Modest expectations – The Forty-Niners

They come in their work clothes and their steel-capped boots, climbing on board the QantasLink plane at Devonport; or disembarking at the same airport. They are the FIFO miners who work on the ore rich West Coast of Tasmania. They have living quarters on the edge of Zeehan and in Rosebery while they are on work down the mine, since 50 per cent of the miners choose not to live permanently on site. Interestingly one per cent of Tasmanian miners are listed as working in the East Pilbara in Western Australia.

Paradoxically, the Mt Lyell mine at Queenstown, the largest settlement on the West Coast, has been closed down for nearly five years. Its Indian parent company in the same period closed its copper smelter in India, but claims there is no connection between the two decisions. However, Queenstown exists as the local government centre amid denuded hills, a settlement desperately clinging to its existence. The beautiful King River, polluted for over 70 years by the mine tailings from Mount Lyell, is said will take 200 years to restore, but at least a start has been made to cover the riverside that was yellow with sulphur with sedge and other littoral plants. Over the last 20 years you can see that change.

King River gorge and Abt Railway track

It’s a bit sad to see that the old anti-climate change warrior from Tasmania, Eric Abetz remains solidly behind the coal lobby given how little coal mining contributes to the Tasmanian economy – less than 100 jobs. Eric moreover was outed for spending $3,000 on a trip to go to an Australian Mines and Metals Association conference in 2018 in Melbourne. He is reported as saying his travel was appropriate “given the undisputed importance of the sector to Tasmanians. Tasmania’s Mt Lyell mine has been the sole continuous AMMA member”, Abetz said. As the report noted as a postscript, as Eric should have known, “it was no mean feat, considering the mine had been mothballed four years before the gala dinner.”

But then Eric comes from Hobart and I wonder how often he has visited the West Coast – if ever. There is much mining – zinc, iron ore, gold, tin – but no longer from Mount Lyell. There are mines near Zeehan, Rosebery, Tullah and up on the Savage and Henty Rivers. However, if you live in Hobart, the Tasmanian West Coast may as well be on the moon.

I have been going regularly to the West Coast for more than 20 years and yet those towns look the same as they were then, except for the increase in hostel-like accommodation for the FIFO. In other words, these towns have not boomed in population as Queenstown did after the discovery of copper and silver in the late nineteenth century. The need to transport the ore resulted in Strahan on the Macquarie Harbor becoming the conduit port (again the population reached 2,000 then) and the revolutionary Abt railway was the means to transport the ore over the mountains and through the rain forest along the King River from Mount Lyell.

Strahan is now a tourist resort and the Abt Railway, which was closed in 1963, has been rebuilt as a tourist attraction. Strahan also still functions as a fishing port – crayfish and abalone – and in the harbour, salmon farming. There are the leatherwoods, the flowers of which provide the nectar for the distinctive honey found here. Even with the mining, there is still this extraordinary temperate rainforest of myrtle, native beech, sassafras, blackwood and the remnant clumps of pine unique to Tasmania – huon, king billy and celery top pine.

Because the changes in the mining industry from the stereotype beloved by those who never go to a mining town, it is difficult to imagine a settlement to have a life once mined out. But people like Abetz would throw money at Mount Lyell in the mistaken belief that it would result in more jobs, irrespective of the return. In most part the company would probably just pocket the subsidy.

As I said, there is still a healthy mining industry – the whole of the West Coast is a mineralised area, and taking just one mining industry, that of zinc mining at Rosebery (population 713) and Zeehan (population 708), it yields about a third of Australia’s output in zinc; and Australia produces about 30 per cent of the world’s zinc. Unlike coal, zinc is unlikely to be replaced because of its recognized use not only in sunscreen but more importantly in galvanizing iron and in the development of electric batteries for cars.

However even with such important mining activity, the resident population of these two mining towns on a rough calculation is equal to the number of FIFO. It should be added that 30 per cent of the zinc is recycled and here, in employment terms, the Swiss-owned smelter near Hobart at Risdon has played an integral role. The problem with mining in Tasmania is that the West Coast is the last area of untouched temperate rain forest in Australia, brought into stark relief – literally – by the bushfires along the east coast from Queensland to the Victorian border. So mining is a case of treading carefully, having learnt from Mount Lyell as an example of what not to do to the environment.

Wind turbines being placed at Granville Harbour are providing 200 jobs during construction, but for maintenance only 10. That, together with the FIFO, means that in the end it is not the technology nor the resources which provide the essence of life anywhere.

Tourism brings 300,000 to the North-West and West – people are the life blood, especially as the Macquarie Harbour boat trip and the reconstructed Abt Railway are the prime attractions, with Strahan the prime place to stay.

Oh, by the way, dear Eric, you should witness the huge wind turbines being moved down the Murchison Highway, round the corner through Zeehan and on up the road to eventually reach Granville Harbour. Wind and rain are the West Coast’s resources to be exploited, and soon the mighty wind resource of the Forties gales will be added to the Tasmanian power grid.

However, given how irrelevant coal is to the economy of Tasmania, I presume your time as a “coal war warrior” will soon be over, your task completed, but as you drive your Tonka tip truck off into a smoked filled sunset, remember your West Coast and its wonderful diversity.

The Martini

I enjoy a gin martini. My wife makes a very good martini and this blog was prompted by an article on the (alleged) best martini maker in the world opining on how to make the best martini. However the Best Martini was somewhat different from that of the expert.

First of all keep the gin in the freezer. This ensures that you’ll know if the gin has been watered down, because if it partially freezes you know there is dilution. Also if you keep the gin in the freezer, it makes the question of shaken or stirred irrelevant.

Next, “vermouth” the glass with green Noilly Prat; here there is no disagreement with yon expert, but it is a question of the amount. The Best formula calls for one in eight and then the gin from the freezer is poured into a chilled martini glass. And again in agreement, the lemon twist is the best addition to this opulent drink, but if you want to fiddle then if you must use three olives on a gold stick. Gold is important as it gives the olives a certain je ne sais pas quoi dire.

However, the problem is the cost of such a drink and the level of sobriety after two if you forsake the ice. There is no dilution if you pour straight from the freezer.

Which reminds me of that hoary old joke beloved by Latin teachers: Cassius Brutus clanks into the Vinum Bar in Rome and asks for a Martinus. The bartender responds: “surely you mean a martini?” to which Cassius Brutus said: “if I wanted two I would have ordered so”.

The best martini apart the uxorious one described above I ever had was a cucumber infused martini in New York. It was not the faintly cucumberish Hendricks, but a more full flavoured version. The nearest I could find was the Gordon’s cucumber infused gin in the green bottle, but I think I must have bought the last bottles in Australia. You garnish with a partially peeled piece of cucumber.

Have not seen any sign of the Gordon’s Green; only its seeming replacement of pink gin…only in Raffles in Singapore please, as I slightly shudder. 

Bernie Sanders Heartland

A 78 year old who has had a heart attack, who now won’t release his medical notes – bad sign, Bernie. In the information vacuum, the obvious first thought is that he has irreversibly damaged cardiac muscle and therefore a heart at risk.

Then we have a President who mysteriously disappeared into and out of the Walter Reed Hospital. Nobody knows what incantations were said while he was in the hospital. However, Trump’s cupboard is probably the most comprehensive collection of skeletons known to man or woman such that another one as the grim reaper would feel at home.

These old crocks are the marvels of modern American medicine – particularly cardiac care where investigative procedures, stenting and improvement in medication are first rate. American health care (as distinct from the system in which it exists) at its best is probably as good as you would get in the world, if you can afford it and go to wise doctors.

You see modern medicine has enabled an obese, insomniac narcissist with a poor diet and the other who looks madly stressed as if he going to blow a fuse every time he speaks, to be President of the USA.

Just as Nixon thrashed McGovern in the 1972 election, if they survive until November, Trump should win the battle, even though Sanders may appear to be a better bloke.

The other man Joe Biden is just a broad grin, which hides a mediocrity clearly demonstrated by his propensity for plagiarism. His major advantage is he seems physically fit, but old age is not a fair hand in the card game of life.

They said how poor Bloomberg was in the recent debate and how politically incorrect he had been in the past. He does not have the populist orator skills that the others have, with their confected outrage. He is old but he wears his age well without panda eyes or comb overs.

His responses where he was allowed to answer were sensible given that the moderators were appalling. He brings a sense of surety, that on the major policies he will see them through. Like many quiet men he carries a big stick, and Trump just will be no match for him, the longer the campaign goes. He knows how to deal with serial grifters like Trump, and if he secured the nomination he will drive Trump mad with his quiet probing, and as he may say if he was as vulgar to Trump – the fact is that, Trump ol’ boy, I have a bigger one than you have – war chest I mean.

But Bloomberg also is no spring chicken, although he has the gravitas that even in four years he may be able to resurrect America from its policy shambles. It is all very well to have a world economy built on gambling , even if there are fancy names for it, such as stock markets, hedge funds plus all those indices, which may as well be on a bookmaker’s chart. Of course, Bloomberg has built his empire as the steward of these goings-on.

If the Democrats come to their senses, and if Bloomberg is selected, then Pete Buttigieg should be considered for his Vice-President running mate, to test whether an openly gay married man will be acceptable to the majority of Americans. Buttigieg is smart and personable, but not this time, brother.

They who read the blog may say I’m a “typical male who has ignored the two women”. Simply put, America needs a different woman prototype to appeal to the whole electorate. Warren, with her artificial outrage would gain votes, but she suffers from a lack of sense of humour and her candidature is now on life support. The problem with the plethora of women who thought of doing a “Hilary” and have progressively dropped out is that their presence has obscured how impressive Governor Klobuchar is, but she too is in danger of disappearing.

To me on the stump if Trump and Sanders are the 2020 presidential combatants they are equally repellent, but then I do not have a vote, only an opinion. That doesn’t get you anywhere; but the prospect of candidates dying on the campaign trail is too macabre – and frankly, just a bit too close to reality. Moreover, it is not the time for old men.

They will not be around to be cheered or booed at the end of 2050 if the world is still belching the same level of pollution and progressively destroying the world that we have known, but will not live to see. The same can be said for all those old men, as well as Elizabeth Warren.

The Price of Never Being Wrong

The problem with epidemics is they thrive on ignorant national leaders, who have no idea of public health, suppressing inconvenient information. This increasing government secrecy is coupled with the modern version of the courtier castrati, people without ideas but with perfumed phrases whispering into the ear of national leaders who have lost the ability to apologise.

I once wrote a small monograph entitled “The Dilemma of the Public Health Physician” in which I attempted, as I said, “to help public health physicians to work through the situation which confronts many professionals when they are in possession of information which others perceive as ‘sensitive’ or valuable in any respect.”

I went on to argue that all public health information should be freely available. The problem is that many public health physicians exist for the collection of data and not for the best way to make it available to the community. But communication skills have never been emphasised as they should be, because even over 20 years ago I wrote; “there is an increasing tendency for the political walls to be daubed with the graffiti of misinformation”.

This current epidemic will test those countries, especially China and Russia, whose leaders’ powers lie in secrecy and misinformation, to become more open. This epidemic will not be the last, given that the world with rising temperatures throughout, is increasingly becoming an incubator for exotic diseases.

Added to this viruses jumping from one species to another, mutating, being always ahead of the game … so no more pangolin penis eating in the restaurants of Asia, please. I assure you it doesn’t help virility only the possibility of a new virus – that is if the pangolin revenge is not already been enacted across the world.

On reflection am I just succumbing to daubing those political walls? Well, that is the point – public health expertise is being allowed not only to languish but to be ignored as an inconvenience. But as many politicians have found out in the past, “wishing an inconvenience would go away” is not a solution.

Having said that it seems we are fortunate in Australia not only to have the calming influence of Brendan Murphy, but also his unheralded deputy Paul Kelly who, unlike his boss, is a public health physician. Their influence on the government where there is a high level of ignorance is, and will continue to be, important. After all, as I wrote they have an imminent dilemma, which I have previously canvassed, which is when is Australia going to lift the ban on unrestricted entry into this country?

That is why the public health physician is as important as members of the police in enforcement of the basic requirements of public health, even down to all Australians washing hands as a matter of course.

Mouse whisper

I am sorry but I cannot let this recent comment by Sanna Marin, the Finnish prime minister, go by without applauding:

“We Finns have our sauna. And traditionally, it is where we make decisions. So now we have five women in charge, we can all go into the sauna together and make the decisions there.”

“Ei vain miehet vapauttavat kuumaa ilmaa”, says my old Finnish great-grand father mouse Aarvo.

That is the last comment he will ever make. They will be after him with birch branches.

Mickey Finn

Modest expectations – The Invincibles

Ah, the delightful Matthew James Canavan saying that Malcolm Bligh Turnbull should come to Collinsville and face the people there, with or without a caravan. It is one of those “what are you?” moments that are part of the Australian psyche when you know you have the mob behind you, especially if the mob is composed of guys you would expect to be unionists with eureka flags on their working clothes.

What a statement. I may as well respond and issue a similar invitation, “Mr Canavan, please come to the electorate of Kooyong, where I have a property and talk to my fellow constituents about the need for more coal-fired power stations. I am sure Minister Frydenberg would be overjoyed to see you and then direct you to the electorate of Higgins and then perhaps on to Chisholm and Goldstein. Don’t forget to bring a lump of coal to remind us what it looks like.”

Ever been to Victoria, Mr Canavan – you know Northern and Eastern Victoria to shore up the seats of Mallee, Nicholls and Gippsland. I am sure your fellow Nationals there would be anxious to pass around your lump of coal with the media in attendance, and your Queensland persona rampant?

Lozzo di Cadore

Now, Mr Canavan, I note your ancestors come from a place called Lozzo di Cadore – a beautiful area in the Italian Alps near to the Austrian border. Ever been asked to be on the show who do you think you are?” But perhaps you already know that Lozzo di Cadore translates as the Stench of Cadore. There are 28 commune, as you probably know, in the province of Belluno, and for whatever reason your ancestors came from that one named Lozzo di Cadore. Perhaps a coal-fired power station there would enhance its meaning.

In fact, there are a few of us who are thinking of targeting some of these Victorian seats with an anti-coal message and you wouldn’t mind us using pictures of you and Mr Joyce – you know big overpowering photos of you beside a cart load of coal personally handled by you or Mr Joyce – alongside the photo of the local member. We shall make sure your photos will show you both grinning just to show the sunny if somewhat smoky side of your nature. After all, it would give full meaning to the term “Coalition”.

Tom Reeve

Collinsville is in the Bowen Basin. Even though I have been to many coal mining towns in Outback Queensland, I don’t remember ever going to Collinsville. But the name has stuck in my memory. Why? Because one of Australia’s greatest thyroid and parathyroid surgeons, Tom Reeve, did a stint at Collinsville 18 months after graduation. It would have been around 1949. After that he moved to surgery and never looked back, as they say in the classics.

However, his reminiscence of his stint on Collinsville below in an article he wrote in 2004 for the Medical Journal of Australia showed the value of career development in rural Australia. Tom was a University of Sydney graduate and I remember him saying to me that it was somewhat of an experience getting off the train in Collinsville unknown to the locals and yet knowing you were there for at least a year. In fact, he stayed for 18 months. I have always used his experience to illustrate that time as a rural doctor can lead anywhere.

As the only doctor in town, I enjoyed 18 months of rich clinical experience. Post-term obstetric deliveries, head injuries, critically ill children, motor vehicle accidents and accidents involving horses all hastened my clinical maturity. I remember a young jackeroo with a perinephric abscess after a nasty horse-related accident. As we were stranded by floods at the time, a surgeon in Mackay took me through the operative steps by phone. All ended well.

