Modest Expectations – Hole

In the blog two weeks ago, Neil Baird, and in this week’s Chris Brook have indirectly or directly alluded to self-sufficiency. With the advance of globalisation the need for self-sufficiency seemed not to be so important. The supply chains were efficient, and it may be argued that they remain so. However, the rise of nationalism and the belligerent rhetoric accompanying this surge have made a number of those multi-national corporations worried if you believe The Economist. Apparently, so it goes, most multi-national corporations found that they did not know who supplies the supplier to their supplier; and so it is conceivable that on distant shores there is a vendor who cannot or will not fulfill its obligations. When the supply chain works, as Brook as shown with blood, the tendency is to take it for granted – nothing will change – let’s move on.

However, this quote from The Economist is salutary: “In the wake of the Japanese tsunami in 2011 a global semiconductor giant tried to map its vulnerabilities to third and fourth tier vendors; it took a team of 100 executives more than a year to work out which firms were in its extended supplier networks.” Presumably this would not happen now if Silicon Valley were hit with a massive earthquake – or Seattle for that matter.

Apart from natural disaster, borders are going up everywhere yet we still depend on the integrity of the supply chains.

Meanwhile back at Parliamentary St Andrews, they chortle over their wonderful use of the wedge, the bluntness of the mashie and the judicious use of the constitutional niblick, while along the course the clouds are gathering. 

Blood

 Brook recounts his Success Story

I first got involved in the organisation and management of blood (and then blood products) in 1988 when I was appointed as Victoria’s youngest Chief Medical Officer.

Then every State has its own separate blood service which, although under the umbrella of the Red Cross, could and did have differences in approach, even donor deferral. This could create problems and these were not resolved until the early 2000s. 

Most of the big concerns at that time were about fresh cellular products, including adequacy of supply, in a system where only a tiny minority of the population are donors, predominantly white and “Anglo”. This has not changed. There are many cultural and even religious reasons for this, but it remains a big problem.

In my early stewardship, I was confronted by the HIV scourge and subsequently the rise of Hepatitis C infection in the blood supply.

Preventing their transmission through transfusion was urgently needed and for people with haemophilia the risks were multiplied due to pooling of plasma used to fractionate into products like haemostatic factors and fractionated plasma products like Immunoglobulin. The number of deaths of those with haemophilia due to contaminated products resulted in a drive to eliminate this spectre. 

It is difficult for people who were not there to understand the horrors of the HIV / AIDS era in the 1980s, before adequate testing and treatment. Australia’s response is regarded as a world leader, thanks to Neal Blewett, then Commonwealth Health Minister, whose government funding provided a systemic health response, community programs and research.

The Hepatitis C virus was not even identified at the time – it was suspected to be a new virus, but was known only as “Non A – Non B” hepatitis. Its subsequent devastating long-term effects were then unknown.

Universal testing for HIV was introduced and Hepatitis C antibody testing came later. There were also stringent rules for a person to be accepted as a blood donor thus assuring safety of the supply.

Problems in product supply and clinical usage became evident in the early 1990s. Australia’s blood and plasma product supply was considered to be largely self sufficient, in reality markedly sub-optimal plasma product use was masked, and overuse and wastage of red cells needed to be addressed.

The States and the Commonwealth jointly funded state-based Blood Transfusion Services on a 60:40 basis and the Commonwealth government at that time funded the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL). CSL did not fractionate some products from Australian plasma due to low volumes and large cost; and while there was funding for some imported products, like purified Factor VIII, the arrangements are best described as chaotic which led to perverse outcomes.

For example, haemophilia was treated only “on demand”, only at the time of a bleeding (often into a joint); and even then the treatment might comprise cryoprecipitate (a form of clotting factor soup)  or even fresh frozen plasma , as these products were “free” being available from CSL, whereas purified  Factor VIII was not and was thus a significant cost to the hospital.

So not only did a generation of young people with haemophilia suffer HIV and Hepatitis C, those who survived grew into adulthood with not only often severely damaged joints but also with repeated painful hospitalisations.

In 1994 CSL was privatised and as a successful case study in the benefits of privatisation when properly enacted CSL Pty Ltd has gone on to become the largest plasma fractionator in the world – a stunning achievement.

In the same year, with support of the then Victorian Premier, Jeff Kennett, I chaired a Working Party to look at Factor VIII in young people with haemophilia. Best practice meant prophylactic daily treatment with purified Factor VIII to prevent bleeding. 

This prophylactic treatment actually reduced hospitalisations, far better adult functional outcomes were achieved, and lives transformed from one of disability to one of approaching normality.

Then imported recombinant Factor VIII became widely available for the treatment for Haemophilia A and other bleeding disorders.

In 1996, I participated in the Red Cross amalgamation of all of the State blood transfusion services into a single national Australian Red Cross Blood Service (ARCBS).

In 1999, the then Commonwealth Minister for Health, Dr Michael Wooldridge, commissioned an enquiry into blood and blood product arrangements in Australia, chaired by Sir Ninian Stephen. Its 2001 report still reads well.

The most important recommendation was to create a National Blood Authority (NBA) to assume all supply planning and purchasing on behalf of all Jurisdictions (including the Commonwealth), using common pricing, and clear jurisdictional agreements.

The design of the NBA included the influential Jurisdictional Blood Committee (JBC), which reflected my belief that overcoming some of the problems of Federation can only be achieved by well functioning cross jurisdictional bodies, a lesson I learned as Chair of the Intergovernmental Committee on AIDS when the initial HIV / AIDS Strategy was devised and which incidentally informed the structure of the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality Health Care. 

During this time I was also the Chair of the AHMAC Blood and Blood Products Committee and remained so until the National Blood Authority creation in 2003.

In 2004 all recombinant clotting factors were funded by the Commonwealth government.

The NBA has performed to above expectations. It is a small agency with around 50 staff and I remain on its Advisory Board.

The NBA has contracts with CSL and with suppliers of imported haemostatic factors. ARCBS is funded by NBA on a product pricing basis for each State and reconciled annually. All products are funded jointly by the Commonwealth and States on an agreed 63:37 split with annual supply plan for each jurisdiction agreed by COAG Health Council.

There are excellent information systems allowing NBA to track fresh product issues and usage, plasma products, and haemostatic factors.

There are guidelines for usage of Immunoglobulin (Ig) and haemostatic factors, and a major blood usage (Blood Matters) program with all jurisdictions having vigilance programs to identify appropriate use and risk. 

In conclusion, Australia is well organised and managed in relation to the availability and supply of blood products.

Red cells are no longer the demand driver. Red cell use is declining as better education and usage monitoring occurs , along with reduction in waste.

Haemostatic products are now predominantly synthetic recombinants. This a great advance, given the tragedies with plasma-derived products in the past as occurred with both boys and men with haemophilia. 

Having said this, demand is now driven by the Ig requirement, which has ever-wider uses but is currently unable to be synthesised. This is not a insurmountable problem, but I also believe some of its uses will be replaced by specific antibody drugs in the future.  

Australia is one of the highest users of Ig, along with the US and Canada, but have long since needed to import Ig. Now imported, Ig is the majority source and costing much less than domestic supply.

Ig usage in Australia, whilst high, is not inappropriate and countries currently with lower usage rates will rapidly catch up – with all kinds of global consequences for its supply. 

Australia can boost domestic supply, but currently at relatively high cost, yet a cost-effective local supply should be pursued given the uncertainty of the global supply.

However, there are three matters that should form the basis of any ongoing review – just because, “it ain’t broke”, does not mean that it could still be improved. 

First, Australia is committed to at least try to achieve self-sufficiency, with minimal waste. We are self sufficient in cellular products, but arguably this should apply also to plasma products, which should this country aim to be?

Second, blood and domestic plasma collection is a totally conducted by ARCBS. The Blood Service is not a charity funded by the Red Cross, but a multi hundred million dollar government funded business, as it should be to assure the community of its efficacy. Should the community know this? 

Third, the ARCBS is trying to increase plasma-only donations but even so, our model has a higher cost structure. As a result Australia uses products from the USA and Germany, which generate the majority of global plasma products. These countries remunerate the donors. Australia is legally committed to a voluntary donation model, and the government would be loath to change. But should it at least be looked at?

Blood is too important a part of the health system not to always be in the forefront of policy considerations, especially when biosecurity and self-sufficiency are on the agenda.

Beware the unintended consequences, my friend

We returned to Australia through Darwin and as always, it is difficult to resist the two-bottle duty free concession. However bottles become heavier as we, not the bottles, age – or else seem to! I am disabled because of an intercurrent autoimmune disease, requiring a wheelchair at the airport. We had to board a flight to Sydney. My companion had recently had a heart attack, and though well enough to travel needs some assistance with luggage.

Thus we have the curious experience of the commissionaire, the name for the wheelchair pusher, being able to place my small bag and two of the four bottles in the overhead luggage compartment.

My companion had gone on ahead, and I was presented with the unedifying spectacle of a young female flight attendant standing by while my elderly companion, who had a recent heart attack, struggled to place her items in the overhead locker.

This spectacle was further compounded by the fact that we had been allocated business seats in row one. In the front row, all bags –including handbags and toiletry bags with necessary medication –must be off the floor. In other words at some time in the flight, bags must be taken down and in a full flight this means moving bags around in the overhead locker often, a strenuous manoeuvre if the passenger is disabled.

Apparently there is some recent ruling that prevents the flight attendant helping with placing luggage in a overhead container. We had not brought on portmanteaux, which for some reason the airline allows people to do. Rather the airline insists that the flight attendants stand back and not help. When I protested, I was put firmly back in my box, old man … them’s the rules.

The problem with rules is that there are those flight attendants with common sense and those without. A rule does not have a brain to distinguish one from another. I would suggest to the airline to stop people bringing on huge cases, and that when people are placed in bulkhead or exit rows, which require all baggage to be off the floor, to exert a bit of common sense. And if they cannot, defer to somebody who can.

Finally, I would say I have been disabled for six years and the problem with airport terminals is they are getting larger, and the demands on disabled services is not getting any less. I have been able to observe many cases where there has been no obvious reason for a wheelchair except it seems culturally important to have your mother when she gets to late middle-aged to be wheeled around the airport. So the task is not getting any easier when you also have to deal with a sense of entitlement as well as disability.

Mouse Whisper

What did you mean by “He met her in abasement” or should it have read “He met her in a basement”? Might be the same. Nevertheless, it put me in mind of the time when I was the MP (mouse parliamentarian) for Mousehole. I sent a stern letter to a PS (parliamentary skunk) where I meant to write that his action was “imprudent” but somewhere along the way, the “r” was dropped. Created quite a stink!

Mousehole

Modest expectations – Pale Waves

One thing I seem to have missed as I have aged is the music revolution. Last week in Melbourne there were all these people in red dancing around in a park – something to do with Kate Bush, in red, outside a window singing about “Wuthering Heights”. My appreciation of music is limited by the fact that in its creation, playing and singing I am completely talentless. However, I understand that there is a very popular band called Pale Waves, an Indie-band with a lead singer called Heather who has one of the voices that would divide a mosh pit like the Red Sea. They sing:

I was eighteen when I met you

Poured my heart out, spilt all my truth

I finally felt like I could feel for the first time

When I met you.

The video is dark and moody with more than a hint of sex but with all the “on the road” clichés pasted along its way.

Now my era danced to Chuck Berry’s “Sweet little Sixteen” – bit of poetic licence in the age difference, but it is all about being young, which is the root of nostalgia. The Beach Boys pinched the tune for “Surfin’ USA”.

