear only rarely. Known as bushfire ephemerals, they are regenerated by fire, followed by good rain. It requires specific climatic conditions for seed stored in the soil to germinate. It is thought the plants germinate in response to bushfire smoke, rather than heat. The smoke-derived chemical karrikinolide is the active ingredient that triggers the plants’ emergence. Other plants with a similar activation after bushfires include grasstrees, or Xanthorrhoea, that send up flowering spears, and Gymea lilies. I saw the rebirthed grass trees, but alas no Gymea lilies.

The current bloom is spectacular, with pink flowers woven among the blackened banksias over these large tracts of shallow, skeletal mountain soils.

With their complicated rosy centre of tiny florets and hairy white bracts, rather than petals, they resemble a daisy, but are actually in the same family as carrots, parsley and celery. They are similar to the common flannel flower but are considerably smaller and have a distinct pink hue.

Pink flannel flowers are a mixed blessing – without fire, they remain dormant. See them while you can, hopefully it is many years before they can appear again. I wonder whether Wentworth ever saw them. I doubt it.

Mouse Whisper

Neera Tanden, a professional Democrat and President Biden’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, fought her way to the threshold of the White House, only to be swatted at by senators who claimed that her appetite for partisan conflict — on Twitter, specifically — disqualifies her from holding that much power. The same fighting that got her here, in other words, now threatens to sink her.

“Just to mention a few of the thousands of negative public statements,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), speaking with the steady monotone of a not-mad-but-disappointed dad, “you wrote that Susan Collins is ‘the worst,’ that Tom Cotton is a ‘fraud,’ that vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz.”

It is an interesting commentary on a feisty intelligent woman, who has raised a swag of money for her Center for American Progress (CAP). She has been a Hilary Clinton sidekick, but it is not only the above Republicans who have been the target of her venom. That honour resides with Bernie Sanders, and at one stage it is alleged that Tanen assaulted the person who later became Sanders’ Campaign Manager. The reason was that Ms Tanen did not like his question directed at Hilary at a CAP forum.

By the way, among her considerable set of donors for the CAP is Mark Zuckerberg who is recorded as giving about US$700,000 in 2018. She certainly is thus a lady not for turning, but her fate will be interesting because she will almost certainly fail to get the nomination for the Cabinet job.

Needless to say the President has withdrawn her nomination later this week.

Modest Expectations – Dalmatians

“The label racist is not one I would apply like that,” Garland said evenly — without a hint of are-you-a-dolt? in his voice. “Implicit bias just means every human being has biases. That’s part of what it means to be a human being. The point of examining implicit biases is to bring our conscious mind up to our unconscious mind and to know when we are behaving in a stereotyped way. Everybody has stereotypes. It’s not possible to go through life without working through stereotypes. Implicit biases are the ones we don’t recognize. That doesn’t make you a racist.”

In his current Senate confirmation hearings for Attorney-General, Merrick Garland shows in this above response to one of those rubber red-necked Republicans what an acquisition he would have been to the US Supreme Court if it had not been for the Kentucky Kernel, Mitch McConnell refusing to let his nomination be considered. Yes, the sobriquet kernel. Is that not a nut case?

The Sewers of Canberra are not Backchannels

And less welcome sexual attentions in the form of sexual harassment also have been a standing problem. In decades past there was a discreet backchannel operating between the prime minister’s office and the opposition leader’s office to keep sexual misconduct in check. Each side kept an eye out for rogue behaviour by members of the other and duly alerted the leaders’ offices accordingly. That system fell into disuse years ago.

I was surprised reading that piece by Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald. Given that I was very senior in one of those offices, the “backchannel” must have been sealed up at the time I was there. I knew of no conversations. It was a time when Parliament House was much smaller, and there were few offices which were not the size of shoeboxes; people lived cheek by jowl. Yet it was a time when there was considerable fraternisation across all political parties and the media, with the non-members bar the central meeting place. Parliamentarians came down rarely.

The Lobby was the place where there was considerable mixing, and I remember one prominent journalist supressing his laughter. Something was happening at a table behind us. Judi Morosi was feeding Jim Cairns. Well known non-relationship, as there was considerable smokescreen about extra marital calisthenics. I was not around during the Ainslie Gotto saga, but hardly a time I thought when Gorton would have been exchanging notes with Whitlam. These were the few associations then which attracted notoriety in the media.

The number of staff was far smaller, but even so, there were not many inglenooks in the old Parliament House where inappropriate behaviour would not be discovered. In fact, given the intimate environment, not much was unknown around Canberra. There were a number of consensual arrangements, but drunkenness was more the problem.

It was also somewhat ironic that in those days, having finished in the office when I left Parliament House often after 1.00 am, it was just a wave to the guys on the reception desk at the King’s Hall entrance. King’s Hall was a very open space – especially at 1.00 am. Any antics would thus have been on a large stage.

The advent of security, presumably at the Ministerial entrance of the new Parliament House, did not save Brittany Higgins; as has been reported the security even facilitated the entry into the Ministerial office, although it must have been clear that she was too drunk to sign her name properly. These days it would appear that there is a very short backchannel between security and coverup within the burrows of government

Facesaver?