The community was full of reliable, loyal Aussies with enormous hearts. They were openly friendly and had a great bank of skills, and gave their local doctor the comfort often absent today.

An outbreak of croup in some young children was the most formidable of my experiences. They desperately needed steam inhalation, but I was a little nonplussed as to how to supply it. One father spoke with his boss at the mine workshop, who rapidly produced a large galvanised watering can with four arms, each capped with a watering-can rose. Placed on a primus stove, this device effectively dispensed steam to four mosquito-netted cots simultaneously. Problem solved!

Tom Reeve AC CBE became a giant in surgery. I once asked him to review surgery at Broken Hill Hospital when the late Ross Webster, himself the Foundation Professor of Community Medicine at the University of Melbourne, was Medical Superintendent of the Hospital. There are days indelibly remembered, and one of these days was when we three lunched at the old Menindee hotel, south of Broken Hill. This was the actual building that Burke and Wills stayed in on their way North. The hotel has since burnt down, but the one unusual and unexpected thing I remember was the solitary red hibiscus flowering in the corner of courtyard.

 

No symbolism – just a dash of colour on a courtyard to be remembered.

Parasite is not only a Korean film

Should the people working in a minister’s office hidden from public scrutiny given their integral public purpose? Public records note the cost and number of ministerial office staff, but the government guidelines don’t require publication of appointments, as has to occur with the public service. With the Prime Minister’s 58 staff averaging $233,000 in 2017 and the Opposition Leader’s 39 staff averaging $193,000, is there a need for more scrutiny?

Silly question. When I was Principal Private Secretary to the Leader of Opposition, his advisers numbered six. Add three assistant secretaries, who could write shorthand at 120 words a minute and type at least 80 word perfect a minute and put up with us males; and that was the office, plus of course the electorate secretary. Ten all up.

We worked very hard, but then it was by choice. The long hours and the need to become an essential part of the policy process rather than just political games were complemented by the fact we all lived cheek by jowl.

Why has the Leader of the Opposition’s office grown to 39? In the old Parliament House there would not have been enough room for that many in the cramped quarters. I have always thought the new Parliament House was an example of Mussolini brutalism. Compared to old Parliament House, there is so much space. Whereas in the old Parliament House, King’s Hall was accessible to the public and politicians and the people mixed together. However, with this mania for security and the extravagant amount of space so that you could run a Formula one around the corridors means that the public gets excluded from consideration except at election time; and the party branch structure for politicians is a “tiresome” token of connectivity with the electorate.

Added to this is the claque of advisers without any experience except in the brutality of factional politics and a taste for authority – if not authoritarianism. Some advisers are very good, and there was no doubt that Arthur Sinodinos as adviser to Howard was one who was essential dampening down the negative side of the Prime Minister’s personality.

However, having had to deal with advisers and having seen how others deal with them, the environment which they inhabit gives them a sense that in the name of their boss they can imitate the same bad behavior – the obscenities, the verbal assaults, documents thrown, the demeaning treatment of experienced experts, the endless bad temper, the sexual harassment, the cynical misuse of entitlements, all in various degrees of toxicity depending on the office. Worst of all is the time waiting, because there is a cohort of politicians who are perennially late. This is a topic for a separate blog.

The extent as with the number of advisers has grown – let us not say “exponentially” because though I may hypothesise that the contents of the Trough are increasing in this manner, there needs to be someone to present the evidence. In all, Parliaments are rubbish cultures, not the least because they are divorced from the world in which their electors live.

Parliamentary Courtiers

The problem is when there is an explosion of entitlements, then Opposition is nowhere in the Parliament – nobody is going to blow the whistle and not take the money. All the politicians on this issue are on the one side of the House.

The problem of course is that the amount and nature of expenses come out, and then there may be an outcry if someone has been too greedy, but the lid snaps shut on the Trough. Feeding time is over, and we mug punters do not have any further knowledge – it is asymmetric information par excellence further obscured by the piety of politicians invoking confidentiality measures and security reasons not to be frank with the people who elected them.

The current unfolding behaviour of some elements of the National Party and the Prime Minister’s office in relation to the grants may have vented some aroma from a hole in the Trough, but the government has Gaetjens and Associates, expert Lid Repairers by Appointment on the job, brought in to seal the leak.

In the past I have identified the three elements of this political toxicity, but no-one takes any notice because it is inconvenient: sleep deprivation, isolation and boredom. However, it is probably time to revise what I wrote an age ago from personal observation.

Boredom is still an important factor. Let me quote from a definition of the Mafia consigliere – 95 per cent hanging out and five per cent ultimate brutality.

Here in Parliamentary Australia the brutality may be just factional brutality – consigliere credentials honed sharp by the advisers from their student politics days. Never had a real job, just hanging around the particular Party of their persuasion slicing their way to the top.

Boredom? I always remember the implication at the heart of beauty was evil. Baudelaire may have said something like that because he was a master at pitting unlikely scenarios together: “As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.”

Hence, although Parliament House may give the impression of a hive of activity, at the heart of this inactivity is boredom – doing the same thing over and over again, leaking, evening up all scores and new ones also, pettiness cloaked as activity.

As I asked rhetorically earlier: why does the leader of the Opposition need 39 advisers. Perhaps someone could volunteer to tell us publicly what they all do. How do they evade boredom for instance?

The problem is when courtier expansion has no brake, and when each incumbent has his or her own idiosyncrasy translated as a need for a new specific post such that when the incumbent changes the post is not necessarily abolished. Why? There is nobody to ask what that position was doing there in the first place.

It is the same with any dynastic institution – it’s called tradition. Not that it is all expansion. For instance, until the coronation of Queen Victoria at each Coronation there was apparently a Royal Gruel carrier, presumably because one of her predecessors became peckish during the ceremony and needed a bowl of porridge.

I once floated the idea that there should be cohort of ministerial advisers who would go out and live with the community and learn what were the pressing problems on the job. I had learnt from experience that living close to a problem helped to solve that problem. For instance when we wanted child care for our infant children we started a co-operative (still running today) where the parents ran the show employing the staff and making sure it was properly resourced. Problem alleviated. I came to being a ministerial adviser with a large amount of outside work experience.

Put another way, how many of the Ministerial Advisers were seen helping out during the bushfires in the early part of the year – on deck or there in the aftermath? It would have been useful for an adviser to suggest to their boss, the Prime Minister to take hampers of “loaves and fishes” to Cobargo, for instance. I heard though that they were allegedly too busy undermining the Premier of NSW, while the State burned. Sorry, that does not count. 

The Patron Saint of Blackbirds

I always remember the headmaster announcing to the school that several lads in dark blue suits had been seen trashing a theatrette in the city.

Now Melbourne Grammar School boys in those days wore blue suits, but there was also another school, where the students also wore dark suits. The words “St Kevin’s” rippled through the audience. The headmaster droned on telling us that he told the owners of the theatrette and perhaps the police that it could not possibly be Melbourne Grammar School boys. They always wore their caps. Such was our headmaster’s presence that they went away and did not bother us again.

The point of the story was that essential identifying component of our uniform was the school cap, which we kept on everywhere we went in public. OK, pull the other leg, but that was uttered as school dogma in those halycon days.

At the time, St Kevin’s was firmly ensconced on the second rung of Melbourne private schools, but because it existed in the nether end of Toorak, we Grammar boys used to run into them from time to time emerging from their Gardiner Creek base.

Private schools in my time reflected the sectarian divide of Melbourne, and Roman Catholic schools in heart of Protestant Melbourne breached this divide. Thus running into them did not mean co-habitation, especially because of their status we never played sport against them. However, how unfair it may have been, St Kevin’s already had a stigma as so tellingly portrayed on Monday night.

What I noted in the Four Corners program was the almost subliminal reference to Scotch College and Xavier College, two of original Melbourne private schools, which are still single sex. Each of these schools has had its problems, but not to the same extent as St Kevin’s. Hmmm?

Thus, if the Victorian premier is ordering the review of one, why stop there with St Kevin’s and not have a review of all these supposed premier schools. It would be interesting to see how the culture compares between the single-sex and co-educational schools.

As is becoming clear, it is not a question of boy versus girl and the interaction between the two, which was how the debate was set in my years of school for co-education denial. The debate is now about whether single sex schools act as a magnet for paedophiles.

There was a degree of prescience in the chant we Melburnians had to endure when I was at school: “if you can’t get a girl, get a Grammar boy”. That is Melbourne Grammar – I’d hate to implicate Geelong Grammar as a butt for such mockery.

Mouse whisper

My mausmeister told me of a couple of his supposed bon mots. He said them first in an interview he did when he had his brief period of Warhol glow.

One he said was that once 50 years ago what was accepted as God’s will is now described as medical negligence.

The second: when two or more doctors are gathered together you have a new medical specialty.

Damien Hirst’s M. Mouse

Modest Expectations – Kontiki

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

When the Virginia legislature in January were moving to enact a number of mild gun control laws, enter Trump in a post on Twitter:

“Our 2nd Amendment is under very serious attack in the Great Commonwealth of Virginia”.

Of course, in true Trump style, the reforms were nothing of the sort.

However, his audience was his gun-toting lumpenproletariat. They had turned up in a mass display of bullying in Richmond, the Virginian capital, armed with a threatening array of guns.

These may be the group that Hilary Clinton lumped under the term “deplorables”, but she unfortunately had not done enough groundwork to separate herself as a leading member of the perceived “elite” so that the right-wing conspiracy trolls could accuse her of being head of an elite that was depriving working Americans of their birthright. “Deplorable” is not a defined movement, but an unfortunate word of disdain. Thus anybody disliking Clinton with her trappings of wealth and her continued association with a philanderer would have found it reason enough to vote against her.

What she was attempting to say has been put in a more analytical context by the American historian, Bruce Franklin. In quoting Franklin, I had always interpreted “lumpenproletariat” from a Marxist point of view, Groucho that is. However, what is written below changes that perspective. It is a chilling description of the Trump constituency.

“In Germany, the lumpenproletariat was the main source of shock troops for Naziism. Anyone who worships the spontaneity of unemployed youth should be reminded of the Brownshirts. In the United States, unemployed white youth are a fertile breeding place for the worst forms of racism, national chauvinism, and the cult of the super-male. This is particularly true in the South, in the urban areas into which the dispossessed rural whites have been driven, and in European ethnic neighborhoods. And among these people there is no clear dividing line between lumpenproletariat and white working class.” 

The American lumpenproletariat has been allowed to become heavily armed. The diffusion of military equipment into the hands of the local police forces means that a militia loyal to Trump which seeks legitimacy under the Second Amendment becomes so very feasible.

This is the ultimate Trump threat and in the event of the possibility of Trump losing the election, this force could be called to arms in every State, particularly where there is Republican control. Trump or his lieutenants more likely will be there preparing the ground for the militia to be raised as if the nation is under threat (that is, Trump’s re-election is threatened) and individual freedoms to do whatever you like (meaning owning as many firearms as you like with the minimum regulation) are OK as long as one supports Trump.

Social media has been a godsend to Trump, enabling him to perfect the tactics he employed in “The Apprentice”. It is a medium that is understood and accessible to his constituency.

However, Trump is an old man, and his dissolute lifestyle has challenged the resilience of the gene pool. While he has hinted at a dynastic succession, this is one of the few themes that he seems to have dropped. Yet if he is elected he would be 78 at the end of a second term. The question is, can The Planet afford it, whether he is elected or especially if the electoral college does not return him? One scenario has the Old Man brandishing the Second Amendment calling up a militia drawn from his alienated constituency energised by ethnocentric hatred.

The bulwark against him is not the current crop of Democrat Presidential aspirants, fighting over the carcass of the Party bequeathed by the Clinton dynasty. Let’s face it, Bill Clinton’s overexposure has legitimised Trump. Clinton is Trump’s atavis.

The Democratic Party’s survival and that of the USA depends on it securing a majority in the Senate, and maintaining control of the House; otherwise the one party state of Trump will become very much the reality. Very simple solution for the Democrats – win both Houses in November.

The Presidency is but a sideshow with the current crop of Democrat candidates. Can any of them face down a toxic Trump with his putative militia if any of them do win? What would they do? It is a question nobody will want to ask, least of all this mob of candidates.

It was a Dark and Stormy Night

The fires in East Gippsland call to mind something that happened to me as a small child. I have recounted it many times but never in a blog.

I could start this story off by saying: “it was a dark and stormy night”, but it actually was. It was May, probably around 1948, when father decided to take my mother and me across the Alps before hydroelectric Snowy Mountains Scheme commenced so we could all see an undisturbed alpine landscape. My father knew that when the Scheme was begun, so would the pristine wilderness go.

It was also the year my mother agitated against the removal of the elms from St Kilda Road to be replaced by desert ash. Somehow the decision to retain the elms was made, and I don’t really know how much my mother’s agitation influenced anybody. But I remember a Councillor Brens was the target for much of her vitriol. Now the elms in their exotic surroundings of Melbourne are some of the finest in the world.

Anyway back to the dark and stormy night in May. There were a few flakes of snow as my father took one of his famous shortcuts in his Vauxhall Wyvern 10. As we chugged along the forested slopes, my father said that this would be quickest way, judging faith in his map to get to where we were supposed to stay for the night – Bombala.

However, it became obvious to my mother that my father was lost, and as the storm intensified and snow began to fall, it became even more evident that this small car was not equipped with the best of internal lights to read the map, and of course there was not a torch in the car. The headlights on the car were the best illumination to look at a map, and winding up the road searching for a sheltered place to stop to look at the map suddenly became unnecessary.

We had just rounded a corner and there in front of us was a hotel, a bush pub nestling in the forest with lights blazing in each of its windows. Even now I can remember the relief my parents showed in the half-light the interior of this tiny car. To find such a sanctuary like that to them was incredible, if not miraculous. We had reached a dot on the map called Bendoc. After my father had determined that there were rooms available – even from a young age I always had my own room – we all went inside.

The chilliness was soon dissipated by the fire, which had that intense burn when you put hardwood logs onto a fire. The radiated heat sears one’s face.

Now warm, and having been confined for several hours in a small back seat, I was running amok in the hotel lounge bar. I suddenly noticed an old bearded man looking intently at me. He was sitting at the fireside drinking a large glass of stout. For a while he sucked on his pipe, and the smoke floated upwards. At last, as if he had enough of this boisterous child flinging himself around the bar, he took his pipe out of his mouth and beckoned me over.

“Son, do you know who Ned Kelly was?” Being a somewhat precocious child, I said; “Yes he was a bushranger.”

He paused and said: “I knew Ned Kelly.”

That was all. It was as though I had tapped a secret. I did not have enough knowledge to ask anything more. I looked around to see if anybody else in the bar had heard. I said nothing to my parents.

The old man smiled and leant back in his seat and relit his pipe.

That was it.

Except now you know, as you read this, a boy-cum-man who knew a man who knew Ned Kelly.

Do as I say?

It proved too much for Mike Keating and Andrew Podger. This apologia that the Head of Prime Minister & Cabinet, Mr Gaetjens, a person who has never lived outside the public service but obviously has been very adroit in crawling up the bureaucratic slope, has just violated the major tenet of survival. Not that it will matter because he will end up in one of those right wing think tanks nursing his not inconsiderable pension and giving a spray to any successor who he perceives to be to the left of Nicolo Macchiavelli.