Sweet Little Sixteen

She’s just got to have

About half a million

Framed autographs

Her wallet’s filled with pictures

She gets ’em one by one

She gets so excited

Watch her look at her run

Berry was a genius. The singer from Indie Pop group, Pale Waves may turn out to be one as well. I saw Chuck Berry perform in the twilight of his career in a basement in St Louis. We were the ageing mosh pit; it was one of our most memorable experiences.

Chuck Berry

I missed the Pale Waves when they were here in 2018, but perhaps they will roll in again.

Fanfare for the Common Man

I am not an American citizen, however for what it is worth, I have an alternative view of the USA to that of its President.

I have friends in Lubec, on the Canadian border in Maine. Across the water in Canada is Campobello Island, which is synonymous with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt smiled; he exuded optimism. He was also a cripple, struck down by the poliovirus one morning on this most beautiful of islands. Yet he strove for his own independence and courage.

I come from a country where to bare arms is to get down to work with my fellow citizens. I have never seen a gun except sleeping in a rack. Maybe I am careful, but the myths of the NRA are powerful, like those of Washington Irving. The story goes … it’s the guns that kill, not people. Guns must therefore awake, get off the rack, stretch their barrels, and discharge a thousand bullets before breakfast. People are killed but guns remain the same.

I live a country where there is no gun culture comparable to that of the United States and yet our major commemoration is a World War One disaster at Gallipoli and our national day is called by some “Invasion Day,” when Great Britain dumped a bunch of their unwanted – convicts and marines – in a desolate place called Botany Bay in 1788. Despite its apparent vigour, this is a country rooted in pessimism.

America’s national day celebrates something more than putting a British foot on a distant shore.

Australia has a dirge for a national anthem. America’s anthem was forged as the smoke from the British bombardment of Fort McHenry cleared in 1814 and the American flag was still flying. Francis Scott Key was inspired to write the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Today Fort McHenry is one of only two places in the United States where the 1814 fifteen-star flag still flies. The other is at the end of the Oregon Trail.

I love my country. I have travelled all over my own country.

But then I have also been privileged to roam the United States too. I have sponsored musk oxen called Amethyst and Pixie Stix in that Folly, Alaska. I have sat in the San Franciscan courtyard and then written about the early days and aspirations of Genentech before Silicon Valley arrived to crush the city. I have eaten king salmon in Salem, Oregon, and crab in Sabine Pass, Texas – both sublime experiences. I have stood at the doors of that miracle of Minnesota, the Mayo Clinic. I have gazed at Mount Rushmore and know now why those four presidents were carved. I have wept at Shiloh. I have stood in the wheel ruts of the Oregon Trail in Douglas, Wyoming. I have joined in a march to the Tenderloin on January 15. And so on … identifying something extraordinary in all the 50 States I have visited, not to mention Puerto Rico.

However, I am white and while there was a certain exhilaration of being part of a January 15 homage to the life of Martin Luther King, I have had another far different experience of turning a corner in the national capital from a gentrified brown stone street, to find that I seemed to be the only white person in the street. Not even an Officer Krupke. I did not turn; I walked briskly making no eye contact yet experienced the tension of being alone in a very foreign country, well outside my comfort zone. I walked the block, before turning into another zone of brownstone gentrification.

I have money; I do not have to panhandle; I have a bed to go to every night. I do not have a child in a cage on the Mexican border. I know where my children and, for that matter, my grand children are.

Now, my luggage did vanish forever at Los Angeles Airport. I still had money and passport, but trying to find a suit of clothes in downtown Washington was a challenge. In the end a modified “zoot suit” made me feel very foreign.

Only once have I had to use the American health system. I quarantine myself by taking out very expensive travel insurance. I am able to do so. My actual experience with the health system came one day after I had run in the Annual Bay to Breakers fun run in San Francisco, a novel way to see that city. I developed a dental abscess, but as I had to fly to Orlando taking a day to get there with only aspirin and bicillin which did nothing. Hence when I arrived late into Orlando, I experienced probably my worst night in pain. I sat up all night watching the wrestling on TV and in the morning the organiser of the conference, seeing that I had a face the shape of an angry balloon, took me to an endodontist who immediately drained the abscess without requiring me losing any teeth. I had immediate relief from the pain.

The United States in all its diversity, both good and bad, has been my energiser from the first time I went there. But I am and have been a privileged observer able to see the sights and yet travelling around its less well-known parts without a gun being poked in my face.

Even in adversity, America has always exuded optimism, and on my latest visit it was no different. But that was almost two years ago.

Make America great again!

What crap!

America remains Great despite all its warts. The only problem is that the USA has a President who wants to make America Hate.

He wants Americans to lose their Smile, to lose their Optimism; to lose the meaning of the fourth of July.

Such a pity!

Twenty years has passed

Let me start with a quote:

“… there is no substitute for a careful and painstaking history and a meticulous physical examination. This is the cornerstone of medical practice…”

This came from a 1977 article by Lou Ariotti – it is clear; it is not infested with jargon. It says it all. It is applicable across all health practice.

Lou Ariotti was the real deal in Charleville for many years and some of what he did with limited resources was remarkable. Initially, there were no beds in the hospital. So he taught the families how to look after the sick in the home, taught them simple procedures. There were inadequate facilities at the hospital; so he set up the forerunner of the day surgery in his premises.

However, very tellingly he stated that he got his inspiration from the Mayo Brothers who trekked out from Chicago as young medical graduates into the Minnesota wilderness – and today we have the Mayo Clinic.

Charles and William Mayo

What the Mayos demonstrated was that you can move intellectual capital to remote areas, but you have to have succession planning. As I have said many times, the doctor in the bush faces inter alia social dislocation and professional isolation.

Yet that world of the Mayo Brothers and Lou Ariotti was the world of the individual. The difference between the Mayos and Lou was that the Mayos left a legacy and Lou Ariotti a memory. Lou made sure the Queensland Premier provided him with a large hospital, but as you know monuments are just that. He may have admired the Mayo Brothers, and while he left an adequate health service – his legacy was the memory of himself, the man rather than memory of Charleville itself being a centre of medical excellence.

After all, we are still digging up parts of the ruins of ancient Roman monuments, but the Vatican on the same site as Ancient Rome has learned the trick about matching monument retention to succession planning.

This was written last year for the commemoration of the first 20 years of the Mount Isa University Department of Rural Health, part of the successful endeavour to move the education of medical and other allied professionals to universities of rural health and rural clinical schools. In my last blog, I questioned the glacial progress of the review of the MBS. Having been closely involved in the introduction of the rural clinical schools, it is disappointing to read that the Rural Health Commissioner, in a recent article, can only conclude by saying “a nationalist rural generalist pathway is good for rural communities” Appointed two years ago in 2017, it has taken him two years to say that! Oh, I forget, there are the inevitable diagrams. 

But at least he will have a huge number of happy snaps to remember where he went over the past two years as the rural Bill Peach. 

Seriously are these reviews going anywhere? Now there is talk of the Health Minister ordering a heath of private health insurance review. Hopefully, Minister, the deadline will be somewhat tighter than the ongoing ones. Show the community how they are influencing health policy or are they just an elaborate way of doing nothing while re-arranging the flowerpots on the window sill?

Mouse Whisper

I remember when the song “Diana” was released in 1957, and the sensational fact at the time was that Paul Anka was the 15 year old song writer as well as the singer.

The story goes that Diana was an older kid who used to look after Paul when he was a child. Paul had a kiddy-crush on her with less than enthusiastic response on her part. There was about a three-year difference. Years later, after the song went to Numero Uno on the charts and he was a star, she suddenly showed up saying, “Take me! I’m yours!” to which he gently replied, “Sorry, our time is past.”

But she still had Diana!

Modest expectations – Chlorine

I am indebted to Stephen Zifcak and the Menadue blog for this quote:

“If I were a journalist, these and other related developments cumulatively would be causing me very considerable alarm. Recently, in response, the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom has produced a report on the state of press freedom in Australia (Press Freedom in Australia, White Paper, May 2019). It describes the progressive erosion of that freedom. The report argues for the enactment of a Media Freedom Act. The purpose of the Act would be to enshrine the principle of press freedom in law.

 The Act would recognise the fundamental importance of national security and the protection of the Commonwealth’s intelligence and law enforcement activity while providing for the fundamental right of journalists to investigate and report on government corruption, surveillance and misconduct in public office. The report’s recommendations are not without legal difficulties. Nevertheless, it provides a sound starting point for a debate that goes to the heart of the Australian democracy.”

I would have thought that this is a call for the media in the jargon of today to weaponise itself. The head of this Alliance is Peter Greste, and as the face of the caring yet resolute person, there is none better.

The Alliance has a Chief Executive Officer who has been recently appointed. Olivia Pirie-Williams has a record as an activist and her poems reflect her deep affection for our planet. Her first target in January this year was the release of the two Burmese journalists employed by Reuters, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. They were released from prison in May.

The Alliance seems to have powerful friends and as such should consider running candidates at the next federal elections, targeting electorates in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. They are the potential spine of a centrist party, where the various freedoms of speech and association are protected; and where the enemy is defined as the trump-sucking, authoritarian, rent-seeking mercantilist.

The problem with the Independent is that they have no future. They can stay around a long time like Andrew Wilkie, but unless the seat is turned into a dynastic satrap as the Katter family has made Kennedy, he will eventually become a footnote in history, a nameplate on a wall in the Royal Hobart hospital.

The way the seat of Indi has been “transferred” indicates that succession planning for Independents is possible and what has been done in Indi may be a blue print. Catherine McGowan may be the centrist required for setting up such a party.

In the end the problem is that Independents are generally rounded up. The least line of surrender coupled with seduction of the perks of office means joining the party most likely to retain the electorate, thus goes the independent back into the authoritarian fold. South Australia like Tasmania has a history of independent thought, but who remembers Steele Hall – and his legacy? Even NSW – but who remembers Ted Mack?

From my experience of journalists and politicians, their personalities are complementary – they like to tell people what to do. Press secretaries in politicians’ offices generally come from the fourth estate in a revolving door. Some go further, as Deakin, Curtin and maybe Abbott have done federally and Carr and Rann at State level.

Therefore the Alliance has the opportunity to form a centrist party, provide an umbrella for the current Independents and target vulnerable seats in the cities – and you never know. Greste has the personality honed by mental if not physical agony, where the right wing trolls would try and destroy, but I am sure he would have studied the Trumpian playbook on John McCain’s reputation.

A perfect time to review defence capital expenditure (Capex) 

Neil Baird comments …

With the elimination of Chris Pyne, Australia is presented with an excellent opportunity to make a comprehensive review of our defence priorities. Pyne’s apparently more realistic successor, Senator Linda Reynolds, should grasp that opportunity.

In real terms, all the major Navy and the Air Force Capex projects have barely started and, in many cases, are decades away from completion. They could sensibly and relatively economically be paused, if not cancelled, while Australia takes a breather and re-thinks our requirements, priorities and most importantly, what we can afford.

Many of the ship, submarine, aircraft and weapon system purchases are scheduled so far into the future to be almost certainly obsolete long before their delivery date. They will undoubtedly cost a not inconsiderable $200 billion or more and be delivered years later than the already ridiculous 30 years that have been signed off by then Minister Pyne, his generals, admirals, senior bureaucrats and their American advisers.

Too many of the projects were ill-conceived for reasons more related to South Australian than National warfare. Minister Pyne may well have been a great representative of South Australia but he was wasteful of national taxpayer funds during his parliamentary career. Now, since he abandoned Parliament, apparently thinking that the Coalition Government was “a sinking ship”, he is seeking a new career as a defence industry lobbyist. That will only add insult to severe fiscal and defence readiness injury. Thus, the current orders for submarines and F35 aircraft, among others, could well be stayed if not totally scrubbed.