To my everlasting shame, I have never used or looked at Facebook. I must have missed something judging by all the furore. Facebook is a free service. I choose not to use it. I remember when Facebook first came into prominence at a time when Zuckerberg had not yet worked how to make it profitable. It was originally a means by which a kid in college could communicate without the distasteful business of actually meeting somebody face to face. There was more than a hint of misogyny in the original motivation for Facebook.

Zuckerberg introduced advertisements into Facebook very early on after he launched it in 2004, but not until 2007 did he launch the first co-ordinated advertisement campaign.

He said at the time: “The core of every user’s experience on Facebook is their page, and that’s where businesses are going to start as well…The first thing businesses can do is design a page to craft the exact experience they want people to see.”

Before he even made money, there was a film made in 2010 about Zuckerberg called “The Social Network”.He was only 26. Aaron Sorkin, the guy who wrote “West Wing” wrote the screen play and promulgated the Zuckerberg myth – the socially awkward nerd who created the greatest social communication platform the World has ever experienced. To put that into perspective, Rupert Murdoch was a running a small Adelaide newspaper when he was 26.

Zuckerberg did not start making money on Facebook advertisements until 2012, and apparently the business has worked. He never promoted Facebook as a news channel. It just happened that organisations jumped on it because of the popularity of that and other platforms the company acquired. In initially opposing the Australian law, Facebook argued that publishers willingly post news to its site, which helps them reach a larger audience. It says that the model differs from Google’s, as publishers don’t voluntarily provide articles that appear in the firm’s search results. The Australian proposal penalises Facebook for content it didn’t take or ask for.

As the Facebook boss in Australia went on to say – “The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content. It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia.

In the Washington Post this week, Roger McNamee, in reviewing “the current state of play today with the tech industry” has stated “Internet platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter aided the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and have contributed to the slow national response to a deadly pandemic. The algorithms on which the firms rely amplify hate speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories, and their recommendation engines manipulate behaviour because doing so is good for business.”

Has Facebook learnt from the experience with Cambridge Analytica, which shamelessly stole data and manipulated data as part of the Trump 2016 election? Arguably Facebook served to amplify such behaviour and this remains an unanswered question in the reports of this feud the Australia Government is having with Facebook.

Facebook pulled the plug on the news pages, and there was the predictable response of those deprived of a free service. However, it gave Facebook an opportunity to see in the real world what the response was. In fact, the news media responded very quickly, by setting up alternative pathways to Facebook. Therefore, in a far-off country, Facebook was able to sample the reaction and appear to give the politicians a victory.

Zuckerberg is obsessed with maintaining his monopoly. He believes he has the “old media” covered, but by his actions, in a few hours he set up a “wildfire” of innovation to compensate for the loss of Facebook. If this goes on long enough, the next raft of innovators will appear to challenge the Facebook sovereignty.

On Monday, Facebook agreed to the Australian government’s added amendments to the proposed code. That included a two-month mediation period, giving the two sides more time to negotiate commercial deals that could help Facebook avoid having to work under the code’s provisions.

In other words, Facebook has not lost – not by a long shot. They have bought time, and to Zuckerberg, what does he care if Morrison and Frydenberg claim victory. “To me, victory in always unconditional”, Zuckerberg might say.

I still believe that if Facebook is making such big profits in this country, the Government should tax them more than the current 2% for the benefit of the community; not push them into a Mafia-style protection racket to benefit a lot of old men who are on the obsolete side of history. Just the normal lazy politicians not prepared to confront the need for an equable tax. And what they said originally probably remains true. Facebook is expert in gathering data – and they certainly gained some this week in the response to their actions, which they will already be dicing and slicing to work out what is what. Has the Government collected the same data to use in future negotiations?

Quids from Quarantine

Anonymouse

You always know there’s a quid to be made when the big players start to throw their hats in the ring, and in the past few weeks we have had the Wagners in Queensland, Lindsay Fox in Victoria, and now Sam Shahin in South Australia, all wanting to get into the quarantine business. The Howard Springs facility has shown the effectiveness of a low-tech facility offering separate cabin accommodation, individual air conditioning, access to fresh air, and importantly, little requirement for staff to enter cabins while they are occupied; worker accommodation on site is an added benefit. Re-purposed it might be, but it’s turned out to be a good solution. Nevertheless, it is subject to the vagaries of a monsoonal wet season

Wellcamp Airport outside Toowoomba has ‘abundant’ room for the proposed 1,000 bed quarantine facility, with another 300 beds for staff. As noted in an earlier edition of this blog, a Boeing 747 can land at Wellcamp – it was designed for large scale cattle export, avoiding the need to move the cattle through Brisbane. Unlike the backward planning endemic in government circles, Wellcamp has much forward capacity – its terminal is large and there is plenty of space. International flights can go direct to Wellcamp.

The Wagner Brothers own the land around the Wellcamp airport so they could start work immediately – and seemingly they already have the blessing of the Queensland Government.

Lindsay Fox’s Avalon Airport proposal already has the imprimatur of the Victorian Premier, which might well see a sod turned for a facility for up to 1000 international arrivals before the others.