Michael Keating and Andrew Podger have stood atop or near the top of the bureaucratic slope, although both of them did not have to crawl, such is and was their ability and moreover their integrity. After all Keating used to play a high standard of tennis with Roz Kelly’s husband, but there was never any suggestion that Keating ever compromised his position. Although different in age, both Keating and Podger grew up at a time when sure, you have your political biases, but advice was given in that time-honoured phrase “fearlessly”. Maybe in the crawl up the slope, Mr Gaetjens had not noticed.

Both Keating and Podger have made significant contributions to public administration, but I know they would have refused if their political superiors had asked them to do what Gaetjens has done. They would have realised that if they had done that, ever afterwards their advice would have been compromised.

I have not always agreed with Keating, even in face-to-face conversation; and in regard to Podger, disagreement with him has never really been tested. After all, how two people handle inter-personal conflict is a measure of the strength of the relationship.

I do not know Gaetjens, but incurring the ire of such distinguished peers shows that he has violated that axiom for all those who wish to maintain their relevance, namely: autonomy of action is inversely proportional to the controversy generated. In other words you can get away with it so long as you do not create a public storm, stirred up generally but not always by the media.

Gaetjens, you did your political master’s bidding. Your retired peers, the ones who do not need to fear retribution from fearless advice, have spoken out. Well, what would you expect! You write a report, which is kept secret but which is seemingly at odds with that of the Auditor-General. Bridget Mackenzie, for weeks beatified by the Government as the Goddess of Generosity and overflowing Cornucopia, stands condemned by this unseen report and off she goes, not because of the Auditor-General’s public damnation, but something you may have handed to the Prime Minister.

Job finished.

Can I go now Prime Minister? You will find my recommendation at the foot of the page – well not actually the foot, maybe just after “My dear Prime Minister”.

Koroit – my Back Road

Every time I used to go to Port Fairy in the 1970s, I would take the Hamilton Highway to Mortlake and duck down the back road past the racecourse through Woolsthorpe before reaching Koroit, where for the first time you could see the Southern Ocean and you knew then Port Fairy was not too far. Then there was the gloomy grey closed convent and intriguingly a scattering of original milestones along this road to the Princes Highway. Eventually they disappeared, presumably incorporated into someone’s garden rockery.

In 1975, we had bought Bowyers Cottage, built in 1848, with its immensely thick rubble stone walls and high ceilings in the front two rooms and in the back rooms where mice ran around the rafters and the ceiling was much lower. It was the time of short summers and being unprotected by the Tasmanian land mass in winter one would feel the full force of the southwesterly gales. It was before Port Fairy became fashionable – before its McMansion suburban development.

Port Fairy, with its misnamed main thoroughfare of Sackville Street, was a coastal village, in the days when you could get a lobster direct from the fishermen, and when the place was alive with abalone fisherman and the favourite drink of their wives was Bailey’s Irish Cream. The whole area reminded me of the west coast of Ireland. I felt at home. After all, my ancestors were from Co Clare from the tiny village of Crossard north of the town of Corofin.

Port Fairy

But Koroit always fascinated me from the first time I went there. It was then the Borough of Koroit and despite the Borough being some 65 per cent professed Roman Catholics, I remember the Borough Secretary was a good Salvationist, amid a field of Paddy potato growers. The land was fertile; the rich volcanic soil spilled down from the extinct volcano, which had itself collapsed into a caldera. Named Tower Hill, it has become a unique nature reserve in the middle of this landscape. In the episode of Koroit Back Roads on the ABC this landmark received scant mention, perhaps because the original settlers denuded the original nature reserve to grow potatoes as though there was not enough soil elsewhere. Fortunately it was restored at some time, probably when spud growing became unprofitable, rather than by a conscious act.

In fact the potato growing industry here received a jolt when consumers in the 80s and 90s found potatoes grown in sand did not require the same amount of cleaning as those grown in the heavy volcanic soil of Koroit.

They also used to grow onions there, but as was told to me the fog rot sealed the fate of that industry. There has been sporadic agitation to grow opium poppies, because the Glaxo factory at Port Fairy manufactures opiates currently made from opium poppies grown legally in Northern Tasmania. Let me say when I travelled around the area in the 70s, there was a bit of local Celtic mythology, which suggested that were fields of poppies in the area grown from seed which had blown across from Tasmania, in defiance of the wind direction, a miracle of blarney.

The Koroit episode of Back Roads did give mention of potatoes, which otherwise suggested that it is one continuous St Patrick’s Day festivity, where if you were not digging spuds you were dancing or drinking and the leprechauns were rampaging the streets at night.

There is no doubt that Koroit has a strong Irish ancestral condition. I remember walking into Mickey Bourke’s Hotel once before I was known there, and everyone stopped talking. You know you are in Ireland when that happens – there is no stronger tradition, except perhaps horses. Not having a race track with all the associated men in cloth caps with brogue on the tongues and brogues on the feet provided was a substantial gap in this ABC exercise in the paddywhackery.

A bit of paddywhackery

Koroit moreover has not reached that level which defines pure paddywhackery as “the fakey, out-of-a-box Irishness that insists on the same damned songs and the same damned menu and the same damned Guinness advertisements on the wall of every Irish bar outside of Ireland”.

However the Back Roads episode, which sought to portray Koroit as a home of the bog Irish, dismissed or ignored an inconvenient fact; namely that it is where an Australian Nobel Laureate went to school.

I remember making a speech to the Koroit school children about Sir John Eccles on the occasion of the Centenary of his birth in 2002. So much for my legacy, but it is a pity that among all the information about Koroit, no recognition was made of this important son of Koroit. The problem is that to mention Eccles would have interfered with the ABC producer’s mind’s eye’s caricature of Irish Australia. Pity, because we don’t have that many Australian Nobel laureates to celebrate along our highways, let alone our back roads. 

Sir John Eccles, Nobel Laureate

Mouse Whisper 

As a young boy John Monash met Ned Kelly at Jerilderie. Monash never said what passed between them. So this mouse is proposing a new expression. ME’s mouse believes it much more Australian to say, “as Monash said to Ned Kelly” rather than some anonymous actress’s exchange with a bishop – and anyway “actress” is no longer a PC word.

For example, as Monash said to Ned Kelly, “hold your horses.” And perhaps his advice to go to a nearby town while the weather was good. You know, “Make Hay while the sun shines”. As young Monash said to Ned Kelly…

Modest Expectations – Palladium

In 1633, the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church forced Galileo Galilei, one of the founders of modern science, to recant his theory that the Earth moves around the Sun. Under threat of torture, Galileo recanted. But as he left the courtroom, he is said to have muttered: “all the same, it moves”.

Last week, 359 years later, the Church finally agreed. At a ceremony in Rome, before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope John Paul II officially declared that Galileo was right. The formal rehabilitation was based on the findings of a committee of the Academy the Pope set up in 1979, soon after taking office. The committee decided the Inquisition had acted in good faith, but was wrong.

In fact, the Inquisition’s verdict was uncannily similar to cautious statements by modern officialdom on more recent scientific conclusions, such as predictions about greenhouse warming. The Inquisition ruled that Galileo could not prove “beyond doubt” that the Earth orbits the Sun, so they could not reinterpret scriptures implying otherwise.

This extract is reprinted from a 1992 issue of New Scientist when the Roman Catholic Church at last accepted that the Earth was round and we were heliocentric. However, what is remarkable is that the Pope asked for advice on the subject, which should have taken no time at all to resolve. Instead it took from 1979 to 1992 for the Report to be acted upon by the Pope.

I do not think we have three centuries for ratification of climate change.

I am not sure that we can as yet class our Government as the modern day equivalent of the Inquisition – high on strigine intolerance; low on intellectual enquiry.

Nevertheless, we are in the grip of the “anti-science” virus, simple in structure but extremely virulent.

In an effort to contain its spread, I would be interested if anybody in the media has asked the Prime Minister whether he believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible, whether the starting date of Earth has been set as 4004BC, as given to the Garden of Eden. Also would he care to interpret the Book of Revelations in terms of his government’s policy?

It is sad that those naïve followers believe this whole sorry contribution of the Prime Minister to this summer’s tragedies will not be repeated; that for the next two years Morrison, with a shepherd’s crook in hand, will guarantee us Australians green pastures and forget this summer ever happened, while Santos contaminates the already over-stretched aquifers of northern NSW and we have the next severe bushfire season in the offing. 

Coronavirus – Another one for our Pentecostal Juggler

The coronavirus has been labelled “deadly” in the news bulletins. The whole doomsday scenario is compounded by people looking like white aliens wandering around being ominous. The facts: 13 cases of coronavirus in Australia as of February 1. Nobody has died in Australia. In fact, those infected have left hospital and infection is said to be mild. Doesn’t sell newspapers this last line.

Coronavirus

In contrast, last year in Australia there were 217,000 cases of influenza and 430 deaths.

The difference is that there is a vaccine for influenza and none for this coronavirus. In other words, there is no defence except quarantine. Yet there is no hysteric reaction to these dreadful figures in relation to influenza, although single cases are singled out.

Then we have the anti-vaxxers who have been somewhat silent during the coronavirus, but why shouldn’t they be. After all there is no vaccine to complain about as yet.

Returning to the coronavirus, the rule of thumb says 14 days is the incubation period. Therefore there is a logic in locking down the world for 14 days or wait until 14 days after the last case. This is an expensive solution.

That is the problem with blanket bans selectively on person-to-person contact. When you do you lift the bans? The number of university vice-chancellors having Chinese withdrawal symptoms must be an imminent public health emergency in itself and while you have a ban on all Chinese people, then when will it all end?

After all, what is the difference between quarantining the Australians for 14 days in Wuhan rather than the expense of quarantining them on Christmas Island? What was the problem of sending public health experts to Wuhan, and making a list of those already there? Two questions? Have the Australians in Wuhan been there for 14 days? Have any Australians currently in Wuhan contracted the infection? Just arrange a quarantined conduit out of the country making sure that there is no wild animal meat in the luggage. That was apparently what has happened, and there is this scattering of people across the outer reaches of Australia with all the inconvenience that entails.

What was interesting was the admission by Len Notaras on the ABC on Tuesday morning that the Qantas 747 had been specially fitted with air conditioning to purify the air in the cabin. Well, if I had been interviewing you, Les, I would have asked why did it have to be specially fitted. You mean Les the current crop of planes are bags of viruses?

It is something I had always suspected, travelling by plane is an excellent way of picking up airborne disease. Maybe whatever was done to this flight should be done to all flights, whether domestic or international. Wake up, Australia. This admission means that flying currently is a public health risk.

However, lets hope nobody gets coronavirus while they are clustered together on Christmas Island, in “discrete” family cluster rather than the “discreet” family cluster as set out in the ABC media release

The problem is that you can impose a ban with your jaw jutting out as if you are a person of resolve. Let us see the same chin jut to show the same resolve in lifting the ban.

At present, the World Health organisation is giving the Prime Minister an out by saying the travel bans are unnecessary. He could take the advice and say Australia will be lifting the ban as soon as everybody is released from Christmas Island. Strength against hysteria is the stuff of leadership, rather than being swept along.

  • How many cases?
  • When was the last case reported in Australia?
  • What has been the outcome of those diagnosed in Australia?

Report to the nation on the facts.

Just an Opinion?

Chris Brook

Polymath & serial blogger

I first met Malcolm Turnbull in person in the First Class International airport lounge in San Francisco.

I was there as an accidental intruder. I had not long entered the hallowed space and thought it strangely small for a Business Lounge, but having realised the airline’s mistake said not a word.

Suddenly, and breathtakingly, a little whirlwind entered, comprising Malcolm Turnbull and a praetorian phalanx of trim bespoke young men (his preferred tableau I later learned). 

At once he began declaring that he was a very important person and had come to America for just one day as a very important person – hence the Gilbert & Sullivan rendition from the Pirates of Penzance.

Although I am a large man, I can be remarkably invisible when I choose, and so that is what I chose. 

What transpired in my mind’s eyes were the lyrics from Penzance, sung in front of his claque of fawning courtiers which commences (sic):

“I am the very model of a modern Major-General

I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral

I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights

Historical

From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical…”

It can be an astonishingly satirical tour de force.

I immediately enjoyed the rendition, yet horrified by the spectacle, and decided that I had stumbled upon a Gilbert & Sullivan tableau in this airport lounge.  Whether he actually completed the above rendition or not, Turnbull struck me then the most arrogant person I had ever met. 

Many other politicians and indeed Prime Ministers have taken the stage since then.

Roll forward to the Centenary of Federation at the beginning of 2001 and my second meeting with Turnbull. My son was a youth ambassador and a recipient of the Centenary Medal. As a loving parent I accompanied my son to the celebration.

This time Turnbull was more formal, he may have been one of the presenters, but there was no dent in his confidence even given his trouncing in the 1999 Republic referendum. 

It was all about Malcolm again rather than those being presented with their medals, an attitude reinforced when I briefly met him.

So I concluded at that time that his hubris was so great that a public career was unlikely, but he survived metaphorically a bloody pre-selection. Yet in spite of all his personality quirks, he is (and was) a very appealing man – highly intelligent, articulate, a real thinker and financially successful. Like many others I wanted him to succeed when he eventually did become Prime Minister.

Time passed and his world changed several times.

Australia adopted populism early, very early, and has more experience than many other nations of its impact, whether bad or worse (I’m afraid there is no “good” on this scale).

And so we have had a blizzard of failed Prime Ministers.

As for Turnbull, in my opinion he failed miserably even though he became Prime Minister against my expectations. 

I am still puzzled though, as to why he subverted his entire belief system to the trolls in the Liberal/ National coalition only to trigger “his own suicide vest” when he realised he had utterly failed. 

And I am still wondering. 

Stop the Train. I want to get off.

I was reminded of a journey I made on the Indian Pacific once. The number of British TV celebrities who seemed to have traversed the continent in a bubble of fine wine and food recently has prompted this memory.

However, when I boarded the Indian Pacific all those years ago, my destination was not Perth. It was Ivanhoe in Western NSW and was the most convenient way to get to Wilcannia where I had a series of meetings. I did not want to drive that long way from Sydney nor was it convenient for my host, the late William Bates for me to fly to Broken Hill. However, he could pick me up in Ivanhoe in Western NSW. It just so happened that Ivanhoe was a station on the Indian Pacific Railway. It was not a regular stop.

Ivanhoe is a hamlet of about 300 people, but William said he would pick me up if the train could stop there. The problem was that the Indian Pacific passed through Ivanhoe at two or was it three in the morning. The train agreed to stop. One lone person with a suitcase alighted – me.

Now, Ivanhoe has another problem, which having been there before, I knew about. The station was about one and half kilometres from town. This was because the train stop was originally a fettlers’ camp rather than being part of town.

So if William Bates had forgotten to come or was delayed because of other business, I had a bit of a walk to town, even though I assumed William would have made a booking at the local pub.

My fear of being forgotten was soon allayed. A pair of headlights dazzled me. William was waiting for me. He got out of car and helped me with my luggage.

“I hope you don’t mind sharing a room with me, doc. The local member has come to town and taken all the other rooms.”

“I hope you don’t snore,” was all I said.

Let me say that the mattresses in the Ivanhoe Hotel reminded me of the kapok ones upon which I slept in my youth. I remember that we did have an early start, so sleeping was a brief interlude. In the morning when we emerged from the Ivanhoe Hotel, confronting us was the local member complete with his election-friendly, hail-fellow-well-met demeanour. We chatted as we waited for the café to open, since it was the only place you could get breakfast. William thought the member was a bit of tosser, but he was nevertheless helpful.

