The Best Mouse Tap

Modest Expectations – Dead Poets Society

King Charles inherited 45,667 acres of land across England & Wales, worth around £650m, generating income of £24m pa. He didn’t pay a single penny in inheritance tax & will only pay income tax if he volunteers. On the 6th May you will pay to put a crown on his head. These stark comments were relayed on a Twitter feed and, given the opaqueness of the Royal finances in many areas, the numbers are probably as reliable as any others.

It will be interesting to note which Australians will be part of the Forelock Shuffle to Westminster Abbey. How many avowed Republicans will be following the Prime Minister who, given his dainty ambivalence, will go and try to dampen criticism by offering to have a Regal Party on his plane, a modified KC-30A Multi-Role Tanker Transport, which in itself is a modified Airbus A330 jet, which can accommodate 100 passengers.

But then, at the Queen’s Coronation in 1953, 250 seats were reserved for Australians headed by the then Prime Minister, Robert Menzies. There were 8,000 invitations issued. There was an Australian military contingent which participated in the changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. Two Australian warships participated in a Spithead Review of 300 ships. Notably, the commentator on British Pathe reported that the crews of British and foreign ships all cheered. Foreign? It should be noted our Australian nationality on our passports only occurred in 1949; the words “British Passport” was retained on our passports until 1967.

The coronation of Charles III provides an opportunity to dispense with all the seductive pomp at which the British are very good – it appeals to all of the Cringe in Australians, afflicted by an inferiority complex which also guides the bunyip aristocracy.

We have a High Commissioner in London – let him be Australia’s representative. That’s sufficient.

But no, no, no – maybe Albanese will still be Prime Minister when William V ascends the British throne. By that time Australia should be a republic.

But then that is Australia Dreaming.

The Flag

One of the most difficult changes in Australia would be to change the flag. My first response years ago would have been dismissive; namely “who cares?”

We are used to it, and then all our history is mixed with histrionics associated with preservation of the hoar frost for those who still yearn for the Mother Country and have never forgiven the Labor Party for doing away with Imperial Honours. The preservation of the Union Jack in the Flag would preserve the hoar on the railing post.

But I suspect most people couldn’t care less. There is not a strong sense of wrapping ourselves in the Australian flag and crying “patriotism”. Yet the process to change the Australian Flag is formidable. The current Australian flag was officially raised for the first time on 3rd September 1901 at the Royal Exhibition Buildings, Melbourne, unveiled by Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton. The design was the product of a competition held to find a national flag for the newly federated Australian nation. The competition attracted 32,832 entries from Australia and overseas; five individuals shared the honour of submitting the winning design. Apart from a few minor differences in the magnitude and number of points on the stars these people had designed what we now know as the Australian Flag.

The Australian flag was called the Australian or Commonwealth Blue Ensign until the Flags Act of 1953 gave it the title of Australian National Flag, confirming it as the chief national symbol by law, custom and tradition. This fact was recognised in 1996 when the Governor-General, Sir William Deane, proclaimed 3 September “Australian National Flag Day”.

New Zealand in the past decade spent NZ$23m in attempting to change the flag, a matter dear to the then Prime Minister, John Keys. He persuasively said that the similarity in the Australian and New Zealand flags was one reason to change. It should be noted that Australia, New Zealand, Tuvalu, and Fiji are the only nations to retain the symbol of British colonialism. Moreover, Fiji is a republic.

Strangely, the State of Hawaii retains the Union Jack embroidered in its flag. Curiously the stripes on the Hawaiian flag are similar to those on the Russian flag. The construction of Hawaii’s flag occurred when the indigenous Hawaiian rulers were ingratiating themselves with the perceived powerful European powers in the Pacific.

In the end, changing our flag is indeed formidable, but not insurmountable. How did the Canadians do it? After all, Canada has always been the favourite place for the Royals to visit, in particular the late Queen. The Canadians eschewed a referendum. They concentrated on the emblem of the maple leaf, set up a Parliamentary Committee, and then a process that involved progressive simplification of the design to the single red leaf.

On 22 October 1964, the committee voted in favour of the single-leaf concept. Two months later the House of Commons approved the design, followed shortly after by the Senate. The Liberal Ontario politician, John Matheson, one of the flag committee’s members, is often credited with achieving consensus within the committee and helping to end the Great Flag Debate in Parliament. The lesson is: keep it simple, use a universally recognised symbol, exert leadership and take nothing for granted.

I wonder if Keys had insisted on the silver fern and an “all black” background with or without the Southern Cross – and stuck to it – would the New Zealanders not have retained their current flag.

Gough Whitlam, in an interview in 1994, insisted that arguments about servicemen and women serving under the existing Flag in all of Australia’s wars were untrue. He said he had been the last Prime Minister to have served under the flag, (he was in the air force in World War II), but that Flag had been a red, not a blue, one and at RAAF funerals the casket had been draped in the Union Jack, not the Australian flag. The current flag had not been formally adopted until the enactment of the Flags Act of 1953, and had only been used in one war, Vietnam, and then only on land. The navy and air force continued to use their own flags.

“We got this blue one because Menzies did not like red,” said Whitlam, adding that his Liberal predecessor had once used the New Zealand flag while on a visit to Canada. Trust Billy McMahon to get it wrong.

Whitlam went on to say, “We need an Australian as head of state who will be accepted by other heads of state in the world and we need a flag which is identified as Australian and accepted by all — the original Australians and those who have come here from overseas.”

Whitlam said he favoured retaining that part of the flag that was distinctively Australian — the Southern Cross.

Keys made the mistake of trying to establish a consensus, probably impossible when you need to obtain change when it is a matter of taste and to convince those who believe the flag is a sacred relic.

First, I would remove the Union Jack, and re-position the Southern Cross in the night sky. I would prefer wattle as emblematic given that the Australian colours are not dark blue, but green and gold. To me, wattle provides the gold and the blue green of the eucalyptus as the background. In spring, in the southern states, the land is a tapestry of green and gold. Why do our representatives dress in a grass green colour given that this is a country of blue mountains, which essentially are the eucalyptus colour from a distance – and a suitable colour acknowledging this green merging into the blue should not be a great challenge to mix?

Then maybe Australia should have “a jury” to determine how to match the elements and then, as with Canada, the most suitable arrangement would evolve.

I must say, I have form. When I was a senior staffer, I was asked what would be discussed at the next parliamentary party meeting, the last meeting having been consumed with discussion of the Flag. I replied I supposed it would be the Party’s policy on heraldic symbols. It was reported in the media. There were some in the Party who were not amused. It gave some insight into the importance that I, as a young man, ascribed to the Flag, to which I alluded at the start of this piece. Maybe age has modified my flippancy.

Jackals and Hyenas Abroad

“Rumore” in Italian is the word for “noise”. Recently, someone commented that I (née big Johnnie) had been kicked out of the Liberal Party. One person close to me said I should wear that as a badge of honour.

Others said to me, why bother? Still a lie is a lie and needs to be corrected. Now the political process, as with any combative arrangement, attracts the jackals and hyenas to feed on the carrion of this process. By this I refer to the detritus of innuendo and lies served up in the clubs, and board rooms of Australia amid the sly chortles wreathed in cigar smoke and the glittering whisky decanters on the pour.

I was a member of the Liberal Party for about a decade in the seventies and early eighties. In that time, I was a political staffer; organised a centrist discussion group called “Grapple” with assistance from other like-minded so-called “small L liberals”, an unfortunate moniker; was a branch president for a few years and failed in three tilts to gain pre-selection for outer Melbourne parliament seats.

When I moved to Sydney in 1979, I cut my ties with “Grapple” and joined the then Australian Institute of Political Science. The Institute received funding then from some of the big Australian companies, but the money spinner was the Summer School, where aspiring politicians, and those interested in political science could debate a particular theme over the long weekend in January. The Institute produced the Australian Quarterly.

The Institute owed its existence to members of the Sydney establishment led by Norman Cowper who, in 1932, set it up as a reaction to a growth of the Fascist New Guard led by Eric Campbell on the extreme right. On the left was Jack Lang, the NSW Premier with his defiant populism, which threatened the established order in a far different way from Campbell. Nevertheless, both were authoritarian as most extreme politicians are whether they are left or right.

In the early years of the Depression revolution was in the air. How serious in retrospect who knows, but one of the results was the Australian Institute of Political Science was formed. Cowper was shrewd in that in the construction of the Sydney-based Board he invited Labor Party members to join the Board – and thus for many years this bipartisan governance persisted. There were also Melbourne directors, who would be present at the Summer School. It was all very civilised; the only problem was that the Institute was running out of money by the time I joined.

There was enough money to celebrate the 50^th anniversary, which I organised and invited David Owen, who was one of the leaders of Social Democrats and at that time considered as a future British Prime Minister. Unlike most politicians these days, he charged nothing for his appearance fee, but we engineered a first class airfare return to London plus accommodation.

The celebration was centred around the first Cowper Oration. Norman Cowper, then 87 years old, attended. The celebration was a success, which surprised some on the Board which had become a comfortable place for mates to meet when money was not a problem. I was an outsider, a Melburnian. The Institute leaned towards the Labor party. Despite the 50^th anniversary, which was just a temporary fillip, the financial situation was increasingly dire and, not for the first time in such a situation, a Board turned to me to become the Chair and solve the resultant problem of potential insolvency.

In the mid 1980s, certainly the mood for change coincided if not clashed within the Institute. The Summer school became non-viable. Where once the Summer School was “the only game in town”, now the growth of forums, symposia, workshops and all sorts of scientific meetings were competing for the space the Institute once had to itself. Politics was becoming more partisan and trying to define the political centre became impossible with the bipartisan adoption of elements of neoliberalism, banging the drum of individual freedom and the contempt for government. In other words, there was a certain pessimism about the future of the AIPS with funds drying up.

At this time, there was a move by some of the Melbourne directors who were members of the Liberal Party headed by Richard Alston to take the Institute to Melbourne and convert it into a right wing think tank. There was no plan just an assertion to trust him while his cabal appropriated the name of the Institute. Nevertheless, the unseen hand of John Elliot, then at the height of his “Fosterisation” hubris, was probably behind funding an Alston-led organisation.

By this time I had let my Liberal Party membership lapse; but the action in resisting this move of the Institute and having the Sydney directors support me in resisting this move, did not win me any friends in the Victorian Branch of the Liberal Party of which I once was a member. Then I took the secretariat of the Institute into my office and it survived, as it does today. I was fortunate to have Gay Davidson, a senior political journalist in Canberra, as my Vice-President for much of the following decade. We retained Government funding. Australian Quarterly survived with people such as Ross Garnaut editing it for a time.

No, I was not kicked out of the Liberal Party. I left it with the minimum of fuss.

I resigned as Chair of the Australian Institute of Politics and Science (the name was changed during my stewardship to better reflect its change in function) after 18 years in 2002 and was succeeded by Rick McLean. The Institute and Australian Quarterly remain to this day.

Dauber or just Dabbler

When I was searching for a site for University of Melbourne Family Club Child Care Centre in the late 60s, I had a strange encounter when I met a Miss Dauber who was, if not the only surviving descendent of Horatio Larcher, certainly a major beneficiary of his estate. Larcher, according in his brief 1942 obituary, had been born in London in 1854, and migrated to Victoria in 1871. He built up one of the largest retail distribution businesses of milk in Melbourne. To illustrate this, by 1907 he was advertising his Farm Dairy at 45 Moor St Fitzroy. At about that time, pasteurisation was introduced, and his dairy continued to increase its output from 50 to 100 quarts daily in 1896 to 10,000 quarts a day in 1922.

Returning from the UK on a visit in 1936, Larcher had brought samples of sterilised and “homogenised” milk, very popular in England. The cream was pressed into the milk and the heat sterilised. Kept in a cool place, if the bottle was not opened, Larcher was quoted as saying the milk would last indefinitely. He brought back samples. “Such milk, which could be sold for about a penny a pint more than ordinary milk, would be invaluable in Australia for transportation over any distance.” He seemed to be describing ultra-pasteurisation.

In Victoria, the Milk Pasteurization Act 1958 specified that “no one should sell or deliver milk except milk pasteurised at licensed pasteurising premises and bottled and sealed as prescribed.” At that time, only about half the milk sold in Victoria was pasteurised. I was in Trinity College at the University of Melbourne then and we had cows grazing on the College grounds; we consumed the milk from the College cows – unpasteurised. No-one to my knowledge contracted bovine tuberculosis nor brucellosis.

Therefore, Larchers had distributed milk through major generational change when at first milk needed to be purchased almost daily from the milkman, unless the family had an ice chest or Coolgardie safe or the new-fangled refrigerator.

The Larcher method of distribution was the horse drawn cart and the horses were stabled on the Moor Street premises, where Larcher himself lived. While there is a photograph of a Larcher horse and cart outside the Southern Cross in 1966, it was not long after that when Larchers closed.

The times had now changed irrevocably. The whole method of distribution was now through the corner store or the supermarket where milk could be refrigerated. The road traffic had increased such that the horse and cart with streets covered with horse excrement was no longer the best method of retaining or distributing milk. This freed up the stables, with their extensive courtyard, in a place not too far from the University of Melbourne.

Miss Dauber was interested in the conversion of the stables into a child-minding centre, and thus I entered into negotiation and I found out I was drawn into a gossamer web. Miss Dauber was a delicate woman whose age was difficult to define by just looking at her finely lined face. She seemed somewhat detached but at the same time she affected coquettish behaviour. There was another young man competing for the property to provide the child-minding centre, but he had no overt experience; even then his strange persona concealed a dark side which ultimately led to him being “sectioned” and held securely in a mental health facility for a period.

With my then young family I visited Miss Dauber on several occasions at her extensive country property at Healesville. What I remember clearly was the magnificent cork tree. I had never seen a fully grown cork tree with its distinctive bark. Funny what you remember, but after a while I realised that, despite her elegant afternoon tea hospitality, I was being strung along, as if courting for Miss Dauber’s hand, much to her enjoyment.

In the words of a nineteenth century novel, I withdrew, thanked her with a flourish of effusiveness. and sought more successfully another premises, this one in Carlton. It was a complete break. I never knew what ultimately happened to Miss Dauber. In a later architectural history of Inner Melbourne, I note reference to a Dauber Child Minding Centre in 1971 located in the Moor Street premises.

Today, it is an undistinguished block of flats. But the Larcher chimney still exists as a remnant of its glory days.

The Melbourne University Family Club with its premises in Carlton has remained, a pioneer in early childhood development.

Mouse Whisper

Jeff Tiedrich is a 65 year old New York graphic designer known since 2000 for his acerbic blogs. He has played guitar in the band Alligator and looks uncannily like Eric Clapton.

After the recent Michigan massacre, he tweeted: Well-regulated militia opens fire on Michigan State University in East Lansing. Cheap thoughts and useless prayers now being rushed to the scene … more on this soon-to-be-forgotten-and-then-repeated story-as-it develops.

Modest Expectations – We’ll drink champagne in Udine

Look, I’m not one for a Grudge …

To him, been just given the Nudge

I shall not, I will not, deliberately Fudge

Nor will I Budge

Yes, he said I did robotically Bludge

Then pushed me back into the poverty Sludge

Who? You guessed it, he was known as Alan Pakenham Tudge

Yes, some say he has left quite a Smudge

But whom am I to constructively Judge

As broken, defeated I onwardly Trudge

The Little Red Citroen

This is one prime example of the unexpected consequence. For years, when we have come to Tasmania, we hired a car. But with COVID and even before that, hiring cars was becoming prohibitively expensive in Tasmania, and at busy times of the years, the car hire companies introduced limits on the free kilometres.

Thus because of both this and increasingly wanting to stay longer in Tasmania at any one time, we made the decision to take the car ferry, the Spirit of Tasmania. Let’s say, that its disabled passenger cabin is excellent, even though it is a long corridor away from the lift, but the crew are solicitous, and one seems always at hand. On this occasion, travelling across from Melbourne to Devonport was uneventful, and we went down the West Coast to our property at Strahan.

When we decided to return, the rain had come to Northern Tasmania – flooding rains but some of the major roads remained open, even though much of the countryside was completely under water. However, the major unexpected consequence was that the level of the Mersey River at Devonport rose, floating the Spirit of Tasmania upwards, such that it was impossible to load cars and trucks. Therefore, with several cancelled ferries, and no confirmation of a new departure date for at least 48 hours, and a departure date delayed for effectively at least four days, we saw the uncertainty that bad weather introduces.

As we were due to go to Vietnam at the end of the week, we had no choice but to leave the car in Tasmania. Fortunately, we have good friends south of Hobart with space in their yard for a car. So we drove the car down from the North to their place, where we left the car and flew back to Sydney.

Fast forward a couple of weeks. Back in Sydney, preparing to travel to Tasmania to pick up the car. Then we were both laid low by a very nasty respiratory virus, not COVID, but may as well have been – how sick we both were. The upshot was that the car was marooned in Tasmania for another month.

Then “the cavalry” came to our rescue. Number two son said he was prepared to go and pick it up and bring it back to Melbourne – flight to Hobart, pick up the car our friends had conveniently left at the Hobart airport, then drive it to Devonport, overnight to the new Victorian Spirit of Tasmania destination, Geelong; thence up the Princes Highway and home.

By this time we were fit to travel, and as we had business in Albury, another friend offered to bring our car to Albury and meet us there. Number one son picked up the car, re-fuelled it and dropped it to our friend’s place. One-way hire of a modest sedan from Sydney to Albury cost about $1,000. Our friend having dropped our car returned to Melbourne by train, a trip which enabled him to read a book and which cost $20.