Mr Shahin’s proposal to develop a “purpose built” facility outside Tailem Bend was very promptly booted by the SA Government which then announced the opening of a dedicated CBD hotel for positive COVID-19 cases. The SA Health Minister said the Tailem Bend plan lacked a hospital in good proximity. Tailem Bend’s hospital is not the “level” of hospital required because, according to the SA Health Minister, “If someone develops COVID, they can very rapidly develop to the level that they need an ICU and isolation – Tailem Bend doesn’t have an ICU.” Tailem Bend is one hour from Adelaide on a dual carriageway. The problem with health care perspectives in South Australia government is that it is a health care wasteland once you lose sight of North Terrace. For goodness sake!

All of this raises a few questions:

If the Commonwealth plans to continue keeping its hands off the quarantine reins, why did it commission a report by former Health Department Secretary and Crown Director, Ms Jane Halton AO PSM, into hotel quarantine?
Is there an agreed position on the optimum template for quarantine facilities and is there agreement on how long they will be required – something the Australian community isn’t being told?
The figure of 40,000 Australians wanting to return home has been quoted for months. Why is this number not falling? Given the difficulty of getting an exemption to leave Australia – unless of course you are a celebrity or ex-politician – who are taking up the hotel quarantine places if not returning Australians?
What is the optimum location for these facilities? Do they really need to be in the middle of the city a block from a tertiary hospital?
What percentage of COVID-positive cases in hotel quarantine end up in hospital, and of those, what percentage require ICU (and tangentially, if ICU is such a pressing requirement, why not upgrade ICUs in regional hospitals where quarantine facilities can be located)?

Hotel quarantine is now the single source of any new COVID infection in the Australian community. “Escaped” COVID has caused problems in Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia, with a greater or lesser impact. Currently Australia faces a hiatus with no new cases. The media is focussing on vaccination. Even with the vaccines rolling out, no one knows how effective they will be at large scale prevention of COVID (as opposed to prevention of serious illness). Quarantine is here to stay for the foreseeable future and is likely to remain the key to opening Australia’s international borders to business and tourists and allowing the Australians overseas who want to return to do so. But it needs to be more affordable and the metropolitan hotel-based quarantine has lost any lustre it had. Did Halton comment on affordability, talk about fair and reasonable charges? See above questions?

The States do not appear in any hurry to hand quarantine back to the Commonwealth; on the contrary, it is the States looking to develop permanent quarantine facilities, presumably with funding by the Commonwealth.

Which brings us back to the National Review of Hotel Quarantine and the point of it all. The sum of the recommendations was that States and Territories should have quality assurance mechanisms and continuous improvement. There needs to be information available to travellers, quarantine options developed for National Cabinet, travel bubbles, and finally the Commonwealth Government consider a “national facility for quarantine”. Did we need this Review to tell us any of this which is just stating the obvious? The undated report was released around October 2020. The author’s name appears only once, in an appendix.

The report did highlight one thing however, and that is the lack of a comprehensive set of data on hotel quarantine. Then, as now, there appears to be no single accessible source and the daily data are just that. The data provided in the National Review report are as opaque as they are revealing; they highlight the fact that no one knew what was happening with flight crews (we know that now), or exemptions, still a matter of extreme annoyance to the general population who have been serving their own time locked up, and the lack of demographic and hospitalisation data on quarantine inmates. Together with the total number of beds and quarantinees, this is the information most relevant to planning.

What is interesting however, is how difficult it is to find out something as fundamental as how many quarantine places there are – what is Australia’s current quarantine capacity (even the maximum and minimum based on a sliding scale of demand)? Phone calls to State health media elicited no information: for example, NSW Health – send us an email; Vic Health – we don’t run quarantine, email the Department of Justice; Qld Health – talk to State Disaster Management, Health doesn’t run quarantine; SA Health – send an email; NT Health – has no media contact and no one on the only phone number knew who knew anything … and so it went on. Tasmania was the standout though – there is a media page, headed “Media” – it’s blank. More next week, if any information is forthcoming.

After a year of COVID the matter of quarantine is still being bounced around – a dedicated series of regionally-located facilities (as recommended in this Blog #76 and 78) could have been constructed and commissioned by now, but perhaps doing that lost out in the economic rationality of providing an income stream to the hotel industry while tourism has been shut down. But without the data that show the vaccines are very effective in preventing transmission of COVID, quarantine is here to stay. They may be expensive to develop, but the need for dedicated facilities should not be taken off the table in the current excitement about vaccinations. These facilities can be mothballed and then rolled out again (as with Howard Springs) for the next pandemic – or even a variant of the current – which, as those who analyse these things have said, could be just around the corner. And after all, Ms Halton did recommend a national quarantine approach.

Déjà vu

I was alerted by the recent activities of that Texan, Senator Ted Cruz … his antics this week reminded me very much of those of another politician early last year, much closer to home.

Let take up the story of Senator Ted. As been reported, the weather in Texas has been appalling – it has taken out the energy grid for the simple reason that the State does not invest in infrastructure, it is a mighty big land mass and the State is run by a group of climate change denialists, including Senator Ted.

So, there is no heating, but further, there is more. Water pipes have frozen, burst, or the water has become contaminated. In other words, much of the State is without running water; and in any event where it can be tapped, it needs to be boiled.

Pictures of pileups on the interstate highways compound the chaos.

Senator Ted Cruz took a trip out of Texas because his alliterative children, Caroline Camille and Catherine Christiane wanted to go to Cancún in the middle of a Catastrophic pandemic.