The nature of modern warfare and its weapon systems is changing dramatically and rapidly. The Americans are spending vast sums of money on unmanned systems for land, sea and air warfare. What Australia could learn from the Americans is more about unmanned technology, as Israel is doing; Australia should be rapidly developing its own. For example, the Boeing Aircraft Corp is developing an unmanned submarine that could well be appropriate for the shallow seas to our north. The Americans are also very advanced with the development of unmanned aircraft, including helicopters.

China has openly declared that America and Japan are its biggest worry and is continuing to battle with them. China has examined American weaknesses and is developing comparatively economical weaponry to exploit them. Ironically, the platforms for some of their best fast assault boats capable of launching long-range hypersonic cruise missiles were designed in Sydney. The Chinese (PLA) Navy has more than 100 of these vessels each carrying eight missiles. Their role is to “take out” American nuclear aircraft carriers.

By contrast, the Royal Australian Navy has none.

The Australian “Defence establishment” suffers from a considerable cultural cringe. For instance, it seems to believe that Australian designs and innovation are generally worthless. Some unkindly suggest the acquisition of frequent flyer points influences Defence purchasing decisions – but surely not!

Nevertheless much of the Defence Capex is invariably purchased offshore. It is then, too often, married incompatibly to being constructed locally. It is no wonder that local shipbuilders, except for the inefficient government-owned ASC, shun dealing with the Australian government, despite the local connection with the abovementioned Chinese missile boats.

This point is worth reiteration, because it is usually forgotten by Government. Australia is a world leader in the design and construction of very effective and efficient fast craft, including large and small patrol assault boats and fast logistics support ships.

While they had little choice, China has taken a practical “clean sheet” approach to the choices of weaponry and doctrine. Australia should follow their example, as it has its own unique cultural and geographic advantages and disadvantages, rather than blindly be following the USA and other ostensible allies. In the end Australia may be very much on its own. After all, who would USA side with if Japan were to go mad again and attack us? Japan has done it before. As far as trade is concerned, it could be argued that Japan is far more important to America than Australia is. We should prepare for all contingencies.

We could learn a lot from a closer study of China’s defence plans and practices. Its Maritime Militia should inspire Australia to look at this inexpensive option for our fishing and offshore service fleets as well as state government owned patrol boats. Unlike China, Australia has virtually no Merchant Navy and the few domestic cargo vessels Australia does have could be much more effectively integrated. The CFMMEU, of which the Maritime Union of Australia is a small but important component, should be eliminated or drastically reformed. That is the only way that local shipowners might be encouraged to invest in coastal cargo shipping which is imperative for defence.

Australia should also be very carefully re-considering our aversion to nuclear power and weaponry, but nevertheless should be developing a substantial cadre of nuclear engineers and other experts.

Australia constructs no diesel engines. As most warships, submarines, tanks and other land vehicles are diesel powered, Australia should be developing the capacity to build a wide range of them here. There is an existing global system for building diesel engines under licence to leading manufacturers. Australia should involve itself in that system as soon as possible.

Similarly, Australia refines almost no diesel and jet fuel in Australia. Most of our diesel is imported from Singapore. Australia has tiny reserves and should be encouraging industry to develop at least one diesel and jet fuel refinery in each state plus a couple more in the north.

China is also constructing much longer-range fighter-bombers than their American equivalents. They are also being fitted with long-range hypersonic cruise missiles to further extend their effectiveness. The cost of all these is dramatically less than for their American counterparts.

The effectiveness of the Russian Buk missiles recently used to down the Malaysian Airlines aircraft over the Ukraine should be heeded, despite the tragic connotation to many. Such truck-mounted weapons could be spread all round our northern coastline. They would be much cheaper to position than using ships or aircraft.

There is so much that we could do better, more logically and more economically. We should remove the focus on welfare from defence planning. The favouritism for South Australia has to go. If something can be built better in that state than elsewhere, fine, but otherwise, it should be built where Australia can obtain the best deal, not to provide jobs for redundant car workers. A fundamental thus should be that the review be a truly national project and not one that favours any one geographic region.

With the re-election of the Scott Morrison government, now is the perfect time to re-think our defence priorities. However let us “leaven” the defence establishment “experts”, its generals, admirals, air marshals and bureaucrats seasoned by academics with some practical business people, among them ship builders, naval architects, aircraft manufacturers, electronics experts, petroleum refiners.

Otherwise, Australia is doomed to repeat past mistakes. The Defence Department decision-making will continue to be slow and an ineffective, expensive millstone around our national neck. Our current purchases will inevitably be delivered so late that much of the equipment will be obsolete before it sees service. Senator Reynolds, as a senior Army Reserve officer, should be aware of the many defects of the current Defence Capex arrangements. It is up to her to ring the changes.

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

The Christie syndrome

Some may think Winston Churchill was an undischarged maverick. However, he recognised one principle of politics, for whatever else he did, he could be forgiven.

He refused to appease the tyrant.

He refused to appease Hitler. He realised that you cannot appease tyrants – especially those so self-absorbed they believe in their own infallibility. The only outcome was unconditional surrender, which Hitler helped by committing suicide. Whatever Churchill had done before in his long public and chequered career could be forgiven, given his resoluteness to stand up to Hitler. I am sure that he had all the pressure to make peace with Hitler, especially when the other appeared to have the upper hand.

Chris Christie was the hapless Republican Governor of New Jersey, who urged his way into heading the Trump transitional team. As he admits “He felt he could stay on the sidelines or support Trump, gain a seat at the table, and improve Trump’s behaviour”. Wrong – under the chuck wagon!

This situation has been repeated: appeasement – effusive praise – abusive humiliation – under the chuck wagon.

Theresa May tried to appease – dismissed.

Sir Keith Darroch trying to smooth the Trump visit to meet the Queen – a very stupid guy.

The British government has quite a record of cuddling up to dictators. For instance, Mussolini was given the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 1923 from King George V and, more recently, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu got a gong.

So much for appeasement. But the saving grace, which probably burns within the Trump brain was he was not accorded a peerage on his recent trip, or at least an Order of the Garter, given his self-confessed love of women.

Fast forward to Boris Johnson. He is already a Halifax rather than the Winston Churchill he blusters to be. He will be tossed aside unless he does exactly what Trump wants him to do – apparently destruction of the European Union with his peculiar enhancement of the Putin connection. My only parenthetic comment is that I hope to see this skein of history seared in our collective memory when all is revealed.

However, Boris first has to be crowned.

But irrespective of this outcome the British Isles are now held hostage to the Trump manipulations. Appease all you like, I fear that to get anywhere with the special relationship is to make him the Duke of Queens and betroth his son, Barron (the name says it all) to one of the junior royals in good ol’ mediaeval splendour in a new Trump Tower Cathedral opposite Buck House. Now that would be a deal.

However, seriously, just as with the Nobel Prize speculation which took off with help of Trumps’ publicity machine, wait for the quest for imperial decoration.

Meanwhile, Australia dangles on a thread of aluminum.

Mouse Whisper

Be careful if you approach a door in Portugal and someone says for you to push. That sound in Portuguese means that you actually should pull open the door. However, when you see the word, most of us would have difficulty recognising it as “push” – “puxe”.

On the other hand “quando empurra vem empurrar” – when “push comes to shove” – the Portuguese use the same word for each.

After all, the Portuguese very early gave us what should be our watchword: “Abre olhos!” Open your eyes!

The West Australians know it well as the Abrolhos.

 

Modest expectations – Tennessee Ernie Ford

We were having lunch at the weekend and were discussing the penalty of age and what happens when you grow old. “Yes”, he reflected. “You may have a point. Once, my phone calls were returned immediately; now it may take four days or longer.”

I immediately thought of a time I was at a function in Dubbo and a number of politicians mentioned my name in glowing terms. One guy came up to me and said he had not heard of me, but I must be influential because of the things being said about me. “No, I replied, “Influence is ephemeral – it can disappear as quickly as it appears.’’

Not that some people do not retain influence for a long time – but there is a price to pay. You have to mix with a crowd of the same types grasping at the ephemera until, like Citizen Kane, they have only “rosebud” to murmur; some don’t even have that.

The comment that summarises much of what occurs was from the defeated member of parliament who said what he noticed most was that the telephones stopped ringing. Obviously that image needs to be updated in social media terms, but it summarises the ephemeral nature of influence and the intellectual laziness that surrounds it and which is epitomised by the growth in each politician’s office of the number of consigliere.

Traditionally, the more senior the ex-pollie the more important the government sinecure away from Canberra; some ex-Ministers have became chancellors of universities all the way down the ephemeral rungs to that of teaching politics part-time. Using their retirement or ousting, some are able to undertake pro bono or voluntary work, underpinned by their generous pensions and their contacts.

The problem is that politicians over the past 40 years have become outrageously well paid, with generous perks that seem to be never-ending. However, the stories of excess are not met any more by community outrage when reported but by clamours for more of the gravy train tickets.

“Jobs for the boys” have been replaced by the scourge of “rent seeking” – essentially jobs for doing nothing while wrapped in the gossamer of influence.

The hoary excuse for such greed is “I have sacrificed so much.” To which is added the lachrymose sacrifice my family has made for my increased prancing around in the Ephemera.

To put it bluntly, a rent-seeker is just a metastasis. A cancerous excrescence away from the main tumour, but still reflecting the nature of the tumour as it destroys the framework of the body. Doing no good but draining the life from the body for a price.

Yes, a metaphor, but the metaphor is obvious. And the metastases, male and female, let’s mention no names but they know who they are.

Mr Unaipon – My modest acknowledgement of NAIDOC week

Of all the Aboriginal people, I would have most liked to have met David Unaipon.

He died when I was in my mid-twenties. I had never heard of him then.

But what had been my exposure at that time to Aboriginal people? Virtually none. I had been to the Hermansburg mission as a child and seen Albert Namatjira and Rex Batterbee, the white fella associated with encouraging Namatjira’s talent in watercolours and that of the Western Arrernte people.

I was a rabid Essendon supporter from a young age. Norm McDonald played on the half back flank for Essendon. I never thought of him being Aboriginal, a Dhauwurd Wurrung man from around Lake Condah; just a magical footballer – boy was he fast!

Then, if an Aboriginal person was mentioned with the word “footballer” it seemed always to be Doug Nicholls.

It was a world where I could have met David Unaipon but there was no $50 note to tell me he even existed.

David Unaipon died in 1967, and the closest I have got to him is his grave overlooking Lake Alexandrina, Victoria’s name before she became queen.

One of my fondest memories of when I used to go around the bush was seeing the Ngarrindjeri land near the mouth of the Murray river at Raukkan. Its Lutheran church is pictured on the $50 note. For some reason, it has some of my best memories.

One of my clearest memories of Raukkan was going into the Aboriginal office and seeing the number of portraits of their late elders lining the wall – mug shots as you would see in a whitefella boardroom. There was no concern about showing the faces or mention of the dead among the Ngarrindjeri, so I was told.

I happen to have a wonderfully annotated copy of David Unaipon’s slim volume “Native Legends” which he wrote in 1929. It is said to be the first volume actually written by an Aboriginal person. He is succinct.

For instance, Pah Kowie – The Creature cell of Life and Intelligence is just one page and concludes:

“Thus many of the ideas formulated by my ancient fathers may seem absurd to an enlightened age fantastic and absurd, but to us these ideas are the foundation of a structure and edifice of knowledge under whose shadow we live today.”

I wonder what Mr Unaipon would have said today.

However, I am a bit surprised that this early work has not been reprinted, at least as far as I know, given that most of us are reminded of him everyday.