The exercise would have not been possible without this chain of friends and family. It makes us realise we are not alone on this planet – and we thank you all.

Medicare and the Constitution

Australia is consumed to a greater or lesser degree by the prospect of incorporating recognition of the Aboriginal people into the Constitution in a nebulous concept known as the Voice.

Meanwhile, the Government is flailing around wondering how to make Medicare work.

Medicare is made possible, because it is based on providing a range of patient benefits for a number of defined responsibilities.

In 1946 the following was passed in a referendum of the Australian people, an amendment to Section 51, namely:

(xxiiiA.) The provision of maternity allowances, widows’ pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances:

The Commonwealth does not have any constitutional power to regulate prices and incomes; and that is the greatest misunderstanding of how Medicare works. Hence doctors can charge what they believe is fair and reasonable; and only individual States can determine otherwise. Thus, of all health professionals, only doctors and dentists are able to receive Commonwealth funded patient benefits for their professional services. When the amendment was passed in 1946, the explosion of other health profession numbers had yet to occur, plus these professions being deemed to be in private practice. Patient benefits can only accrue to doctors working in private practice, although this has been systematically undermined by public hospitals “privatising” some of their clinics – in essence promoting double-dipping. Here the Commonwealth has been weak in its response.

In 1974, optometrists were given access to a limited patient benefits scheme where the profession accepted the benefit in effect as full payment; and they were deemed “medical” – a sleight of hand because at that time there was an unusually large number of optometrists as members of parliament. The other means of providing patient benefits is to provide a medically supervised patient benefit for a health professional group. In areas such as diagnostic imaging, radiotherapy and pathology, there has been a long term recognition that the benefit contains not only a professional component for the medical service but also the payment for technicians and scientists essential for the delivery of the services which are incorporated in the technical component of the medical benefit. The other component is the capital component, which acknowledges the level of capital expenditure to deliver the medical service. This last is a vexed question because it has not been universally agreed, and for instance, there is a separate list, from which prostheses are costed.

Recently, there is a clamour by various health professional groups for direct access to patient benefits, but despite the above stratagem, it should be ruled to be unconstitutional. As reported in the Persons with Disability and the Australian Constitution monograph, that:

In 1944, The {Pharmaceutical Benefits} Act was challenged by members of the Medical Society of Victoria with the support of the Attorney-General of that state. Publicly, the society objected to its members being co-opted into the scheme and having their professional judgment limited to only prescribing the free drugs from the Commonwealth scheme. The challenge before the High Court rested on two points. The first was whether the scheme that required doctors and chemists to act in accordance with the regulation was authorised by a legislative head of power in the Constitution. In short, did the Commonwealth have the power to regulate medical services? The second point was whether the Commonwealth scheme was in fact merely the appropriation and spending of funds authorised by the Parliament, and thus supported by the incidental powers under the Constitution.

The challenge was upheld by the High Court, but indirectly led to the future constitutional amendment in 1946. Effectively by adjudging the distribution of £30 million for the provision by the Commonwealth of free drugs to be unlawful constitutionally, it provided ammunition for that future constitutional amendment.

As a parenthetic comment, pharmaceutical benefits are directed towards providing a benefit to pay for medicines, and these are contained in the Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule, not for pharmacists to provide independent professional services, however defined. This is a major pressure point, but it effectively confuses two roles. The pharmacist often knows more about the drug; the doctor, the reasons behind the prescription. Currently a pharmacist may provide health advice, for which there is no patient benefit. The doctor provides health advice for which there is patient benefit.

The pharmacists receive a patient benefit for dispensing medicines, their administration and the potential side-effects but not for dispensing health advice.

2023 – Prime Minister Albanese – who knows …

The Commonwealth Government has different means of handling this. Already it is strangling Medicare and effectively passing the funding as sickness benefits under the NDIS system. The Constitutional amendment by including “sickness benefits” codified Commonwealth funding in the disability sector. It is unfortunate but the AMA has been asleep at the wheel for decades, as the value of Medicare benefits to the patient has been eroded. In response, specialists have just raised their fees, devaluing in effect the value of the medical benefit. Increasingly, GPs have abandoned bulk billing and are charging fees that leave patients with significant co-payments over and above the patient Medicare benefit.

This solution is not that easy for general practitioners. They have been fooled because every time the Commonwealth initiates a review into Medicare, it just puts the whole question of increasing patient benefits on hold. Stratagems such as reducing time with patients, so the doctors time spent is little more than a greeting, a cursory look and then dismissal has been one response. As one wag jokingly said, in some practices, one doctor spent so little time with the patients that they had to be fit because they were required to jog through the surgery to sign the benefit form at the exit.

The central agencies shudder when they hear suggestions that all health professional services should attract a patient benefit – essentially an unlimited payment scheme only constrained by the Commonwealth’s willingness to ascribe a benefit. Currently, the Constitution stands in the way, but if judged by the legal challenge against pharmaceutical subsidy back in 1944, a referendum to change all that would surely be in the gunny sack of every populist Australian politician.

Ironically, amid this agitation, under the Constitution a dental benefits scheme could have been set up long ago. None has ever occurred, despite the concern over the dental health of the nation. Why? The dentists traditionally have not wanted it. This says something about the “influencer”.

Parramatta 1973

Back in September of that year there was a byelection. This was the first under the Whitlam Government and was caused by the resignation of the local member. This local member was Nigel Bowen who, after the 1972 election, had lost the leadership election of the parliamentary Liberal Party to Billy Snedden by one vote. In 1973, Bowen was appointed as Chief Judge in Equity in the Supreme Court of New South Wales. This meant his resignation from Parliament, thus precipitating a byelection. Nigel Bowen in 1964 was elected to Parliament to succeed Garfield Barwick, then on his way to be Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia. The Parramatta electorate at that time was “the Menzies gift”, as though he was propelling distinguished jurists into Federal parliament to emulate himself. It did not work out, although as Attorney General, Bowen produced some enlightened proposals, but not enough to be drafted in as Opposition leader.

As a distinguished jurist, facing years in Opposition, he decided to resume his career, not unexpectedly, especially as he was 61 years of age at the time. Snedden was fifteen years younger. For the Parramatta byelection, the Liberal Party preselected a young Liberal, direct from conservative casting, his father was a State MP, Philip Ruddock. Philip always danced from one end of the Party to other, but he had a certain resilience. He trounced his Labor Party challenger with a swing of nearly seven per cent. Ten other candidates, mostly independents, contested the seat.

This was the first Federal election in which eighteen-year-olds were eligible to vote, the voting age having been lowered from twenty-one earlier in the year.

As was expected Bowen did not involve himself in the campaign. Snedden did, and although he was a poor public speaker, he was a good grass roots politician. Whitlam on the other hand made a declamatory speech which canvassed the forthcoming prices and income referendum to be held later in the year. As with the by-election, this referendum was soundly defeated. It had been a triumph for Snedden and helped to consolidate his shaky hold on the Party, especially in NSW at that time.

Peter Dutton, the acclaimed Leader of the Liberal Party, is now faced with a by-election in the first year of a Labor Party government, as was Snedden. The recently retired member, Alan Tudge has been a conspicuously poor performer involved deeply in the Robodebt imbroglio. Let us say, he is hardly the person Nigel Bowen was. In 1973, Snedden was campaigning in NSW whereas his natural base was Victoria. Likewise, Dutton will be campaigning in Victoria, where his normal habitat is Queensland.

Nominally both Parramatta in 1973 and Aston in 2023 were and are safe Liberal seats. The expectation would be that the Opposition Party would achieve a swing as this is the expected outcome after the election, thus strengthening the hold on such electorates. In Parramatta in 1973, Ruddock achieved this swing, and had no need to go to preferences.

Dutton wants a female candidate. He’d better choose wisely, because I hate to see a dead bird floating among sheets of unread Murdoch papers – lose the byelection and you are a dead duck paddling, mate! It will be interesting to see if a wild duck, disguised as a teal is pre-selected. And what of the Labor Party? Can’t lose many feathers contesting; and as a bonus gives an idea of whether it has made inroads into the teal vote.

Thus, what of Aston, where, despite a swing against him at the 2022 election, Tudge held the seat comfortably. Can Dutton emulate Snedden?

ChatGPT – So you want to Cheat; go right ahead

Lawrence Shapiro is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is coy about his age, but he received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, so he must be cognitively still vital.

He writes very calmly in the Washington Post about this artificial intelligence tool which has been heralded as a means of writing essays and assignments without even thinking about it – albeit a means of cheating.

This opinion piece is a very clear appraisal of the tool. He seems very relaxed. After all, he has recently published a second edition of his book Embodied Cognition which a reviewer has hailed as an outstanding introduction for those unfamiliar with but who would like to explore this movement. As the reviewer continues: It clarifies the very idea of embodiment, elaborates the central themes of embodied cognition, and evaluates theories of embodied cognition against standard cognitive science.

I think I will stick with this general appraisal.

ChatGPT has many of my university colleagues shaking in their Birkenstocks. This artificial-intelligence tool excels at producing grammatical and even insightful essays — just what we’re hoping to see from our undergraduates. How good is it, really? A friend asked ChatGPT to write an essay about “multiple realization.” This is an important topic in the course I teach on the philosophy of mind, having to do with the possibility that minds might be constructed in ways other than our own brains. The essay ran shorter than the assigned word count, but I would have given it an A grade. Apparently ChatGPT is good enough to create an A-level paper on a topic that’s hardly mainstream.

Universities are treating the threat as more dire than an epidemic or even a budget reduction. The most obvious response, and one that I suspect many professors will pursue, involves replacing the standard five-page paper assignment with an in-class exam. Others expect to continue with the papers but have suggested that the assigned topics should be revised to focus on lesser-known works or ideas about which a chatbot might not “know” too much.

Good luck with that. If ChatGPT can pen a solid essay on multiple realization, an issue on which I happen to be a world authority in good part thanks to lack of company, I doubt it would have difficulty constructing essays about lesser-known Shakespearean sonnets or unremarkable soldiers who fought for the Union Army. Besides, if we’re going to demand deep thought from our students, shouldn’t it be about the more important stuff?

Here’s what I plan to do about chatbots in my classes: pretty much nothing. Let me say first that as much as I value the substance of what I teach, realistically my students will not spend more than a semester thinking about it. It’s unlikely that Goldman Sachs or Leakey’s Plumbing or wherever my students end up will expect their employees to have a solid background in philosophy of mind. Far more likely is that the employees will be required to write a letter or an analysis or a white paper, and to do this they will need to know how to write effectively in the first place. This is the skill that I most hope to cultivate in my students, and I spend a lot of time reading their essays and providing them with comments that really do lead to improvements on subsequent assignments. In-class exams — the ChatGPT-induced alternative to writing assignments — are worthless when it comes to learning how to write, because no professor expects to see polished prose in such time-limited contexts.

I should emphasize just how desperately my students need formal instruction in writing. My wife confirms that I’m noticeably crankier than when I first started teaching 30 years ago. Everything today seems worse than it was back then: traffic, TV news, macaroni and cheese. But I don’t believe that the deterioration in writing quality that I see is a consequence of age-tinted glasses. I read too many papers from upperclassmen, from students who have taken other writing-intensive courses, in which only one sentence out of five is not grammatically or stylistically defective. I would be failing these students if I let ChatGPT discourage me from teaching them what might be the most essential competence they can gain from me.

But what about the cheaters, the students who let a chatbot do their writing for them? I say, who cares? In my normal class of about 28 students, I encounter one every few semesters whom I suspect of plagiarism. Let’s now say that the temptation to use chatbots for nefarious ends increases the number of cheaters to an (unrealistic) 20 percent. It makes no sense to me that I should deprive 22 students who can richly benefit from having to write papers only to prevent the other six from cheating (some of whom might have cheated even without the help of a chatbot).

Here’s an idea for extracting something positive from the inevitable prominence that chatbots will achieve in coming years. My students and I can spend some class time critically appraising a chatbot-generated essay, revealing its shortcomings and deconstructing its strengths. This exercise would bring a couple of rewards. First, analytical writing, like any skill, benefits from seeing examples of what works and what does not. While students might reasonably object to having their own essays made a target of public inspection, chatbots couldn’t possibly care. Second, given that chatbots are not going to fade away, my students might as well learn how to refine their products for whatever uses the future holds.

I urge my colleagues not to abandon writing assignments for fear that some students will let artificial intelligence do their work for them. Instead, let’s devise ways to make chatbots work for all of us. Truly, the cheaters are only hurting themselves — unless we respond to them by removing writing assignments from the syllabus.

Mouse Whisper

He has been reading this book The Amur River which relates to Colin Thubron’s recent travel from Mongolia, reaching towards and eventually along the Amur River which divides Russia from China to its mouth. Fascinating book, he announced to all and sundry, and me. He could not refrain from telling us about Kim-Jong-Il, the original poisonous North Korean puffball. Kim-Jong-Il was not born in some celestial nursery but in a tiny Russian village near the Amur River and was swept up in fighting the Japanese. But Thubron recounted this description of this high born North Korean dictator – his tastes I doubt were developed along the Amur. How, I ask you do such nutters get these gigs – no mouse would ever be allowed to indulge in such a display? {Sic}

Despite his propaganda, he was mundanely earthbound, and frightened of flying. He travelled only in a luxury carriage of his own armoured train. On a secret journey to Moscow, his Soviet escort described him eating fresh lobsters airlifted in every day, with roast donkey and champagne, while his people starved.

Modest Expectations – Voiture ancienne

The Defence force spends somewhere in the region of $40m a year in recruitment of men and women to the army, navy and air force. Nowhere in the advertisements is the message, join the defence force to be killed fighting for your country. Rather, learn skills, enjoy yourself.

So why would a young doctor go into general practice when there is so much moaning in the background about how terrible general practice is. When I was young, I remember “Country Practice”, a TV show which extolled the virtues of general practice. Since then there have been TV doctors featured as dysfunctional, exiled to the country, as for instance in “Doctor, Doctor”. The portrayal involved a great amount of sordid activity. The characters were hardly appropriate role models, but when you watch an optimistic sitcom such as “Call the Midwife”, one wonders how that would play out if moved from an inner London setting to the Australian outback.

I was involved in rural health until about five to six years ago. I have seen very clearly what works and what doesn’t; and it distresses me to see the same suggested solutions rolled out, knowing they have failed previously. One is this bleating about how difficult it all is; and their need for more doctors. Then when a doctor is suggested to join some of these doctors in apparent need, some back away worrying that their income will be impaired.

Then I wrote about the challenges, which I have observed over the years; I doubt whether they have changed. They seem not to have been taken into account in the platitudes in the latest 12 page report supervised by the Minister, who unfortunately seems to have been captured by these purveyors of stuff that does not work. The challenges to rural practice are:

social dislocation
professional isolation
community tolerance
succession planning

Social dislocation is encapsulated in the reluctance of one’s partner to relocate and where the doctor needs to send his/her children away to school. Professional isolation exists in a variety of ways – working on one’s own so that one is effectively rostered on duty 24/7, without locum relief or where one refuses to share on-call with doctors in other practices. I have worked in small communities with hospitals; and well managed they provide an essential resource in enabling work with other health professionals where there are not enough doctors.

Community tolerance is thus at the heart of the inter-relationship with other health professionals and the community. The idea that health professionals will automatically work together, by some magical wafting of a bureaucratic report, is fanciful. Strength of leadership and an ability of the doctor to work in the community needs someone who automatically is expected to join a community and its activity. When there is an immediate barrier of language and customs, not to mention personality traits, expectations may not be fulfilled. Some doctors are not joiners, they do not want to become involved in social activities. Added to this, some doctors need to adjust to the fact that unlike the city, there is no anonymity; one common reaction is to leave the community over a weekend “just to get away”.

Then there is the most important challenge and that is succession planning. Few practices do it, but the ones that do are successful because they promote continuity in service and hence corporate memory and trust among their patients. There should be a rule of thumb that if one survives the initial period, then one should guarantee (and be guaranteed) a certain length of time in one practice. Five years seems to be reasonable in this modern age, where there is fluidity in employment among health professionals. That means that once the number of doctors needed to provide the best possible service is settled, then one works to maintain that level, remembering that what attracts doctors is a functional practice which, implicitly or explicitly, has paid attention to the top three challenges I have listed.

Income is always important, but it is not a specific condition for general practice and the whole matter of Medicare will be dealt with in my next blog.

I have written about rural medical practice endlessly, (my previous blogs attest to this) but the underlying problem is that the bureaucrat writes the report as if the work has been completed. In reality it is only the beginning, because implementation is always the difficult part.

Once they genuflected and cried: Go to Pell

Many shameful episodes in Australian politics in recent years, but hard to think of a lower moment than seeing two former Prime Ministers attend the funeral of a cardinal who covered up institutionalised sexual abuse of children and protected paedophile priests – Twitter comment

My eye was attracted to this comment about Cardinal Pell’s funeral. I have a relative who played football with the young George Pell when he was a journeyman country Australian footballer, a big man (195cm) who shouldered some of the ruck load. My relative was adamant that Pell would never have been a child abuser.

The problem is that Pell did have “form” from his time as a young priest, was criticised by the Royal Commission into Child Abuse, was convicted and imprisoned, and the conviction overturned on technical grounds which did not clear Pell, but the decision indicated that High Court was not convinced that the matter of reasonable doubt had been addressed satisfactorily. The evidence of a monsignor seemed to be believed above the evidence of others, without any real evidence of the veracity of his recall of the circumstances of the accusations made against Pell.