As he is alleged to have said, “Look my wife Heidi said to me our children are freezing, let us get out of the hell-hole and go south to Mexico.” As the newspaper said “Also, way to throw your kids under the bus, senator.”

In contrast, as the paper went on, “most responsible parents would have told their tweens that the closest they’re getting to Mexico these days is a chalupa from a drive-through at Taco Bell.”

Instead, the Swift Family Cruz packed a suitcase “the size of a steamer trunk”, left their poodle, Snowflake, behind and dashed off for fun in the sun. This action contravened what CDC has recommended for nearly a year, i.e. that US residents should avoid travel to other countries. The advice was ignored but that it is the way of the Cruz. His problem virtually duplicates that of Australia’s Prime Minister, who disappeared to Hawaii, did not let us in on this voyage north, and all this while Australia burned. The American media, which is less controlled (and apparently more observant) than Australia got onto Cruz almost immediately and there he was, scuttling back to Texas mouthing a number of mutually-conflicting self-serving reasons for him going to the Mexican Resort in the first place.

The American media has shown its public service usefulness (without recourse to Facebook). “There’s no need to reiterate the extraordinarily poor timing of Cruz’s trip while Texas froze. That burro has been beaten to death, shamed, and then beaten some more. This is a look at a man who should be setting an example for the millions of Texans who are aching to travel. But in order to be able to see their families and friends again safely in the future, they’ve followed Dr. Anthony Fauci’s advice and stayed home as much as possible. They’ve worn their masks, practiced social distancing, and washed their hands diligently.”

But not our Boy, Ted.

The Prime Minister apparently has stopped asking his wife Jen for advice, at least publicly. There is a political playbook, where “mistruth” is very much part of the narrative – an uncaring narrative which Trump over the years exploited even beyond the wildest nightmare of the original Florentine Editor.

Politicians who flirt with the edges of the narrative, hide in the marginalia, indulge in palimpsest or have their own scriptorium where their life becomes an illuminated manuscript finally have to face that question – are they up to the task of being a genuinely caring person, sensitive to their constituencies? Let’s face it, most aren’t. Unfortunately, the community elects images, not the sordid reality.

By the way Prime Minister, when did you last go to the bushfire ravaged communities to see evidence of the fruits of your Government’s response?

This quote below sets out the damage that Trump has done, and how an insidious callousness has invaded the proto-narcissist political mind, and unfortunately the Cruz scenario will increasingly play out, especially when nobody is told or worse ignored.

As Jennifer Rubin wrote incisively in the Washington Post in the past week: “Incompetence is not the purview of one party. But when you view politics as theater and grievance-mongering, chances are you are going to shortchange governance, elect a president with no public-sector experience, no interest in learning, no desire to hire competent people and no ability to accept responsibility, and you get something like the covid-19 debacle. Moreover, if your party is hostile to government and exercising regulatory power because it is beholden to a donor class and right-wing ideologues, you will not be prepared for disasters when they strike.”

How very true!

The King lived; the Prime Minister died

And the Answer is…

a red dawn

where laid

morula upon blades of green

urgency to become

spiky quilted ectoderm

sprouting

teal topknot

emergent wave to

a new world

where neighbours in serried ranks

wave back

until

with swelling yellow belly

we stand among the green detritus

of yesterday

proud that we alone know the answer.

I have a particular reason to remember my time in eSwatini. My wife has a friend who has a large plant nursery in Malkerns in what was Swaziland when I last was there, but is now renamed eSwatini. The Swazis have their own country, ruled by a king who has a penchant for wives. Once a British protectorate, eSwatini is a tiny enclave wedged into a corner between South Africa and Mozambique. It is one of the last absolute monarchies in the World. The capital, Mbabane, lies in the Highveld (1000+ metres), whereas Malkerns lies in the Midveld, (770m), a fertile valley where the mountains form a distant hazy rim.

This is the country like so much of Southern Africa when you leave the coast, the climate is milder, less humid but nevertheless tropical. Behind her property stretched a huge expanse of pineapple cultivation, which prompted me to write the verse which heads this piece.

Our friend’s property was unusual because close to the house she had a large dam, constructed to provide a reliable water supply for the nursery. The dam also attracted hippopotamuses, who would wander up from the river in the nearby Mlilwane wildlife sanctuary, through the pineapples, to spend quality time in the dam. Then they would leave. Several years ago, a worker accidently got between a mother and calf and was trampled to death. Otherwise, the pilgrimages have been peaceful.

More recently, a large Nile crocodile came to share the dam. Crocodiles apparently intermittently appear. This means that going outside is a hazardous exercise, especially for Suzy, her large black dog, which had to be kept inside until the crocodile was captured and returned to the river. Hippopotamuses and crocodiles will happily co-exist, but this crocodile’s presence has acted as somewhat of a deterrent to the Hippo Walk.

What I remember clearly was that the day before we left, my wife and I went for the longest walk that I had done for months because of my progressive tiredness. I knew even then that all was not well, but the walk enlivened me. I felt more freedom, less stiffness, the weakness had evaporated and the pain in my legs had been reduced to a dull ache. The pineapple stroll had been recuperative – or so I thought.

The next day, the pain, the weakness, the stiffness had come back with a bang. For the first time, my denial fell away. I knew that there was something wrong. Fortunately, the bathroom was well supplied with therapy aids which had been installed during my wife’s friend’s husband’s terminal illness.