The Bruce Robinson New World Odyssey

I remember the Independent Enquiry into the Repatriation System under the wonderfully named Justice Paul Toose. It was set up in 1971 and did not report until February 1976 – three elections and three Prime Ministers later. As people in government joked, this “plodding” inquiry lasted longer than the First World War and ran to 800 pages and 300 recommendations, one of which seems to have been changing the name of the repatriation department to the department of veteran affairs.

Not that I would like to see the Review of the Medicare Benefits Schedule break the Toose record, but Professor Robinson is giving it a red hot go. The review has been going for four years – for what? Any review that takes that amount of time becomes problematical.

As a comparison, while this Robinson Review with its 30 committees has been meandering along, the Review into Australian banking practices under Mr Justice Haynes has been [2017-2019] and reported in 1,137 pages ; in the USA the Mueller investigation has also been [2017-2019], and reported in 472 pages.

They were somewhat significant inquiries.

Yet here we have Bruce Robinson and his crew backed by McKinsey just like the Mississippi River, “it just keeps rollin’ along”. I have heard the time 2023 mentioned as the new end point. Well, that would break the record – a formidable feat. Probably we could have a plaque to celebrate the finish of this Homeric epic.

Perhaps getting a sharper Shadow Minister for Health in Chris Bowen will see if we can dam the Robinson and his multiple tributaries.

The subsidiary question is how much has McKinsey cost the Government for no noticeable impact – you know McKinsey, the firm that is in a running feud with the NYT about its methods and clients. It is an unedifying backdrop.

It is interesting that the latest round of Ministerial adjustments to the Medicare Benefits Schedule by Minister Hunt did not seem to mention the Review. As one senior politician said to me once, governments use these inquiries as a means of maintaining a freeze on patient benefits. I wonder if the patients themselves know of this stratagem.

Unlike the original Nimmo Inquiry which reported in 1969, which had the knowledgeable advice and expertise of John Deeble and Bruce Scotton, subsequent reviews since the breakdown of the periodic Enquiries conducted by Government and the AMA have not achieved very much – but at a great cost in time and the employment of outside consultants.

I should know. Medibank and Medicare have been central to the life of most doctors, including myself and it should not be left to slowly decay, because of an interminable uncertainty, which is the other side effect of an unending wander through the Medicare Benefits Schedule.

Knock before Entering

My wife loves photographing doors. Front doors, that is. Front doors opening on streets; front doors not hidden by a pathway, a garden, a porch or verandah and a flyscreen.

In it simplest form she believes the front door defines the place, the thoroughfare, the relationship of one place to another, the people behind the door in the space, working and living there.

I am not so sure. I see the front door as an identifier of the place but not necessarily those behind the door. Many of us merely inherit our front doors. Many front doors do not identify anything. There may be nothing behind that door but an empty space.

The doorway is Ianua in Latin, named for the god with two faces and from where the word “January” is derived – and janitor as well. January is the doorway to the year. We cannot prevent anybody from passing through the doorway. February always comes.

We, however, may have a janitor to maintain the upkeep of door and passageways. That person may have many names and interpretations in many languages.

We invented the door and then locks to keep people away from the space behind the door, for whatever reason. The door becomes the vehicle for the lock and for maintaining permission to use that space. The door can become a massive contraption to secure that space or as occurs in rural areas in my country just a way of keeping the dust and the animals out. The houses meanwhile are left unlocked. The unlocked door can be a measure of trust, but also a measure of carelessness.

Once I could turn the handle on any church door in any out of the way place, and I could enter and stand in this church with all its furnishings and stained glass intact. This is not carelessness, but an act of trust by those who have the key to the door.

The front door as an inanimate piece of wood or metal is an obstruction to that passage, and so may be an identifier. My wife may be right. How we regard the front door in fact may define the civilisation in which we tread.

Mouse Whisper

I decided to try my hand at shrew taming. I sent for an application form and received the following questions. Well, not actually.

I have inserted the word “shrew taming” to protect the names of the drongos who manufactured these questions. My reflection is the same as it has always been, except my fur is bit greyer and the lines on my faces are deeper than when I was a pinkie.

But see if you can interpret this set of Parts into English. Good Luck!

“Part 1: Tell us about yourself and your role 

Objective: Understand the individual’s overall role and interactions with shrew taming

Part 2: Tell me about your experience with shrew tamers

Objective: to understand individuals touch points with shrew tamers and their overall end to end experience

Part 3: What is your overall reflection based on these experiences? 

Objective: to understand shrew tamer’s strengths and pain points to identify future areas of focus for the end to end experience 

Part 4: What would you like to see more of in future? 

Objective: focus on the future experience and how we can orchestrate touch points in the future to ensure a seamless experience.”

Modest Expectations – Union

One can hardly believe that in a country with so many challenges there is so much concern over some footballer who made a list of people he wished to be assigned to Hell.

Echoing what I wrote in an earlier blog, Peter Singer, the bioethicist, is reported as having written:

“Folau is a born-again Christian, and his post was an expression of his religious beliefs. To prevent misunderstanding, I should say that I do not share those beliefs. As an unrepentant atheist, I am among those for whom, Folau believes, hell awaits. But that does not trouble me, because there is, in my view, no god, no afterlife, and no hell. Nor do I differentiate, ethically, between homosexual and heterosexual relationships.”

Singer picks up the “hell awaits”. It is not as though Folau is advocating violence or even earthly sanctions. Nevertheless, the sheer arrogance of such a list should not have goaded the Rugby Union establishment into a response, which in turn has started a chain reaction. It has enabled the fundamentalist Christian groups to start braying about religious freedom, using Folau as a martyr strung up on a goal post.

In the course of this saga the community is being suckered into a situation where a silly statement is now being adopted by those who want to use the cloak of the Christian Church to run extreme agendas; where dominance of women is one of, if not the main objective.

Symptomatic is the resurfacing of the anti-abortion crew, who have never gone away – the matter has become a surrogate for maintaining the subservient role of women. Christian churches out of the mainstream are very good at keeping women as handmaidens, where the violence is not necessarily physical. And it is not limited to Christianity.

I have a visceral dislike for abortion, but it is not my business – not my choice. It should be a woman’s choice.

There was one occasion when I was faced with a friend who wanted an abortion, and the potential father had disappeared. It was at a time before the Menhennitt ruling changed the secrecy and enabled abortions to occur openly, and the words “criminal abortions” rendered obsolete. (In Victoria, a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1969 (‘Menhennitt ruling’) established that an abortion will be lawful if the accused held an honest belief on reasonable grounds that the abortion was both ‘necessary’ and ‘proportionate’.)

The whole episode made me so disgusted that we, in an ostensibly Christian society, were allowing women to be exposed to emotional and – on those occasions when the “backyard” procedure went wrong – physical trauma on women. Here a degrading scene was being played out, because men – predominantly men, and celibate men at that – thought it sinful.

Fortunately, my friend survived the ordeal. She recounted what had happened, I was appalled but we never talked about it again.

That is the worry if this whole Folau imbroglio, with the forthcoming legal action, is allowed to energise this group of anti-abortionist misogynists over what is, in the end, a belief lodged somewhere inside Folau’s head that should have nothing to do with anything but his contract with RU.

Nearly 20 years ago, Susan Ryan, the former senator, reminded us it had not been that long ago that the House of Representatives’ vote against abortion – four years after the Menhennitt ruling – was 98 to 23.

“The debate was conducted in an all male chamber, the women were outside rallying, organising, shouting through loud hailers, preparing for disappointment. I decided that next time we should be in there making the laws.”

It is not often that I agree with Susan Ryan, but I do on this matter – wholeheartedly. The whole of the Coalition voted against the decriminalisation of abortion although one young Liberal party member who stood up with a flourish as though he was going to break ranks and cross the floor to vote for decriminalisation, looked around and seeing he would be on his own, sat down.

As for Folau, it may have been easier to tell him to get lost. Of course he would not have, but I do hope that when some other sportsman near the end of his career and with enough notoriety to be noticed, says something as stupid as Folau has, that the situation is better handled, including not to renew the contract at some astronomical figure.

For instance, select him in an Australian team and he can then work out who is the adversary, given that he likes to compile lists.

Somewhat more important than Israel Folau

Opera is watched by an estimated a total audience of 300,000. It is a form of artistic licence that belongs to a different age. In that age women were treated dreadfully, composers had various forms of pathology. Who knows how many operas were written under the creative phase of syphilis so rife then. But now, to try and change the opera so as to satisfy a fad is as crass as the efforts of the Bowdler family in the 19th century to change Shakespeare to remove the “dirty bits”.

It is ironic that a report in the SMH of the opera “deisembowdlerising” itself, is perched alongside a report about the number of hate and violent items appearing on Twitter, Facebook/Instagram and YouTube. Here those indulging in such unspeakable behaviour are totalled in the millions.

So while token behaviour to cauterise opera plots may make those involved feel appropriately righteous, the problem is not solved by tokenism towards women’s rights.

However there is, as reported, a public health emergency in the way social media has become diseased.

Humans coming in contact with one another harbour the means of infecting one another with both the good and the bad. Globalisation is the jazzy word that we have for the removal of barriers to the spread of a vector, be it conventional trade, disease or whatever.

As the globalisation of Christianity occurred so did the spread of European disease against which the Pacific islanders and Australian aboriginals among others had no defence.

Similarly the globalisation of those who went to the New World of the Americas took a cornucopia of transmissible diseases as the contribution of Europe in this “free trade of infection”. In return Columbus is reputed to have brought back larges doses of syphilis. So it was a form of bilateral trade.

In those days when there was no idea what caused disease: perhaps the miasma, which was great for the perfume trade; or some dark unknown medium, which provided the excuse to torch women – and the ersatz cure – the miracle sustained by intercession via prayer or veneration of some osseous part of a saint.

Perhaps it is encryption that is the best analogy, especially as the means it has to deceive is akin to microbial mutation.

However, it is always the word “plague” which focuses the mind. And while we do not have the spectre of bodies loaded on carts being wheeled to mass graves, the world is entering into a time of cyberdisease, and “cyberplague” is convenient shorthand, although it has been used in generic terms before.

We now know the bacteria Yersinia pestis causes plague. Fleas and lice carry the bacteria. They can also lodge directly on humans if sanitation is bad – otherwise rats, dogs and cats inter alia are convenient intermediate hosts.

These abbreviated instructions from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta on how to prevent plague provide clues:

* Reduce rodent numbers. Make your home and outbuildings rodent-proof.

* Wear gloves if you are handling or skinning potentially infected animals to prevent contact between your skin and the plague bacteria.

* Use repellent if you think you could be exposed to fleas or lice.

* Keep fleas off your pets by applying flea control products. Do not allow dogs or cats that roam free in endemic areas to sleep on your bed.

So it should not be too difficult to assign the appropriate language to deal with Cyberplague. One thing is for sure: it is the role of Government to supervise. The private sector does not do this well.

This darkening cloud over social media is the scourge. It is a public health emergency. And Donald Trump seems able to call a National Emergency, at a drop of a red cap… if he understands.

Where did all the Money Go?

I received an email this week from John Kitzhaber, once the Governor of Oregon and the man who received international attention when he devised the Oregon Health Plan. In part he wrote:

The cost of health care in this country is utterly out of control.  Mind-boggling. Approaching $3.8 trillion a year. This amount of money has attracted a whole host of private equity funds (that are) simply milking the system to feed shareholder profits. We had big national for-profit insurance companies that are likewise using public funds to increase shareholder value instead of reinvesting in the community.