After Pell disappeared to Rome, the Sydney diocese must have started planning for his inevitable death. It was such a highly staged spectacle, seemingly having every Roman Catholic priest recruited for the ceremonial requiem mass. It also seems that the Sydney diocese has decided not to go with the shift in the political winds in Rome, even with the current ailing Argentinian pope, and to combat the progressives who are on the rise. Sydney may decide to become the home of such Roman Catholicism – refusing to consider contraception, abortion, celibacy, the ordination of women, vaccination against cervical cancer and even encouraging the re-introduction of the Tridentine mass (currently four churches in Sydney).

To airbrush Pell is a common trait in Australian culture – turning a scumbag like Ned Kelly into a national hero is another example. Tony Abbott ‘s extravagant comment does not do the situation justice. Abbott is not rabid, in that he has not presumably been bitten by a dog, squirrel or civet. His statement that those outside the cathedral yelling “Pell go to Hell” meant they at least believed in the afterlife and thus this was the first verified Pell Miracle (gained him a few cheap tweets) but was just plain stupid.

The Church cannot be serious about canonisation of a man who has been shown to facilitate, indirectly or directly, sexual molestation of children by a collection of priest predators, some of whom were close to him at some point. Since Peter became the first Bishop of Rome, the Church has survived a great deal of malfeasance, and perhaps this will continue to persist.

The other perception of the Church is how ludicrous some of the regalia looks when placed alongside stated conservative attitudes. After all, look at the fancy dress of the church dignitaries and then fast forward to the forthcoming dress-ups for mardi gras by the queer dignitaries.

And the other intriguing question, will Abbott and his seminarian mates have to wait for a new Pope to get an Australian Cardinal – or will there be a progressive addition to the Curia gifted by Pope Francis? And could he reach beyond the current list of bishops to perhaps a priest of principle, a man with a progressive tinge.

My Country, Ngangkari

It was one of those times when I was in Ernabella, and I was introduced to a young man, who I was told was a ngangkari. Ngangkari is a Western desert name for the medicine man. In every community I understood that there were these people, not necessarily men, who were responsible for the spiritual totems. I became aware of this fact when there was talk of a kadaitcha man when I was working in western NSW in the 90s. Although he was never identified, I was assured that he existed, right down to the feathered feet not leaving footprints. Before this can be dismissed as myth, I wonder if, in the construction of the Voice, whether these medicine men were consulted. Do they still exist, because it is important for the integrity of the Aboriginal traditions given the fragility of oral traditions; to assure the continuity of the spiritual values of each particular tribe.

As I said, at Ernabella I was introduced to a young man, who had been identified as a ngangkari. Like many Aboriginals, he was taciturn, especially confronted by a whitefella “blow-in”. What attracted me to him were his luminous indigo eyes. I was looking into the 40,000 or whatever years of Aboriginal heritage. I tried many approaches to engage him, and the one that worked was when I said “Adelaide Crows”. He broke into a wide smile, and the indigo eyes glinted into the twentieth century. For me, it was important to know that the medicine man existed; it was not for me to interrogate him. He was non-committal in describing his role; but what I knew was how important the oral tradition was to the medicine man/woman and the secrets that had been passed onto this man. By responding to Adelaide Crows meant that this ngangkeri was not set apart from modern life.

Aboriginal healer and artist Betty Muffler, standing on Iwantja, Yankunytjatjara Land in front of her artwork, Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country), (2020)

The question arises as to where these medicine men and women have been included in defining such an ephemeral notion as the Voice, because so much of the tradition included in the Voice is embodied in oral tradition. This handed down from one generation of medicine man/woman to the next would seem to be more important than a bunch of Aboriginal academics with confected lines, none of which are incorporated in oral tradition that have been lost or remain as an imagined thread.

I just hope that Voice is not an exercise, a grab for power, by some clever Aboriginals without any real links to the oral discourse. It is as if in the same way I would invoke my Irish ancestors in justifying an Irish voice in how Australia is run. In the end so-called “recognition” could be extended to being an implicit right of veto over legislation, as interpreted by a sympathetic High Court so that the end result is a third chamber of parliament in Australia, with all the complications that would bring.

The ongoing judicial interpretation of something as broadly worded as seems to be proposed by the referendum is likely to cause headaches, since Aboriginality may become of one of judicial interpretation. The legal consequences of a successful referendum will move slowly. Without the involvement of those such as the medicine men or women who carry the Aboriginal lore, it is in danger of becoming the plaything of that band of academic Aboriginals, and of course Noel Pearson. I do not have to worry about the unexpected consequences of all this political malarkey which threatens to consume the country’s political life this year, but my grandchildren may.

Our Bicentenary

I was amazed to see how the mangroves are flourishing around Iron Cove in inner west Sydney. The past three years have meant that I have spent little time in a place where, 30 years and more ago, I used to run to maintain fitness. The Iron Bay run is 7 km, and relatively flat. Nevertheless, the run includes a number of microclimates, which make it an interesting route. The problem with Iron Cove, which is one of the estuarine inlets of the Parramatta River, is that it has experienced two centuries of whitefella pollution. One of the major pollutants has been dioxan, and therefore I would never intentionally eat fish or crustacea from the Cove. But others do.

When I used to run the Iron Cove, the mangroves were there, but not to the height and extent as the mangrove forest now. It used to be stunted and did not exhibit its current lushness – rather it was a swamp bordering on the estuary, the water flowing tidally, and at ebbtide, it was a muddy swamp with just a thin cover of mangroves. Now it is different and given the mangrove so essential for water hygiene, maybe the underlying pollution will diminish.

After all, the Parramatta River which is estuarine for a considerable way contains numerous diverticular inlets to enhance its presence and importance. If there had not been such a river, the original settlement would not have survived because the soil around the harbour is poor and shallow on the underpinning sandstone. Gardening in suburban Balmain attests to the need to improve the soil and not dig too deep. The Parramatta River was a gateway to its upper reaches where cereal crops could be grown. In other words, here was the arable land,

In recognition of its importance, to celebrate the Bicentenary in 1988, we ran the Parramatta River from Long Nose Point as far as we could to Parramatta and to where the Toongabbie Creek flowed into it.

Like the mangroves, there has been a cleansing of the Parramatta River and its banks. This has been done without interfering with historic buildings built in the early years of the colony. Then many of the buildings were fenced off and left to rot because they were deemed too expensive to renovate. A large chunk of land with a 220 metre frontage on the Parramatta river was given over to the Department of Defence Naval Stores depot at Ermington, fenced off and like so much of the littoral lands unavailable to public access. In some parts, the other side of the river was available. But there was still a great deal of industrial land to be negotiated, for instance running through the coal dust and railway lines at Camilla. The skun dog carcase added to the sights as we padded along the riverside pathway nearing Parramatta one Sunday.

In 1988, it was an unloved waterway – the industrial sewer, yet with these marvellous sandstone Georgian buildings boarded up; fenced off – then too expensive to renovate. To us, just running it was our tribute to 200 years of European migrant population

Now 44 years later, the NSW Government has announced that it will put $60 million towards the pathway, which has been dubbed the Parramatta to Sydney Foreshore Link, a 91 kilometre path able to be used by both pedestrians and cyclists. It will start by the Harbour and end at Parramatta Park. “In the process, it’ll become one of the city’s longest transport connections, spanning a whopping 18 suburbs,” boasts the media release.

So, there you go, it took us several Sundays to run the distance. We had to make various compromises because the foreshore was unavailable; but what it said to us about 1788, there were many resourceful people who for better or for worse brought their civilisation to this huge continent. While we have despoiled, we have avoided building a country torn apart by waves of invaders battling over territory, because the Australian continent was ignored until the end of the eighteenth century except by a few, who left alone for thousand of years developed a most intricate culture among a remarkably diverse “nation”, yet which needed only one group of invaders to almost destroy it. But then again, Australia could have been colonised like Africa, and then the Continent would have been properly shredded.

How to deal with a Pomegranate

Obviously, pomegranate seed mining presents a problem for Americans, as suggested by this article in the Washington Post. An example of tough love?

Cut the pomegranate in half through the equator, hold a half cut side down in your hand over a dish or bowl and whack it — firmly, confidently — with a wooden spoon.

That’s it. Just make sure you’re hitting the fruit with the underside of the bowl of the spoon, rather than the edge, which is more likely to crack it. If you want to be a little extra, you can roll the fruit around on your counter before cutting to help loosen the seeds, though I didn’t bother. If you’re worried about splatters, use the biggest, widest bowl you have. (don’t do this while wearing white.)

It took me a less than two minutes per half to remove all the seeds, no prying required. Just periodically turn the halves over to see where you need to focus your efforts to ensure all the seeds come out. Very little of the membrane or white flesh ended up in the bowl, and whatever did was easily picked out. If I shook the bowl like I was tossing a salad, the extra bits rose to the top or spun to the edges, making it even simpler, no water needed. After that, it was easy to transfer the seeds to an airtight container in the refrigerator, where they should be good for at least five days, though I’ve pushed it longer. If you want to freeze the seeds for a few months, be sure to place them in a single layer on a lined baking sheet and then pack them in a bag or container once they’re froze.

This simplicity of this method was in stark contrast to the more photogenic technique that infiltrated my Instagram feed, in which you carve out the top and then try to cut the pomegranates into its naturally occurring segments. It took me way longer to do this, as I still had to press and pry out the seeds. Plus, surprisingly, it sent more seeds onto the floor than the whack-it-over-a-bowl method.

As an added bonus, the wooden spoon strategy is incredibly therapeutic. Whack out your frustrations, and then enjoy the fruits of your labour. Win-win.

Mouse Whisper

As he says, his pronunciation leaves something to be desired. Thus, when he pronounced his Citroen as a “Citron”, he wondered why it did not sell, until he was placed in the front of a mirror and given an elocution lesson.

Modest Expectation – The Deer Hunter

Activity in War is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man immersed in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in War, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity. This is the reason that the correct theorist is like a swimming master, who teaches on dry land movements which are required in the water, which must appear grotesque and ludicrous to those who forget about the water. This is also why theorists, who have never plunged in themselves, or who cannot deduce any generalities from their experience, are unpractical and even absurd, because they only teach what everyone knows—how to walk.

I am no Clausewitz; what is going on in Ukraine probably owes something to those who are familiar with what he has said on War. War creates extraordinary times, and only a few people can survive its intensity. Zelensky is on the cusp of greatness, and unlike Churchill who was deeply flawed, could emerge as a great figure without the negative aspects – and at a younger age. Zelensky is a comedian – as such he understands the frailty of human nature; and it is that understanding, coupled with his incorruptible ferocity, which enables him to tower over both friend and foe. Before Zelensky, Ukraine was seen as a basket case, with both a succession of corrupt governments and, for a time, a very pro-Soviet Government, not unlike Belorussia.

NATO, with the escalating commitment of tanks to the War, seems to be signalling a Spring offensive, where the tactics which the Germans used in early 1940 to win the battle will be played out again, albeit in a modified form. Even without feeding the troops with amphetamine as the Reich did, it is here that NATO has an overwhelming advantage. Black soil dry is a beautiful surface upon which to launch an offensive, but if the Spring rains come, then the tanks will become less effective in the terrain. But the overall number of tanks in the offensive should be sufficient to counteract the rain – hopefully.

At the same time, intelligence is being gathered as to where the pro-Russian population resides within the Ukraine boundaries. Neither side wishes to garrison a countryside where an underground resistance movement is the last thing anyone wants, having been exhausted by war.

Nevertheless, despite the NATO decision to contain the War, the aim will be to take back Crimea, which has been considered pro-Russian. The Kerch Bridge and the land bridge from Rostov in Russia through Mariupol and Melitopol in Ukraine and into Crimea would be viable targets for an augmented Ukrainian force. Therefore, optimistically, assuming that Crimea will be retaken and Ukraine is accepted into NATO, Russia will be strategically outflanked in the Black Sea. No need to cross the border; all so simple. Unfortunately, no. No need to garrison anybody.

One suspects that Russia is so riddled with corruption that it is hard to imagine that such a country, despite an initial overwhelming superiority in arms can endlessly prosecute conflict at the current level without a massive change in the situation it finds itself in. The refusal of NATO to allow the war to spread across the Russian border provides some relief. This allows the Russians to destroy much of the Ukrainian infrastructure, without it appears, it cowering the general population. But there are limits, and the Russians in the end have at least one viable threat – convert the Ukraine War into a nuclear war.

What puzzles me is the seeming disconnect between the everyday life – in Australia concerned with the so-called “Invasion Day” and preparing for a year with scant attention to the prospect of a nuclear war and the inexorable movement of the planet to irreversible, unmanageable climate change. A nuclear war is not being seriously contemplated. But much of the World is being governed by old men, most of whom are in positions where they are protected from being fingered for dementia. I do not rule out that some of these grandees have tertiary syphilis, but nobody looks for the chameleon disease. In the end, the World does not need demented grandiosity.

Men are loath to go to the doctor. Putin has been subject to speculation over his mental condition, and he would have steered clear of any examination which might confirm this – especially if an organic cause were incidentally discovered. As written in the Los Angeles Times just after the Ukraine invasion in February last year, it suggested that while Putin could be going mad, mental disability can be used as a ruse. The notion that a head of state can reap foreign policy rewards by appearing utterly unpredictable — a tactic President Nixon was said to have employed to try to rattle North Vietnam — also had recent echoes during the Trump administration, when supporters maintained he cleverly flummoxed opponents by unexpectedly breaking with established norms. I think cum grano salo, notwithstanding!

As I said, nobody seems to take the nuclear war option seriously. Russia has extensively destroyed Ukraine infrastructure which will need to be rebuilt. What will stop Russia from going the further step, if madness is abroad within the Kremlin. When the Cold War was at its height in the 1950s, and there was a real fear of a nuclear war, WWII damage in Europe at least was still evident. Russia had effectively sealed off Eastern Europe and neutralised Austria and Finland; thus, the Russian Empire had a huge buffer zone, and when rebellion occurred in Hungary in 1956, the West just sat on its hands and watched Hungary moved back into the Russian fold. Yet the prospect of nuclear war was uppermost in the American government’s minds, culminating in the Cuban crisis. However, the defences against a nuclear war were extensive – I remember seeing the nuclear shelter at Greenbriar, a historic hotel in West Virginia, where a bunker was built so the government could be transferred there from Washington in the event of a nuclear war.

Putin has shown that he is the master of divide and rule; and he has been able to exploit the narcissism of the wave of populist dictators. Particularly troubling has been his relationship with Trump. The relationship as reported as changed from the years when Trump was hosting a “world” beauty contest as his then contribution to American foreign relations. In 2013, Trump admitted to an unspecified yet warm relationship with Putin, something he later denied. Nevertheless, what exists behind outward conflicting statements, can only be only the subject of conjecture, but it is inconceivable that the Americans are not well acquainted with Trump’s behaviour in compromising his own country.

Another game changer the Russians must be contemplating is the assassination of Zelensky, and reckoning that the Ukrainian resolve will crumble, given that Ukraine was perceived to be corruption-ridden not so long ago. Zelensky, from his recent action, is acutely aware that corrupt behaviour must be combatted quickly.

Then what is to stop Putin slinging a few nuclear warheads into Poland to test reaction. Once the tide turns as inevitably it must, Russia must face defeat, whether they cut off her head by employing nuclear devices or mounting an invasion by technology superior to any the Russians can muster. Presumably NATO has enough data to assess the risk. NATO is in a bind. Things were fine when it was just a case of brinkmanship, but Putin changed the game when he invaded a country close to the heart of NATO.

He had telegraphed his tactics by the brutality in the Russian Caucasus, and in Georgia where he took a piece of that country because he could. Armenia was another playground, but rather than upping the ante there, he turned to the Ukraine. He predicted after his takeover of Crimea, that the Ukraine would be easybeats.

Nevertheless, he has shown that while he may be losing the ground war, he can destroy the infrastructure of the country with impunity. He may believe that Europe is not ready for the same level of destruction in order to prevail over Putin. Putin may, as I wrote above, send a few missiles into Poland to see whether NATO has the appetite for a war as bruising as it has been for Ukraine.

In one way, the deployment of the leopard tanks is symptomatic of this hesitancy, which dictators view as weakness, and others bureaucratic sluggishness. Presumably if someone decisive in NATO said, “let’s muster all the tanks and let’s go!”, there would be a flurry of reasons advanced not to send them. Masterly inactivity; and all the while the Ukrainians keep defending their country, despite it being gradually destroyed. Anyway, Spring will come at the beginning of March, and it will be Autumn in Australia. I’ll be celebrating St David’s Day, eating Welsh rarebit and watching “On the Beach”, so as not to worry about the cloud on the horizon.

But in the end, what would I know, as Clausewitz said about just telling everybody how to walk without, I suggest, sucking an egg or two. I can’t even swim.

The Battle for Alice Springs

Our major aim would be the central remote building construction. It is one that the government worked very closely on, through the Indigenous Housing Authority of the Northern Territory. It was one where they changed the procurement process from each community having a pick of housing to it being under one project manager. The project manager had the responsibility of allocating the houses as well as the funding, so it was vacant of any deception or manipulation. That having been done, the standardised designs and standardised specifications came in. It got rid of a lot of unscrupulous thinking and made it workable. That is the way that the community had control over the apprentices, where they wanted the houses and the designs, and the money came directly from my hand into the project. – William Tilmouth Executive Director the Tangentyere Council 2005.