However, it was not for some weeks later that I saw the doctor on return to Sydney, who immediately diagnosed me and ordered tests, which confirmed the diagnosis. I had seen or been close to a number of doctors in the preceding three months – and this was the first doctor who diagnosed me. Yes, the diagnostician was an orthopaedic surgeon.

As a footnote to describe the headline, King, Mswati III, has just recovered from his COVID infection. His Prime Minister was not so lucky. He died in December of the Virus. Currently, the number of infections in eSwatini is nearing 17,000 with 13,500 having recovered and there being 645 deaths. eSwatini brought in strict anti-COVID measures very early on. In perspective, the population is 1.14m. Infections seem to be dropping as the second wave rolls on.

Mouse Whisper

Tegestologists and labeorphilists. Now there are words which you don’t often use to describe obsessive losers.

Tegestologists have a great excuse to spend time in bars since they collect coasters or beermats. They should probably team up with labeorphilists, or collectors of beer bottles. Having decried the above, I must admit to souveniring the odd coaster, but as for beer bottles, I have transitory labeorphilia but only when they are full of beer.

Modest Expectation – The Ton

This is my centennial blog. I haven’t missed a week and most of my blogs hover around the 3,000 words. People have chipped me because a few, trying to find my blog, ended up enmeshed in advertisements for mouse traps; as a result I have the link to the blog at the bottom of my emails.

My blog has served a number of purposes. It is occupational therapy, and in the swelter of words being gushed forth every second around the world, the expectation that anybody will read anything is minimal. The second consequence of the blog is that you can invite not only comments but also contributors. However, this then requires time spent soliciting and cajoling for a possibly nano-audience. I have been appreciative of those who have written and Charlie McMahon’s diary of his time in the Desert should have a far wider audience, but that itself is the subject of a future blog.

I started with an advantage. I had stacks of journals I had never had time to read, and yet never had thrown out – on the grounds that I would read them next week, although that mythical “next week” never came. There was no time to read them while I was working.

The blog serves at one level as a self-educational tool, and in its weekly discipline makes one forage far and wide in order to write a coherent argument. Therefore, time spent seeking other authors becomes a question of priority for a one-man-blog. In the end you have to write the bulk.

To back up a blog, there has been no better time to invest in newspaper and magazine subscriptions. Online subscriptions allow ready access to the Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Washington Post, The Guardian and The Economist as well as The Sydney Morning Herald locally. I gave up reading the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly on line – interesting, very lengthy articles, but disrupted by just too many advertisements. I still subscribe to the New York Review of Books, even though the articles are often more prolix than pithy.

Currently, I receive only two medical journals, The Medical Journal of Australia because I am life member of the “Union” and the Harvard Medical Letter, which is a very interesting publication because it is directed towards advice – mainly for sensible ageing – and has a commonsense approach, albeit from an American perspective.

A friend of mine said I should stop at the centennial blog. I shall ponder on that advice, but for the first time in my life I have written how I actually feel, and do not have to show respect to some whom, over the years, I have despised but held my tongue because career was all important.

That summarises my view of why Australia is in the state it is. To me those in the middle political ground have held their tongues for too long. Too many have held their tongues while Murdoch and his minions have rolled over us. It is such a pity that in this old but still very smart man the only residue of his privileged Australian upbringing is a pathological hatred for the country that bore him.

It is not obvious to me who will save the Lucky Country. I have been alive long enough to share the blame. Denial is the new policy. I was not smart enough to lie – enough!

Maybe this blog is a strange form of penance.

Navalny – Mother Russia

When the data in relation to the GDP of Russia and Australia are compared, this country’s GDP is very close to that of Russia, and over the past year the Australian economy probably has performed better than Russia’s. Yet here is Russia trying to match it with the United States.

I remember a very well-connected Professor in the early 1980s telling me that Reagan and his government would drive Russia into the ground within the decade. All America had to do was continue to increase the stakes until Russia could no longer compete – “until the pips squeak”. Already then the borders of the Soviet empire were widely spread and the cost of garrisoning an increasingly restless empire became less economic than continuing the looting of captive peoples.

Russia reset itself. Gorbachev came and went. So did Yeltsin. Assets were acquired by the few who revelled under the name “Oligarch”. Then came Putin. I remember George W Bush saying he could look into the Putin soul. Really! As many commentators have observed, Putin came of age as a secret service police officer in the Soviet Union, and he approaches his job through the lens of a centuries-old tradition of secretiveness and authoritarian power politics. No soul on view here.

Russians understand power. Russians are renowned for their ability to play chess, and if you split the game into opening gambit, middle game and end game then you begin to see how the Russian mind works. The person from whom I learnt a considerable amount was Russian born. His family came to Australia as did many, trekking across Russia, through the Manchurian city of Harbin and then by ship to Australia.

I well remember when I was on the S.S. Taiping at the beginning of 1957 a group of these emigrés came on board in Hong Kong bound for Sydney. I stumbled upon one of their Russian Orthodox services being held in steerage and was confronted by this mixture of octavist solemnity and suffocating aroma of incense. It was my introduction to Russian emigrés. Even existing as they did as lower deck shadows, they set forth this unforgettable expression of Mother Russia – a fealty no matter the circumstances.