Manara Hills

Then leaving the electioneering member, William and I departed along the Cobb Highway, a wonderful name for a dirt track through the Manara Hills with their amazing Aboriginal stencilled hands, until it joined the paved Barrier Highway, just out of Wilcannia. Now that is a journey. In fact, of all the road trips in Australia I have made (and they are many) the trip through the Manara Hills has some of my fondest memories – but that is another story.

William Bates was a Barkinji man, and I was privileged to know him. I met with him often in those days. A good man; when I mixed with many Barkinji he taught me a great deal about his Nation. The problem with so many white fellas is they tend to see Aboriginal people through a lens not a prism. I do not know whether, since that the Barkinji shaft of light has diminished with the cultural encroachment, which has occurred.

Darren Chester

I must admit that the emergence of Darren Chester is one of the most sensible happenings since the demise of gun-toting Bridget and the attempted Assumption by the Penitent Joyce. McCormack has survived but it will be Littleproud who will eventually succeed to wear the Golden Akubra, assuming the numbers remain as they are and the party does not become an overseas branch of Bharatiya Janata Party.

During the East Gippsland bushfires, Chester was there in the bushfires, showed a steely but compassionate resolve, and like the Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews, acted as a leader. He lives on the edge of the bushfire area in Lakes Entrance. At times, the fire would have come perilously close, I imagine from my knowledge of the area.

It is obvious that he has been appalled by Barnaby’s antics and those of his coterie of loud-mouthed Queenslanders. Pauline Hanson spooks the Queensland nationals into eating coal at every meal to exorcise themselves. To some extent the spookiness carries over into the NSW Nationals with the Shooters and Fishers Party triumphantly taking the last Murray cod from the river to show who is boss – us or Nature. The mantra for this party seems to be that to be a conservationist is to be sissy. However, if Ricky Muir’s showing in the 2019 Senate election is any guide, this party has very little traction in Victoria.

Chester is far enough away from these sideshows to be an objective voice.

He once had plenty of timber in his electorate, and still has. The timber industry, with its penchant for chopping down one of the climate change antidotes will have more than its normal axe to grind. There is so much harvesting of burnt trees to be undertaken particularly the pine before the bugs beat the industry to it that they will hardly be able to cope.

Notwithstanding, the forestry industry is a longstanding culprit in leaving behind wood and scrub remnants after the logging. Hazard reduction is more that burning a bit of undergrowth. It is an industry in itself, and Chester’s constituents won’t be impressed if this means a pall of smoke over his electorate for most of the year. Have to become smart!

Yet in a perverse way, the bushfires assist Chester not only because he showed courage in face of fire but also he has the chance to assure proper conservation policies and oversee if the sustainable logging mantra can be turned into a win-win situation.

Nevertheless, he must help assure the country that his Party does not remain Coal Comfort Farm even though he is speaking from his Veterans’ Affairs portfolio. There is much more to be said.

Darren Chester was once a journalist. So were John Curtin and Alfred Deakin. Role models are very useful when you have to withstand bullying and anti-intellectualism.

Mouse Whisper

Disaster One:

Bushfire smoke hangs like a pall over Parliament House as ACT burns.

Disaster Two:

Hail stones as big as golf balls litter Parliament House lawns, broken car windows, bureaucratic sobs heard as far away as Civic.

Disaster Three:

Politicians return to Parliament House to find Trough no longer in full working order having been sabotaged by gun-toting Girl from the Bush.

All in 30 days. Wow! This climate change sure is something!

Modest Expectations – Hiroshima

I have always been a great admirer of Winton Turnbull, who was Country Party member for first the Federal seat of Wimmera and then Mallee for over 26 years. Turnbull was among a number of parliamentary members such as John Carrick and Tom Uren, who spent time in Japanese Prisoner of War camps – he was in Changi.

Winton Turnbull

Turnbull was the member who, in his slightly stuttering voice (not bellow as elsewhere sneeringly reported), announced in Parliament that he was a “count-ry member” at which the quicksilver Gough Whitlam interjected “I remember.”

He was also the butt of an Eddie Ward interjection. Turnbull was holding up a bunch of skeleton weed, when Eddie inquired which was the weed. It is a pity that there was nobody quick enough on the Labor side to emulate Mr Ward when Morrison came into the House that day brandishing a lump of coal.

Turnbull was such an assiduous local member, that he was known as the member for “currants and raisins” such was his advocacy of the dried fruits industry. He was well respected despite being the butt of some memorable interjections.

However, what distinguished the member was that he never took a perk, never took an overseas junket. He never missed a sitting of Parliament and thought his time was better spent traversing his huge electorate looking after his constituents rather than cavorting at The Ritz or the George V. He was a person of the utmost probity; a pity that his legacy has been supplanted by the National Party pork barrel. 

Bridget McKenzie

And now by contrast is Senator the Honourable Bridget McKenzie, characterised somewhat briefly early this week in her entry in Wikipedia as Minister for Pork Barrelling.

So much has been written about her that even if she survives, as Minister without Portfolio, her parliamentary life will not be a happy one. As the current Minister for Agriculture, the pressure from the farmers will grow for the Government to develop an objective policy both for the short and medium term as climate change alters the viability of various primary industries. The whole dairy industry with the advent of climate change appears to be one such industry. Cotton and almond growing are others because of their voracious appetite for water. And these are just three of the problems that are afflicting primary industry, especially as climate change has underpinned the ongoing drought and integrity of the Murray-Darling Basin.

However, if she substitutes the pork-barrel for policy, this Annie Oakley from Alexandra will reinforce the fact that she looks at home with a double-barrelled musket – and not much else.

Yet Agriculture is the portfolio of McKenzie, the ridiculed former sports minister, where every day there is another nose discovered in this particular trough. Obviously she did not do this on her own as some vicarious quirk. The more the Minister is defended the more vocal is the disgust and the more one realises how many other Ministers have been to the trough.

However why do we, the cynical populace, single out this particular rort? It is just de rigeur for the way this country has been governed since rum was the currency.

Probably the brazenness and the particular arrogance of the central player, especially at a time when so many people are doing it hard – and the media images are of her laughing – as if she is mocking the Australian community.

The National Party is essentially a Queensland and northern New South Wales party. It hangs on in Victoria at the extremes of the State, but Victoria is centred very much around Melbourne and regional centres and eventually the National party seats seats will be distributed out, and with that the entitlement to be on the Coalition ticket.

However, even before that happens there will pressure from Queensland, and obviously if he has got the numbers to be the new Deputy Prime Minister, Littleproud will challenge the hapless McCormack. And if Littleproud wins, then McKenzie can retire to a lucrative “consultant position” in the footsteps of Pyne, Bishop et al. The pension would be greater if she retires as a Minister not as a backbencher, where her final salary will be halved if that was her final position. Watch this space! 

Julia Creek, Colonia and Me

I read where this cattle station family from Julia Creek had just relocated to running a B&B outside Colonia in Uruguay. That was quite a shift I thought, but having been to both places, I thought that this family migration could anchor a yarn about my time in both places.

I remember when I was working at Mount Isa I used to go out to Julia Creek which was a respectably sized speck on the map east of Cloncurry, but part of the territory that I was working in at the time. I went to meet the local doctor, and there they were, direct from central casting for a “Country Practice” not the tripe, which roams around TV currently under the name “Doctor Doctor.”

The then local doctor was a tall young English doctor, whose military bearing and quiet reserved manner was what the community perceives as the good doctor, which he was. The director of nursing was Scottish born and she was vivacious, unconventionally good looking and highly competent as well as being popular with staff and patient. When I met them at the hospital, my instinctive reaction was that both being from the United Kingdom, they were “an item”.

How wrong could I be, and fortunately I did not put my foot in it, but I was subsequently introduced to the doctor’s wife. Attractive, vivacious, she was running the public relations for the world women’s tennis from Julia Creek. When she needed to go somewhere, she would exchange her check shirt and jeans for a tailored suit and taking her laptop, fly from Julia Creek to Brisbane via Townsville and then onwards wherever she had to go in the World. They were meat for a TV series, but what soap opera writers would have thought the scenario credible at that time.

However, like all magical situations it eventually ended and that bugbear of lack of succession planning intervened, and Julia Creek went back in its health services to square one.

The problem is that no small country town where the economic justification from a reasonable Medicare reimbursement point of view is a population of 1,000 per doctor, and the community expecting 24/7 year in and year out service without burnout, is wishful thinking.

That was over 20 years ago and as I wrote then about Julia Creek: “flat savannah country: pubs, railway station, hospital, this is travelling the outback, along the song lines of the bush troubadours past the turnoff to McKinlay where the pub scene for the first Crocodile Dundee film was shot.” Nothing much has changed, except for those flooding rains and intervening drought.

Colonia, Uruguay

However, turning to Colonia, where the Julia Creek couple with their family have recently migrated. Colonia is a town in Uruguay. Uruguay is a place I consider in three parts in regard to population. The population is about 3 million, a third who live in Montevideo and a third of the Montevideo live in condominia alongside, if not overlooking the River Plate.

Montevideo is at the same latitude as Sydney and along the River Plate towards Punta del Este there are endless sandy beaches. The river Plate resembles Port Phillip Bay in so far that due to its width Buenos Aires in Argentina is over the other side of the estuary, but not visible. At Punta del Este you can see where the River Plate empties into the Atlantic Ocean. It is like having the Gold Coast just up the road.

However if you go the other way from Montevideo you end up in Colonia. Alongside the River Plate, it is all cobblestone alleys and low-slung adobe houses, and the church dominating the square. You can almost feel that somewhere there is a Ramona listening to the mission bells. The town was contested at one time between the Portuguese and Spanish, and the influence of each can be detected in the layout and town architecture. Again the sandy beaches are not far away.

I went there last year and had a memorable grilled steak Uruguayan style for lunch at the El Viejo Barrio, which fortunately given it was winter was very cosy inside. Nevertheless, like Sydney it has a mild winter, and now that the South Coast of NSW has been devastated by fires, Uruguay is an attractive alternative spot for a summer vacation. It is cheaper than Australia, and if you as a foreigner use a credit card, you get 15 per cent off the bill. Their currency has been buffeted by the international situation, but not as much as the Argentinian and Chilean currencies have been.

I hope the Australian couple make a go of it, and finally it is tragic that I have to say this, but I am in no way benefiting financially by this recommendation. I paid my way across South America without there being any need for a barely visible acknowledgement at the foot of this blog that I received sponsorship. I thus recommend Uruguay without any thought of financial consideration for a smoke-free holiday.

Tourism

I have always thought Tourism Australia has been stuck somewhere in the mid-secondary school years where bedrooms are coated with pinups and memorabilia relevant to the school year heroes and heroines. However, how relevant is it to project those teenage images for Australia as a whole when you are encouraging visitors to Australia.

Australia had barely recovered from that ludicrous advertisement shown at the Super Bowl in 2018 of some American dill as a supposed American love child of Crocodile Dundee and then that “PhilAusophy” essay in smug meaningless.

The latest opus whose release was aborted by the bushfires featured – predictably – Kylie Minogue, whose home for the past 20 years has been the UK and Adam Hills, who has lived in the UK for the past decade.

By contrast in a recently shown episode of Griff Rhys Jones’ Griff Off the Rails: Down Under, with a background of the Opera House, there was Ross Noble, the British-born comedian telling us viewers how much he loves Australia. His enthusiasm for being one of us should be tempered by the realisation that his home in St Andrews, north-east of Melbourne was burnt down in the bushfires of 2009; he had to regroup, and here he is, optimistic about Australia, ten years later, the best Ambassador Australia could have at this time. He has come back; he has more than survived

You know, it is extraordinary but here we have a raft of well-known Brits: Julia Bradbury, Jane McDonald, Griff Rhys Jones and now Michael Portillo all at it – selling Australia, mostly concentrating their efforts on Australian railways, but not solely. Their efforts have seemingly been ignored by the character, our Prime Minister, also known as Scotty from Marketing, which is somewhat surprising for someone who needs every straw he can find.

It is a little known fact that Morrison learned his marketing skills growing up alongside the Poseidon Adventure and the Towering Inferno – two of the best disaster movies ever made. He has this exquisite sense of timing of being able to advocate calling the military out in emergencies at a time when one of the military helicopters has just started a bushfire. The apologists say they are not trained for domestic emergencies, but that hardly excuses the defence forces setting fire to the ACT.

Another Bridget legacy

When she was Minister for Sport, Rural Health and Regional Communications in the Turnbull Government, she signed on the appointment of a Rural Health Commissioner, and an academic general practitioner, Paul Worley, got the job.

He was re-appointed in late October 2019 until 30 June 2020 by another National Party stalwart, Mark Coulton, the member for the NSW drought stricken electorate of Parkes, the Minister for Regional Services, Decentralisation and Local Government, hardly a ringing endorsement despite all the hype, and “rural health” has disappeared from the title.

I am not sure that just reeling out a number of rural generalist positions to be absorbed by the Queensland regionalised health system is the answer. From personal experience some rural general practitioners are first-rate teachers and they integrate teaching seamlessly into the practice. Others are not; and training is minimal. Very hit and miss.

However, the advocacy of rural generalist positions has suited the vested interests that have pursued the rural generalist model for years. Essentially, this initiative is a fancy title for training general practitioners in the country to deal with emergencies, and getting the Queensland Government to pay specialist rates for these doctors.

It is unclear whether this model has enhanced retention rates of general practitioners in rural practice. From personal experience, the program has minimal effect in Victoria, and it is unclear whether Professor Worley’s photo-opportunities that would have rivalled the travel of Bill Peach, has yielded any change in behaviour.

The other Worley report concerns allied health professionals, and while it is clear that they do not want a counterpart of the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine, preferring to maintain the status quo in regard to infrastructure, there is special pleading, which I have become accustomed to read. In the end it is all obtaining access to Medicare benefits, which I have argued elsewhere is on the face of their argument unconstitutional, but then who would argue against it politically. Only the central agencies have stopped entitlements under Medicare becoming a flood of pork barrels.

Having had a close association with the development of the successful rural medical school, rural clinical school and university department of rural health program – both before and after the publication of my Rural Stocktake report in 2000 – I am well aware of what does not work, but one of the problems I have encountered in public administration is a basic tenet of same.

If it does not work, don’t do it again.  

In your remaining time, Professor Worley you may wish to reflect on that dictum.

A different Turnbull

 I started with Winton and am ending with Malcolm.

You have had your time, Malcolm. Your recent bleat in the Time magazine makes uneasy reading. Complaining about your own failure is not a pleasant sight, anymore than reading about a quixotic Rudd tilting at the Murdoch windmill.

However, your grand entrance once into an airport lounge with your entourage gaining attention by singing snippets from Gilbert and Sullivan gave a clue to your future. Light, mildly entertaining, trivial.

The Grand Poo-bah

However, I suppose it’s better that “Nessun dorma” which rang out nightly when Rudd was Prime Minister.

Mouse Whisper

I shudder to think what Dutton’s advice would have been if he had been around during the poliomyelitis epidemics. Christmas Island would be very crowded I suspect. Thank God, he never read about “lock hospitals”.

My Blogmaster was a small child then. He stopped inter-school activities but still went to school – but one thing we had no ice cream. He said he was never fearful; just accepted the risk, as his parents did, heightened by living in an unsewered area, as much of outer Melbourne was at the time.