The Alice Springs debacle challenges the relevance of the Voice. The NT government virtually gave open slather to the town camp inhabitants to be intoxicated at will so that domestic violence has increased and the young kids rampage through the night, showing a combination of boredom, recreation and pilfering.

It is summer and the Aboriginals tend to come to town to avoid the heat of the outstations; but as I always remember when I was visiting towns where there was a high proportion of Aboriginal people, there would be talk about the “bad people” coming to town, without specifying who they were. But if you worked in a place long enough, you had a good idea. The other influence which was mentioned to me was the kadaitcha man, unseen whose power was exerted over spiritual totems, but nobody identified anyone to me, although I met a number of ngangkari, (medicine men had a number of names).

Alices Springs has presented a chronic problem of alcohol abuse. It is commonplace to have loud shouting matches in the streets, and at the root of the problem is alcohol, drugs, neglect, boredom. These need addressing, but not by a fleeting visit by a Canberra entourage. Each of these demands strengthening traditional structural change and a willingness for this to occur.

Years ago, William Tilmouth, when he was the Executive Director of Tangentyere Council, took me around the camps where Aboriginal people live for at least part of the year. It was a time when his elder brother, Tracker Tilmouth was still alive. It was clear that William and his brothers carried authority. He was intent in improving the standards of town camps, at a time when outstations were the winter accommodation. When I met him, he was one of Arrente brothers, who were described to me as graziers. Between 1989 and 1997, his brother Tracker planned and oversaw the purchase of five pastoral leases for Aboriginal traditional owners. As Warren Snowden said about Tracker at the time of his death in 2015, “He was an enigmatic figure but he had a real passion for getting people involved in employment.”

William did, and the youngest, Patrick, also have similar passions. In explanation, the three brothers were the last trio of children born into a family of eight. Ostensibly because of their darker colour, these three were sent north to Darwin in the first instance. The first five because their skin was a lighter tone were sent to Adelaide. The whole family were part of the Stolen Generation – dispossessed from their lands. Hence when they returned, the three brothers gained influence through the land acquisition.

In 2018 William had moved to head Children’s Ground, (inter alia its aim is to secure the fundamental rights of the child, the family and the community, wherever intergenerational inequity pervades). Yet Tilmouth said, When my father’s traditional lands were given back, my brother and I were not even notified of the ceremonial handback. The apology meant nothing to me – there are too many sorries and not enough truths.” In other words dispossession is a great weapon which the white populations so exploited.

The point is that William Tilmouth is not a blow-in. Yet when the Prime Minister dropped by and presented himself as an exemplar of old whitefella paternalism, Tilmouth was apparently not invited. After all, Linda Burney and Pat Dodson came too – talking the normal banal stuff, to which the nation has become inured. It should not take a gaggle of photo opportunity prone politicians pontificating to reinstate the alcohol bans, which should have never been removed.

The local Member of Parliament for Lingiari is Marion Scrymgour. I thought she looked distinctly uncomfortable as part of the Prime Minister’s entourage. I knew her when she served as director of the Wurli Wurlinjang Aboriginal Corporation, co-ordinated several trial community care programs around Katherine, and as Director of the Katherine West Health Board Aboriginal Corporation. She did a very good job, and I remember she had a corps of very good Aboriginal health workers (as they were then called). I had always identified her with Katherine and the Jawoyn people, but she is half Tiwi; half Arrente – which does give her sufficient standing to sort through the challenges this Alice Springs crisis presents.

The problem is that it is said Canberra only listens to Aboriginal people, who some deride as “coconuts”. The currently most influential of the Aboriginal bureaucrats seems to be Tom Calma who has walked that edge. He is an Aboriginal who has immersed himself in the Canberra bureaucracy since 1992 and become the convenient authority for the media to consult. He is the whitefella anodyne, who has an exceptional ability to collect laurel wreaths and shiny baubles, the latest being Australian senior citizen of the year representing the Australian Capital Territory. It is not an unfamiliar trajectory, as in 2012 he was named ACT Australian of the year, only to be defeated by Geoffrey Rush for the gold medal. The nature of the man is not to give up in the quest for ongoing deserved recognition.

His trajectory has also shown a canniness of being given credibility without leaving Canberra, without the unpleasant task of doing anything but pamphleteering – a blackfella Fabian. He has left that activism to his mate, Marcia Langton, and Noel Pearson; demonstrating what can be done by a distant megaphone? History will judge whether Calma will have any legacy but a trail of documents and whether he will have any impact in solving the problem with black and white relationships, as shown by this latest trouble.

I have a simple solution as a start. Sit with William Tilmouth and whoever else he believes relevant and review what has worked in Central Australia, and as often happens what has worked for more than just a couple of years, generally until the governing “mob” changes. A common scenario is that a different mob gets control, and matters go back to square one. Feuds are common among Aboriginals, but whether these are greater than in the whitefella world, it is for others to provide objective evidence. I was not aware of that having been shown in Alice Springs.

I was amazed to see the Congress (Central Australian Aboriginal Congress) buildings vandalised. Congress, I remember, was integral in assuring Aboriginal social and health status in Alice Springs. At the time I was most closely involved with Aboriginal people the idea that it would be vandalised would have been unimaginable.

However, I am haunted by the time when standing in an Aboriginal quarry elsewhere with an Aboriginal elder. We were accompanied by a woman doctor. I turned to him and said, “This is men’s business”. He looked at me for a minute and replied, without directly responding, “When the young fellas moved the corroboree stones to do burn-outs, I gave way and do not care any longer.”

Thus goes Aboriginal elder authority.

Hog Deer, Anyone?

Control measures for deer have not been extensively investigated as priority has been given to other pest species in Australia… once and future bureaucratic published excuse!

Deer are the next pests to be exterminated. They are just big rabbits. So, while they will eat out native vegetation, unlike the rabbits, they are hoofed animals so they also trample it and as such are enablers of weed infestations. Deer spread disease, and foot and mouth disease is an everpresent scourge which has been kept out of Australia. Then there the incurable wasting Johnes’ disease (JD), caused by a paratuberculosis bacteria. Reservoirs of this disease are known to occur in deer, very germane to this comment from the Queensland Government where the highest risks of spread of JD into and within Queensland is the movement of livestock from high-risk populations interstate and from properties where infection is known or suspected. It is unsurprising that deer are considered a feral pest there.

Thus, some states and territories consider feral deer to be pests (WA, SA, QLD, NT, ACT). Yet States with the largest deer populations (VIC, NSW, TAS) give deer full or partial protection status and ostensibly manage deer primarily for recreational hunting. In Australia there are estimated to be two million deer, in 1980 there were 50,000. This is despite an estimated legal harvest in Victoria in 2011 of 41,000 deer, including 34,000 Sambar.

The Victorian laissez-faire attitude is exemplified by the fact that “Hog, Red, Sambar, Fallow, Rusa, Chital, Sika and Wapiti Deer are defined as protected wildlife under the Wildlife Act 1975 (Wildlife Act). Hog, Red, Sambar, Fallow, Rusa and Chital Deer are further defined as game, which means they can be hunted by licensed game hunters. All other species of deer are declared as prohibited pest animals under the Catchment and Land Protection Act 1994 (CaLP Act).” The whole of the Victorian approach is that Victoria is akin to the Scottish Highlands, where deer hunting is a recreational activity, where class distinctions are acted out. Take the Victorian concern that hunters must also follow approved hunting methods and equipment; must comply with bag limits, seasons (for Hog Deer), and hunting times (no recreational night hunting); and must have a current Game Licence endorsed for hunting deer: either stalking and/or hunting Sambar Deer with hounds.

So much rubbish only in place to protect the hunting lodges which do a lucrative trade in providing accommodation for the deer hunters and charging fees to hunt on their property. Hardly a sufficient excuse, but enough to have the funds to lobby politicians.

Tasmania still has legislation which has protected the deer population up till now. In Tasmania the deer are fallow and, it is estimated, now number, 100,000. This has ignited the people with a green edge to campaign for the unequivocal declaration of the deer being vermin, with no limits on the number killed. The Tasmanian government is about to embark on aerial shooting of deer using firearms and night spotting equipment not readily available in Tasmania. Aerial culling has been shown to work in New Zealand.

Move across the South Australian border, and the incidental comment that deer have been eradicated from Kangaroo Island just confirmed the tenor of the South Australian approach. Hunting the deer which are considered a pest was the responsibility of the landowners, with the intent of culling the number of female deer, so the number of fawns falls. The small and relatively localised deer population on Kangaroo Island made the eradication program feasible and possible because of community involvement, particularly in reporting sightings. What did not work was use of stalker dogs and food lures. However, with the bush fires in 2020, while the level of destruction was in region of 44,000, most of which were sheep, deer casualties were not mentioned, suggesting that the previous eradication had been successful, but the original numbers were comparatively small.

Kangaroo Island deer became a problem when a deer farm collapsed and the deer were set free. This is one of the common reasons for the explosion of the deer population – deer farms that fail and the deer are let go. The other major reason for the deer explosion has been the “salting” of the environment by deer hunters, who want variety in what they bag. In all these endeavours, there are devotees in high places, who have blocked any endeavours to change the system,

Deer have a number of advantages. There is this lack of recognition of how dangerous they are. Unlike feral horses in the high country, they hide away from urban Australia. Their destructive effect is complicated by perceptions of deer, either being dewy-eyed fawns – the bambi effect, or alternatively projecting the majesty of the Monarch of the Glen. The hunter lobby is very powerful given that, in both the Victorian and New South Wales parliaments, there are representatives of Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party.

As a footnote, what intrigued me is that enshrined in Victorian Law concerning deer is the inclusion of wapiti as protected species. We know them as elk, and for hunters the antlers are irresistible as wall hangings, and the elk sausages I once had when staying with a family in Montana – very tasty. Australia, you have been warned; elk are loose in the South Island of New Zealand.

Time to develop a national plan to rid Australia of a pest, before the eastern States release elk into the wild, adding to the list of feral animals destroying Australia. Or is the shootin’ and huntin’ lobby and its votes in parliament just too strong in Victoria and NSW?

Mouse Whisper

In a recent issue of The Economist when the future of the Walt Disney company now that it approached its centenary was being considered, the writer reminded us of what Walt Disney said on the eve of the first Disneyland opening: “I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing – that it was all started by a mouse.”

Modest Expectation – Luis Quisquinay

I once knew a bloke who played “chicken” with his fuel supply. He would not fill up until the tank was nearly empty. It was his defining quirk. It was how he played destiny. On one occasion when he was completely out of fuel, he had to roll down a hill where fortunately at the foot was a service station. However, he was always proud when he had less than five kilometres worth in the tank, before he filled it.

I only remember apparently running out of fuel in a vehicle which we were lent over the weekend. We were somewhere between Cloncurry and Normanton, and the engine just died. We flagged down a couple of blokes. They had a quick look, reached under the dashboard and turned the switch so that the second tank came on line. They looked at us and laughed good naturally. We felt like chumps, but nobody had told us about the second tank. “Come on, we thought you knew about such things; you’ve worked in the country.” Rejoinder was pointless.

The places mentioned in this following anecdote are all in Western Australia, for those trying to put the names into a British Isles context. This other time involved being in a hired car somewhere in the bush about 100 kilometres from Perth. It was a Sunday evening and we were hoping to make York. Suddenly the fuel gauge plummeted to zero, and the nearest township – a speck on the map was Beverley. It was about 20 kilometres away by our calculation. Never has 20 kilometres caused so much angst. Then, when we reached Beverley, the place was closed. The service station was closed; and we knocked on a nearby door to find out where the owner was and whether we could get him out to open up the station. The people were bemused by these two strangers looking for petrol on a Sunday evening, Nevertheless, they were able to direct us to a place round the corner where the owner of the service station was tinkering with a car. And that was that. He was obliging; went and unlocked his garage /service station. Nevertheless, it was one of those regions of Australia, where the expectation of having a service station available at all hours just did not exist. After we reached York and booked into the motel, we had first trusted the fuel gauge and believed there was a convenient place to fill up. Negative, on both accounts.

Welcome to the new world of the EV and the charging point. At least once the petrol started flowing, it did not take much time to fill up. Thus the fact that the weather was freezing, only made the thought of waiting an hour to charge, another hurdle to overcome in the introduction of convenient EV charging – and being caught in a similar situation as then.

The enigmatic Ardern

Over this period, politicians have lost the confidence of the public. Camelot never existed, and the raft of exposés have portrayed Kennedy as less than the Camelot myth. But the important point is missed – in those years from his inauguration in 1961 to his death in 1963 – to me and many others he could be summed up in one word – a paragon.

Now I am an old man, and seeing this woman, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, she is the first politician since Kennedy to cause me to believe, perhaps that to me she is an exemplar against the fear and loathing that has characterised so much of what passes for political debate. I, like many, am just frustrated by the low level of debate. There is no longer any consideration in this Me All The Time rent-seeking political crop for policy discussion.

Yet Jacinda Ardern gives me hope. Her words – her demeanour of grace, compassion, resolve, her ability to call out the bully – the courage of making herself a target for all the “unspeakables”. She is indeed a paragon.

As I write, bursting forth from somewhere at the back of the house is the glorious contralto voice of Kathleen Ferrier singing Edward Elgar’s “Sea Pictures”, the evocative study of the beauty that is the blue waters of the planet set to music. Her voice soaring perfection – contralto being a difficult female singing voice to weave such an intricate vocal artistry, for I am tone deaf and yet this voice I can convert to visual interpretations of what she is communicating. Her voice is the water – so deep that the colour is caught between indigo and blue.

Hearing Elgar prompted me to turn to Elgar’s Cello Concerto, and the marvellous interpretation by Jacqueline du Pré. Her command of the cello; her embrace of it; her facial expressions; the interaction with the woodwinds; her bow work; her finger work; even being able to brush an errant hair away from her face. This woman had that ethereal air, so in keeping with the mood of the Concerto – the powerful entry of the cello urging the orchestra to engage, being an index of Elgar’s genius and du Pré’s interpretation

Then I played the most popular of the Elgar Enigma variations – Nimrod. It is often associated with majesty and death, but as one correspondent wrote, this piece is music coded to life. The slow majesty of birth, rising to a crescendo in life’s prime and gradually, but descending to a farewell of a life well lived. But there are many ways of saying farewell.

To me the wide smiling face encased by long dark hair – a face that has for five years been that of New Zealand still exists– not a Māori warrior nor an All Black forward replete with scars and cauliflower ears, but a compassionate women who can inspire a generation and yet, being the object of their infection, she has flushed out the purulent elements, the shameful abscessed underbelly of New Zealand in need of complete excision. Jacinda has exposed it, but she has called time out and it is up to others to complete the surgery. Otherwise, a diseased body exists no matter how much neoliberal balm you apply, there will be no cure. Except for the ongoing Enigma which is Jacinda Ardern to return.

In my first blog in March 2019, I wrote about Prime Minister Ardern. I was surprised by the toxic response from some quarters as if I was beatifying her. At a time when role models are scarce, especially in politics, I took the positive route which by and large has been verified given the difficult period through which she governed. After all, when I made the initial assessment, it was when the COVID-19 epidemic was just an oddity growing up in a Chinese city wet market.

Where have all the Horse Troughs Gone?

One of the questions that has arisen is when to replace our car with an Electric Vehicle (EV). Up until a few years ago, we ran two cars, both diesel. Then we sold one. We like Citroens, and have owned various combinations of C3, C4 and C5. The size of the car we have bought depends on not only the cost of the vehicle and the cost to run but also the dimensions of our garage given that in both Melbourne and Sydney we are lucky to have single car garages; but let us say that the Sydney one is compact. There is no way we could get one of those off-road tanks into it – or, for that matter any of the big cars. Only having a dextrous driver were we able to park the C5 in the Sydney garage. We currently own a C4.

From reports, the Sydney to Melbourne drive is still a nightmare for EV drivers, takes longer and the anxiety levels of those driving fearing that they will run out of charge, is frankly not worth it. For those who want to puddle around the suburbs, then probably the EV is the horseless carriage of choice.

When the horseless carriage arrived in the late nineteenth century, there was no organised distribution of petrol and there was a need to crank the engine to generate the ignition spark. The Stanley Steamers as the rival, were expensive. They took a good amount of time to come up to temperature, needed condensers – devices that took the steam after it did its work, cooled and condensed it back into water, and recycled it for further use in the steam engine. Without a condenser, a Stanley Steamer consumed about a gallon of water per mile, so the car could travel no more than 30 to 50 miles before the car’s operator had to stop and refill the water tank from the local horse trough. Once the ignition problem was sorted so starting the internal combustion engine became reliable and swift, then the demise of the Steamer was sealed.

What car owners are used to is the convenience of being able to refuel. This ease of refuelling developed side by side with growth of the number of cars. Initially, petrol was available from the general store, filling from a barrel, and then the pump was introduced with an attendant to pump the fuel into a reservoir and then release it into the car’s petrol tank. I remember these solitary pumps outside the country town general store. It was not until 1913 in the USA, that the first dedicated “gas station” was opened; by the mid 1920’s there were 90,000 of them, and ten years later 200,000.

In Australia, development was slower. The same level of data as held In USA seems not to exist. In Victoria, for instance, by 1923 pumps were permitted at those city motor businesses concentrated in Elizabeth Street, though barred from many other central streets. Traditional selling of petrol in four-gallon tins at hardware outlets, cycle shops, grocers and blacksmiths was effectively ended in 1925. Growing municipal concern over the safety of kerbside pumps was a factor in the development of drive-in service stations, the first of which were constructed in suburban Malvern and Prahran in 1926. There was thus a lag, as is occurring in providing the appropriate environment for EVs to have the same certainty for access to an ultra-fast charging outlet as we currently have to a petrol and diesel outlet.