John Kitzhaber – painting by Henk Pander

That problem is now also occurring here. When the Medibank model was established here in Australia, the expectation was that the patient would receive a medical benefit when they consulted a medical practitioner to assisting in paying for that medical service.

Doctors were considered to be in solo or group practice, and in fact when the first benefits were struck for procedural items, it was assumed that the benefit reflected what the government was prepared to pay to the patient for the perceived skill of the doctor.

Therefore when the array of medical benefits was struck for a surgical procedure, it was assumed the patient benefit recognised the skill of the doctor. The cost of the attendant scrub nurses, the surgical materials, the operating theatre were all absorbed into hospital costs, covered either by the public or private hospitals. In other words, the Medibank the scheme was constructed on a guild model – a hangover from the time when doctors sent accounts in guineas to patients who could afford to pay.

However, the medical professional entrepreneurs recognised that with the advance in technology, particularly in pathology but followed by diagnostic imaging with the arrival of the CT scans, there was a “pot of gold” awaiting. Radiotherapy and general practice have followed, and now other specialties such as cardiology are the target.

Technology improvements emphasised two of the problems with an open-ended floor price scheme as Medibank and subsequently Medicare demonstrated. The first one was the entrepreneurial manipulation of throughput against capacity for a particular procedure. This was lucrative when the Medicare benefit was set at a low throughput and not scrupulously adjusted over time as throughput increased with technological improvements. The second was the tiresome ‘pass-the-parcel’ game between the state and federal governments, otherwise known as ‘cost-shifting’. Private sector entrepreneurs have been able to utilise this for their financial gain but state governments have equally become adept at the cost shift and at the same time burying the real costs of health care.

As can be seen, health financing was drifting away from the original intention of enabling the patient to get a fair and reasonable subsidy for their medical care

The problem with the business model, which may have been devised first by economic rationally doctors in the Edelstein mould, is that it has been transformed into a business model not unlike the one described by Kitzhaber.

Here the doctors may be listed as the providers but in reality it is a company which employs them in some form which is harvesting the profits and shovelling Medicare money who knows where into tax havens around the world. Medicare money has acted as seeding finance for the eventual acquisition of overseas health companies.

It is difficult to watch the Federal government being so compliant. The problem is compounded by these companies giving a fraction of their Medicare-seeded profits to political parties for them to enable to run election campaigns saying they are looking after “all Australians” and thus these private firms to have a firm foothold into the political process.

The central governmental agencies know this but at present their political masters are impervious to this flow of taxpayer’s money off shore – after all we have a taxpayer Medicare levy so some firm profiting from such taxpayer funding can buy a health service in the USA or a pathology company in Germany – in effect using Australian taxpayers’ money to fund their business and not only that, but funding where there is a guaranteed floor price for each of services. So risk is negligible once the investment model is settled.

Kitzhaber’s comments are more than timely.

And for us in Australia, it gives us gives another meaning among others for a sonic boom.

Mouse Whisper

Heard between Nobby and Cambooya driving through that magnificent black soil country of the Darling Downs.

“Mate, the soil is so good out here you can plant nails and they come up crowbars.”

Yes, appropriately it is Steele Rudd country out here. But as my young mouse cousin asked “Who is Steele Rudd?”

 

Modest Expectations – Thaddeus Stevens

Shirley Shackleton is one of those inconvenient people whom governments just wish would go away – in her case she is a reminder of a government without compassion complicit to murder if not genocide. At the Balibo Fort Hotel, there were two books for sale – hers written a decade ago – and a volume of Xanana Gusmao’s speeches.

There were three copies of the Shackleton book – “The Circle of Silence”. One at the top had been multiply caressed. So we bought the one on the bottom, which seemed the least ravaged – the cost was immaterial. It was Balibo.

Shirley Shackleton will be 90 next year and unless there is somebody to take up her crusade, when inevitably she shuffles off the mortal coil, her inconvenient noise will cease. There is a son, a lawyer, a magistrate living in Perth. Maybe he will take up the crusade.

However as the personalities fade, it does not dim the enormity of what we have done as a nation to the Timorese – turned our collective head away. Yes, there have been other journalists, notably Peter Greste, imprisoned by authoritarian regimes, but he survives and to the best of my knowledge the Australian government was not complicit in his imprisonment.

The building in Balibo where the Balibo 5 were executed (Photo Sue Morey)

There is still the case of the bugging of the Timor-Leste government and this ongoing Orwellian campaign to eliminate whistle-blowers with the Press caught like the Balibo 5 in the cross-hairs of governmental suppression.

When I was President of the Students Representative Council at the University of Melbourne, ASIO came calling – that friendly invitation to come and join the party. I never crossed that threshold. It is another story. But I am sure I was not on my Pat then … and recruitment patterns now?

The only thing I can say is that presumably the same personality types are still being recruited as in my day, but now with many more toys; truly terrifying. As for me, I never looked good in a gabardine raincoat.

Balibo sunset (Photo Sue Morey)

Anti-Vaxer – Prosecute for Genocide

When I was born, it was dangerous to be a child. There were few defences against the ravages of infectious diseases. There was no penicillin. The only immunisation apart from small pox available as a young child was against diphtheria. Nobody in the wilds of anti-vaxer propaganda would ever had heard of or seen diphtheria – a paediatrician friend of mine has seen it once – it was a huge killer of children before the introduction of a vaccine. In the decade up to 1935, over 4,000 children died of the disease; mass immunisation had commenced in 1932. Between 1996 and 2005 there were no deaths, but three have been recorded since that time.

The vaccine was later combined into triple antigen, targeting whooping cough and tetanus as well.

I am an age as are my sons that we all had measles, chickenpox and mumps as children – and we were all very sick. However it was the late Gay Davidson, whose younger daughter developed a rare late complication of measles infection who brought into public view the importance of the vaccination against measles in particular. The brain goes to mush, and the beautiful vivacious child becomes a vegetable over time before dying – a horrible death. Gay Davidson was an important face in advocating immunisation against measles and in the late 1990s the immunisation rates rose in Australia, the Australian government then being a very strong proponent.

Finally, there was poliomyelitis. There was no vaccine when I was a child. I went through an epidemic when contact between schools was banned. Ice cream was banned. Children died and those who survived the disease were added to the wards of crippled children in every city of Australia; children in iron lungs; children with heavy calipers; children with all stages of disability. I was immunised first with Salk and then given Sabin. Poliomyelitis had nearly been eliminated before the antivax barbarians in their various guises have come calling.

The problem is that the community’s level of immunisation is a measure of civilisation. As the antivaxers – the health barbarians with their poisonous message – raise the level of uncertainty in the community, so will go civilisation as we know it. It is paradoxical that in a world where the diversity of safe vaccines is expanding, in so many places the level of immunisation is falling because of the uncertainty promoted by antivaxers.

I have detailed five diseases where the burden of disease has fallen dramatically because of immunisation. There were many other diseases that have yielded to vaccines. Some I faced growing up. As medical students we vaccinated one another against smallpox. This disease has been eliminated from the face of the earth. When I first went overseas, together with my passport I also had a yellow booklet showing that I had been vaccinated against smallpox and immunised against typhoid, cholera and later yellow fever.

This country has had a brilliant immunisation program since the 1990s and much of the early success of this program can be attributed to Michael Wooldridge, the then Minister for Health, as well as the indomitable Gay Davidson. Nobody has written her story. However, the program and the strategy is clearly and crisply stated up to 2024.

Yet I cannot remember it mentioned once in the recent election campaign as a signature of success.

However, in Australia the government is fixated on keeping our borders intact by keeping a few poor refugees out rather than drawing attention to the ongoing successful national immunisation plan.

The charlatan, former doctor Andrew Wakefield and his girlfriend, Elle MacPherson from their lodging in Austin Texas are demonstrating how destructive systematic antivax propaganda can be. If a government becomes timid in the face of community agitation as it has done on fluoridation, then this country should watch out, especially if these antivaxers start infiltrating the political grass roots.

I have lived in this other universe when there are few antivaxers –yes it was a universe where there was an antivax element who believed if you were vaccinated with cow pox you would grow horns, but why were there so few antivaxers? Vaccines apart from smallpox were new. Since there were no evidence-based preventative measures, the populace just accepted that it was God’s will that children should die a myriad of deaths from these diseases.

Today, in that universe antivaxers would be in their element, no vaccines – just watching children die. But of course according to the antivaxers, saving the children from autism. Today it would be what I would say is not God’s will but Genocide.

To Cook a Roo – Part 111

Charlie diversifies

Pintubi are practical. They cooked all creatures in their skin. The fat content of Australian native animals is too low for cooking on a spit. That would create a hard dry gristle and there were neither cooking containers to stew meat, nor any salt available. Furthermore getting about near naked makes retaining animal hides unnecessary.

As no salt or other flavouring was used in traditional Pintubi cooking, this was literally life lived in the raw in what they laughingly if not longingly called “before trouser time”.

Cooking in the skin must happen right away and before the blood congeals so no road kill gone stiff! Not once in six years eating the cooked-in-skin earth oven food did I crunch on any stones!  

The niftiest cooking trick I saw was that used for the delicious rumiya (sand goanna) a white meat that tastes much like chicken. Averaging about 40cm long they are abundant and easiest to catch in spring when they start new burrows in the sandy earth. They live mainly on ants and insects having neither the ghastly infectious bite of the large carrion eating goannas nor a gamey smell. By pushing the hind legs hard into the abdomen the contents of the sand goanna’s gut are forcefully excreted so they don’t need to be cut open. To cook, the skin is scorched to remove the outer layer, which would otherwise ruin the flavour, before it is placed under the ashes for about 10 minutes. The meat is mostly in the tail and there’s some fat attached to the skin and at the loins. The 10ml steel bore pump rod I always had was sought after by the goanna hunters who used it to probe sand goanna tunnels so that you follow the hole by probing from the surface instead of laboriously digging deep along a tunnel that can be seven metres long. 

Plant “tucker” was far less plentiful but some was so excellent that it could not be improved by any flavourings. In the spring, the pungana bean, which was shown to me, was my favourite. Growing like giant acacia pods on a three meter high shrub and similar in appearance to snake beans, the long pods are cooked in a minute on a burning clump of grass, the green soya sized beans with a flick of bright yellow tastes like corn.

Rumiya and plains bustard (about a turkey sized bird) were tasty cooked in the earth fire pit and much better than food from my tucker box a few weeks after the last trip to town. I only ate feral cat once, cooked by Minyina and the horrific look of that fore half of scorched cat passed to me dripping juices with the charred skin peeled back over canine teeth was unappetising. However, I was hungry enough and it all stayed down which is more than I can say for the last time I had ample helpings of kangaroo in 1984, three years on from the cooking lesson at Tjiterong. (To be continued)

Mouse Whisper

To cap off this blog of culinary delights, I was talking to this Pangolin at the international arrivals at the Wood’s Point airport who told me that one is permitted to bring a kilogram of civet coffee back into Australia without having to declare it. Apparently it makes the best “Catpoo-cino” and yes, that’s what they call it!

 

Modest Expectations – Bakers

Tony Walker’s article in the Sydney Morning Herald this Monday could not have come at a more opportune time.

His questioning of whether it is the policymakers driving policy or the country spooks and their ideological soul mates in the country’s so-called security establishment amplified by the Murdoch press? That of course begs the question in which of the Murdoch beasts do the utterances fit?

One Australian problem is the number of authoritarian personalities who seem to worm their way into senior positions in the public service. When coupled with a lack of sense of humour and a tincture of paranoia, we have created the cadre, their foreheads labelled “security, spies, spooks”. The reason you do not see the label is because these men value “invisibility” – until recently.