As someone who played mediocre chess, I learnt from my Russian-born boss. Opening gambits are often flashy and are the province of those who want a quick killing and without the patience or the concentration to survive the middle game where the thrust and parry delivers the tactical advantage; and where you worked with an end game expert, it helped to use the midgame to bottle up the adversary. The Russian mind has an eye to the end game, and I certainly learnt from a master.

I have only been to Russia once and then only to St Petersburg. It was “early Putin”. We went there via a Finnish train from Helsinki as was recommended in 2005. We were advised to have someone looking after us – a Russian guide and driver – and when we walked the streets unaccompanied to leave our passports at the hotel but have copies in case some officers of the law wanted to “shake you down”, as it was termed.

We stayed in the Astoria Hotel opposite the commanding St Isaac’s cathedral, at a time when there was a meeting of oil oligarchs in the hotel. The number of men in long, belted, dark overcoats provided a sinister backdrop to our vodka martinis. We happened to overlook the square. James Bond did not appear but out of one of those limousines stepped somebody with whom I had been friendly but had not seen for years. He worked for British Shell, and when I tapped on the window, he emitted a cry of surprise, and seconds later his long lanky figure bounded in through the revolving door and then there were three vodka martinis and a background to the Conference.

If you have money, preferably without political ambition, then one has a privileged existence in Russia. There was no waiting in a queue to enter the Hermitage – we were ushered directly into the museum. I said all I wanted to see were the Rembrandts on this day, not only just seeing them but also absorbing these masterpieces, being able to go back and forth, and not be constrained in a shuffling queue pushing one inexorably out the exit door. The Hermitage has the greatest concentration of Rembrandt paintings in the World, and this was my only shot at seeing them. Not obeying our guide obviously annoyed her, but we did what we wanted to do. We had paid for that privilege.

Yet saying St Petersburg is Russia is as true as saying that New York is the United States of America, but it is not. St Petersburg was built from a swamp by a series of enlightened despots. New York emerged from a swamp but without an imperial stamp, formed by capitalism rather tyranny. Within both there was both extreme exploitation and misery to achieve the current situation. Russia achieved magnificent opulence before the United States, but at a high cost.

One of the two places in the world where I could stay and look for as long as the proverbial length of string is the Amber Room in the Summer Palace. The Summer palace was virtually destroyed by the Germans, the original Amber Room dismantled, who knows whether it was reduced to shards. Russians faced with restoring this royal palace after the War recognised its cultural importance and rebuilt it, complete with the Amber Room.

One trip to one city – but life is a collection of impressions. And one of those has been to never under-rate the Russians. Never.

Now almost two decades on, Russian despotism is alive and well. It flies under the icons of the intensely conservative Orthodox Church, which provides that conservative framework upon which fascism can now flourish.

Putin has reasserted State control. With Trump as his marionette, he was allowed to rectify a number of the weaknesses which had preceded the fall of the Soviet Union. His experience as an officer in the secret police enabled him to put the pieces together which he had to do before he could bring his own “wild men” into line, which he has showed with middle game strength.

Putin no longer has a fragmented restless set of satraps to govern, and he has built the military power into a disciplined unit. He has probably looked very carefully at and used Israel as a model. He realised unlike Stalin that it is unwise to murder most of the senior ranks of the military. He has revitalised and streamlined his armed forces – particularly the army and air force. Putin disentangled from Afghanistan, and now watches how the United States have handled this Tar Baby inheritance. His reported system of bounties on American lives there elicited a limp response from Trump. No wonder he was emboldened to see how far he could go in weakening America.

The problem is that Putin has used that four years in which Trump was in the White House to polish his routine, which was the real “fake news”.

It means that with a modest investment, Russia could outwit an unwary America – or a country then in the thrall of a narcissistic ponce.

The Biden Forces are presumably isolating and neutralising the Trump legacy so as to free itself to deal with Russia. How does Biden deal with Russia, its cyber games have been magnifying its influence far beyond where it should be?

Maybe Biden may look back at the Kennan legacy, given that during his time in the Senate, Biden would have met Kennan on a number of occasions.

George Kennan was an American foreign affairs expert who, over his long life, came to know Russia extremely well.

George Kennan was not everybody’s cup of tea, He started his involvement with the Soviet Union when he was a junior diplomat in Latvia, then an independent republic created after World War I, in 1932. Among a number of ambassadorial roles, he served as Ambassador to the Soviet Union; yet spent most of his life advising the American Government with varying degrees of direct influence; but let us say he was not very far away from the ears of the Great and Powerful.

As Susan Glasser, former editor of Foreign Policy has written:

It is because of Kennan’s meticulous observations, incisive prose and deep knowledge of the country and its people that 20th-century Americans were lucky enough to have him as witness to the monstrosities of Stalin’s Russia — one who didn’t merely throw up his hands in confusion, or succumb to wishful thinking or fellow-travelerism or any of the other diseases endemic in so much Western writing about the Soviet Union.

This is a relevant legacy of Kennan’s, and one that we have yet to fully absorb. Indeed, the tradition of getting Russia wrong has a distinguished Washington lineage, and one that I witnessed while covering the rise of Putin for The Washington Post in the early 2000s. In those years, Putin was reconsolidating power in the Kremlin, taking over independent media, jailing or banishing potential political opponents, shutting down elections for governor and putting into place a new security-state apparatus from such remnants of the Soviet police state as had survived the 1990s. Yet back in Washington, there were those who persisted in believing for years that Putin was not exactly as he seemed. Remember when George W. Bush looked into his “soul” in 2001?