An interesting piece appeared a few weeks ago in the Boston Globe and I have taken the liberty of editing it, but hopefully retain the useful observations, which may be germane to future Australian experience describing the trip through New England. The various destinations seem to be doughnut outlets somewhat irrelevant in Australia to the efficacy of EV travel itself – because leaf-peeper season was over, we made round confections the driving force behind our drive.

As the writer wrote: To test the current state of EV infrastructure, we took off on a 400-mile road trip across New England in two typical — but quite different — electric cars. One of us (Aaron) drove a Kia Niro EV purchased a year ago while the other (Sabrina) rented the flashy Tesla Model 3 Performance.

The Niro costs about $40,000, has an EPA-rated range of 240 miles, and looks and drives like an ordinary car. The Tesla Model 3 Performance costs nearly $60,000, has an EPA range of more than 300 miles, goes zero to 60 miles per hour, which is comparable to the conventional sports car.

At a time when EV purchases are on the rise, our question was simple: Are there enough chargers around to make this a realistic choice for long-distance rides?

This journey started in Portland Maine. We started the day bright and early in Portland in Maine, at Holy Donut on Commercial Street, home of the gourmet potato doughnut. The dark chocolate sea salt did not disappoint: moist, rich, and just the right touch of salt.

There’s one big adjustment to owning an electric car: EV drivers cannot rely on the century-old ecosystem of a gas station around every corner. Instead, they need to plan their trips based on the availability of a growing but still spotty network of charging stations. Tesla has built its own network of widespread and speedy chargers but, at least for now, they’re only accessible to Tesla EVs.

A reliable and accessible charging infrastructure is critical if the region wants to successfully entice millions of car owners to make the switch to electric and slash climate-warming emissions. After all, drivers aren’t likely to ditch their gas vehicle if they’re going to have to worry constantly about running out of charge.

Given Tesla’s charging network advantage, we expected the Kia would have more issues on the road — and we were right. But neither one of us ever came close to running out of power as we enjoyed a perfect day and some nearly perfect doughnuts.

Unlike road-tripping in a regular car, we knew we needed to do some advance planning to make sure we were near chargers when our EVs’ batteries ran down. We used an EV-specific app called A Better Route Planner, or ABRP, to map our journey. After a few seconds, the app spat out recommended routes, complete with charging stops along the way.

For the Tesla, using the app wasn’t strictly necessary, as the car’s built-in navigation app can plan routes with stops at the company’s Supercharger stations.

On the other hand, even using ABRP doesn’t solve all challenges for non-Tesla drivers, because some areas lack adequate charging. On Cape Cod, for example, there is only a single fast-charging station with two connections, located in Hyannis. Tesla has four stations spread over the Cape, with a total of 42 connections. In Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, Tesla accounts for two-thirds of all fast chargers, while half in Vermont, according to federal data.

Thankfully, there were ample options to make an unplanned stop at one of Tesla’s Superchargers along that stretch of highway in New Hampshire. One 10-minute top-off later, the car was back on the road.

A key variable for EV road trips is a vehicle’s maximum rate of charging, which can mean the difference between waiting 15 minutes or closer to an hour.

But reaching the maximum requires an equally speedy charging station. For Teslas, that’s no problem, as the Supercharger network is composed entirely of very fast chargers. The Model 3 can add 175 miles of range in 15 minutes. For the rest of the world, it’s hit or miss. Adding 175 miles to the Kia’s range takes three or four times as long. Cold weather, underperforming equipment, and other variables can also affect charging speeds.

Things did not go smoothly outside Walmart for the Kia. There were four chargers, but one was offline and another was in use. At the first charger, the rate was abysmally slow — less than one-third the Niro’s max, meaning it would take an hour and a half to charge. And because of New Hampshire utility regulations, the cost is based on the time it’s used, not by the amount of electricity consumed, so slow also meant more expensive.

There was another charger available. It was better but still slower than expected, taking just over an hour to get the battery from 18 percent to 80 percent. The bill came to about $11.

Meanwhile, at the Price Chopper, with a gleaming row of 17 chargers, the Tesla charged in under 30 minutes. The cost? $15.64.

After charging, we headed south, skirting the Green Mountains along Interstate 91 through Vermont.

The Kia driver also got a nice surprise when he pulled into a nearby mall parking lot in Chicopee that houses the very first Electrify America location. On previous visits this year, some chargers were not working and there was sometimes a 30-minute (or longer) wait for an open space.

But after a September overhaul, all four chargers were working and unoccupied. Forty minutes and $7.41 later, the Kia was ready to go.

As Chicopee’s charger improvements hint, both reliability and availability problems are being addressed. Electrify America, which has more than 800 charging stations and 3,500 chargers in North America, is in the process of replacing 300 of its oldest chargers this year.

For the Tesla, using the app wasn’t strictly necessary, as the car’s built-in navigation app can plan routes with stops at the company’s Supercharger stations. The Tesla taught us some EV lessons right away: Parking outside in the cold overnight before our road trip had drained some of its battery. And cruising along at 80 miles per hour drains the battery much faster than if you stick to the speed limit.

The Biden administration, which is touting EVs as a big part of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, set aside $5 billion over five years in the infrastructure bill for more charging improvements. And in Massachusetts, the Department of Public Utilities recently approved utility plans to spend nearly $400 million on EV charging and market development over the next four years, including investments in public fast chargers.

All in all, the charging experiences were better than we expected. It was definitely easier to fill the Tesla. But the disparity wasn’t quite as pronounced as one of us (Aaron) experienced over the past year, or as is often reported by other drivers. And the Kia never came close to running out of charge.

But not everyone wants to plan every trip on a specialized app. And to some degree, the Kia was lucky that fast chargers were available along the day’s route. For people who can’t afford a Tesla or drive through areas with fewer good charging options, the infrastructure bill’s improvements can’t come fast enough.

For Australia, the answer to one of the questions that has arisen is “when to replace our car with an Electric Vehicle (EV) question”? This I posed in the first line. The answer? Not until there is a national standard for the charging stations I suspect is the safe but not particularly useful answer.

A New Meaning to Walter Mitty Disclosed in Long Island & Nassau County

Below combines comments not only from the media, but also from the Lincoln Project, suggestive that there are Republicans who still have a moral compass. Santos, the Republican representative from the 3^rd district of New York State is such a warped figure, that one can even wonder whether his real name is George Santos, but it is clear the First Amendment is worded such that anybody can say anything, despite there being a bar on sedition.

This outrage of the press and the Democrats over Mr Santos is so poignant. Since he ran again, and won, they have not just torn away his veil of autobiographical humbug but turned his deceit into a national scandal. Yet given Mr Trump’s enduring success at warping reality, this blow for justice seems even less satisfying than catching Al Capone for tax evasion. It is more like hounding one of Capone’s accountants for jaywalking.

None of this excuses Mr Santos. His lies do matter, but not really for what they reveal about him. That such a person should represent Americans in Congress is a national disgrace. But it is also fitting, because he represents something true and awful, particularly about the Republican Party, yet also about America, a nation lousy with misinformation, also known as deceit.

Ultra-MAGA Republicans don’t believe in democracy. They don’t believe in the truth. They don’t believe in integrity. And as long as they are in power, they will continue to allow candidates like Santos to flood through their recruitment pipeline and muddy our democratic institutions.

It won’t stop at the House. What type of people do you think Steve Bannon has lined up in his “shock troops” to take over our executive agencies, should the GOP take the Presidency in 2024?

George Santos is not an outlier.

In the politics of ultra-MAGA, he is the new norm. And until we defeat the entire movement, morally-bankrupt Russian-tied frauds just like him will continue to walk the halls of the House.

And by the way if you were wondering about the exact words of the First Amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Mouse Whisper

Out for my morning scamper, I saw this cable stretched across the footpath. Its purpose was to charge the family EV. There are way more cars than garages in the inner Sydney suburbs in particular and, as can always be predicted, regulation lags behind innovation, even if this innovation derives its inspiration from Heath Robinson. As one source has said, “I think when you’ve got cables going across metal fences, through trees and out to a vehicle, coming off household power, it’s not ideal, it’s not good practice.” Some people are just too polite.

Modest Expectations – Ghost Moth

I am ruminating on these 40 year old males who, as men in their early twenties, partied in the uniform of a Nazi. Presumably this act was not confined to these two guys, continents apart. It would be amazing if Harry and Dominic were the only ones among the millions of their contemporaries now in the 35-45 age group who had not at some earlier time dressed up as a Nazi for a party, night club or whatever after dark. Added to this, for even those who may not have encountered a Jew during their schooldays at Eton for Harry, or two exclusive Roman Catholic schools for the Premier, WWII was a long time past, and some children of privilege do often have the sensitivity of a warthog. Sometimes in the morning when I looked in the mirror I wondered where my tusks had gone. But that particular animal act was not part of my partying in the late 50’s and early 60s.

The well-known German artist, Anselm Kiefer, was photographed in a Nazi uniform in 1969. He had been born in 1945,(thus 24) and what he did at the time was illegal in Germany. Whether you believe that Kiefer’s interest in exploring the possibility of coming to terms with the Nazi past by transgressing post-war taboos against visual and verbal icons of the Third Reich is replete with irony, as has been stated in an apologia, is up to you. Yet this action has not cast Kiefer into the wilderness nor, to my mind, has he been pursued by members of the Jewish diaspora.

There is a term “Nazi chic” which, as one writer wrote: “From high end designers to campy trends like “swastikawaii”, ” the iconography of Nazi style has elbowed its way through history, whether its wearers promote its ideology or not.” You see echoes of this in the uniform of those services which dress in dark leathers and buzz round on motorcycles in pursuit of the errant motorist. In fact, if you look at a photo of a German officer such as General Rommel, you see a man in a well-tailored uniform, and the fashionista that appropriate such a uniform, they do not seek meaning, rather they concentrate on appearance.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, was very aware of the magnetic attraction of fashion in devising the Third Reich’s militarism.

As another writer says: Uniforms, which have come to be known as one of the most visually-striking elements of Nazi aesthetics, served as one of the principal vectors of propaganda in the Third Reich. In biology, a vector is an organism, typically of the biting sort, that transfers a disease from one being to another – Nazi uniforms did just that. However, instead of fleas transferring the plague, the Nazis used clothing to present propaganda that conveyed their message of racial dominance and militarism without uttering a word. Uniforms operated as an arm of the Nazi ideals of Volksgemeinschaft, in English, a people’s community and Gleichschaltung, the idea of bringing everything in line with the values of national socialism. The Nazi uniform aided in the destruction of personal identity and smoothed out the differences between German citizens thereby constructing both an egalitarian and passive society.

When I was at university, I went to many parties and there was never any question of us impersonating Nazis. We knew people who had survived the concentration camps – the number on the forearm. I clearly remember these numbers on some immigrants I met. There is nothing so shocking in seeing images of concentration camps, even if they were grainy and in black and white. I reckon that many of my contemporaries saw the same images, and there was no way we would don the swastika.

Moreover, many of our teachers had been in prisoner-of-war camps. So, impersonating the Japanese was taboo (unless cartoonish) but there was never any “Tojo chic” that I know of. The POWs may not have been gassed, but their living conditions were hellish; yet they were members of strength and they refused to relive their life in captivity – well, not in front of us who had lived through World War II as children.

Some of those who have studied this area believe the genesis of “Nazi Chic” can be attributed to the film the Night Porter, where a concentration camp survivor resumes a relationship with her Nazi captor, who is now a night porter in a Viennese hotel. It is said that Dirk Bogarde regretted his role as Night Porter, but it brought notoriety to Charlotte Rampling. What “Nazi chic” brought to the fashion-conscious uniformed services was leather – the black or grey leather jackets, leather gauntlets, leather leggings. Thus, when you pass members of the uniformed services, it is interesting to see how many of those services have adopted black shirts. Nazi Chic?

Backroads

I must say that I have been to most of the places featured on the ABC’s Backroads. Initially I resisted looking at this series, because the trailers reminded me of an endless loop of old Women’s Weeklies replete with “human stories” of a crowd of old inhabitants, the more eccentric the better, and young people making a go of it in the bush with an endless succession of dances, pubs, race meetings, and cake stalls.

I remember that I had been told that the ABC team descended on Strahan in Tasmania, and at the end of this recent Backroads episode I wondered how enlightened the visitors would be about this little township beyond a few elegant images of a most photogenic Australian region. Stories of brutal convict prisons may be a historic backdrop, but they have next to nothing to do with the reason for Strahan’s continued existence.

And as for showing that waterskiing record; what the hell was that to do with Strahan, apart from being held there. The organisers, the Horsehead Water Ski Club, are located far from Strahan in West Kentish in Northern Tasmania, and as far as I know they have never come back – nor for that matter have I ever seen anybody waterskiing on Macquarie Harbour.

What else? The guy with the smart ocean-going yacht Stormbreaker – images of tannin-stained water, an introduction to Macquarie Harbour; images of the 1982 Franklin below Gordon River protest, which stopped a dam being built on the Gordon River, and where the Stormbreaker picks up those adventurers who kayak the river. It would have made sense for the ABC crew to have kayaked the river and been picked up by the Stormbreaker, rather than the presenter just being briefly on board with glass in hand without explaining the relevance of ecotourism to the area.

The other image of the Strahan episode was that of the Ocean Beach, and the tragedy of the periodic beaching of pilot whales and, despite all the endeavours by the locals, mortality is high. It is a recurring tragedy, and there are many bones of whales under the sands,

What was grating was the appearance of a couple of the Maunsell women wandering the Ocean Beach. They were shuffling broken shells and pieces of stone – and trying to say these are relics of Aboriginal habitation. Their contention was these were parts of a midden. The idea that a midden could survive on a beach with such ferocious storms is ridiculous. Yes, I have seen middens at Trial Harbour further up the West Coast, but not in such an exposed location as the Ocean Beach. As for fashioning stones, I have been shown an Aboriginal quarry elsewhere. Aboriginal quarries where stones were fashioned are mentioned in The Aborigines of Tasmania, H. Ling Roth’s book first published in 1890. The idea that the Aboriginals would have a quarry on a windswept beach and moreover had any use for them there strains credulity. Yet the Backroads crew fell for such nonsense.

Heather Ewart has been the main presenter and she comes across as lovable but a bit of a boofhead, who gains her rural legitimacy by being brought up in the Victorian countryside near Murchison. I was disappointed but not surprised by this last but one Backroads episode about Brunette Downs. It would have been useful to know more about the Australian Agricultural Company, which owns and operates a string of properties, feedlots and farms, comprising around 6.4million hectares of land in Queensland and the Northern Territory, including Brunette Downs. This equates to roughly one per cent of Australia’s land mass.

What made me particularly shudder was Ewart dressing up for the race meeting which is held in June each year, and which seems to have been the centrepoint of the episode – a race meeting, which was an all-white affair, aping the social calendar of metropolitan meetings.

But what saddened me in watching the Brunette Downs episode, is that there seemed to be little interaction at a personal level between whitefella and blackfella. Sure as one the Aboriginal men, Elvis said working conditions had vastly improved – and one of the older white men entrusted to training the newcomers said how much he had learnt from the Aboriginal stockmen, a theme not further pursued as Backroads reverted to the Blue Hills view of the Bush.

There was no time where blackfella and whitefella were interviewed together, which suggests that was the reality. The ABC is always footnoting everything with a statement about what “country we are on”, but the fact is that Brunette Downs is part of a business, which claims one per cent of the Australian land mass.

In 2014 the Federal Court made a momentous decision. In session in 2014 in Tennant Creek the Federal Court granted land rights (excluding mining rights) over 37,000sq km (including Brunette Downs) to the “Kulunurra (Anderson), Purrukwarra, Karrkarrkuwaja (Kalkalkuwaja), Jukatayi Palyarinji, Walanja, Kurtinja, Kuakiji/Lukkurnu, Kunapa, Jalajirrpa, Mangurinji, Kujuluwa, (Y)ijiparta, Gurungu/Kulumintini and Warranungku”. I don’t remember that being footnoted on the Backroads episode.

In the crowd that day {in 2014} were old ringers in cowboy hats and wrangler jeans and the younger men in baseball caps and urban streetwear. One elder reminisced a few men lived with him at Connells Lagoon between Brunette and Alexandria, with the women and children in town because there was no school.

He said: “Us kids were born in the saddle and we got paid in bread and beef. You can’t stay around the camp, old people had to go out and walk, out and hunt, looking out for food. They used to send us out to the stock camp, do a little work around the kitchen, helping the cook out, just for a feed. In those days we went hunting in a wagon, no motor car. We used to walk from Alex to Brunette. It was about three nights on the road, walking and a wagon just to carry a bit of swag and a bit of water.”

Those words said in 2014 voiced conditions once occurring at Brunette Downs; the same year a waterskiing record of no relevance was broken on Macquarie Harbour. In one episode of Backroads, the question of what has occurred in respect to land rights was not addressed; in the other the Backroads crowd highlighted an event of no moment to the Strahan community – yet so much of real relevance is ignored.

Is that all there is? A race meeting and a waterskiing event to characterise the essence of an Australia back road. Not a mention of land rights nor the forthcoming referendum.

In a year when there is a proposal to give the Aboriginal people a Voice – for what? To determine the horses to run on Annual Cup Day at Brunette Downs or judge the fashions on the field there?