Most of these senior bureaucrats are highly intelligent people, far smarter than their political masters. There is a great amount of academic twinkling among this group, although this is not necessarily represented by any real common sense.

One of the dumbest things is to forget the maxim – the greater the controversy, the less the autonomy of action.   Then compound that truism by harassing a member of parliament. In this case the senator is a former submariner who unsurprisingly does not like being coerced.

The only way the authoritarian can counter the controversy-autonomy axis is to persuade the pollies to pass legislation to suppress free speech even further. However, given our authoritarian’s Campanian heritage, if he comes calling again late at night the senator may recognise that Neapolitan heritage by greeting him with “Va fa Napoli.” That should end the conversation abruptly.

Balibo 

I went to Balibo last week.

Balibo is a town in the mountains of Timor-Leste near the Indonesian border.

Balibo is where five journalists, Australians Greg Shackleton and Tony Stewart, Kiwi Gary Cunningham and British nationals, Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie, were murdered by the Indonesian military on 16 October 1975. We know them as the Balibo 5. I had met Greig Cunningham, Gary’s brother, when he ran a restaurant in Hawthorn. That was over 20 years ago. It had taken that time for me to come to Balibo. I have the film, but have never been able to watch it.

In the centre of Balibo is the Flag House, named for the Australian flag painted by Greg Shackleton on the side of the house, and renovated by the Victorian Government and others almost a decade ago. The photographs of these Balibo 5 plus Roger East, another Australian journalist murdered in Dili later that year when he came looking for the Balibo 5, hang on the wall.

Confronted with the ghostly blue photographs of these young men in the Flag House, who are my contemporaries, I broke down and cried uncontrollably.

I was ashamed of myself for my inaction, and yet the tears were those of both shame and anger. Alippio, our Timorese guide, plays a grainy film, which opens with Shackleton the day before his murder reporting from Maliana, a township down the road, alerting the viewer to the imminent Indonesian invasion. The film moves on to the likes of Gareth Evans and Alexander Downer pompously poncing about, in effect dismissing the Timorese and siding with the Indonesians.

The role played by our senior diplomats in Indonesia was equally disgraceful. Dripping with their diplomatic superiority, these diplomats may as well as been employed by the Indonesians. Deciding whether they would ask for Tanqueray or Bombay gin while the Indonesians murdered 200,000 Timorese is an indictment of our lack of care for our neighbours.

Last year, an Australian Parliamentary delegation visited Timor-Leste for five days. The Balibo 5 get scant mention.

One of the members of the delegation was Senator Patrick who has been shown by his recent exchanges with the Secretary of the Home Affairs Department, Michael Pezzullo, to be a staunch advocate of freedom of speech. Therefore the ghastly suppression of this right by the murders of the Balibo 5 and Roger East should not have escaped him.

There was a fear in the upper Australian echelons in 1974/75 that an independent Timor would become a communist state once the Portuguese left; the Indonesians had massacred their own communists a decade earlier, and the “reds under the bed” complex of the right wing security establishment in Australia allowed the slaughter of the Timorese. Australia thus was complicit in genocide, where the Balibo 5 killings were “collateral damage”.

The Parliamentary delegation last year did visit Balibo and were photographed beside the memorial and then presumably they went up the hill to the Balibo Fort Hotel, where a large RSL flag is pinned up over the bar, a reminder that Australian troops had also served and lost their lives there in both East and West Timor during World War 2 in 1941/42.

However, given how brief their trip was, did they stay and see the sunset, the spectacular mountainous view, overlooking the tropical vegetation where the Balibo road winds, a boneshaking series of craters amid islands of asphalt. From the hotel garden one can see the sea stretching to the horizon, a strait separating Timor from the Indonesian island of Alor, the contours of which were lost in the intensity of a red sunset.

The mean age of the Timorese is 17.5 years. There are thus few old people evident in the population. Not surprising since 40 per cent are 15 years or younger. Our young driver, Jonias has nine siblings. His father was one of the Fretilin, and the photograph shows an impressive white bearded elderly man. There is a photograph of his father being embraced by Xanana Gusmao. Jonias refers to him as Xanana in reverential terms.

When you visit the museum in Dili you can see the fatigues and berets, the symbols of the Fretilin resistance – and reminders of the former repression – the dark cells, the yard with the high concrete walls where the Timorese were shot. But this is not Cuba; if resentment of Australia is there I did not feel it personally. Everybody was friendly and helpful – spontaneous gestures. No begging.

My most lasting memory was in Balibo, of this old white man sitting in a truck watching a bevy of school children walk by and then on seeing this old man, they turn and wave and smile and then turn back and do it again to see if he has responded. They made even that old man smile and return their waves.

So much to love about Timor-Leste; it is a place where Australia should spend more time. Despite everything, it is not a failed nation. The Parliamentary delegation spent one day in Balibo. It made me wonder whether that passionate defender of human rights, the Honourable Evans, you had ever done so. Even now as an old man like the man in the truck above, you should do so – perhaps as a penitent.

Many journalists have reported on conquering the arduous Kokoda trail to honour those who saved our Australia from Japanese invasion. Perhaps the same journalists may consider walking the road from the border town of Motain up the mountain to Balibo each year on 16 October, the day the Balibo 5 died. The finishing line would be the Flag House, so impressively renovated on the initiatives of the then Premier, Steve Bracks and his comrades from Victorian government, business and the voluntary sector. Such a yearly pilgrimage would constantly remind us all of the importance of having a fearless media refusing to buckle in the face of government pressure. There was no higher price than that which these journalists paid in defence of that freedom. And to reach Balibo in time for the magnificent sunset, what more would those young men have asked as a remembrance of them.

How to cook a kangaroo – part 11

The recollections of Charlie continue

“You see him, Murra Hook (arm hook), narrata (that way) him is one for that mob,” Henry whispered while pointing to a stand of mulga. “Wea,” (nothing) I replied. Henry gestured for the rifle, which I handed to him.

When he aimed I could just make out the head and shoulders of a roo perhaps 80 metres away. Henry fired and the roo seemed to drop.

“Rungu marlu!” (The roo is hit) exclaimed Tony and they all ran over to the spot while I followed in the ute. The roo was finished off with a blow to the back on its head with the rifle butt. “Hey, easy with the rifle” I called out to Henry. As Alan and Tony loaded this huge male red onto the tray, I got a whiff of its pungent odour. The roo was taken to a clear area, where Pinta-Pinta was pointing to the ground with glee and telling the younger fellas, “Warru mandjila katti” (get firewood).

A dish was dug out in the dry sandy ground and wood from two dead mulga trees was placed over it and set alight. While a chase was irresistible for the dog, Danger, he had reasonably good manners around a fresh kill. So I let him loose and he just displayed a puppy-like excitement darting about, sniffing the carcass and rolling in its scent. Meanwhile fresh green branches were placed on the ground nearby as a kind of makeshift tablecloth on which to prepare the carcass. I noticed the chest of the roo was sticky with muck it had applied from I don’t know where and was the source of the odour. The tail was cut off about a hand width from its anus so that it would not bleed much. This is also why a fresh kill is always clubbed and not shot again or stabbed to death. Pinta-Pinta talked to his son about correct procedure while he whittled a short mulga stick about as long as a table knife blade sharpened at both ends. Henry cut a same length line through the skin of the roo’s belly.

All the internal organs of the roo were pulled out onto the ground sheet of leaves. Multiple conversations went on, reporting on observations about the condition of the organs and content of the stomach and bowel some of which Tony and Henry translated for me. Pinta-Pinta sang softly. I had seen wallaby stomachs on the East Coast before, teeming with thin white worms among the green grass in the stomach, but roos like this one are rarely infested. With the bile and stomach discarded, most of the remaining organs were pushed back into the abdomen.

The abdominal skin cut was closed with Pinta-Pinta’s sharpened stick skewering the skin flaps held together and the white bowel tube was wound around the stick in a figure of 8 tie sealing the organs in the abdomen. With the fire still flaming, the carcass and tail was thrown on and turned for half a minute so that the fur was charred black. It was then taken off the fire and all the charred fur scraped off leaving it hairless, so that it can be cooked in its skin without the burnt fur stench ruining the taste on the meat.

Within about 15 minutes the fire had died down and the hot ashes were pushed aside for the roo to be placed in the pit and covered with the embers and scorching dust. The tail was buried in ashes beside it. Meanwhile an entree was had with the small intestine grilled on top of the ashes at the edge of the pyre for eight minutes. This intestinal fat so it works as a grill. The roo was cooked for an hour and tested periodically for heat by waving an arm over it.

What I learned from the Pintupi is that the dry earth oven will only burn the food cooked within if more wood is added after the initial burn. On the other hand, if the ground is damp two fires are required one to dry the earth the second to cook. I also learned that potatoes can be cooked in their skins perfectly under the ashes with no foil needed to prevent charred skin.

Pulled out of the fire and back onto the leafy “tablecloth”, the roo was cut between the hind legs and a billy can used to collect the hot blood, which had boiled inside to help cook the meat. Young fellas are thought best suited to drink this tonic and Tony, Alan and Frankie went for it on this day.

The meat was half raw with a strong gamey smell, too much for me to have more than a couple of mouthfuls. I was happy to take some tail, which is less gamey and though tougher, is not so raw and had some fat. The dog was given some rib bones. Yet had the roo not being cooked in its juices and skin it would have been too tough to chew and contain quartz grains that crack teeth.

Before cooking the roo, Pinta-Pinta had removed its Achilles tendons, used for binding barbs on spears. After the meal we went to the creek, shovelled about a ton of gravel onto the tray, returned to the fireplace to pick up Pinta-Pinta and his son, Matthew, with the meat. They were indeed happy hunters that returned to Kintore and their meat warmed their welcome.

I still had misgivings about the death of such a magnificent animal merely to fill a few stomachs but my feeling was different from that of the Pintupi people, who never seem to experience such sentimental thoughts about the natural world. They live too close to it. (To be continued)

For those who do not know Charlie McMahon and the reference to him as Murra Hook is that the lower part of his arm was blown off due to an accident when he was a young fella. Charlie has a prosthesis with a hook attachment, which he uses with great facility.

The facility of age

A couple of weeks ago something happened that had never happened to me before. I was in Elizabeth Street near the Flinders Street station in Melbourne when I needed to go to the toilet urgently. No public toilet was immediately accessible when I needed one. The problem with age is that a tranquil reservoir in a nanosecond can become a raging torrent threatening to breach the cystic defences. In medical terms it is called “urgency” – and when combined with irritable bowel syndrome as this was, can present as an emergency; but easily solved if you can find a toilet.

I went into a Japanese restaurant expecting that they would understand my plight. First one then another Japanese lady barred my way – “no customer; no use toilet”. I said that I would buy something but had to use the toilet first; in fact I became so exasperated I said I would buy the (expletive deleted) shop.

Fortunately a young male employee intervened and allowed me the use the toilet. When I came out, he explained that he had a non-customer, who had smoked in the toilet. I wasn’t sure of the relevance but thanked him and left relieved. The staff knew I had been there and lined the way out. I had remonstrated but not touched anybody; pushed anybody aside.

However, it brought home to me that in the design of cities there must be sufficient accessible public toilets designed for an ageing population. Having them underground and locking them up is hardly a definition of accessibility.

In the UK for instance the number of public toilets is decreasing, apparently because of the local authorities’ belief that public toilets are cesspools of unsavoury behaviour. That perception can be solved by a combination of appropriate supervision and modern technology.

In the United States if it were not for the fast food outlets there would be few if any accessible public toilets.