Much of Kennan’s genius about Russia is contained in what has become known as the Long Telegram, which he wrote to the then US Secretary of State in 1946 while he was US Chargé d’Affaires in Moscow. He made this very perspicacious observation: The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth–indeed, their disbelief in its existence–leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another.

The fact that Trump also subscribed to destroying objectivity thus made it very easy for Putin to flummox the West.

Putin is careful to target his intervention to areas which he can control, or where surrogates will substitute. As a Sunni Syrian from Aleppo said to me once, the country had been seized by a coalition of small minorities replete with a sociopathic mentality, in this case the Alawites, a sect of the Shia. Iran is the centre of Shia Islam. Putin has demonstrated his game plan and can be a continual irritant in the Middle East, Ukraine, Crimea, Armenia, Belarus. What next? Cyprus, the Balkans – in mufti or uniform his operatives are spread out? Now that Trump has connived with his screams of “fake news” and “Hoax”, Putin can gleefully keep on starting cyber fires to compound the Chaos.

After all, Trump has been gold in the way that he saved the Russians money, because the American oligarchs have done it for the Russians and filled the Trump coffers to enable him to keep helping Putin, especially now he may feel bullet-proof following the failure of his impeachment twice.

Russia is living beyond its means, especially if the game changes from chess to poker. Raising the stakes and watching who will call whom bluffing. It should not be the Americans. Oil prices are not high enough to bail Russia out; and what if the Americans seize the gambling licence, (i.e. in less colourful terms, tighten the sanctions) so that the Russians are denied the chips with which to play. That may not be enough, but it may cause the Russians to stop meddling.

In his famous Long Telegram, Kennan reminded his countrymen that Russia lost some 20 million during World War II, and yet rose as “a single force greater than any other that will be left on the European continent when this war is over” yet there would be the cultural factors that would eventually prove the communist state’s undoing.

“The strength of the Kremlin lies largely in the fact that it knows how to wait,” Kennan wrote. “But the strength of the Russian people lies in the fact that they know how to wait longer.” Therefore, this time the Americans must join the end game, and assure checkmate. Putin has shown that given what he has, he has had to play the long game, but his end game is beginning to become unstuck.

Trump remains some sort of political force, but suddenly some of the Republicans have obviously been receiving information. Mitch McConnell’s alluding to criminal charges suggests that he has been made privy to some information.

What is more immediately pertinent is that the Russian people have found an alternative leader in Alexei Navalny and multiple clandestine attempts to assassinate him have failed. Putin could execute him and may still do so -it’s a very Russian way of dealing with dissidents. The problem that Putin has with Navalny is he is intelligent, speaks English, knows how the system works in its deepest recesses, is a populist with a huge social media audience – and has tremendous resilience. He is the epitome of Mother Russia and that must infuriate Putin because Navalny has shown him up as the dwarf that struts.

The demonstrations against Putin can be subject to overwhelming force under the guise of government security, but unlike that of Stalin who executed or sent dissidents to Siberian concentration camps. Therefore, he cannot lock up all the dissidents without a very great economic and social cost.

However, Navalny needs the help of the Americans. The Biden administration concurrently needs to root out its own internal sedition and treason, which has been creeping in under the cover of the First Amendment.

The Americans must target Putin without targeting Russia. They must surreptitiously promote Navalny as Mother Russia. They need to test the Russian commitment for expenditure to protect Mother Russia. As I have said before, Kaliningrad, the exclave where, despite the Germans being moved out by Stalin and replaced by Russians, there has been suggestion of “Germanisation” since the population tends to go next door to Poland and Lithuania for their supplies; an ageing Baltic fleet lies at anchor as it is currently the only ice-free Russian harbour, and indeed the navy is said to be only a coastal fleet of ships. What does that mean; whereas the European Union may call a particular ship a trawler the Russian may call it a corvette. Who knows what is truth, but geography does not change and one can only speculate on what would happen if it could be publicly shown that most of that Russian cyber mischief is being orchestrated from Kaliningrad. Did someone mention blockade?

While this is going on perhaps attention needs to be paid to Putin welshing on the deal to hand back at least two of the Kuril Islands to the Japanese, which he apparently agreed to do. It means diverting resources to the other side of the continent. The Russians have already done that with a few tanks, but America may get serious and say: “You agreed to one thing; and now?”

All the strategies rely on there being sufficient will to turn to someone, who epitomises somebody who flies in the face of Russian Government – democracy. Among the Slavonic nations, democracy is an uncertain concept.

However, Biden cannot let Putin get away with continuing to sow chaos. Democracy depends on an underlying certainty, which Trump tried to upend on 6 January with his motley group of fascist thugs – a reminder of Putin’s love too of the leather and tattoos and wearing machismo as his favourite fragrance. He loves to incite disorder, but not in the Kremlin.

But elsewhere, Putin is Chaos.

Searching for a remedy for Chaos, my eyes alit on the following entry: “You can easily counter Chaos Knight’s illusions with ES Echo Slam + Veil of Discord or Lion Finger of Death with Aghanim’s Scepter, since illusions take more damage.”