Why not answer the question of what has giving land rights to the Aboriginal people done for those living on Brunette Downs – much more fruitful than sitting on a rock on West Strahan beach waiting for a water skier cavalcade to pass by on Macquarie Harbour. Or was that Godot?

Far Removed

People always remember those who were at school and made good – and not only made good but became a household word, hobnobbing with the rich and famous until they become the object of hobnobbery. One such person is Sir Michael Parkinson CBE.

I have a friend who came from the same village, Cudworth, as Parkinson. Yorkshire men they went to the same school – Barnsley Grammar School in Barnsley – the nearby town. Both are passionate supporters of Barnsley FC – The Tykes. They have once won the FA Cup in 1912, but currently lie mid-table in the 3^rd level of the Football Association. I am sure you need to be Job to be a supporter, given the Tykes’ lack of success. That might just describe a South Yorkshire child of a coal miner. The comment was made about Parkinson’s claim that his father worked six days a week, 12 hours a day, a mile underground. One other respondent thought that a bit odd as his father had worked eight hours a day for five days a week, as his dad was a “deputy” like Parkinson’s father and believes both fathers would have been employed on similar terms.

Parkinson did not endear himself to his old boy contemporaries, when he said that “Barnsley Grammar School did for education what myxomatosis did for rabbits”.

As my friend said “Every year all kids around the age of 10 years old in Barnsley and district sat examinations called the 11 plus. The top 150 boys and 150 girls were then offered places at Barnsley Grammar School for boys and the Barnsley Girls High respectively.

He went on to say: “I thought Barnsley Grammar was an excellent school with mainly good teachers and great sporting facilities. With one O Level it sounds like Parkinson was in the lower graded classes i.e. the ‘E’ stream. That’s where kids of poorer academic ability ended up. In the cruel way of school kids they were known as the ‘thickoes’ but not to their face … that could be dangerous. For Parkinson it just goes to show there’s a life without O Levels – in his case a brilliant one.

For Parkinson, in his autobiography, wrote: “I didn’t like the school and it didn’t like me. I decided at a very early age … that I didn’t want to have anything to do with the place. I wanted to leave as soon as possible.

I dropped out of the “express stream”, which fast-tracked brighter pupils into taking their O-levels a year early, and went into the A-stream. And that’s where I stayed until I left at 16 with two O-levels – in Art and Literature – to my name.

It didn’t matter to me. From the age of 12, I knew I wanted to become a journalist.

The description of the class to which Parkinson was consigned was not unusual then. This bottom class at my school in Melbourne was called ironically Remove, which was a subconscious hint to the boys in the Remove that they would languish at the bottom of the academic ladder. Hence nobody stood in their way to leave school, and then the age one could leave school was 14 years. I remember my first vacation job was just after I had turned 14 years. This one was in the public service assembling files, for which I was paid £3/6/7 a week. At least this was only a vacation job – taught me a lot, but mind numbing if you did not turn the tasks into a game.

One of the reasons one was sent to Remove was if one was hopeless at mathematics, as Parkinson admits he was. Overall, his complaint about school was the standard of the teaching staff. Generally, the poor teachers were consigned to the least academic. One of my sons was sent at one stage to remedial maths. His teacher was a guy who had been a teacher when his grandfather was at the same school. He was not much of a teacher when I remember him at school, but he provided a stern pastoral role for the boarders. By the time of my son being at school this fellow had been at the school for a good 60 years. My son realised how little the old boy knew, and his uselessness was compounded by him constantly dropping off to sleep. In other words, they were hiding a faithful servant on the edge of dementia. As my son said, he knew more mathematics than this poor old man.

Nevertheless, it is also said about poor teachers that they dislike children, and I had the experience of one teacher, who had a massive tantrum in front of the class. He sent the whole class to be caned by the Principal. It was a non-streamed class at that stage; we were not caned. After that incident he really hated us, and we were not blameless. Nevertheless, at that time, which would have roughly coincided with the time Parkinson was at school, the quality of teaching was sometimes bizarre; and some of the characters were indeed consigned to the Remove class.

But in the end, what did it matter to a guy like Parkinson, as one of his fellow old students, said.

Retreat to Cleverness?

I reckon Pelosi would not have wasted the time with such cuteness as reproduced below. This is the problem of self-conscious intellectual pretentiousness – imagining themselves as latter day Ciceros. Obama did have a bit of the rhetoric rather than action which, in the case of this guy below, does not bode well in what is going to be free-for-all legislative savagery over the next two years. For instance, what is his index for success, say of “freedom over fascism”.

Here is what he said, in part:

Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) got off to a flying start in the 118th Congress with what will forever be known as the “alphabet speech”, including this bit of acrostic poetry:

We will never compromise our principles.

House Democrats will always put 

American values over autocracy. 

Benevolence over bigotry. 

Constitution over the cult.

Democracy over demagogues. 

Economic opportunity over extremism. 

Freedom over fascism. 

Governing over gaslighting. 

Hopefulness over hatred.

Inclusion over isolation. 

Justice over judicial overreach. 

Knowledge over kangaroo courts.

Liberty over limitation. 

Maturity over Mar-a-Lago. 

Normalcy over negativity. 

Opportunity over obstruction. 

People over politics. 

Quality-of-life issues over QAnon.

Reason over racism. 

Substance over slander. 

Triumph over tyranny. 

Understanding over ugliness.

Voting rights over voter suppression.

Working families over the well connected.

Xenial [hospitality] over xenophobia. 

‘Yes, we can’ over ‘you can’t do it,’ and

Zealous representation over zero-sum confrontation.

Makes one want to weep – how bloody awful the flight of rhetoric is, from one so crucial.

Mouse whisper

I am always mildly interested in why the French call a bat – chauve souris. You know, bald mouse. First, a bat does not look like a mouse. The only mice I’ve seen hanging upside down were a couple of mates into murinyoga. Anyway, the naming is a mixup. It should be cavannus souris – night owl mouse. Has a bit more class. “Cavannus” is Gaullish Latin!

Modest Expectations – A Recent Australian Declaration

I always remember that mixture of nihilist and smart-arse sage, Reg Withers, ruminating on the cupboard we had in our office which was stacked full of anti-abortion letters to the then Leader of the Opposition, Bill Snedden. This was in early 1973, when this matter was subject to parliamentary debate. He looked with some disdain at the overflowing cupboard and the 100,000 letters. He then said there were 13 million people in Australia and this protest therefore constituted only a small fraction of the voters. Yet it spooked the whole of the Coalition into voting for the anti-abortion crowd. Even when Andrew Peacock flamboyantly stood up, I am sure with the intention of leading a group of Coalition members into the pro-abortion vote, but when he looked round and saw he had no support except from the Opposition staffers, he quietly sat down.

I had the same feeling as Withers concerning the mention being made of the number of those who filed by the body of Benedict XVI lying in State in Rome last week. Maybe up to 200,000, being generous in the number who did, but the celebrities were few, especially from his country, Germany. I noticed that they were not burying him with his famed red slippers. Funny, the things you notice, but I found out later he had to relinquish the red slippers with his pontificate. Funny, in another way!

The denominator – us – seemed indifferent to the death of this man. This denominator numbering billions would form, I suspect, an indigestible number for the Roman Catholic Church, if it chewed it over for a moment.

Many matters have always worried me about Cardinal Ratzinger. Perhaps it was his opposition to the worker priest movement. Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI said very clearly,

“Clerics must not “surrender to the temptation of reducing [the priesthood] to predominant cultural models.” In today’s world, “widespread secularization” has cut into appreciation for the priest in his pastoral and ministerial role and accentuated his public activities. There is great need for priests who speak of God to the world and who present the world to God; men not subject to ephemeral cultural fashions, but capable of authentically living the freedom that only the certainty of belonging to God can give.”

The worker Priest movement had originated in France during WWII “putting young priests into secular clothes and letting them work in factories, to regain the confidence of the French working class, which had almost completely abandoned the Catholic faith.”

Then, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he was the warrior against liberation theology, which was sweeping through South America repelled by the fascist regimes, some of which were sheltering Nazi war criminals. Cardinal Ratzinger, the doctrinal enforcer for the Polish Pope, John Paul II, called Liberation Theology a singular heresy. As reported, Cardinal Ratzinger blasted the new movement as a “fundamental threat” to the church and prohibited some of its leading proponents from speaking publicly. In an effort “to clean the Papal stables”, Ratzinger even summoned outspoken priests to Rome and censured them on grounds that they were abandoning the church’s spiritual role for inappropriate socioeconomic activism.

No wonder that the current Pope, the Argentinian Francis I, has exhibited an ambiguity in his relationship with his predecessor.

I have other major concerns and that was the apparent ease with which Cardinal Ratzinger moved from the Nazi Youth into the seminary towards the end of WWII, when Germany was in chaos. Bavaria was one area not spared from the war, unlike much of the Southern Poland of John Paul II, alias Karol Józef Wojtyła. Munich was heavily bombed. It seems that the Church can always produce a couple of Monsignor apologists (the title apparently provides a degree of gravitas) when they want to paper over inconvenient cracks. Thus, Cardinal Ratzinger was in the middle of this chaos as a teenager, but survived. The period needed that papering over.

Contrast the fate of Father Reinisch, the Austrian priest, who just before his execution by the Nazis in 1942 said: “I am a Catholic priest with only the weapons of the Holy Spirit and the Faith; but I know what I am fighting for.” A simple affirmation, no. sophistry. He, together with Franz Jagerstäter, the Austrian conscientious objector, believed his Catholicism was incompatible with giving his oath of loyalty to Hitler, Jagerstäter was guillotined in 1943. This oath to Hitler, from which the Hitler Youth were not exempt, is airbrushed from Cardinal Ratzinger’s biography.

Jagerstäter had been inspired by Father Reinisch. In 2007, the Vatican, through the Bishop of Linz, beatified Jägerstätter, the conscientious objector finally being bestowed with the halo of martyrdom from the Catholic Church. The bishop’s predecessor had tried to talk Jägerstätter out of sacrificing his life for his faith during World War II, and instead, align himself with the Nazis as the Catholic Church hierarchy had done.

Therefore, resistance to the Nazis was hardly a situation where one could disavow the Nazis without retribution, but Cardinal Ratzinger and his elder brother, Georg, seem to have been fortunate in this regard, but then he was only about 18 when he handed in his Nazi Youth credentials and vanished back into the seminary.

There was allegedly a period of being held by the Allied Forces in between these two events – presumably there is documentation to prove that they were held by the Allies. Both Reinisch and Jagerstäter, who were executed, were men and they were Austrian. The point was made to excuse their membership that the Ratzingers were insubordinate when members of the Nazi Youth. As if that attitude would have helped the survival of the young Ratzingers, as members of Hitler Youth? I would have thought not – as they say “pull the other leg and it plays Jingle Bells”.

The younger brother was briefly Archbishop of Munich before he was appointed to Rome by Paul VI, but it was the time when the sexual predatory nature of the Roman Catholic Church was emerging. Cardinal Ratzinger was not blameless. The familiar shuffling of predatory priests under his rule ended up with one notorious predator consigned to an isolated Bavarian village where he plied his sexual trade, destroying at least one life.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s elder brother was ordained and was the choirmaster at the Regensburg Cathedral between 1964 and 1994, and this too seemed to be a hotbed of sexual molestation. Choirmaster Ratzinger the Elder was reported as being unaware of this; or was lying. “Lying” is a word which the Roman Catholic Church seems to hate using, but again when the younger Ratzinger was accused of turning a blind eye also, then the veil of obfuscation (in other words – lying) comes down.

What is clear is the younger Ratzinger tried to keep sexual molestation accusations within the Church and not have them reported to the police. His expertise in rolling out the Roman Catholic mystique was second to none. He was smart enough to cherry-pick obvious and completely indefensible targets, such as Father Maciel, the Mexican priest, who founded the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi movement of which he was its general director from 1941 to 2005. With the declaration of ridding the Church of “filth”, the then Cardinal Ratzinger heralded his intention to pursue Maciel, who was known to have molested his seminarians. The newly minted Benedict XVI was able to force him to relinquish his position. Never defrocked, Maciel died conveniently in 2008 after which his practical views on priest celibacy were also revealed, having fathered six children from a number of relationships.

I first became aware of Cardinal Ratzinger years ago when one of my Roman Catholic acquaintances quipped about a cartoon of Archbishop Ratzinger immersed in a pool of sewage so only his head and neck was showing, but he was smiling. I asked “why?”, as I was supposed to do, so my acquaintance could insert the “killer line”, by saying “He is standing on Hans Küng’s head.”

Hans Küng was a liberal Swiss Catholic theologian, a contemporary of the aforesaid Ratzinger, who was censored in 1979 and essentially removed from The Church. My acquaintance thought the quip very funny. I didn’t.

Doctor Goes Walkabout

The European invasion of the outback destroyed this balance between man and nature for ever. The sheep and cattle of the settlers ate up the ground cover on which the natural food of the Aborigines existed; the kangaroos and other bush creatures were shot for sport or because they ate the feed needed for stock pasture, and the soaks and waterholes were taken over by the intruders. Also, the sacred places of the tribesmen were profaned by the white men.

Charles Duguid, who lived to 102, wrote these words. He was born in the same year as my grandmother in 1884. Thus, I have a personal acquaintance with the age in which he lived. Duguid wrote this reminiscence, “Doctor Goes Walkabout”, when he was 82. It detailed his life from a Scottish childhood and early adult life as a young doctor.

The book opens with a description of the ingenuity of doctors at a time when there were no off-the-shelf remedies. Faced with a girl with quinsy where the pain prevented her from opening her mouth, his grandfather doctor ordered a poker to be heated until the point glowed red. He then approached the girl menacingly. The girl screamed, the abscess broke, the quinsy had been cured without him placing a hand on the patient. Never mind the morbidity associated with the tactic. It was anecdote -the stuff of medical recall – often where sensitivity is subordinate. This book is no different.

However, I found the book informative because this was a man who graduated from Glasgow University at the end of 1909, and then when he first came to Australia practised in the Victorian Wimmera town of Minyip, which I knew well. He paints a dark picture of the life there, where he witnessed a strychnine poisoning – a murder carried out before his uncomprehending gaze. Later, following a conversation with a neighbouring doctor, he realised he had been duped by a family conspiracy.

His book portrays a devout Presbyterian who was always very close to his church, with all its basic conservatism. He saw action in Palestine in WW1, and amid the carnage with which he was expected to deal was his search for his brother, Willie, who he found was coincidently stationed in the same part of Palestine. Eventually, the two meet, after Charles had gone on an extensive search for him. They talk through the night, little knowing that this would be the last time he would see his brother, killed soon after.

His description of his first wife’s death is succinct. He dismisses it in a sentence. Coming home from England, she had an intracranial haemorrhage and died; by the end of the page, he had married again, to a teacher he met at the annual prefect’s dance at the Presbyterian Girl’s College in Adelaide, which eventually served as base. It was a wee bit offhand I thought, given the description of his efforts to seek out his brother. But then I suspect he was very stiff upper lip.

There in Adelaide he set up his practice eventually, but he was always off somewhere; and soon he was concerning himself with Northern South Australia (the Pitjantjatjara Lands). His relationship seems very similar to that which occurred later with Paul Torzillo; visiting, providing advice and support, but never practising among them for an extended period. Duguid’s view of his contemporaries I found interesting. He liked Pastor Albrecht and the work that was done at Hermannsburg. The Lutheran influence on Aboriginal life probably has been discarded by the present view as pernicious, part of the “whitefella” mission culture. Yet Duguid noted in his book was that of all the outback missions only Hermannsburg looked after full-blood Aborigines in the 1930s.

Duguid was less charitable about the Australian Inland Mission (AIM). He did not care for Flynn abrogating the initials from the Aborigines Inland Mission (AIM) which had been founded some years before. Flynn did not care.

Duguid and Flynn disliked one another. The author, Brigid Hains has written extensively about the feud between the two men. Thus anything Duguid wrote about Flynn should be taken with that in mind.

Duguid quotes the Director of the Australian Inland Mission, without naming him, as saying: “The A.I.M. is only for white people. You are wasting your time among so many damned dirty niggers.” John Flynn was Superintendent of the AIM at the time, not titled “Director”. Duguid then hastened to say that the AIM did a “splendid job” for the white community, especially for white women. The nurses were the “wellspring” of the Flying Doctor Service, “inspired by the Reverend John Flynn of the AIM” and made possible by the invention of the pedal wireless. Later in the book he describes in 1936 arranging with the “Padre of the AIM” for white children to sit with a group of Aboriginal children. As described, this annoyed the Padre very much. “He rang me, told me that he was making other arrangements for the day, and said, “You’ve invited those children – asking them to sit with niggers”. The chapter ended – no further comment.

The anonymity of these two persons only named by their titles suggests that perhaps Duguid was ascribing a Jekyll and Hyde persona to Flynn. Brigid Hains in her 2006 article makes the same point about Duguid’s view of Flynn.

In 1934, at a Presbyterian Fellowship Conference in Adelaide, Duguid said “the shooting and poisoning of natives that took place in the past are too horrible to recall, and yet occasional happenings of a similar kind still take place for outback areas.” His words were reported as “sweeping allegation by Dr Duguid”. Instead of defending the essence of what he said, he pursued the Adelaide News for wrongful reporting; and he was mortified when the report went further and he received inquiries from the Federal Government. The essence of what he said was true – that these actions against the Aboriginals were still happening at the time he had spoken at this Conference. Yet he was concerned with his personal reputation, rather than confirming the general veracity of what he had said.