Australia’s Medical Incarceration

Modest Expectations – Overlord

This is one for the arsonist-is-the-cause crowd that sit in the Conspiracy Corner of the Coalition Party Room. On a recent day of complete fire ban with the North-East Victorian bushfire front near at hand, some idiot was out there with a slasher cutting dry grass. Not the first time he had done this on a day of complete fire ban. Inevitable spark and a grass fire erupted. Fortunately the fire was brought under control before it could threaten the herd of prime cattle up the road, not to mention the residents.

It is a bit immaterial how this joker voted but obviously by his actions he was a climate denialist in as far as denying hot weather should have been hampering his stupidity. However, not much better than mining for coal on a complete world century ban on temperature rise.

Let’s play Premier

One of the reasons nothing gets done is that everybody is always in meetings. One of the frustrating things is that the person with the current designated responsibility seems to be positively Arthurian in the number of round tables around which he is perching.

In Tasmania, a former auditor-general, Michael Blake heads the review of fire services. He replaced a real estate agent as head of the review in early 2019, the initial report having been made in 2018.

He has headed reviews before, which means that in the parlance for appointment to such positions, he either is seen as a “safe pair of hands” or else someone who “won’t rock the boat”. In reviewing the 2016 Huonville floods, he wrote presciently:

“Finally, and I raise this with no particular view about the causes, perhaps greater attention may be needed to agencies we establish or why bother to set them up? I refer to agencies like the Tasmanian Climate Change Office. Its research indicates temperatures will rise and rainfall will remain unchanged but there will be more intense rainfall events. The implications of this research need to be considered for the benefit of all Tasmanians…”

However, the current fire review does not give one a sense of anything being done – and hence does Tasmania have to have a catastrophic burn before anything is done?

Last year, a review of fire services regulations was initiated, with 35 questions asked and 39 responses (plus 4 appendices) received. Let us quote from the short response of Sustainable Timber Tasmania:

  1. Agree the Act should be amended to exempt hazard mitigation activities from LUPAA. Given the Statewide Strategic Fuel Management program is based on tenure blind treatment of fuels, and TFS, STT and PWS are partners in the program, any provisions to TFS in the Act should also apply to STT and PWS when undertaking hazard reduction activities on private land (where these provisions are relevant and appropriate).

Concentrate on tickling the regulations and one gets bureaucratic, acronymic obfuscation – and no commitment and no money.

Instead, let’s lay out a plain sheet of paper. You, the reader are now the all powerful, all knowing Premier of Tasmania.

It is not conventional bushfire season; there are probably only four months in the year when bushfires are unlikely, and thus we have to choose a time when it is furthest away from bushfire season to get a lead time to accomplish a preventative strategy.

You, the Premier for the point of this exercise, lay out the topic of bushfires. You call in the 29 local councils to show you their fire plans and you ask them to detail individual budgets and resources. You know Central Highlands, West Coast and Huon have the lowest density population but the greatest “pristine wilderness” – the signature of Tasmanian uniqueness, which you know has been continually under threat by the timber cutters and the engineers who do not care a dam. Tourism meanwhile is cast against the image of a scantily clad model frolicking with a stuffed thylacine uttering jolly Australian obscenities. These images are the dilemmas that you, dear Premier, face.

There is another more pointed dilemma. It was understood that rainforest on the west coast had not had fires for hundreds of years. However, man has been careless in allowing weeds to grow – gorse, blackberries and bracken for starters. We also do not want fire in the peat that underpins so much of the button grass, whose tannin residues wash into the creeks and river to give the tea colour. Peat bog fires can form an eternal flame in front of which Tasmania weeps. But enough of your tears, does Tasmania have the expert advice on how to isolate the weeds in any removal and then the will to do so?

A timber industry representative arrives at the table advocating tree thinning. Tasmania has already suffered from the euphemisms of timber predators. And judging by their current contribution to the fire services review they know one course of action – woodchopping. Where are the groves of huon, king billy and celery top pine? Let us show who’s boss by cutting down the tallest trees we can find; after all is that not thinning?

OK you’ve cut down the trees. I presume you are not leaving any detritus on site – it’s not about cutting down trees to leave fuel for bush fires? In good industry parlance, you’ve cut down the trees and now you want the government to give you permission to do what you have already done. Sorry, didn’t you get the message that times under my government have changed?

As I have said to those who may be tempted and then get caught for malfeasance such as looting or deliberate arson, I will allow them to cut down one tree – the one upon which he or she will be hanged.

Finally, there is also the major question raised in the report on the 2009 fires in Victoria about the danger of electricity delivered above ground since it was shown that powers are a source of fire. The question arises therefore, in vulnerable areas, of placing the powerlines underground, where they may have a life of up to 80 years before needing renewal. This again is a consideration that you, as Premier for the day, need to consider.

Once upon a time a young fellow could spend his vacation time in the bush fire-spotting. How can drones substitute? Are they the best way to detect the first signs of smoke? Drones? How many drones operating around the clock or when the probability of lightning strike is high are needed? Is the technology up to it?

Accessibility by roads: have our forest trails been graded and are they able to take increasingly large vehicles and what of bridge loads? What about access to water? How many training exercises have you done since last summer? I can ask the fire chiefs that.

What vehicles do we need? It seems that these new fire vehicles can also clear a passage into the forest to the seat of the fire and some are able to evacuate people in emergencies. What are you doing about that?

And the fixed wing aircraft including seaplanes and the helicopters, how many do we need permanently and on lease from the beginning of summer? Or is the beginning of summer already too late? Are our landing strips sufficient for these aircraft to land as close as possible to the fire and in emergencies?

What about boats? The current array of defence force boats seems unwieldy to be of much use. Can a ship the size of the S.S Adelaide be able to dock in Macquarie Harbour or any of ports around the coastline? After all, to paraphrase that Minister of the Crown who famously said: “Tasmania is an island surrounded by water.” Therefore, up front the sea should figure in any plans, not as an afterthought.

Now that most valuable of resources – fire fighters. Each of your communities provides the people to fight fires. How many do you have? What is the optimum number? How easy is it to get reinforcements from elsewhere in the State and outside the State.

And what of the community – you know those who don’t have house and contents insurance and bludge on those who do (not forgetting that the fire levy is part of the insurance premium). Sorry to use the word bludge but if you build a dwelling without having insurance, and then presumably hope the community will bale you out … It shows a degree of irresponsibility (although who will bale you out in you are burnt out is probably not a conscious thought when the house is built or bought). In this worsening climate, the luxury of being uninsured is no longer an option. And there is the other side of the two edged sword: for the majority affected by bushfires, probably since 2009, the building codes in fire prone areas have become so much more rigorous that even those with basic home and contents insurance will not be adequately covered to rebuild in the same area.

Now submit your answers, and we shall excuse errors of omission and commission, because the answers will not remain gathering dust, or is it ash.

The Progress of John Barilaro

Canberra Times 9 April 2019: The report of Mr Barilaro’s announcement on postponing any brumby cull in Kosciuszko National Park (“NSW puts ‘immediate’ brumby cull on hold”, April 8, p.7) exposes his approach to facts. Mr Barilaro: “before we can determine how many brumbies are to remain …”

Fact: an exhaustive process in 2015-16 determined how many brumbies should remain. The answer was 600 to 750.

Mr Barilaro: “a draft management plan needs to be drawn up”. Fact: a draft management plan exists and is available on the web – the Kosciuszko Draft Wild Horse Management Plan of 2016.

Mr Barilaro seems determined to keep asking until he gets the answers he wants, even if this involves spending the tax-payers’ money on yet another committee, another report, and another survey. The broad-toothed mice and other species whose existence is threatened by feral horses in Kosciuszko National Park are running out of time.

Canberra Times 26 July 2019: Acting Premier John Barilaro has launched an extraordinary on-air attack at ABC South East NSW, appearing to encourage people to stop listening to the station. He also heatedly exclaimed he would not leave politics while the independent broadcaster continued to operate.

Canberra Times 13 November 2019: Mr Barilaro had a spat with a union after his party was accused of hindering bushfire preparations across NSW with “crippling” staff cuts. A political blame game has broken out – even as bushfires continue to rage – with Mr Barilaro criticising the National Parks and Wildlife Service for not doing enough hazard reduction in the lead-up to the fire season.

The Public Service Association, which represents park rangers, hit back by saying Mr Barilaro was “tastelessly blaming” public servants after his government slashed staff numbers. The PSA says there’s been a 35 per cent cut to fire-trained positions in the state’s national parks, which are now being managed by “skeleton staff”.

But the NSW government says the number of firefighters in national parks has increased from 1050 in 2011 to 1226 in 2019. Mr Barilaro refused to back down when he was grilled in State parliament on Wednesday. “The truth of the matter is that we still live with (former premier) Bob Carr’s legacy – lock up the forest and let it burn,” he said. “I make no apology for my comments. The PSA went out and fibbed in relation to the reduction of rangers dealing with fires in national parks.”

Mr Barilaro in a separate statement said he wouldn’t be lectured by those pushing a “green-left ideology”. “There are things to learn out of every bushfire emergency and what’s clear is that more hazard reduction work needs to be done during times where it is safe to do so,” he told AAP. “We can’t be dictated to by a green-left ideology that advocates locking up bushland and leaving it.”

PSA acting general secretary Troy Wright said politicians should focus on preparedness – not political ideology. “If the origins of these catastrophic fires across the state are in national parks then it is the National Party and part of the Berejiklian government that are responsible for the lack of preparedness,” he said in a statement. “It is the complete absence of proper funding, not some mercurial green movement as the Nationals allege.” Australian Workers’ Union national secretary Daniel Walton is calling for an inquiry into firefighter staffing levels in national parks. “Every day we are hearing from members across the state about how their resourcing is poorer than it’s ever been and the knock-on effects that’s having,” he said in a statement on Wednesday.

“The AWU has been warning for years that fire services are grossly under-resourced. We just don’t have adequate resources to deal with catastrophic events that are becoming increasingly common due to climate change.

I thought the call by Mr Barilaro to stop listening to the ABC particularly tasteless, but then he was in London on holidays while the South Coast burned. Without the ABC broadcast, there would have been nothing, no communications, broadcasters putting themselves in some risk, but then the Savoy (was it?) does not take the ABC.

Now Mr Barilaro, you can weep for your beloved feral horses, but weep also for the koala and other native animal habitat that the horses have destroyed or by land clearing which had been done to increase their vulnerability.

Hazard reduction burns, well your majority in Queanbeyan may be slashed when the few remaining days of the year are coated in smoke, year in and year out. I’ll assure that everywhere there will signs saying Barilaro Hazard Reduction Burns, if and when it happens.

As I leave you bouncing hyperactively on your bar stool, some might hear one say you are full of la cacca di toro or would you prefer merda in the first degree.

I’ve worked in a town that speaks Italian, but correct me if my Italian is wrong.

However, the Premier has seen fit to anoint you to clean up the mess, but while you were away in London determining which chianti you wanted from the rack, remember Andrew Constance, your fellow Minister was there, every day, coated in bushfire ash, a true Australian – in every sense.

Mouse whisper

Has any estimate been done of how much vermin has been killed in these fires – foxes, rabbits, feral cats and dogs, deer, wild pigs – and of course those feral horses?

But hopefully there are still alpine dingoes. Somewhere. They seem to be forgotten in the destruction.

Alpine dingo

G’Day

The late Robin Day once came to Australia to do a BBC Panorama program to get the everyperson Australian view of the prospect of the UK entering the Common Market. He wanted an Australian view and he sought advice from Zelman Cowan, the then Dean of Law at the University of Melbourne, to gather a group of students whom he could interview. We were gathered before while he talked to us, and his belittling tone reminded me of why we of Irish descent had some difficulty with the monarchy.

Later in the filmed interview, he turned to me and asked my view. The substance of my response… “I’m a republican. I couldn’t care less what the UK does.” and unexpectedly from the front row someone piped up “And I don’t like the Poms too”.

A shaken Day was led away by Zelman Cowan, who was heard to say “Totally unrepresentative opinion.”

The next year, I happened to come into the student common room at the maternity hospital, where I was doing my obstetric term as a medical student, and there he was on television – Zelman Cowan coming off the Shrine steps burbling something about the indissoluble ties between Australia and the Mother country. I did not wait for any further balm and went out to deliver another baby.

I wrote this following poem in memory of Robin Day and Zelman Cowan and all those people who have been unable to dissolve the indissoluble ties.

Australia Day

Once upon a pastured lawn 

The Pom called Robin Day did ask 

To serried ranks we stood

Respectful 

Should we seek republic

And the answer unexpected

To knees once genuflected

To Day we all said aye.

 

January 26

A day of Independence 

When India

Grew up and threw away it swaddling clothes

A cope with mace and orb and sceptred crap

Lie shattered upon brown flattened earth

For a people confused by Battenburg

But now Republic Day they all say aye

 

January 26

A good man stood on Botany shores

Sent from porphyric hungover king

Possession gained with jack of Andrew, Patrick, and of George

But no place for David, no daffodils nor leek

Yet this Southern harsh and sunburnt land earmarked for gaols

He christened green and pleasant New South Wales

In homage today we whitefellas celebrate that day

 

January 26

Summer invasion to those not tanned

To frolic in illusory freedom

The Jack still flutters

A cornered eye

The Southern Cross is overseen.

By stiffened queen

To celebrate a day of smoke and sand and foaming ale 

 

Robin Day is long since dead

That rank of 61 or was it 2 now thin and worn

Who once called aye for change

Yet Her of steely Albion eye

Or He of fumbling foreign voice survive

Shall we now spent and grey

Not live to have a true Australia day

Which we can call our own

 

A lone voice rings out

Make September First Republic Day

Is it not the first day of Spring

Is it not when wattle bloom 

A sprig for all

Is it but a symbol of youth and vigour

This day which is

The First of September.

Modest expectations – Carthaginian Vanilla

How appalling is Mr Albanese suggesting that the Parliament adjourn for a whole day as a part of respect and condolences admixed with confected piety.

All that does is delay what he then said is vital – that is, the passage of urgent legislation.

Otherwise such a gesture is symbolic of Parliament – hypocrisy and inaction.

By all means apologise that you did nothing about preventing the bushfires but spare us the crocodile tears – and get on with the business of government. In fact you should be meeting earlier.

And incidentally get away from this Albo and Scomo nonsense. It sounds as if they are clowns.

No caption required

Fell or Fall

I have written about clearing the trees around the house surrounded by bush. That’s fine if your land does not abut land where the owners can’t be found. The chap who cleared parts of the block and the boundaries asked Council about the absent owner. The Council were not particularly interested; so we went ahead and took down the trees on the boundary and in so doing, cleared the scrub from a large section of the block. This was last year. There were several trees that required a specialist arborist to fell them safely so that they did not fall on the house – a possibility if you do not have the specialist knowledge. In addition the insurance companies take a dim view of those who are literally “cutting corners”.

Even with gutter guard to prevent the accumulation of leaves in the gutters, these trees were a fire risk. We have a celery pine growing close to the back door. That was spared but pruned, as was the leatherwood, so essential for the bees to make honey with its distinctive flavour.

The detritus of forest clearing

However the mass of fallen trees if left present a problem. It was bought to mind by the allegation that the NSW Forestry Corporation leaves what is called “slash” after they have cut down trees. This outcome should be remembered anytime the foresters say we need “to thin the trees”. As you drive through areas which have recently been harvested, there is always a lot of residual wood left in the cleared coup. Around settlements, some trees when they are cleared by Councils are wood chipped, but these wood chipping enterprises seem to be carried out alongside roads where bringing in the appropriate machinery requires clear access.