There you are – never thought it would be that simple. That is the problem, treat life as a Game; and meanwhile, Navalny – Mother Russia – is executed.

A Turnup for a Swede?

The Government has nominated Cecilia Malmström as Sweden’s candidate for the position of next Secretary-General of the OECD. The Secretary-General will be appointed by the OECD member countries by 1 March 2021 and will begin their five-year term of office on 1 June 2021.

Cecilia Malmström is a Swedish politician with solid international experience, including as EU Commissioner for Home Affairs in 2010–2014 and EU Commissioner for Trade in 2014–2019. She was also Sweden’s Minister for EU Affairs in the Reinfeldt Government in 2006–2010 and a Member of the European Parliament in 1999–2006.

That is the unemotional way the Swedes last year announced the nomination of Ms Malmström’s candidature for the position of OECD Secretary-General. Since the appointment is imminent and our own Mathias remains in the running, I was curious to see how she was perceived in Sweden.

Ms Malmstron speaks Swedish, English, French and Spanish fluently. She has a good working knowledge of German, Italian, Norwegian and Danish. Our Mathias has Flemish to himself. We underestimate the multilingual capacity of the European intelligentsia of which she is a member. I remember well being invited to a family gathering in Stockholm to celebrate the graduation from school of the son. When we arrived, all the family switched to speaking English in our hearing, such is the understated courtesy of the Swedish. After about an hour we excused ourselves so a more family gathering could proceed in Swedish – just returning the courtesy.

When I asked my friend about Ms Malmström, he replied (sic):

How very singular to learn about the OECD race from Down Under. At least I had forgotten about this nomination.

Not much has been written in the press, signalling that there is no great controversy regarding the nomination. Although a Liberal Party representative (in the conservative block) she was nominated by the government of socialist greens.

Ms Malmström has a very solid background in the EU, and has been instrumental in several significant trade deals which will impact world trade in the years to come, mitigating the four lost USA years, as well as the Brexit disaster. She is quite competent!

In further explanation, she seems to have wide political support across the eight political parties in the Rikstag.

She is currently marking time as Visiting Professor, International Trade and European Affairs, University of Gothenburg School of Business, Economics and Law, Sweden, from where she received her PhD some years ago. Her professional life has been spent bouncing around the European and Swedish political system. Therefore, with the exposure she has had in Europe, she has had plenty of time to run the gamut of being universally respected or universally loathed.

There are 23 EU countries voting, plus Iceland, Norway and Switzerland, whereas in Asia and the South Pacific – Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Australia are the only members. In addition, Canada, the United States and the recently-divorced Great Britain… well who knows. However, there will be questions relating to Johnson’s threat of green tariffs to be negotiated, particularly by Matthias. He certainly would have not burnished his green credentials by flying in a government plane all over Europe.

The remaining four thus remain agog, waiting for the announcement probably in the first week in March.

This Pot is Truly Black

Parliament House is a saucepan containing a broth of consensual relationships. Increasingly, the broth has been allowed to boil over, and the mess on the stove reported by people such as Louise Milligan.

Brittany Higgins is in different pot. She says she was raped at night in Parliament on March 23, 2019 by a fellow Liberal male staffer.

Rape is rape, a criminal act. Nothing consensual about rape.

The unmitigated arrogance of the former Brigadier Reynolds in intervening in the case and conducting her own investigation in the office where the alleged rape occurred.

The delay.

Then a young woman hand-passed between two female Ministers of the Crown, both coincidently from Western Australia

It is as much anybody in power can do to provide succour in such cases when faced with a traumatised individual; not frighten the bejeezus out of her or him.

Where are the police called in to investigate the rape? Specialist police who have witnessed this situation before.

No, another Western Australian Member of parliament of the same deeply conservative ilk as her Ministerial colleagues now called in to investigate.

Enough has been said about the inappropriateness of the Prime Ministerial response.

The Prime Minister spoke about the “perpetrator” as he calls him. Note, he did not used the word “alleged”. The Prime Minister said that the perpetrator had been sacked. He now knows who the man is, even though as usual he crouched beneath the convenient toadstool of “I was not told”.

Let’s stop this political charade of complaints committees/commission/star chamber. Everybody knows it is a device for flannelling the exposed political backsides, just because they can hear bones jangling in every Party Room cupboard.

The alleged rapist is known. Unmask him. Presumably the evidence is there. Charge him. As Margaret Thatcher may have said, “Tell us his name”.

If found guilty, put him away. The judicial gloves should be removed.

However, Ms Higgins has innocently uncovered a subplot in the actions which were taken in response to her situation.

As for having investigations, maybe it is time to review the level of influence a few Western Australians now have on the Government of Australia – and the destiny of my family. They are allowed too much time flying in RAAF VIP or the NevJet across Australia to plot.

Mouse Whisper

People initially had a hard time finding this blog because it invariably ended up in online mousetrap advertisements. This has been rectified. Apparently, “mouse”, in this unfortunate context dates back to 1965, when the name was first documented. An American engineer named Bill English, named it after me instead of using the term “computer pointing device”. Named for the fact that the original “mouse” had a cable and therefore resembled my tail without the elegant swish. In keeping with the tendency to modernise plurals rather than reflect my ancient English origins, those nerds rampant have agreed that a mouse in each hand are “mouses”. At least you must have a certain hereditary escutcheon to be known as MICE.