Urban planners have to realise that in designing pedestrian malls in cities complete with images of promenading slim figurines amid trees looking like puff balls, these figurine humanoids may not need toilets, but we humans do. This is an ageing Australia and toilets become an important public service. Local government wants to turn streets into pedestrian malls and one site suggested is this Elizabeth Street. The Arcadian world of the local government dreamers and their courtier planners needs to include accessible toilets.

Mouse Whisper 

Ratbag repeated comments she made to me in the cyber room of the Noccundra pub about the time of 50th anniversary of the Balibo 5 murders in 2015.

Even after all these years, the memory of these murders remains fresh and clear. In 1975, there were no faxes, mobile phones, internet and emails. Sitting in a shack on a ridgeline in a third world country, you really were alone and very very isolated.

Strange but I still feel alone and very isolated, even though Ratbag is a very wise murine valise.

Modest Expectations Doze

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

How to Cook a Kangaroo – Part 1

Recollections of Charlie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neil Baird

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chisholm – My last rumination on the Lessons from 2019 Election

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mouse Whisper

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

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

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

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

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

Modest expectations – Whistling Dixie

In the Weekend NYT, there was a thought-provoking article saying we now have a great way in Instagram of recording aphorisms – the one-liners, deep philosophical verbal gestures. Jean Crispin writes:

“This should be the golden age of the aphorism. Constrained as we all are by time, attention and social media platform character limits, when we pull out our smartphones and stare into their illuminated fields, we can take in only so much. Shouldn’t those words be perfectly chosen to vibrate with hidden meanings?”

An aphorism has a way of bending you to its hidden truth, changing your way of thinking not with a 20-page document of well-reasoned arguments, but with just a sentence or two.”

I have two responses – one is that an Instagram is a vehicle for one line vanity press – “Look at me, aren’t I clever?” Mostly, the answer is no! In fact, given the weight of encouragement her opinion may give, I would introduce a Crispin Licence to Practise in her golden age.

The other is a question: “Have you ever read an anthology of aphorisms.” It is eye-glazingly boring unless you want to filch one and then pass it off as your own cleverness.

However Chris Brook, later in this blog, makes a very valid point, if obliquely. The name “blog” implies stodge as if we are working our way up a muddy hill. However, as Brook points out, the blog is a very good place to set up a conversation as long it remains coherent.

A blog is a modern cartouche. Not only does it name the author who is trying to explicate an eternal truth but also in itself it is self-contained. As I am writing, I glance up and see the front wall of our house; it is a variegated set of bricks that have been put together to cohere. Not exactly the wall of a Pharoah’s tomb, but the wall of brick cartouches is a sufficient metaphor for policy by cartouche aka blog. Thus, the blog can be used to build a policy wall, which Chris Brook is doing incrementally with his health policy contributions.

Napoleon Bonaparte, when he saw the ancient Egyptian way of hieroglyphic messaging, thought it looked like a gun cartridge, hence the name “cartouche”. I am sure he would have had a less viscous name for “blog”, perhaps “L’araignée boisée” abbreviated to “abois”.

A Memo to Me Mate the Minister for Minerals

Change is something that can take a long time. Therefore it is useful to live long enough to see change happen and then see the society change, especially when you yourself started on the wrong side of history.

By this I mean I started smoking when I found a half empty packet of brown Capstan in the train on the way home one night when I was 17 years old and from then on I smoked until I was 40, when I gave up. I have never had a cigarette since. But back then tobacco usage was pervasive. I owned several pipes so that tobacco could give me gravitas. They didn’t.

One of my memories is being in the emergency department during my internship. We used to light one cigarette from the butt of the last one. Many of the senior doctors smoked and we were corralled into the room at the end of the ward so that he, the senior doctor, could have a smoke (never “she” then) while he taught. The Medical Journal of Australia had until recently then been accepting advertisements from cigarette companies. My father, who was a doctor smoked cigarettes and more often Cuban cigars. He died in 1970 – he had a heart attack. It was Tobacco that helped get him.

It was Richard Doll who, with his colleagues in Oxford, identified the link between lung cancer and cigarettes from the late 1940s. He authored an article on doctors’ smoking habits in 1954. This whole public health investigation was not on the political radar, and even when it was there was a reluctance to interfere given how much cigarette money was sponsoring so many activities, including political parties.

Like many of my contemporaries in the health industry, I had one particularly uncomfortable moment on the way to weaning myself from cigarettes. I happened to be in the office of one of Jimmy Carter’s advisers. I asked whether he would mind me smoking, pulling out a packet of Gaulois. He looked at the packet and suggested that they were worst cigarette to smoke from a lung cancer point of view. Needless to say the rest of the conversation could have been better.

However, it was three years before I abruptly stopped. By that time I was working for the AMA, but there was no overt pressure for me to stop. I just decided one day it was a dirty habit. I just smelt. Cigarette ash like coal dust was a pollutant. So I went cold turkey. I surprised myself and never smoked again. And one of these days, we as nation will have to go cold turkey on coal, before it is too late.

The only contribution I have made to policy in this area of tobacco happened one day in the early 1980s during my time at the AMA. I was rung up by a friend who was then on his way up the bureaucratic ladder, who asked what I thought about indexing the excise on tobacco products. I said great idea – and QED, it came to pass.

However, far more importantly, community behaviour has changed in Australia. The smoker is very much a pariah in public places – the array of butts on the windy corners of the city reinforce the image of the uncaring polluter.

One wonders how long it will be for those who hold up a lump of coal in Parliament proudly, to be like the young doctor in the emergency department lighting a cigarette amid an atmosphere of tobacco smoke, and change. Hopefully it will not take 17 years.

One cigarette executive once said of me that I was a hypocrite in my attitude to smoking. No, I said, as our coal-fired politicians and their minions hopefully may eventually recognise, they will eventually become as I did over the matter of cigarettes – a penitent.

Not to everyone’s Taste

When I went to the Baltic States a little time ago I visited many churches. I climbed the Hill of Crosses in Northern Lithuania. My visual cortex is an attic stacked with images of Christ the Child and Christ the Man. These are not my image of Christ nor indeed of my God the Father who dominates those below as if some Jovian presence as though Heaven is at the top of a religious escalator. As for the Holy Spirit as some wraith dodging in and out of my cerebral inglenooks … really?

Hill of Crosses

I therefore cannot conjure a visual image of the Trinity. I do not have the capacity to do so. They are not Three clustered on a Throne. I am thus left with my other known senses to provide me with some reference point by which I can relate to the Trinity.

I cannot touch Them, although in some worlds people seem to believe in the supernatural. Whether that is some kinaesthetic experience where God in various forms intrudes is again beyond my ability to fathom.

I cannot hear God. It is not that I am deaf, but I have not had the experience of having auditory communication, although I may have missed it – by not having paid enough attention, not being able to break the code or simply not knowing the language.

I thought that since frankincense and myrrh were so important in the Nativity that perhaps there would be a particular fragrance where I may be able to smell God. To me substances that emit a smell are important to my being. In particular I love herbs in all their differentiation. The Bible is full of references to herbs, and for a moment I toyed with the ability to distil these olfactory sensations as a means of conceiving God. But then the idea was too difficult and my brain inadequate to process – at least at this point in time.

Then there is taste, and in the early hours of one Thursday morning, I realised that when I have taken the Bread and the Wine at Communion it is somehow different. I cannot express that thought any further, but taste is a very complex physiological phenomenon. Taste is itself a trinity of cranial nerves – the facial, the glossopharyngeal and the vagus.   Surely that is a coincidence!

Perhaps, just maybe, that is how God is in my head. But I am still uneasy and unsure to presume even that. But it is the only way I can sense my God.

Chris Brook on Health

Whenever the future of the Australian health system in Australia is discussed, the discussants tend to focus on their own area of special interest and to adopt the “gap filler” approach. It is the basis of incrementalism.

It seems pragmatic and sensible to target perceived areas of deficiency. Examples of this currently are:

  • universal dental care (a costly initiative if ever adopted)
  • mental health care including youth suicide ( very deserving of consideration)
  • better public information to facilitate informed decision making
  • integrated care initiatives.
  • In fact the list is endless. It is a question of priority.

Filling gaps seems to assume that all is otherwise rosy in the health care system, when of course it is not. I listed above some of the schemes. Underlying the edifices we wish to build are the fault lines.

  • Think how far dental health schemes are from universality
  • Think lack of coordination between GP type primary care and specialists
  • Think of the gulf between hospital care and any form of community based care whether specialist, general practitioner or other
  • Think cost shifting between levels of government between care settings and funders including private insurance funds, a set of pernicious behaviours raised to an art form in some jurisdictions
  • Think out of pocket costs and deliberate privatisation of services
  • Think of the difficulty for the increasing number of people with chronic and often multiple morbidities in navigating the fragmented health system.

Above all, think “systems”! Then ask why don’t we actually have one! For historic reasons we have a set of arrangements based largely on fee for service, whether Medicare, Hospital casemix funding, or Pharmaceutical Benefits scheme.

Multiple costly government attempts to engage general practitioners, with the latest being primary health care networks (PCHN), but also with practice incentives, IT incentives and without anything similar for specialists. They just have not been sensibly considered.

There are many questions about the Australian health system. For example, why is Australia’s rate of hospital admissions some two and a half times greater than virtually all other OECD countries? The answer lies solely in what Australia counts as an admission where it includes day treatments and day procedures as admissions when no actual overnight stay is involved. Once this is taken into account the Australian apparent admission rate plummets to the normal international level. Australia does this for accounting and payment purposes and it may be said that it works reasonably; but could it be better if done differently?

Many countries are far more advanced in consideration and implementation of capitation-based funding for large parts of health care, adjusted for risk using some really very good predictive tools, such as DxCG predictive for risk.

The appeal of capitation since the 1930s has grown with the birth of Health Maintenance Organisations like Kaiser Permanente. Offering an annual payment for all care should allow flexibility in the “what and where” of care including, most importantly, preventive services. It should allow tailored care for individuals and greatly facilitate navigation.

The theory may not always translate because the bogey of managed care is that it is rationing in disguise – and rationing has caused many problems notably in the USA, in particular knowing where to draw the line.

Nevertheless, capitation has its advantages, especially for the funder.

Fee for service at the extreme is a free-for-all encouraging providers to offer as many services as possible to as many people as possible, whereas capitation encourages providers to offer as few services as possible to the least number of people.

So measurement of adequacy of patient benefit must be part of any approach, being preferably outcome based, incorporating the triad of: clinical assessment, whether periodic or after a specific care; patient reported health outcome measurement, including some measure of satisfaction; and periodic functional assessment. Here elective surgery is the easiest one to reference – post-joint surgery or post spinal surgery; one functionality, the other more relief of pain.

Barriers are pervasive. The structure of the Australian Constitution originally only accorded one Federal health power – that of quarantine – and has made the Australian health system a patchwork, which is increasingly fraying around the stitches.

One blog is too short a space to go much further, so take this as just a start. Serious policy is always work-in-progress. However serial blogging over time will help, as now is a very appropriate time to take this whole policy area much further.

The rise of the zinger

I remember when the late Senator John Button, in a mischievous moment in the Senate, once asked the Minister of Science a question without notice: how many centimetres there was in an inch? The Minister did not know. Button achieved his point; he made the Minister look like an idiot. Although amusing at the time, it has not improved the quality of the politicians who have been given the science portfolio – that is when the portfolio hasn’t been abolished.

Alan Jones uses the same ploy but slightly differently. Ask a relevant question when confronting someone ideologically at odds, but unlike Jones who does his homework, the other person has not done so.

So when Jones asks one of these adversaries what is the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and that person doesn’t know, Jones goes on his victory tirade. It doesn’t matter if that person knows the answer, reality is not based on some human dot not knowing the answer.