But back to our block – left with a large pile of wood, there were several ways to go. We could have a controlled burn – a “pile fire” – with the local volunteer fire brigade using it as a training exercise. That proved not to be feasible. The pile of wood was on the absent landowner’s property. Then there was the problem that there was never suitable weather for such a burn to be organised safely, or so the local fire chief said.

In the end, we had the pile of wood removed, some of it would be used as firewood as many of the houses still have open fireplaces, but the rest moved to garden waste – still flammable but away from the property.

There is still a way to go, but bushfire prevention needs a concerted approach if the community is not to end in charred regrets.

Next to our property is a deserted miners cottage, which was illegally moved on site many years ago. It had been lived in, but now the empty land is covered in blackberries. Blackberries have also threaded their way along the foreshore and there has been no attempt to remove the bushes; the trees have been allowed to increase in number, because some eucalypts and melaleucas proliferate at a great rate. There is now a thick line of bush between the foreshore and the heritage footpath – so much so that visitors walk on the road at night because the footpath is too dark. The only clear line of sight to the harbour along this foreshore is in front of the former mayor’s property.

In the end in this over-governed country, we the ratepayers depend on the competency of local government and its finances are dependent on the ratepayers and the amount of money that trickles down from the State and Federal governments. So, can I ask what is being done about those people who buy a bush block and then do nothing to clear vegetation?

In our case on each side that is the situation. We have taken unilateral action, as we prefer prevention to “re-embering” a once pristine countryside.

Tasmania is here to burn. This is a serial problem, a new ABC soapie called “Burnt Hills”?

Postscript

I bought my wife a chainsaw for her birthday. No, we shall not destroy the habitat of the New Holland Honeyeaters or the wrens, who of course love a pile of rotting timber as a habitat. Then perched in the trees are the yellow-tailed black cockatoos. Green rosellas come calling once in a while – they are particularly fond of stripping fern fronds. There is still plenty of bush, but as the local fire captain said, keep it at least 30 metres back from your house. Enter the chain saw.

However, there are still those melaleucas, which are constantly sprouting. We cut them down. What next? The wood has few commercial usages, beyond a brush fence which was constructed years ago when the Council accidentally cleared a piece of our property and we needed a temporary fence while the undergrowth grew back.

Here on the west coast of Tasmania I thought we would be free of the bushfire smoke. However silly me – the population and wildlife of the West Coast are enshrouded in smoke. I worry that my grandchildren will show photographs of what their grandchildren will never have seen as they splutter with their chronic respiratory disease – blue skies.

A small question

One of the intriguing facts of the recent bush fires, which came to light in the fire started in Ebor, a self-styled village in the northern tablelands of NSW, is the impact of illicit crops. Here some guy tried to “back burn” to save his marijuana crop and in doing so set the bush alight with horrendous effect. I have been through Ebor some years ago, and chose not to stop. It is duelling banjoes country.

Even more dangerous are “meth labs”? A large one of those turned up as well. The bush has a way of hiding all manner of things, but the production facilities are flammable.

I have tried to find out whether growing marijuana in the bush leads to small isolated communities resistant to bushfire evacuation for obvious reasons. If marijuana growing in isolated communities can be substantiated, then such horticultural endeavour presents a hazard to human life, if nothing else. The answers don’t lie in intensifying police action, which in turn leads to hiding cultivation in more and more remote inaccessible bush.

However, it is a vexed situation as was tobacco cultivation in the Ovens Valley – the last place in Australia where it was commercially grown. I was working in Myrtleford in the years of the last tobacco crops grown there; we watched the whole farce of growers, “standover merchants” and various government agencies chasing one another around the district at harvest time which was enough for the government to enact their own variety of “chop-chop”.

Tobacco at Myrtleford

The crop is no longer grown in the Ovens Valley, and it is not a crop that is easily able to be illicitly grown there. The kilns for drying the tobacco leaf are a giveaway although many have now been re-purposed as stylish Airbnb accommodation. Anyway Australian tobacco leaf was never rated as much good, and until the early 1980s it was one of, if not the most heavily subsidised crop grown in Australia because of its inferior quality. I remember being a party before the Industry Assistance Commission Inquiry, on behalf of the medical profession, to argue the case for the subsidy to be withdrawn.

Therefore, given the changing attitudes to marijuana cultivation, would it not be better grown in controlled conditions away from the bush? After all, it would be one way to enhance tourism if they could visit a legal greenhouse and see the crop under cultivation and sample … just a thought.

I have a bone to pick with you

An interesting emergency occurred last week when we were having a meal of fish and chips. A fish bone lodged in my wife’s throat. This once happened to me when I was having a meal in Derby in the Kimberley. It was probably barramundi, and fortunately I was having the meal with the legendary outback doctor, Randy Spargo. The spectre of being evacuated to Perth, a distance of 1800 kilometres, confronted me if the bone could not be dislodged. Water and bread was Randy’s solution, and after the initial trial, we went to the local hospital to pursue his cure. Randy was extraordinary – it was as though he talked the bread down – a “bone whisperer”. Randy had worked for a long time among Aboriginal people and at one point had an Aboriginal partner. Randy had a very calming way of handling a situation that could have turned awkward. In the end, the bone cleared my throat, whether “talked down” or not.

We went back to the café and finished our meal. Next to the restaurant was a meeting of Pentecostalists, complete with glossolalia and very audible groaning, which created a fraught atmosphere when we left for the hospital. When we returned after the bone had “gone South”, all was silent.

So last week we embarked on the bread and water exercise. It was unsuccessful, as was the banana; so we called an ambulance and with the expectation of there being at least an hour’s delay then dialled a general practitioner friend for any other suggestions to try in the meantime. He suggested that the bone might be caught up in a tonsillar crypt, and reassured us that if it was not causing breathing problems we could leave it until the morning and via a referral from the general practitioner to an ear, nose and throat specialist the bone could probably be removed under local anaesthesia. This would be a two-stage procedure, potentially drawn out, dependent on the availability of the doctors.

We were about to accept our friend’s advice, and cancel the call to the ambulance when two paramedics turned up after an hour. The situation explained, Rocco, one of the paramedics asked if we had any Coca-Cola or lemonade – something both carbonated and acidic. As we had Coca-Cola he suggested my wife gargle with it. She went out to the kitchen, gargled and Eureka, it worked almost immediately. A few gulps and all’s well. So we learnt something, because as Rocco said the first response if they had taken her to the Accident & Emergency Department would be to purchase some Coca Cola from a vending machine and see if that shifted the bone.

As there were a few minutes while the fish bone was moving its way down the gullet, I asked how they had found their education. It was nearly 30 years since I undertook a review of the NSW Ambulance Service, and one of my recommendations had been to establish a formal tertiary education course for ambulance officer training, not only to introduce a reproducible training program, but also to assure reciprocity for Ambulance officer recognition between State services. At the time, training was internal and there was no reciprocity between the States. Learning was robotic and one of the teachers was reputed to carry a baseball bat to establish what passed as a learning environment.

It was a time when the NSW Ambulance had more ranks than the British Army such was the promotional system based on seniority rather than qualification. Behind this system was “the Brotherhood”, in which the power of the ambulance service rested at the time. Not a particularly enticing prospect for someone entrusted with review. However the NSW Ambulance Board at the time was progressive. Changes came. It seemed that the education recommendation has survived with these two paramedics being graduates of this system that had its genesis in the early 90s.

As Rebecca, the other paramedic there at the “Fishbone incident” said, looking at me just as they were leaving; “Thanks for the HECS debt!” I think she was joking.

Barramundi

When I have had the best seafood meal, I record it – not the exact date or time as they are immaterial except in a general sort of way. I am too impatient to be an angler and the complexity of the fly fisherman is well beyond my ken. However, I remember inter alia my very best barramundi meal.

It was Good Friday about 20 years ago and the temperature in the shade was in excess of 40oc by mid morning. We had pulled up at a nondescript store outside Wyndham. There was a sign advertising fish and chips, but given the time and place there was no expectation of there being any tucker available. No fish apparent. One of the young Aboriginal guys there looked at the other and said could we wait a half an hour or so. We agreed to wait.

Sure enough – a freshly caught barramundi appeared. One of the guys had gone down to the Gut and speared one. We didn’t mind waiting and then sitting in the shade, the sublime enjoyment of consuming this most notable meal of barramundi. When you are not expecting excellence, you appreciate it so much more. Legally caught? Of course, with a wink.

And one more thing…

I was a bit taken back by the army chief, Angus Campbell, jumping out of a helicopter onto the deck of the “Adelaide” to be surrounded by many cheering troops and saying what a good job they had done. I thought it would be better if this claque were out working in the community rather than giving the General a rousing cheer on a boat moored off Eden.

I wonder what would have happened if the head of the firefighters had called them in for a rousing reception while there were still bushfires all around. Condemnation I suspect.

Irrespective of the motive, with all due respects it was a bad look, redolent of George Bush declaiming on the Abraham Lincoln under a banner “Mission Accomplished.”

The fact is that the defence force was caught unprepared, and while they are obviously learning lessons with them increasingly visible in helping with bushfires, your self-congratulatory action, Angus Campbell, was a poor, unnecessary image which hopefully will not be repeated.

It is the problem with public relations staff trying to justify their existence.

Mouse whisper

The local vicar on the Tasmanian West Coast also owns the earth moving business. One feels very safe in the hands of someone who can move both heaven and earth.

Modest Expectations – The meaning of Life

Stop Press: Premier Andrews will strive to lead Australia out of the charred wilderness at the next Federal election. He is a builder.

Anthony Norman Albanese will make a great Governor- General.

Yet it is reasonable to believe prophecy is just one step ahead of fake news.

Nevertheless, what is going is eerily reminiscent of the Liberal Party Coalition in 1972 when it entered a period of policy paralysis – Vietnam and China being two unresolvable problems. Despite the apparently huge wave of support generated for Whitlam, he did not win a huge majority in the 1972 election. Despite the narrow margin to Whitlam, the two unresolvable were immediately resolvable.

On the other hand Rudd did have a landslide, and in the process the man from which Morrison is seeking advice, John Howard, lost his seat. Australia was prosperous and yet the Prime Minister lost his seat. This had not occurred since 1929 when Australia was struggling economically; Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce was intent on confrontation. He lost his seat of Flinders.

Over the years the fickle nature of the electorate has come to resemble Queensland where there have been electoral landslides over the past 50 years. Queensland is unicameral and thus landslides are not complicated by a House of plush red seats. Rudd and Abbott both won large majorities, but the Senate – the house of the Red Plush – can muddy the policy waters and in between even in the lower house when there are slim margins and independents calling the shots, policy goes out the chamber in a gust of deals.

So bugger bushfire policy, sweetmeats for the privileged and the rent seekers is the go, with parliament a sandpit.

But underlying Dante’s Australia are the climate change denialists.

Young John Howard was a protégé of John Carrick and Bob Cotton, two guys out of Florentine casting, and he was their Chosen One, but it took from 1974 to 1996 for him to achieve his aim – Prime Minister Howard. To be so single-minded requires a certain sort of brain. But John you are 81 and I admire you for your tenacity. You actually made a much better Prime Minister than I thought possible, because you had principles. Many of my achievements were achieved under your watch, although I am not sure you would acknowledge that.

However climate change is reality, just like getting out of Vietnam and recognising China was a reality so long ago when we were both young. And I sure I know where you stood on these two issues, Young John, just like climate change.

Don’t get it wrong again otherwise Daniel Andrews is a real threat to your protégé, Scotty.

In the meantime, read on …

To market, to market, to buy a plum bun, Home again, home again, market is done.

Everybody is concentrating on Scott Morrison in these extraordinary times because politics Australia has never seen such a transparent calculating self-marketeer as its Prime Minister. In this season of the bushfire, his prime aim is that he must not let it consume his base – the Liberal Party of NSW.

He has been wrong-footed, and there is discontent within the ranks. Worse, the country is watching and listening to the ABC and not the Murdoch publications, and Alan Jones, the parrot on his shoulder, is also away. The belated announcement of the call up of reservists, the deployment of aircraft and ships are all good anchors on which to embed images of a forceful leader.

Undermining the NSW Premier is an essential strategy. She and her head of fire fighting have been criticised unsurprisingly with the Daily Telegraph implicated, especially in the plotting. Shane Fitzsimmons has the temerity to say nobody told him of the deployment of defence force staff. Then the blame is smudged in the need for all to come together. Nobody wins by personal spats at a time when the country is burning; but seeds are sowed for a time in the future when social media starts to be infected by stories about what could have been done better before the intervention of the Marketeer.

In marketing terms, the emphasis must be taken away from the States – the fire fighters, which are the Premier’s responsibility and thus the essential ingredient in halting the fires. The emphasis must be transferred to men and women in uniform, his responsibility. The fire fighters only have fire trucks and a few aerial helpers, but the real toys are held by the Defence forces. The Defence Forces can provide the imagery of might, even if they in the present circumstances providing a very public but, if analysed, marginal impact.

A good marketeer demands images and big ships and big aircraft with attendant servicemen and women helping the small child onto a helicopter conveys both concern and relevance. “Army heroes” – The Daily Telegraph shouts on the front page – is ferrying people away in helicopters heroic? Soldiers doing their job – but heroes? In these Telegraph front page images, there is not a firefighter in sight.

After all, the community wants good news stores of heroism and the Defence forces – a federal responsibility – coming to the rescue is the story.

Now the images are collected and the Murdoch Press assured, control of the ABC is the target. Reading the hostility towards Morrison on Twitter by prominent ABC employees will test how strong Ida Buttrose will be under the inevitable “ember attack” by the Murdoch claque. A strategy of inserting a number of friendly commentators repeating the Prime Ministerial mantra into the ABC reporting schedule is underway. I suggest one look at some of the commentators based in Canberra who show the first signs of this phenomenon – earnestly repeating without commentary the government’s media release. Once this is done to the ABC seen as untouchably “independent”, then media control is complete. The ABC becomes a loyal servant, and who cares about a journalist without an outlet.

Prince Valiant coming to save the damsels in distress with an audience of faithful knights and yeomen is a perfect marketing morality play. However, the Prime Minister has a long path to cement that role given the uncertainty of his out-of-town rehearsals, but there is always Jon Shier as producer.

However in deploying the defence Forces, Mr Fitzsimmons recognised the problems when a group untrained in fire fighting are dumped upon him, and he went public. I am sure if he had been informed he would have suggested an appropriate role, but normally outwardly calm, he was obviously irritated that he was not told prior to the Prime Minister’s announcement.

After all, the current Minister of Defence, Linda Reynolds should know. She has had an interesting career. She has had an astonishing rise to one of the major portfolios has this Senator from Western Australia. However, she had two parallel careers: one working as a employee of the Liberal Party and the other as a member of the Army reserve from the age of 19 years, rising to the rank of Brigadier and being awarded the Conspicuous Service Cross. This is a relatively recent award given for conspicuous “non-warlike activities”.

She was wrong footed in taking the Prime Minister’s lead by going to Bali with her family, while Australia burned over Christmas, and leaving her portfolio to Minister Littleproud.* Modest Expectations Joel 11/10/19

Having been in the Army Reserve for 29 years, she would know the capability of the reserve forces. Given the gravity of the present situation her first response was surprising in seeming to criticise Mr Fitzsimmons rather than indicating she wanted to cooperate.

However, she made a big deal of the deployment of reservists when the Prime Minister announced it as unprecedented. The obverse question is why the reservists have been left idle domestically for so many years; again, Minister Reynolds should know. Hence if she thought they could contribute why did she delay any recommendation given that she would be well aware that mobilisation of such resources takes time. Or did she recommend in a suitable time that they be deployed and her advice was initially rejected. I presume she is not a muppet, saying nothing when all these disasters were unfolding.