Later in the 1950s he again appeared again more worried about his own standing. When the Government alienated Pitjantjatjara Lands for the Woomera Rocket Range, his reaction was not that of an outraged defender of this people who had befriended. He certainly resigned from the Aboriginal Protection Board when they agreed to Woomera, but his disapproval seemed to have been assuaged by the appointment of a “good white man” by the government – a man who looked after the sheep at the Ernabella Station as the Aboriginal Protector. He was “ideally suited to the job”. I am not sure that Duguid realised how that could be interpreted, as likening the Aboriginal people to sheep. But remember, for the devout, a reference to “sheep” is not derogatory.

He should have taken a stand, but that was not his nature – the quintessential man of reason. As he progressed through life, he still expressed concern for Aborigines but did nothing that might offend a country inured to the thinking that Aboriginals were relics of the Stone Age.

In the end, despite his long life and his good intentions, and a clear insight about the treatment of the Aboriginal people, I doubt he left much of a legacy, except in his writing. What can be said is that he tried, but his conservativism, his paternalism and his concern about other people’s opinion probably inhibited his effect on public policy; but at least he never referred to Aboriginal people as “niggers”.

In other words, Australia may have expunged such words, but given the referendum this year, how far has the country really progressed from the times of Duguid?

O Verão de 42 (The Summer of ’42)

Essa canção é tão bela, transmite uma harmonia tão grande que é até difícil descrever em palavras!!!
Eu concordo, meu amigo brasileiro

Portuguese is such an evocative language, and I noticed the above comment, and I agreed with it – simple as that.

I had just finished listening to The Summer Knows, the theme song of The Summer of ’42 written and played by the late Michel Legrand. The essay below by Roger Ebert describes for him the inevitability of the distortion of the nostalgia for that time one had a brief relationship with an older woman. It is one of those experiences with all the magic of a fairy tale which, as you grow older and the evocative last words of the film “I never saw her again” exaggerate the poignancy but also the unreality of this experience – not the tragedy that it originally seemed, but a privilege to have briefly believed one was in love. And perhaps one was, but I am no longer the adolescent to verify that emotion.

Robert Ebert, who was the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, wrote this brilliant piece about the film; brilliant in being flashy rather than being brilliant in his insights because I suspect it probably never happened to him. The background stuff which he describes is only mortar holding the film together but contributing very little. The action between the youth and the older woman is the centrepiece, which needs to be dissected carefully and laid out, because it has a fine grain and yet a longing for something that doesn’t exist. Yet so important to build the romantic cushion, which some would call soul and others cloisters upon which to gaze upon long ago.

Nevertheless, even though I may disagree in part with his piece, it is worth reading both as background to the film and as a piece of fine writing.

Word comes to the woman that her husband has been killed in action, and almost wordlessly she takes the adolescent boy to her bed that very same night. The next day she is gone, leaving behind a note in which she gently declines to comment on the meaning of their experience — suggesting that perhaps, with time, it will take on an appropriate meaning of its own for the boy.

The problem is that it doesn’t. Robert Mulligan’s “Summer of ’42” is constructed to suggest that during that summer an event happened after which the boy was never the same. But we have to be content with an adult narrator who tells us this about himself; we never do learn how the boy, as a boy, put it together for himself. The fault may lie in the movie’s obsession with nostalgia. The movie isn’t set up to tell a story about a boy who was young in the summer of 1942; it insists on presenting itself, instead, as an adult memory of that long-ago summer. We don’t learn very much about the boy because the movie’s adult point of view refuses to come to terms with him.

Nostalgia is used as a distancing device — to keep us safely insulated from the boy’s immediate grief, love, and passion. “Summer of ’42” seems to be suggesting, between its frames, that since all these things happened long ago and far away, in a world of meat rationing and old Unguentine ads and black Hudsons with running boards and theories about the care and use of rubbers, that the boy’s experience is somehow less intensely human.

The movie fairly drips with what’s supposed to pass for taste and restraint; the love scene itself, for example, is filmed in a stubbornly minor key (as if, here again, Mulligan was trying to turn ice into slush, or an immediately felt human experience into a sort of vague and gentle memory). But in the scenes that produce the most laughs — the hero’s embarrassment in the drugstore, or his friend’s sexual initiation on the beach, or their double date at the movies — “Summer of ’42” isn’t restrained at all.

That drugstore scene, for example. “Second City” has had at least two versions of the sketch where an adolescent tries to whisper his order for Trojans to a loud, unsympathetic druggist. This will do as comedy revue material; but “Summer of ’42” handles the material on exactly the same level, breaking step with the movie’s cadence to get some easy laughs. Same with the double date scene, which is crude in comparison with Frank Perry’s similar scene in “Last Summer”.

What we’re left with are some beautifully produced and photographed notes toward a movie. Mulligan has succeeded in convincing us that his movie remembers and understands the wartime summer of 1942. He is very good, too, at trying to convince us that adolescence was somehow more innocent then. But anyone who has ever been an adolescent — and every adult has — will remember that it is hardly ever easy-going, in 1942 or any other year, and that although it may seem innocent when we remember it nostalgically, at the time it felt like an agonizingly prolonged fall from grace.

As she was going through the family papers

The Prussian Army at the Battle of Waterloo

Today, my wife, Janine found out that her great-great-great grandfather, Samuel Hoffmann, was a member of Blücher’s army, which fought at the Battle of Waterloo. He was 20 years old at the time but stated to be a surgeon. He emigrated to Australia in 1847 with his wife and nine children to escape the Lutheran persecution initiated by the Calvinist King of Prussia, Frederick III. The Hoffmanns came from Silesia, the Centre of the Old Lutherans who had refused to buckle to the King’s decree for unification of all the Protestant Churches.

I had a relative who was in the British Forces at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, but Waterloo…!

Mouse Whisper

The U.S. will fund the purchase of 18 new High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) for Ukraine, more than doubling the number of launchers that have arguably altered the face of the war in Ukraine. The Ukraine now has an almost 3,000 kilometre border with Russia, of which about 10 per cent is a sea border.

The Australian coastline (the sea border) is nearly 26,000 kilometres. How many HIMARS does the USA have? The US Army has 363 and the Marines 47. Singapore and Romania each have 18 and Jordan has 12. The Poles ordered 20 in 2019 and want 200 more, and it has been reported the USA Defence Forces are said to want another 500 by 2028.

To get comparable protection, it would seem that Australia will need all of these above. After all, Singapore’s coastline is 193 kilometres and it has 18 of these weapons!

But being a Mouse, have I got my calculation wrong?

One of the 2,600 HIMARs Australia would need?

Modest Expectations – Irène Joliot-Curie

Christmas is well and truly over and today is Epiphany. The remains of that day in December have been long eaten. The last mince pie signalled the end of what has increasingly become a secular holiday, given over to gift giving and delays in getting anywhere. Our Christmas tree will remain until Candlemas. The hymns of 2nd February lack the gentleness of the Yuletide but have the robustness of the Presentation of Christ, the Circumcised, in the Temple.

“Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise” replace “Away in the Manger”.

Then at Christmas there was the excruciating King’s speech; it is interesting how we accepted the starchy nothingness of his mother for so many years, but then nobody bothered with her ratings. The intrusion of such speeches is like making sure you clean your teeth. It’s wholesome, takes little time, but of what relevance? It is certainly not in placing the holy liniment on the aristocratic brow sometime at a costly Coronation this year. The Carolingian speech, if not to be considered high-falutin’ dribble, should be followed by funding to the needy, rather than having an unnecessarily tawdry, increasingly irrelevant ritual such as crowning Charles.

We give the grandchildren cash for Christmas and for that matter their birthdays. Equal recognition for all, age notwithstanding. Only one variation is when they reach 21 years, each gets an extra 21 dollars.

After all, in regard to Christmas, as reported in The Economist, one Joel Waldfogel of the University of Minnesota identified a “deadweight loss” when he studied the difference between the cost of seasonal gifts and how much their recipients valued them after they had accounted for exchanges and put sentimental value aside. Today he says that on average cash spent on another person yields around 85% of the benefit of cash they spend on themselves. Although gift-giving may make some people happy, it’s “a lousy way to allocate resources.”

No reason for not being economically rational at Christmas; nobody is trying to pass through the eye of a needle, especially after Christmas.

Statues of Women

There she was, in her Emma Peel black ensemble striking her Avenger pose. Professor Clare Wright, her booted foot on the plinth of the statue of ‘Sofia’ by Herman Hohaus at LaTrobe University Bundoora Campus, which apparently typifies the allegorical depiction of women in statues. The garden is empty; no students in sight playing homage to this carving.

This Professor of History’s comments have excited a great number of responses since she made the observation that there were far more statues of males than females in Victoria. The figure of nine to about 500 was quoted. She wanted redress, and predictably the Melbourne City Council responded by scrounging three worthy women from the archives to have statues made of them and plonked who knows where.

Now a brass life size figure costs $40,000 upwards, and if the ultimate aim of Professor Wright is to have an equal number of female statues scattered around the city and suburbia, it would be at a cost rivalling the Coronation of Charles Rex. Rather, let us reduce the number of statues of men to nine. Would that satisfy Professor Wright? After all, statues after unveiling stand mute, unnoticed, hidden, defaced.

There is one statue, which was once placed prominently at the corner of Point Nepean Road and Bay Street Brighton. The subject of the statue, Tommy Bent, was a crook. The statue has now been moved to what is described as an inauspicious location just off Bay Road. Next to the statue a beautifully crafted public fountain, of Italian marble, provides a re-hydration station for the many cyclists that make their daily commute to and from the city for work. It might be said that this fountain dedicated to his wife Elizabeth Bent may ultimately come to be most cherished by locals, because it at least has a useful function.

Take Field Marshall Blamey and his prostitute trail. He is commemorated by a statue standing erect in a jeep at the corner of Birdwood Drive and the Governor’s Drive. Perhaps it would be appropriate to have the Madame Brussels condom dispenser next to his statue to commemorate in addition, the long line of distinguished parliamentarians who used her services and that of her successors, maybe carved in the form of the parliamentary mace which ended up one eventful night in her brothel.

Professor Wright has started me thinking. Between 1837 and 2022, there have been only 51 years when our monarch was a king. Do you know how many statues there are of Queen Victoria in Australia? Nine, plus a monument in Geelong – the same number as in London alone. Pray, what did those worthy queens do for women’s rights, and for that matter for the progress of civilisation. There are only seven of George V, four of which are in Victoria; two of Edward VII, and George VI gets a consolation prize of a couple of gates. Elizabeth II has four, including one in Adelaide which is a real real tribute to longevity. The number of statues across the globe of Queen Victoria may just reflect a time that is passing, in that government – particularly local councils – do not have the spare cash to build a folly to a worthy. If it is functional like gates or barbed wire, it doesn’t cost much to label it such as the King Charles III Stretch of Barbed Wire in the Kimberley.

Statue construction these days tends to be of sporting heroes and it seems fitting when the fans embellish his statue with their own dedication. Sporting bodies as the prototype of the new religion are just going through an iconophile phase, a sign of their prosperity. It is a pity that the statue of Warne when periodically venerated by his fans resembles a rubbish heap in the alleyway behind an inner city café.

Personally I have only sought out two statues – one was the Little Mermaid overlooking the Baltic Sea in Oslo; the second, the evocative sculpture of John Betjeman at the Paddington train station, peering upwards towards the roof of the monumental station that he in life strove successfully to save.

In the end I suspect Professor Wright has a very traditional view of sculpture. In another age she probably may have promoted statues of Queen Victoria in every town in Australia – maybe not – if only to ensure gender equality.

We at home have our own sculpture of one of the Pleiades carved by a Yorta Yorta man and painted by a Yorta Yorta woman. The Pleiades are the seven daughters of the Titan god Atlas and the ocean nymph Pleione. They look down upon us from their celestial home. The representation we have is made from mallee wood. It is superb.

Thus, every day when we are home, the statuesque woman presides – part of the household lares et penates – protecting us. It has a special meaning of an Australia where our female heritage can only be sculpted if there is an empathetic receptiveness, not because of silly notions of political correctness.

A Box of Mystery

The box appeared as my wife was clearing the family house. She had never seen it before. An empty box of mystery indeed!

It is varnished, stained chestnut, very light to pick up, and on the inner side of the lid is an elliptical monogram of curlicues around which is the inscription “Queen of The Orient – Made of the Finest Manila Leaf.”

It seems that manila leaf is tea, and that would stand to reason given the size of the container. It is a box, not a caddy. Wooden caddies, a word derived from the Chinese catty, normally are compartmentalised, originally to separate green and black tea but when that division was abandoned, the wooden tea chest or caddy, with a lid and a lock, was still made with two and often three divisions. In the actual caddies, the central portion became reserved for sugar. In the late 18th and early 19th century, caddies made from mahogany and rosewood were popular, but this box was made very much later, and while it was light, it was certainly not balsa nor one of the afore mentioned fancy woods. Probably just pine or poplar, my expert brother-in-law thought, rapping its lid.

The family has a history of timber working as my late father-in-law made nearly three hundred boxes, showcasing different timbers. I remember scrounging pieces of English elm for him from one of the trees in Melbourne which had been toppled in a storm, and which had been sawn up ready for disposal. Since the advent of Dutch elm disease there are very few places in the world where English elms still thrive. Melbourne was one of these, for a now protected timber, almost impossible to obtain unless nature intervenes as this was the case,

This box may have been made by him and been forgotten. What gave the individuality to this box however was the intricate carving.

On the box lid was an emu and a kangaroo on either side of a crown and around the edge was a border of triangles, both upright and inverted, separated by a thin line creating a cartouche. The body of each of the emu and kangaroo was faceted so that when you turn them to the light the facets have a silvery glow.

On the front of the box is the Australian flag on a hoist. It is encased in a similar cartouche, in each corner of which are stylised flowers. The other sides of the box have no decoration. The figures are primitive, but the woodworking is that of a skilled craftsman. As a boy, my father-in-law lived on a farm and was one of a large family of sons. He was taught by his mother to sew, knit and crochet – and his fine movement co-ordination was an important attribute. But since he is no longer alive, there is no firm confirmation of provenance.

When I had looked at the box first, originally I thought it was pokerwork. However it is not two-dimensional; the more I turned it over the more I admired it, very fine carving

As has been written attempting to place it in our art heritage: Pokerworking (or pyrography), especially of functional items, reflects early 20^th century domestic life and “almost everyone who lived in Australia before World War II seemed to have at least one pokerwork ornament or decorated utilitarian object” Yet it is also an art form which is under appreciated today, despite its significance to social history and the arts and crafts movement. Remember, the next time you see a piece of pokerwork, appreciate the craft involved and don’t discard it so easily!

The Aboriginal people employed pokerworking as a form of decorating, not only of their everyday utensils such the coolamon, but also in the creation of figures, notably the goanna. We have a number of examples of these collected mostly from the desert tribes, which we have scattered around our home.

XBB sounds like a High Speed Train

Americans can “maximize” their protection against XBB and the other variants by staying up to date with their vaccine. What does that mean? Yes, what does that mean, Dr Kelly?

I listened to the Health Minister this week talking about the requirement for testing on travellers coming into Australia from China. Apart from using the terminology of “abundance of caution” at least five times, he then went on to give a curious state of play which suggests that there is some conflict aboard in the Halls of Albanese. Minister Butler was careful to refer to the public health advice of the various chief medical officers, which appeared to give the green light to travellers from China coming into the country, but by the end of his press conference, he was outlining a series of restrictions to reduce the impact of a COVID invasion through Chinese vectors. The amber light is flashing brightly.

Hence, I am surprised that Paul Kelly, the Chief Medical Officer, is opposed to the step-by-step approach to ensure that Australia has some data to work with from these incoming travellers from China (and in fact worldwide), in unknown numbers, vectors seeding the COVID variants around the country. Probably my opposing view may be too harsh – and smacks of the yellow peril fallacy. However, Australia cannot run a public health system blindfolded, even if contact tracing is apparently unworkable and Australia has to rely on testing the water supply, where there is still no nationwide consistency.

The white flag is being waved by the academic experts. As one is reported as saying:

“The virus continues to circulate globally. We do need to monitor for variants carefully, but screening everyone coming from China won’t make any material difference to the state of the transmission in Australia.”

As one suffering from long COVID, who has followed instructions when they have some meaning, why do we keep paying guys like this one proffering such meaningless maunderings?

I am not sure if these two articles below (combined from The Boston Globe and The Washington Post) help much, apart from providing in one sense improved information, raising the level of uncertainty, and wondering whether instead of watching, a course of action could be set out. They do indicate it is not only China where the variants are spreading. The cruise ships one must say are convenient worldwide vectors. Apart from which, both the US and UK have significant outbreaks of a new variant – there are no test requirements

A new coronavirus variant dubbed XBB has swiftly become the dominant form of COVID-19 spreading in the Northeast (of the USA), jumping from about 35 percent of cases during the week ending Dec. 17 to just over half of cases last week, according to CDC data.

Here’s a quick primer on what we know about the variant from The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.

Is XBB more transmissible? Experts say the rapid spread of the XBB variant suggests it’s more adept than its predecessors at evading the immunity that comes from vaccines and infections.

“The most likely explanation is that it’s more transmissible,” said Dr. Jeremy Luban, professor of molecular medicine, biochemistry, and molecular biotechnology at UMass Medical School, in a recent interview.

Who is at greatest risk? As with other recent variants, people who are immunocompromised face greater risk, and the monoclonal antibodies used to treat them do not work against the latest variants, including XBB. That has eliminated an important tool for treating some of the most vulnerable patients.