Oh please … the zinger. Smart, but it doesn’t help when we are seriously discussing the future of Planet Earth.

The reality is that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is straight lining upwards like the trajectory of a bullet into the sky. We have passed the 400 ppm mark.

If fossil-fuel burning continues at a business-as-usual rate, such that humanity exhausts the reserves over the next few centuries, CO2 will continue to rise to levels of order of 1500 ppm. Then forget about the human race. Think Venus with billowing clouds of CO2 disguising the uninhabitable planet surface below.

But Alan, you will not be around, nor shall I – but unlike you, I have descendants for whom I feel responsible.

Mouse Whisper

Three years too soon? Or don’t talk about the Polls? It was not only Newspoll. Some weeks before the election …

“Labor is comfortably ahead of the Coalition in the latest Guardian Essential Poll, and just over half of the voters in this fortnight’s sample, particularly voters under 34, worry Australia is not doing enough to address climate change.”

Modest Expectations – Iroquois

I have just been looking at the election results again, and remembering very clearly the backslapping which occurred with the landslide that Bjelke-Petersen effected in the 1974 election in Queensland when the ALP was reduced to 11 seats. At the same time the Queensland Labor Party, the Santamaria-Vince Gair offshoot, was wiped out completely.

The only safe Labor seat left then was Port Curtis or, as it is now named, Gladstone. True to form, in the 2019 swing to the Coalition in the electorate of Flynn, which is a pendulum electorate at the best of times, Gladstone remained Labor as did much of Rockhampton.

Queensland has this history over the past 50 years of being electorally volatile.

However, what intrigued me recently was Blackwater, which is touted as the coal mining capital of Queensland; the coal is exported via rail to Gladstone. The two booths there voted strongly Labor, as did the electors of Bluff down the road where the coal trains interchange in 2019.

The story of Blackwater is instructive – named because of the colour of the water passing across the coal seam. It had a population of 77 in 1966. Then the open cut coalmines came and the population swelled to 10,000 in the 1970s to decline to a current figure of about 4,000. There were about 1,000 voters at the two booths. The majority voted Labor (57 per cent at one booth and 64 per cent at the other). It is also true that other coal towns across the Bowen Basin of Collinsville, Moranbah, Dysart and Tieri all voted for Labor.

Small figures but instructive as a pointer. Given how unreliable the polls are, you might as well attribute the swing in Flynn to the State Government with the duumvirate (or more correctly duamfeminate) of Palaszczuk and Trad, as to the substitution of Morrison for Turnbull. However, quite rightly there was the Longman by-election and subsequently the swing back on May 18, which would point more to the second as the major cause for that phenomenon Nevertheless, change is not always due to one factor.

Flynn has a great many people on the land doing it tough because of the drought, and as you cannot directly blame God, well the State Government may as well cop the blame through its surrogate, Shorten, despite him being the son-in-law of the Queensland Dame, surely a person of renown in her own State.

Blackwater is just one of 40 odd mining centres in the Bowen Basin, which is South of the Galilee Basin.

Admittedly one of difficulties in defining voting patterns in the Bowen Basin is the number of “fly-in-fly-out” (FIFO) mining employees, estimated at 18 per cent of the population. It would be interesting to know the home postcodes of these FIFO miners but the assumption that they are locals, who earn the money that sustains the local economy, needs to be tested if we wish to clearly define the miners’ voting patterns. 

Strathmore Furore 

I came to Australia as a 14-pound “Pom” on the S.S. Strathmore, a P&O liner. The 14 pounds is an estimate. I might have weighed a pound more or less at four months old, in 1946, when I arrived with my Mum. The ship berthed first at Fremantle.

Somehow the Sydney Daily Telegraph had got wind of stench from our ship. Was the Fremantle Doctor that stiff a breeze to reach Sydney?

The story the paper ran the day after the Strathmore arrived was headlined: alien passengers filthy, ship’s passengers allege. Unbeknown to me for sixty-odd years, around 200 refugees had boarded the ship in Port Said—distressing many of those who, like us, had embarked in Southampton.

A Mr Pugh (“ex-R.A.A.F”) said to the Telegraph: “They are mostly women over 50. “Some,” he added for good measure, “are aged 70”.

That sexism and ageism was just lustre dust to the real thrust of the tabloid’s story: These filthy Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Palestine Jews, Cypriots, Greeks and Maltese were covered in sores and so dirty that the real passengers dare not dip their toes into the same pool.

A Mr Spencer of Regent Motors in Melbourne described the refugees as verminous, pointing out that they refused to be deloused. He demanded, “Why don’t we select our migrants from the magnificent types offering in England, and in Norway, where there are 10,000 ready to come here?”

The Sydney Morning Herald also made news of passengers’ complaints. “They’d turned the ship into a floating ‘Tower of Babel’ (and) wore peasant-type shawls draped about their heads (or) jackets gaily bedecked with patterns worked in silver wire.”

The Herald too handed Messrs Spencer and Pugh a megaphone. Each said in turn:

“The immigrants spat on the decks, threw their fruit peelings everywhere, and hung their washing across the deck promenades. It staggers me that Australia should have to rely for its population on the type of people that this ship brought.”

Sydney’s broadsheet listed just some of the languages spoken in the seagoing Migdal Babel: Hebrew was the first mentioned … then Egyptian, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Austrian, Hungarian, Yugoslavian (sic) and Czechoslovakian (sic).

The furore ran for several days in newspapers around Australia.

Then the following Friday, The Sydney Morning Herald published a letter from a man called David Hand. He was a passenger on the ship, an Australian, who was also an Anglican priest. His five-paragraph letter was written “purely in the interests of truth and justice”.

The fourth paragraph reads: “As a priest on board, I had occasion to learn a good deal about the moral or immoral behaviour of the passengers; and I know that the highest officers of the ship would support my contention that the morals of the British people were no better – perhaps worse – than those of the ‘aliens’.”

He added in the final paragraph, “Those who were privileged to get to know any of them usually found them friendly, keen to learn Australian ways and language, and full of admiration and gratitude of the British people.”

I must have had my foot tickled by one or two of them because I have always sensed what he means by “privilege”.

ME & my mouse are indebted to John Bevins for this recollection. John was responsible for some of the most potent and innovative social marketing and advertising campaigns from the 1980s to end of the century. 

Flynn Addendum – A Message for Albo

This is a tiny parable about the town, which perceived unfairness and bullying.

There was this Tamil couple with their two Australian-born daughters, who were taken from a Queensland town called Biloela in the electorate of Flynn (the majority of which voted 58 per cent for the Coalition). They have been in detention in Melbourne since 2018 under the Dutton aegis, to be deported back to a country where 48,000 Tamils have been killed.

Biloela liked this couple. In fact a petition was raised for them to stay – many people are signing it. The flag over Biloela is not blue. Fifty four per cent of the Biloela citizens voted Labor on May 18. Biloela North admittedly voted 51 per cent Coalition. However, Thangool, 12 kilometres down the road voted 71 per cent Coalition. “Small numbers. Means nothing.” Or perhaps just an example of small town fair play disliking the Big Government the Coalition says it despises and keeps banging on about.

The parable of this story is taken from the Book of Morrison paraphrased: “There is no fair go for those who are forced to go.” 

Coal and the Pro-Adani Canavan

Matthew lives in Yeppoon. He has a wife and four children. Yeppoon is a coastal community that is renowned for its beaches, tropical climate, and the islands out on the bay. So says Wikipedia. It is where people who can afford not to live in Rockhampton go. Rockhampton is on the Fitzroy River far from the coast. It is not the place in which to spend summer. Yeppoon is better.

Yeppoon does not have a coalmine. Matthew has a younger brother called John. John likes coalmines. In fact he has been reported as keen to acquire the Rolleston mines, which were surplus to need for Glencore. John and Matthew seem to regularly communicate about their love for coal.

In a cuddly meal at the “Brekky Creek” Hotel in 2017 with the AFR, Matthew’s position was described thus: “The senator has become an avid reader of mining history and uses it to justify his position to use taxpayer funding to back Adani’s controversial mine, saying a leg-up from taxpayers helped get all new mining regions off the ground, evoking the “if you build it they will come” attitude of the Bjelke-Petersen era.”

Now I live around the corner from where there was once a coal mine, next to the primary school. The two mineshafts, Birthday and Jubilee, were sunk in 1897, and named for the 60th year of the Victorian reign. In fact my late neighbour as a boy used to dart round the corner to get lumps of coal from the dump for the family fire. He would brandish them triumphantly as he scooted home. Lots of soot in the air but it was only where the working class lived.

Matthew would be proud of how the then NSW Government offered to assist the viability of the coal mine when eventually after 30 years it was shown to be uneconomic, but in his terms needing “a leg-up.”

Oh, it was so picturesque, Matthew. Undercapitalised, the mine was never mechanised; so there were pit ponies lowered every morning to work in the mine’s narrow shafts. There were 159 men on the day shift, and the atmosphere was dusty with the temperature reaching 38 degrees C. Miners had a short life.

It is impossible to reconcile why any Australian government would tolerate such a situation, but during this time it was mostly a Labor seat with the then H.V. Evatt being one of the members for the Balmain seat when the miners were working under such appalling conditions. So much for his occupational health credentials!

But I digress. Even as late as the mid-eighties there were discussions about using the mine for gas supplies, and I remember that the opening to the mineshaft was still visible at that time.

Incidentally the remediation process for the mine took decades, including the death of three workers in an explosion of methane gas. To make the mine safe after that tragedy needed four million gallons of water – not sea water, fresh water – to get rid of the coal gas. Note water usage, Matthew.

As a student of mining history, I am sure Matthew would like to know the original stakeholders for the Balmain mine lived nowhere near Balmain. A bit like Adani, but more Old World. London to be exact.

And Matthew, somebody always has to pay the Piper … maybe your children and our grandchildren.

Hawke in the Willow

When I was seriously involved in politics, I met Bob Hawke once when he was Prime Minister and was very impressed and flattered that he knew who I was. He was one of those politicians who knew both faces and reputations. He was on a different rail line to me.

However, one night years later my wife and I with a few friends were celebrating our ninth wedding anniversary. Now the ninth wedding anniversary is willow for all of those who are not obsessed in knowing what to give on a particular anniversary. Needless to say, I had just presented my wife with a cricket bat at the celebratory festivity in the Flower Drum restaurant in Melbourne, when in walks Bob and Blanche with a few friends, including the late Martin Crowe, then recently retired after captaining the New Zealand cricket team.

Given that the last time Hawke had greeted me like a mate, and with a reasonably high sherbet level I took the cricket bat over to them after they had settled in but before any of that elegant Flower Drum Chinese tucker had started to flow. I asked Bob as a mate to sign the bat for my wife giving him a potted history of why I had a cricket bat in a posh Chinese restaurant. He obliged. Blanche signed too. Hawke however looked at me quizzically given that it was a unique experience to be asked to autograph a cricket bat in such an environment. However, that was the personal touch of the man.

Then as I thanked them and was walking back to our table, the owner of the restaurant insisted on signing it too.

As we were walking down Little Bourke Street after dinner, my wife had the cricket bat over her shoulder, and somebody in the street yelled out, “Melbourne is not that dangerous, luv.”

Mouse Whisper

Heard in the Manolo Blahnik industrial boot store in Paraburdoo.

“So if blue is Liberal and red is Labor, when they come together in the political centre do they mix to form purple? The Political centre must be called the Purple Patch then.”

By the way, just back from Mousehole where the last Cornish speaker, Dolly Penteath died in 1777. Her last words were defiant. “Me ne vidn cewswel Sowsnek” – “I don’t want to speak to English”.