One of tasks foreshadowed for the reservists is burying dead stock; and I think it a bit harsh when my friend said when that is finished they may be asked to bury the Government.

Somebody who knows

Chris Brook PSM FRACP State Health and Medical Commander (Emergency Management) Victoria 2009

You don’t need an analysis of the response to the 2009 Victorian Fires or the 2010 Queensland Floods. It’s all on the public record and in people’s living memories. What you also already know is that the then PM Kevin Rudd was front and centre from the outset in both events and was praised for his initiative.

That’s not to say that his promises were prudent, nor even fulfilled in whole, but he was everywhere. 

In both cases there was a massive rebuilding and recovery effort, largely due to the important work of the States continuing long after Federal intervention had come and gone.

But this misses the real story of the here and now.

It looks to me as though Morrison is set to reinvent himself, as he must, to get through this. All of the anti-climate change rhetoric and anti-socialist left tirades do not change the fact that he has lost the respect of a good part of the community – although the hyper partisan Murdoch press remains staunchly supportive.

He must by now realise that his precious wafer-thin budget surplus is gone and that long term economic damage has been done.

For the fire affected coastal and alpine communities the damage to domestic tourism – their lifeblood – will last for years.

So he will pivot embarking on a huge rebuilding effort; a stimulus thus cunningly concealed. If he’s clever the cost will be described as a capital injection (from borrowings but no one will worry about that) and he can still claim that we are in surplus on the current account.

Gorse – an example of Government indifference

Janine Sargeant – Tasmanian ratepayer & regular blogger

Recently I wrote to the Premier of Tasmania because I was concerned about the rapid spread of gorse along the Zeehan to Strahan road on the west coast of Tasmania. Its spread is symptomatic of the disregard of the environment by all levels of Government, given that gorse as well as blackberry are two of the biggest invaders on the west coast.

If an example of where fuel reduction is needed, this is one hell of a big one.

Fuel reduction is but one element in what should be a comprehensive Statewide fire management plan; the lines of responsibility are clear, readily accessible and the expected results can be easily tallied against the actual achievement.

On Tasmania’s west coast, it rains – a lot. However, it is now clear from the NSW South Coast experience that temperate rain forest can burn. The only thing that prevents it occurring in Tasmania is the level of rainfall, which this year has been about two metres. By way of contrast, the NSW South Coast’s rainfall this year was about half the expected rainfall, between 40 and 60cm, as it was also last year. Much has been said about the desperate lack of rainfall across much of Australia in what is the driest and hottest year on record.

However, despite the rainfall, Tasmania is vulnerable and the gorse invasion is just one symptom of Government’s neglect of the fire risk.

I would hate to have to quote this next summer because nothing has been done and the West Coast has been burnt – with gorse being a prominent culprit.

DIPWE defines the spread of gorse on the west coast as “widespread infestation”. Gorse is a declared weed under the Tasmanian Weed Management Act 1999 and “a Weed of National Significance”. Government’s response is supposed to be to “prevent further spread”, a response in word only as there is not action. Gorse is a major issue in a region that is heavily dependent on “wilderness”, native forests, wild rivers, spectacular scenery and unique fauna – these define the reasons why tourists come to Tasmania.

However, apart from being a hugely damaging invasive weed environmentally, gorse is a major fire hazard, because of its oily content and tendency to shed its dead wood as it grows.

Some years ago there was a gorse eradication program in this area, which seemed to be keeping this weed in check, but there is no evidence of anything being done recently and as a result, the spread of the gorse has gone unchecked. There is no evidence that agricultural contractors, utility maintenance crews, road and earthmoving contractors and other people visiting the areas infested with gorse, are required to undertake basic hygiene measures to prevent spread of seed; this doesn’t happen. In fact it is reported that the roadside mowing that occurs from Zeehan south towards Strahan is actually spreading the infestation closer and closer to Strahan due to seed spread because the vehicles are not being cleaned.

There needs to be an integrated control approach with a combination of methods: herbicide, mechanical, burning and biological control, for maximum chances of long-term success.

Tasmania’s environment, wilderness and forests are an incredibly rich resource that must be protected and in the face of what has been happening across NSW and Victoria, the Tasmanian Government needs to sit up, take notice and act before Tasmania too is wiped out by fires. The gorse invasion is one element of a potential major fire problem that being ignored. My letter to the Premier is ‘being considered’; I hope the response is a little more enthusiastic.

Mouse Whisper

My marsupial relatives, the dunnarts on Kangaroo Island remember that during the 2007 fires there were over 800 people, seven fixed wing water bombers and an Elvis Skycrane Helitanker, all assisting in firefighting efforts.

Now dunnarts smell smoke; and run at the first whiff.

Thirteen years later I have asked on DunnartMail how are they and if the resources committed in 2007 are different from that committed today. The fire in 2007 was contained quickly and the Dunnarts replied to my query.

Unfortunately, this time I have had no response. Communication has been lost.

There may be 500 firefighters, with about 50 of the Reynolds reservists there as back up, and there is at least one 737 waterbomber. Maybe the response is comparable to the 2007 effort and has not slipped backwards. Probably not. Who would know. But what of my cousins?

Now they may be extinct – a terrible, terrible outcome.

I weep for them – they were such a close-knit community.

Modest expectations – Montana

This is a story about the unexpected – an unremarkable story on the face of it, but like many stories of its ilk, instructive.

In August, as I have recounted several times in my blog, I was in Chile and in particular Valparaiso. As I was hobbling down a flight of stairs and across a doorway in the restaurant, my hand caught on something sharp. Whether metal or wood, it created a spectacular gash over my fifth metatarsal right hand. It as not particularly long, but it bled. My canes clattered to the floor. As I had nothing immediately at hand except paper serviettes to staunch the bleeding, and rudimentary Spanish to say “Ayuda”, it continued to bleed profusely. It took some time for my companion, who was sitting by the window in this upstairs-downstairs configuration, to come and put order into stopping the bleeding, by pressure.

Eventually Chilean band-aids were produced and these reduced the bleeding to an ooze. The wound was not stitched, but there was a bit of debridement and the edges of the wound were roughly opposed – without seeking outside medical help. I thought that was one reason it took a long time to apparently heal, but the skin remained pink as the scar tissue started to form.

One day about a month after I had returned home a lump appeared at the site of the scar. It grew relatively quickly, but the skin did not ulcerate. I went to my long time plastic surgeon in Melbourne. I thought there must have been some retained fragment – a foreign body that had been missed. The surgeon who has operated on me on a number of occasions said nothing except after a little hesitation, that he would take it off immediately.

Jean-Nicolas Marjolin

I was surprised by the length of the incision and its depth; I should not have been so surprised when the pathology came back – squamous cell carcinoma. Sometimes in wound tissue an aggressive skin cancer can erupt. That had occurred in my case – Marjolin’s is the eponymous name for it – normally these cancers appear as an ulcer, and this would probably have occurred in a few days if it had not been removed.

That was a month or so ago, but now the area has healed and the scar from the incision is barely visible.

A very good astute surgeon, now onto my next experience…

The Surgeon Never Replied

Below is a letter I wrote to a surgeon just prior to a proposed operation three years ago. I have still not had the operations, and although I have a few mild symptoms I have not had to endure the morbidity or my family the funeral costs which could easily have resulted from operative intervention. I am writing this blog to provide an informed consumer perspective on my doubts about spinal surgery.

The other problem with surgery, especially with severe osteoarthritis in the shoulder joints, is that when you are being moved about during cervical surgery the anaesthesia will mask any incidental damage being done in the shoulder. One does not feel the pain of tearing a ligament or muscles or the rotator cuff of the shoulder joint until one comes out of the anaesthesia, and suddenly there is another centre of pain. In the aftermath of proposed surgery, pain relief for me is always going to be tricky because of my sensitivity to opioids. That does not matter to the orthopaedic surgeon – the surgery itself is the centrepiece, not the subsequent morbidity nor the rehabilitation. After all, I was facing three major orthopaedic operations in short order – nearing the end of my eighth decade.

The following is my letter to the surgeon appropriately de-identified sent in the days before the operation.

I thought I would explain the reasons for deferring my operation. I am sure you respect that the choice I have made has not been undertaken without much deep consideration of balancing the risks and benefits. My response was largely generated from our last consultation and your subsequent letter to Dr A. 

I note you made a comment that if I stressed my spine that there was a possibility of worsening the condition but I recently spent nine days in Malawi on a number of extremely rough terrains in a four-wheel drive without any apparent change.

Currently I have very mild numbness in my little and ring fingers intermittently in the morning on waking – not every day!

If one reads my latest MRI report it demonstrates that I have significant pathology in my cervical spine, yet I am virtually symptom free. You list the risks associated with the procedure without setting out the probability of any them occurring. Hence I take the paragraph in your letter to Dr A to mean that they are considerable risks. I thought it preferable to have the MRI at JHospital well before the operation rather than the day before – and there is no doubt that JHospital runs a very professional operation. However, so does the Diagnostic Imaging Department at IH, with which there appears to have been an unfortunate failure in communication (with yourself. I am sure you did not meant to criticise the IH nor the fact that at that time it was more convenient for me to have my imaging undertaken there.  

In addition you intend to take iliac crest bone which, as you rightly point out, is better than cadaveric bone for the putative operation on my cervical spine

However I have chronic polymyalgia rheumatica, the aetiology of which condition remains obscure, but there is one observation I would make which is that any shift in the dose of cortisone (currently 4 mgs a day) has a far more marked clinical effect than would be expected – manifested as stiffness and muscle weakness. There is no mention of the possible impact of operative trauma on such a condition, but you would have more information than I do. Therefore, that is one matter that needs to be resolved. The other of course is the effect that the cortisone has had on my bone given that I have been on the drug for three years, despite taking Vitamin D regularly.

I am nearly 77 years old, which is a factor, and the fact is that my cervical spine has significant pathology. The question that is raised is whether there is any guarantee that intervention would not have a cascading effect requiring more operative intervention for diminishing returns.

In relation to my lumbar spine, I do have symptomatology of mild spinal claudication as you have noted as 5/10, but as one senior physician said to me the other day, the major problem is my right knee – and knowing the success of such an operation would it not be preferable to do any operative intervention starting with the knee?

The question then arises of whether the operative schedule should be in reverse, and would a laminectomy guarantee relief of my symptomatology – particularly my ataxia and loss of proprioception? Your letter would seem to suggest otherwise. Is the fact that even if I had a lumbar spine operation I would not be helped? What are the odds of improvement given my age and lumbar pathology. 

I walk with two sticks for social reasons not because I need them invariably. For instance, I challenged myself the other day to walk without sticks but accompanied for three blocks to the coffee shop. There was some pain in my knee, minimal pain in my back and no symptomatology referable to my neck. The pain did not stop me at any stage, there and back.

I continue to do hydrotherapy twice a week and find it very helpful and, so as to clarify your comments in the letter concerning “Panadol Osteo” dosage, I am taking 4 tablets of Panadol (625mg) a day in divided doses and not six as previously. Do you think that a significant observation?

There are a number of other matters in your letter to Dr A, which could be better put. The comment concerning my heavy smoking history is totally ambiguous given that I have not smoked for 36 years, and it was taken not from any direct interrogation but lifted from my “confidential note”. The fact that I produced those notes to inform you so that it saved time and helped you to take a comprehensive history. I am sorry to have to make that point, but in providing such information it should be attributed and not just “noted”.

A copy of the letter was sent to Dr P who retired at the end of June and my doctor is now Dr Q locally. Given that the letter was sent to Dr A, who made the initial referral I am at a loss to understand how that occurred. The copy to Dr P has been archived at NHospital with certain agreed caveats. I believe that any copies of correspondence should not only be sent to Dr Q but also to Dr R, who has been the rheumatologist responsible for my treatment for PMR since 2013, when Dr A referred me to him, Dr A having made the initial diagnosis.

You have not referenced my severe shoulder osteoarthritis, which would be a consideration in any cervical spine surgery? (Here a confidential matter relating to another person has been excised from my letter.)

There are there other matters that puzzle me and that, given all the potential complications set out, I understand you will be away the week after the proposed date of surgery – and if that is true who would undertake my post-operative care, should any of the dire consequences set out in your letter occur. 

The second source of my puzzlement is an initial comment you made that you would be prepared to operate on my back four days after my cervical spine operation. Does that still hold true? 

The third matter is your comment that “ agreed with your need to alter the plan on the day before”. I must have misheard but I do not remember agreeing to a change in plan –especially as it would appear that a substantial part of my cervical spine is affected and yet I am virtually asymptomatic. My cervical symptomatology is better than it has ever been given the problems I had with it 20 years ago, and which were relieved by some excellent physiotherapy.  

Those cervical symptoms were resolved a long time before I first presented to Dr A. It is certainly not a decision I would take the day before the operation, given the seriousness of the complications you have listed. Hence this was my reason for undertaking the imaging a substantial time before the proposed operation.  

The underlying question is would it not be better to reverse the operative schedule on the basis of relief of symptomatology and enabling me to walk pain free, with a reasonable gait and with an improved ability to negotiate stairs, reverting to what I could do in early 2013 before the onset of the PMR, which seems to have acted as the tipping point for all this? 

As you foreshadowed in your letter you have awaited my further advice –and my basic response is the question above couched against the previous consultation, but not with the benefit of you reviewing the MRI and spinal X-rays

I asked for a number of second opinions. The average elderly person who is suffering from degenerative disease does not have that option because information in the health sector is so asymmetric.

To me the non-response to the letter reflects on the person. Here there is an arrogance characteristic of some of the medical profession. They do not see it, especially when they have only patient contact and are acting like a high paid tradesman, who comes in does his job, gets paid and moves on. From my experience very few tradesmen ever come back to view their work. Unfortunately, I was brought up to be a doctor and now as a consumer my perspective has only shifted to the other side of the desk. There should be debate, including this doctor who has remained silent for over three years. 

Boeing Sub-Max

In a investigative piece on Boeing at the time that it was amalgamating with McDonnell Douglas to monopolise the American plane construction in 1997, Boeing’s warts were well and truly revealed. McDonnell Douglas had some very good planes, but inter alia fell over because of its failure to build economic wide-bodied airliners, despite in 1995 receiving US$334m in rebates from kindly Uncle Sam.

Meanwhile the Pentagon was awarding Boeing US$1bn for “restructuring costs” and so eager was Export-Import Bank to ease any problems that Boeing might have, was renamed by some in Congress as the “Bank of Boeing”.

If you want to blame the Republicans for allowing this monopoly to occur, well that’s just not true. Increasingly when the truth of this has emerged, since there in the centre of these appalling decision, smoking a cigar in his Oval office was Mr Teflon – Bill Clinton.

He agreed with the advice that the Boeing position was legal because of the pressure it faced from Airbus. As the1997 correspondent said: “Using this logic all the US automakers could merge because the ‘Big One’ would still face foreign competition. Too bad the Detroit lobbyists can’t figure out a way to hide price hikes in the airline tickets and Pentagon procurements.”

Now Boeing is being confronted with a major problem – its latest airliners appear to be duds – and dangerous duds at that.

I have flown on most types of Boeing: 707 through to 747 internationally, 727 and 767 domestically, and even the 717 and 757 although not as commonly as the workhorse, the 737. They have all been good aircraft, although the Qantas 747s are becoming creaky and by preference I try to avoid them.

A former retired Boeing engineer and policy analyst has been reported recently as saying: “(There has been) a shift in the culture at Boeing from one which strove for engineering excellence to one focused on cost cutting. This deliberate strategy from the very top of the company led to massive, ill-thought-out outsourcing and the discarding of engineering talent as work was moved out of the Puget Sound region…(and in turn) has led to major failures on Boeing’s latest two major airplane development programs — first the heavily outsourced 787 Dreamliner and then the minimally upgraded 737 MAX. Both planes had to be grounded over safety issues.”

This failure has left companies in the supply chain in tatters. Fiddling and tweaking has not worked. Other airlines are running out of patience and are ordering planes from Airbus. As the airline fleets age then attention turns to maintenance; and if cost cutting takes over there as at Boeing, then air travel becomes not just an atmospheric pollutant but also a health hazard.

As has also been reported locally in the Seattle media “Boeing hopes for its first good-news event: the long-delayed first flight of the new 777X, with its massive composite wings. In late January, Boeing’s new leadership will reveal the latest tally of the cost of the MAX grounding, updating the $9.2 billion estimate through October. The rest of the year is likely to be a long slog, getting the MAX program restarted and slowly ramping back up again. No one can yet foresee the long-term impact.”

Boeing 737 Max engine

It sounds forlorn, since many of the mistakes Boeing has made in the 20 years interval have been glossed over by Government not holding them to account and the accompanying high profitability of the 737 until the MAX version came on line.

There have been failures such as not exploiting the 717, which, as one our own Alan’s choices, was particularly shrewd. There is now an increasing requirement for jet airliners with 100-150 seat capacity to run on regional services. The 717 fulfilled that need, but it was given the cold shoulder at Boeing because it was essentially a McDonnell Douglas enterprise and Boeing stopped making them. Only Delta, Hawaiian and Qantas have the plane in any numbers, and they are not selling them. Now through its Bombadier subsidiary, Airbus is filling the need. In the end the 717 will suffer as we all do – it will need spare parts that are no longer there.

However, all is not lost on the bottom line. There are the cost-plus projects where the Defence force chiefs inflate their budgets with expensive projects. Because they are seen as symbols of military might, it is interesting to reflect on the giant transport plane, built by Boeing, the C-17. With a budget of between USD200-300m a year for each one, one official labeled it the Golden Turkey because of its cost and its vulnerability to being blown apart by $22 mortar shell. Perhaps it has been made less vulnerable, especially after one crashed into an Alaskan forest in 2010.

Nevertheless more recently than that, someone who had experienced the joys of travelling in a C-17 said despite all the hype of being long range and being able to be refuelled in midair, it was more like a “stopping all stations conveyance” between the United States and Afghanistan, even including a stop for repairs.

Despite all the rending of garments, the Defence establishment continues to pour money into Boeing. In 2018, Boeing won contracts to build a new pilot training jet for the Air Force, an in-flight refueling drone for the Navy, and a fleet of the Airforce security helicopters.

As reported, Boeing’s “Defence revenues” had fallen by more than one-third over the timeline of a decade: from USD32.1 billion in 2007 to USD21.1 billion in 2017. But, President Donald Trump’s higher defence spending and three new military contracts put Boeing back in the game in 2018.

Still, to put all of the boondoggle in perspective, the Boeing commercial division in 2018 before the Supermax crisis billed USD60bn by airlines around the World.

Cap in hand to the Government you would think can go only so far, but Boeing has shown it has a capacious chapeau.

Mouse whisper

Just a message for the Nimbin anti-vaxxers …

Your child about two years old gets chicken pox; has a high fever – starts fitting – you prescribe one of those herbal remedies that incidentally has aspirin hidden away in it. Child severely incapacitated mentally – or dies.

Remember the name Reye, who first described the mixed brain and liver symptoms and signs as a syndrome in small kids.

Chicken pox plus aspirin; vaccinate against chicken pox. Reyes Syndrome no longer. QED.

Ralph Reye incidentally was an Australian pathologist – normally they are the doctors who deal with the dead.

Like polio, Reye’s syndrome was nearly eliminated until your mob came along.

Reye’s Syndrome

Modest expectations – The Roaring

As I’ve mentioned before (ME18 Pale Waves), we have friends in Lubec on the Maine-New Brunswick border, overlooking the Bay of Fundy. You can drive from the United States border to Campobello Island in Canada – an instructive exercise in itself. However, driving across to have a lunch of lobster is a good enough reason to go to the Island once one has tramped around the Roosevelt exclave. The house has beautiful views over the Bay of Fundy. Driving across the Canadian border is no problem, but coming back the other way across the United States border, even with your American friends you are liable to be greeted by an officious, albeit offensive, border official, who more often or not will want to look very closely at the boot of your car, if not to frisk you.

An old fish shed on the Bay of Fundy at Lubec

This is an aside to an observation that was made to me that a United President would not dare vacation outside the United States these days. Campobello island was where Franklin Roosevelt had the family holiday house; it was where he came to unwind as a young man; it is where he was stricken with poliomyelitis.

Later in his Presidency he used to relax at Warm Springs in Georgia and rarely went to Campobello after he became President.

The United States Presidents know that there are beautiful places to vacation in the United States and even Campobello island is only spitting distance away, but note: after he became President Roosevelt he went to Campobello only once a year until 1939 and then that was it! 

Now just why did Fran Bailey sack you?

Where do you start with Scott Morrison?

I always remember when Prime Ministers took their Christmas break they holidayed in Australia, even when the rich lent them a place in which to relax.

Look Prime Minister, I’ll come clean. I took a trip to the United States with Leader of the Opposition at the same time of the year you went to Hawai’i. Let me say, we did not tell the press gallery, but there was an important task to be sorted out. It was late 1974, just after Bill Snedden had survived the first challenge to his Leadership by Malcolm Fraser, and that and accompanying machinations had been kept away from the Press. Even Laurie Oakes did not get wind of it – nor Alan Reid. So not telling the press is legitimate, on the grounds of when it does not ask, why tell. The smart journalist will generally work it out.

Our visit to the United States was brief and Snedden was back and able to go to Darwin to view the devastation caused by Cyclone Tracey on Christmas day. The reason he went to the United States merited some degree of discretion, but for God’s sake a holiday with the wife and kids. Why the secrecy?

The only residual question is who paid for the holiday? The reason he did not disclose where he and the family went? Was it because it was somebody’s private luxurious pad? Now the reason for the secrecy has been cast against a backdrop of security.

The Prime Minister was reported to have returned via Hawaiian Airlines. I have flown Hawaiian Airlines as probably a number of you have too. Friendly environment, but hardly the most secure. When one of the pilots wants to go to the toilet, the cabin staff block the aisle with food trolleys. Also, unless the holiday was on Oahu, there would have been intermediate air travel, which would have accounted for the time lapse. The whole process shouts “Swiss-cheese” security.

I would have thought that the damage of being absent in an undisclosed location had been done. Finish the holiday and come home with the family. However, the whole episode has an element of panic, and given that the Prime Minister seemed to have difficulty with communicating anyway, he may have been on one of those beautiful resorts, perhaps on an outer island.

Now, Prime Minister, you are back in the country at a time when increasingly the whole nation knows you have ignored warnings, scoffed at global warming, sat on you hands in relation to water, and have no environmental plan to combat climate change. It seems that you remain defiant. The nation may view you as just stubborn to cover impotency, because you have done nothing but treadle the looms of the marketing flack that you once were.

One of the reasons you took the holidays is that you intend going to India and Japan in January to meet two of Australia’s pinups – Modi and Abe. The whole exercise shouts “Coal”.

I doubt if nature will call a truce for you while you go calling on them. But at least we shall know where you are when the fires are burning. I suppose if you will be doing your best to ask them to reduce their country’s contribution to World pollution and from Modi in particular tips on how to enact religious freedom, then it could be viewed as genuine contrition and be excused. But not if you are doing a coal deal and the flames are licking the edges of the Shire.

Let me say I am more concerned with how the volcano burns victims are getting along, especially when there is the potential for the health system to deal with more serious burns victims from these fires.

And one more thing, if you really looking for a really exotic location for “you, Jenny and the kids” go and keep the Biloela family company on Christmas Island; still part of Australia.

Everybody, Prime Minister, should have a road to Damascus moment.

Personally, I did not feel any anxiety about you being away. From reading the notes scattered on that road and the anger generated, you will be lucky to have Murdoch still supporting you – after all, he gave McMahon away as a bad job. The only thing you have on your side is time until the next election and the fickle nature of the attention span of the Australian to wash this incident away. 

The Boy from Wagga Wagga

I have met some impressive National Party leaders, but the current one I have not met. However, from a distance Michael McCormack is not impressive.

A self-combusting pile of manure?

In his fumbling response on climate change he mentioned three factors that he thought were important. McCormack is reported to have said that: “dry lightning strikes, arson and self-combusting piles of manure” were among the causes.

At least he peppered his invective with an attempt to diagnose the problem – somewhat thin, but a statement which raises the question of whether they are relevant elements to be pursued by government. Now that is the genesis of a policy.

In the background however, among his followers infected by the Hanson bacillus , bushfires are all about the Greens – it’s their fault not allowing for hazard reduction and allowing all those wicked national parks to stay in existence. Unfortunately, I was talking to a friend and he repeated the nonsense.

The mayors of five local councils in NSW, one of which is Randwick, are members of the Green Party, and there are 58 Green Party members scattered across 31 councils; hardly a coalition of obstruction. One can criticise the Greens for being conservative heritage protectors, but they are not the only people trying to retain “old growth”.

Yet the right wing columnists spread conspiracy theories about the Greens manipulation as reasons for the fires. For God’s sake we have conservative government both federally and in NSW and the lack of policy and planning in the face of climate change is not due to obstruction by the Greens.

It is our governing politicians doing nothing.

The problem with many politicians is that they do not have the capacity to read – they are functionally illiterate. They have to be told because they cannot read. If they could read then they would look over the science and see that although there are a few areas of scientific fact in contention, there are agreed facts.

Read what the science says: once fires get to a certain temperature then it doesn’t matter how much hazard reduction one does, the country still burns. The burnt vineyards in South Australia were manicured and easy to access, and yet the fire still ripped through the vines.

How you build a national bush fire policy is to mitigate risk. The first statement from McCormack in this interview was “put the fires out”. The unquestioning outcome, but a Hillsong prayer is not the only option.

Science says it is unwise to build on steep slopes, ridge hilltops and riverine bush, where access roads are minimal and where access are cute cul-de-sacs. The fires came eventually to a friend’s house sweeping off the ridge and engulfing this holiday home. Hazard reduction won’t change the vulnerability of gutters with overhanging eucalypts if the fire front is charging down the slopes and the tree crowns are exploding. Before the fire, the ocean views were extraordinary; there were koalas in the trees and the house nestled snugly on the slope had only one access road. New building regulations have seen the house yet to be rebuilt after four years.

After the fires

Turning to the matters McCormack raised. Evidence suggests that about five per cent of fires are started by lightning strikes. Here the Hillsong prayer may be the only option.

Arson is difficult to prevent. True pyromania is thought to be rare, and laying to one side insurance and criminal arson, the other arson profile that the fire brigades looks out for are the “hero” arsonist; a profile that in the United States is predominantly white males between 16-30 years of age. There is another potentially very dangerous group – the revenge arsonists where there is a fine line between revenge and terrorist.

I was in Valparaiso, Chile, in August. Driving by the quaint houses clinging to the steep slopes above the city proper where access roads are narrow and poor, I didn’t think about bushfires. However now these suburbs are burning, as this coastal city goes up in flames – as does the surrounding country side with its forests and picturesque vineyards. There are reports that these fires have been deliberately lit.

On the third matter, waste management is an increasing matter for national policy and not just how to dispose of paper and bottles. The mixture of bacteria and the oxidation process of substrate such as cellulose are an ever-present problem. Trying to develop a national policy on waste management, where incineration is one solution, means that fire control should be a priority. That does not factor in the development of illegal waste dumping of flammable toxic materials in remote unsupervised bush lands. Mr McCormack, waste management policy is not just about picking up cow pats on your property before they explode into fireballs.

A report from California that is instructive is saying that most human-caused fires are accidental and avoidable, such as a burning cigarette carelessly tossed out a car window. But Californian fires can also start from “fireworks (the odds of a California wildfire double on July 4), improperly extinguished campfires, out-of-control burn piles, hot vehicle parts making contact with dry grass, power lines rubbing and arcing in windy conditions, and a variety of other causes. A surprising number of fires start when trailer chains or wheel rims strike pavement and send sparks flying.” This last situation is the likely cause of one of the most deadly Californian wildfires. The Californian attitude is far more cavalier than that of the Australians, and universal bans on lighting of fires are harder to enforce. However, there is an increasing recognition that there will be longer and hotter periods as summer merges with spring and autumn. The end result means a drier and drier landscape.

Hazard reduction by all means – but have we a systematic nationwide policy on hazard reduction and one that will become increasingly narrowly focused when climate change has rapidly reduced the available days for hazard reduction, and the community will increasingly become layered in smoke from fires spreading over those remaining days. The nation will become very impatient with a government that blames the Greens.

The bushfire is a complex challenge; it demands coherent policy; it also demands the funds to efficiently and effectively manage the challenges and, given the way the water policy has been corrupted, to also deal with the other factors that affect how we as a nation can respond to widespread bushfires. What happens when there is no water to fight fires?

Perhaps the best form of hazard reduction would be to remove the rent seekers and the other parasites that bug our political system. The problem at present is they wield the levers of power not the hoses. Barnaby Joyce’s bizarrely berates the government and demands it get out of his life – well, yes, but first the government should give us back our water, then it should have to courage to develop some decent policy recognising that we are in a different climate ballgame now (yes, the Prime Minister can take his baseball cap off to that) and then everyone might get out of Barnaby’s life.

However, all revolutionaries by their nature are optimists. I am and always have been an optimist – even now one foot away from a minha cadiera de rodas

Christmas on the move

Christmas was never a good experience when I was young. We generally went to my grandmother’s place, and the day generally ended in unpleasantness, as one or other family argued among themselves – and when I was young I generally engaged in fighting one of more cousins at some stage during the afternoon. The item of consumption that sits uppermost in my memory was my grandmother’s obsession with making Yorkshire pudding to top off the roast bird. It was one of Cook’s lesser legacies to Australian cuisine.

Santa Fe farolitos

While I had my 1956 Christmas in the Sea of Japan on the S.S Taiping, my nomadic Christmases started in the 1980s – different year; different place. However, the only time that I remember snow in any quantity was Christmas in Santa Fe. Snow was a foreign experience to me, and so trudging through snow covered streets lighted by farolitos – candles stuck in sand in paper bags. In the freezing cold we were part of the congregation at an outdoor Navajo Mass. The mass was memorable with its Navajo interpretation that included the final benediction of a sort – the man close to us raising his rifle and firing a shot into the darkness.

All part of celebrating the miracle of Christmas wherever you may be.

And given it is Friday 27 December, may I wish you all the Best for the Feast of St Stephen – at least east of Rome.

Mouse Whisper

The ultimate put down.

Asked if he liked Melbourne, Augustus Woodley Bernal replied:

“Immensely. But don’t you think it’s a little too far from town.”

Bernal spent some time on the Bendigo Goldfields as a Commissioner in the early 1850s.

Chortle, but remember it was people like Bernal who came, saw and went back to Britain – just leaving the questionable imprint of the British gentry.

The Gentry