What can I do to protect myself? As always, experts urge people to get booster shots. The bivalent booster vaccine, which works against the Omicron variant as well as the original form of the virus, appears to be especially effective against XBB, according to a recent small study.

If I test positive for XBB, could I be looking at severe illness? While XBB does not seem to cause more severe illness or death, little is known about the effects of its subvariants, XBB.1 and XBB.1.5, which have turned up in the Northeast, said the assistant dean of research at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine’s Jonesboro, Ark., campus, in a recent interview.

What are experts saying about XBB? In a Dec. 23 online column, Dr. Eric Topol, executive vice president of Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif., noted that the arrival of XBB.1.5 in New York coincided with a marked rise in hospitalizations in that State. He predicted on Tuesday that “XBB will soon be the dominant variant nationwide. A functional @CDCgov would alert the public about the XBB.1.5 variant — which has already established dominance throughout the Northeast — and, with its big growth advantage over BQ.1.1, soon country-wide.”

“Of course, other factors are likely contributing such as waning of immunity, indoor/holiday gatherings, cold weather, lack of mitigation. But it is noteworthy that New York’s [COVID-19] hospital admission rate is the highest since late January,” he wrote. “So we don’t know for sure how much of this is being driven by XBB.1.5, but it doesn’t look favourable.”

Dr. Cyrus Shaphar, the White House’s COVID-19 data director, tweeted on 23rd Dec, that Americans can “maximize” their protection against XBB and the other variants by staying up to date with their vaccines. He also noted that the highest concentration of XBB can currently be found in the north-eastern part of the country.

The University of Minnesota’s Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy notes on its website that the CDC’s variant projections for the week ending Dec. 24 show “that the Omicron XBB variant, a recombinant of two BA.2 viruses, now makes up 18.3 percent of sequenced samples, up sharply from the week before. Much of the rise appears to be from two northeastern regions where XBB is now the dominant subtype. XBB has fuelled outbreaks in parts of Asia, including Singapore.”

Regarding XBB, the Centre says, “experts are watching a subvariant called XBB.1.5 that was detected in New York and has a mutation that has been linked to immune escape. Scientists suspect that XBB.1.5 has a growth advantage over BQ.1.1.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday it is tracking a new variant of concern dubbed XBB.1.5. According to new figures published Friday, it estimates XBB.1.5 makes up 40.5% of new infections across the country.

XBB.1.5’s ascent is overtaking other Omicron variant cousins BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, which had dominated a wave of over the fall. Scientists believe its recent growth could be driven by key mutations on top of what was already one of the more immune evasive strains of Omicron to date.

“We’re projecting that it’s going to be the dominant variant in the Northeast region of the country and that it’s going to increase in all regions of the country,” said Dr. Barbara Mahon, director of the CDC’s proposed Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division, in an interview with CBS News.

Mahon said the agency had not listed XBB.1.5 separately in its earlier projections because the strain had not cleared a minimum threshold in the underlying sequences collected by the agency.

The agency’s 40.5% figure is only a projection, Mahon stressed, with a probability interval ranging right now from 22.7% to 61.0%.

XBB.1.5’s prevalence is largest in the Northeast, the agency estimates. Most of the earliest cases from XBB.1.5 recorded in global databases through early November were sequenced around New York and Massachusetts.

More than 70% of infections in the regions spanning New Jersey through New England are now from XBB.1.5, the agency is projecting.

The ascent of XBB.1.5 comes as COVID-19 hospitalizations have accelerated across the U.S. in recent weeks. The pace of new admissions is now worse than this past summer’s peak in several regions, but still lower than at this time last winter.

“There’s no suggestion at this point that XBB.1.5 is more severe. But I think it is a really good time for people to do the things that we have been saying for quite a while are the best ways to protect themselves,” said Mahon.

This month, the Northeast has recorded some of the worst COVID-19 hospital admission rates out of any region in the country. In New England, the CDC says new hospitalizations among Americans 70 and older have climbed to the highest levels seen since early February.

Around 13% of Americans are currently living in areas of “high” COVID-19 Community Levels, where the agency currently urges masking. Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City rank among the biggest counties now at these levels.

Mahon said XBB.1.5’s mutations could be part of driving the increase where XBB had failed to gain a foothold. But she added that other factors, like the higher risk posed by respiratory viruses during the winter holiday season, could also be playing a factor.

Mahon cited the agency’s recommendations to seek out updated COVID booster shots, as well as taking other precautions like improving ventilation, testing before gathering, or masking in high COVID areas.

“So that advice doesn’t change at all. And this time of year is a really good time to be following that advice,” said Mahon.

The XBB.1.5 strain is a spinoff of the XBB variant, itself a “recombinant” blend of two prior Omicron strains, which drove a wave of infections overseas earlier this year.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration had voiced optimism that XBB was unlikely to dominate infections in the country. South Asian nations like Singapore reported that strain appeared to pose a lower risk of hospitalization relative to earlier Omicron variants. Now, the CDC says that increase was driven largely by XBB.1.5. After ungrouping XBB.1.5, the agency estimates all other XBB infections currently make up just 3% of cases nationwide.

Beyond its parent, XBB.1.5 has an additional change called S486P. Chinese scientists have reported the mutation appears to offer a “greatly enhanced” ability to bind to cells, which could be helping drive its spread.

“We’ve been tracking XBB for weeks as I said, and it was XBB and XBB.1, and they really weren’t taking off. They weren’t increasing rapidly in proportion,” said Mahon. Before evolving into XBB.1.5, XBB had already ranked among the strains with the largest immune-evasion relative to earlier major Omicron strains. Scientists in Japan reported this week that XBB appeared to be “the most profoundly resistant variant” to antibodies from breakthrough infections of any lineage they had tested.

Like BQ.1, XBB is resistant to a roster of monoclonal antibody drugs that doctors had relied on earlier in the pandemic before they were sidelined by new variants. Data from a team of federally-backed researchers earlier this year found the current batch of updated bivalent boosters appear to offer better “neutralizing activity” against Omicron variants, including XBB, when testing antibodies in the blood of people who got the updated booster compared to after only the original vaccines.

“We expect that the bivalent booster will provide protection against XBB.1.5 as it has against other Omicron subvariants. And if people haven’t gotten it yet, this is a great time to do it,” Mahon said.

However, antibody responses in that study were also worse for XBB compared to the other strains they studied.

“The XBB.1.5 variant would look similar to the XBB we tested in our study. The R346T/I mutation within the spike increases the ability of the virus to evade antibodies more efficiently,” Emory University’s Mehul Suthar told CBS News in an email.

For antiviral drugs like Pfizer’s Paxlovid, data from another team of scientists in Japan suggest they will retain efficacy against XBB. “With what we know so far, XBB.1.5 has not acquired any new mutations in the viral protein targeted by Paxlovid. The susceptibility of XBB.1.5 against Paxlovid should not change, given the current data,” emailed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Peter Halfmann.

Everyone seems to be watching XBB.1.5 and hopefully the advice about the effectiveness of current vaccines and antivirals is borne out – in Australia we just need wider access to the new bivalent booster and the antivirals.

Mouse Whisper

Do you know what the Health Minister Butler said to his pet kangaroo at the side of the Southern Expressway?

“A Bound with Caution!”

Modest Expectations – Timor Leste

Normally I just make an association with the number of the blog with the title, and let the reader deduce the association. But I have had to alter the title of this blog from Tonga to Timor Leste with the fall of Liechtenstein, to accommodate the number 197. Why? Because in the latest FIFA rankings issued on 22 December, Liechtenstein have fallen two places in the rankings, where San Marino rounds out the 211 ranked nations. As a result, Tonga and Timor Leste have moved up one place each in the rankings.

Following the recent World Cup, Australia and Morocco have made the greatest advances up the ranks, each rising 11 places. Morocco is now at 11 and Australia 27. Canada and Qatar fell the furthest, each cascading down 12 places to 53rd and 62nd respectively. Wales slumped to 28th, registering a fall of nine spots. Denmark has fallen eight spots to 18th position and Serbia is down eight spots to 29th.

Brazil still heads the rankings with Argentina second and France third, with Belgium plummeting to fourth.

Ceduna 2002

We met a few people once in Ceduna like Jay Pasachoff whose death, at 79 years of age on November 20^th, was reported in an obituary in a recent Economist (December 10-16^th). In Ceduna there was a total eclipse of the sun in 2002, and the Allens and the Best-Sargeants decided to venture across to view it. Like much of which we did together, it was a spur of the moment decision. When we had done the same for the Sydney Olympics, we bought the original package, which included tickets for the Opening Ceremony. That spur of the moment decision was timely; the proposed trip to Ceduna was not.

The immediate problem of getting to Ceduna was solved by our flying to Adelaide and getting a lift with the Allens who drove over from Melbourne and picked us up at the airport. There were 780 kilometres still to drive. We senza Allens had previously been to Ceduna on a memorable occasion when my wife injured herself on the way to the airport and by the time she had arrived to meet me in Adelaide (I had been in Whyalla) she was unable to walk, but that can wait for another blog .

However, on this occasion we went the inland route through both the townships of Wudinna (where there is a mini-Uluru, Mount Wudinna) and Kimba (where the Big Galah glowers down upon the traveller). The second problem which had faced us was there was no accommodation in either Ceduna or Streaky Bay. We should have anticipated that, given that Ceduna itself is isolated except for the Aboriginal communities in the West and Streaky Bay in the East. Any other accommodation was over 100 kilometres away and only in a caravan park. Fortunately, I knew some of the Prideaux family and I contacted one of the elders whom I prefer not to name for cultural reasons, and she said they had an empty Aboriginal owned house in Ceduna. Yes, she said we could have it for the week. Given how difficult accommodation was, it was a Godsend to be able to rent such a three bed-roomed house in the centre of town.

As a side comment, if one wants to get the freshest King George whiting, Ceduna certainly was the place, when we were there.

Like many small, isolated settlements, Ceduna has its own distinctive culture. One often finds Pitjantjatjara people in Ceduna. They roam around the Great Victoria Desert, which lies between Ceduna and their settlements in the far North of South Australia, in settlements such as Ernabella and Fregon. Aboriginal people can be reticent, but ask them what mob they are from and they‘ll open up.

The eclipse had lured a number of them across the desert; their traditions had bequeathed the landmarks so they can go safely from one place to another, where we white fellas would only see stone and sand and spinifex. Research studies have revealed that “Pitjantjatjara communities would project sacred stones at the eclipsing Sun whilst chanting a particular song—always with success. The act of casting magical stones at the Sun strengthened the medicine man’s status in the community since he was always successful in bringing the Sun back from the darkness, averting the evil and saving the people.”

The Aboriginal medicine men were often very shrewd, and before modern science knew that this was a natural phenomenon upon which to base their illusionary magical powers. It is amazing what was once seen as a mystical expression of a higher power, whatever called, can now be as precisely calculated as what will happen tomorrow to us cannot. This particular eclipse was thus slated for 4^th December 2002, and expected to start between 6.38 pm and 6.45 pm on that day. The total eclipse would last for 32 seconds, the longest time in any of the places across Australia. We duly went down to the beach, the clouds cleared, donned our eclipse glasses and settled down to watch the spectacle. I had been in Melbourne on October 23, 1976 when the city was plunged into that eerie light of the solar eclipse, but since I was in a built up area without any protection for my eyes I did not see the eclipse directly.

At Ceduna, it was different. Once the eclipse came, it was as in all the textbook descriptions but being there experiencing the passage, the penumbra, the diamond effect of the sun reappearing, it was all so worthwhile. Thirty-two seconds of a light which is described as “eerie” is that of a special dimness, so hard to define if you have never experienced it. If there had not been some whooping, it would have been silent – a silence most fauna respect. Then the eclipse was over, the sun emerged. We did not get up and immediately fold our deck chairs. We just kept looking out to sea.

Jack Pascachoff was, for 50 years until his death, the Professor of Astronomy at Williams College Massachusetts and director of its Hopkins Observatory. To him “the perfect alignment, in solemn darkness, of the celestial bodies that mean most to us” gave a primal thrill that was indescribable. As a self-styled “umbraphile”, a shadow-lover, his greatest joy was to stand in that brief darkness cast by the shadow of the Moon”. His College is ranked as top in national liberal arts across the USA, and is located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires and is one of the oldest colleges in the country. The school was originally a men’s college; women were first admitted in 1971 – almost all students are resident.

Pascachoff had observed 75 eclipses, and we met some of these eclipse devotees in Ceduna – but do not remember Pascachoff among the crowd. These people travelled from one eclipse site to the next, which at that time was Chile, I heard one of them say. Well, as I say, some people collect teddy bears, and others obsessively try and visit every State in the USA.

In reading the obituary, I loved the anecdote of an eclipse in Manitoba, when he was shocked by the drivers who just turned on their headlights and kept moving. As one would say, takes all types…

He enthused his students and “an even better eclipse was forecast for 2024, with totality from Mexico to the Canadian Maritimes. He wanted everyone to observe it. As for him, he was already plotting hotel reservations in Sinaloa, the place with the best view.” Maybe now his view will be unique.

De-Hoarding

I am in “the throwing out” phase of my life. While not pathological, I tend to keep correspondence I should have turfed out years ago. But there is a certain nostalgia for my several careers. For instance, I moved out of clinical and laboratory research at the end of 1971. Some of my co-authors went back to the own countries. I had corresponded with them while we finished collaborative work, and then I moved on. I kept the reprints, and I wondered what had become of them in the intervening years. I found out one was deregistered over 20 years ago for falsifying consent forms for his clinical research; and the other has been showered with honours as an eminent professor clinician. Their notoriety is recorded on Google, and for better or for worse these two research chums had not just faded away without leaving any trail.

The problem when you throw out correspondence, I am walking with ghosts. Not all the old correspondence went into the wastepaper basket. For instance, there are some very friendly correspondence. In 1988, I wrote a book for the Bicentenary entitled “Portraits in Australian Health”, one of whom came from interviewing Vivian Statham who, as Vivian Bullwinkel, survived the Bangka Island massacre where all her fellow nurses were gunned down by the Japanese in 1942, and she survived wounded but able to nurse herself back to a state where she was able to spend the rest of the war as a prisoner of war tending to other POWs.

Initially she had declined to be interviewed, but relented. Even in her interview, at least at the start, her husband was present and she was a little wary throughout, but after I sent her a copy of the book I was very pleasantly surprised by her letter in reply in which she thanked me and praised the content and the style. Such letters are what encourages one to live another day

Given that life is a cascade interrupted by changes of direction, I have met a great many people, and so many have contributed to my tiers of paper. One can kid oneself that they are archives; really it is underlying vanity that some person will want to write one’s biography in the future – as if one’s life provides a unique insight worthy of such.

With the help of three of my grandchildren, we emptied out two large storerooms, and then this evacuation ground to a halt. Obviously word of the experience had gone down the line and emptying dusty storerooms was not for them, even if it was their grandfather’s so-called heritage. At one stage, no 2-grandchild asked point-blank why I was keeping all this stuff. The problem is that there are regulations which insist on records being kept for a varying number of years, and when you are working, it is easier to store more than less. But for a perspicacious teenager, that was a lame excuse.

I wish I had written a diary from whenever. The blog is a useful piece of technology which pen and paper, and scrawled notes, and annotated files could never be. However, I had the foresight to at least have a set of “Personal” files, but even that has been in a chaotic state because filing is always a problem when you live an itinerant life. I hope to have sufficient time at least to catalogue the stuff which provides a useful legacy. Nevertheless, as I say a diary would have helped, although imagine 60 years of compulsively written diary. Would have spent less time in the non-members bar. Maybe.

The Essential Breakfast

If there were no other meal in the day, I would always choose breakfast.

I was musing about this because in the morning when all the various rituals I have to follow – the ablutions, the tablets, the skin medications, the compression stockings – have finished, then breakfast comes along. It is a time of enjoyment as my wife is a very good provider. While she has a routine with variety of either mushrooms on toast, or bacon sandwich, or muesli, or boiled eggs, or scrambled eggs, or avocado and tomato on toast, or omelette. Welsh rarebit is reserved for St David’s Day.

My favourite is the poached eggs that she conjures. Long ago these eggs were cooked in those soulless metal poachers, which produced those semi-lunar firm, maybe eminently edible – but essentially breakfast via the tradesmen’s entrance.

My wife’s poached eggs are sublime. In Italian, poached eggs are called uova camicia, literally eggs in a shirt. The shirt analogy gives an impression of a free-flowing white tail floating in the hot spring water. These are not the poached eggs, neat compact white nuggets, uova in canovaccio , highly professional but in the end lacking the abandon of my wife’s expertise.

So much enthusiasm for an ordinary chook’s egg – not from the araucaria with their blue eggs; or duck eggs with their rich yellow yolks or speckled quail eggs.

She also makes a mean uova strapazzate – such a demonstrative word for scrambled eggs. The Italians say it so well.

But back to the start. My original introduction to breakfast as a child emerging from infancy was porridge. One of my earliest memories was the sight of porridge bubbling away on the wood-fired stove of my aunt who had married into a Scottish clan. I always remember her gentle boiling of the oats, which she stirred in milk and water, clockwise. Counter-clockwise was considered unlucky. I was always intrigued when my aunt added salt to the porridge and yet before we ate it, we smothered it with brown sugar. I learnt that for hot liquid you ate from the edge where it was cooler. I remember there was always a sprinkle of wheat-harts on the top, to keep us all regular, the meaning of which I did not understand at the time.

Years later, I learnt that porridge was stirred with a spurtle, a round rod with a smooth surface which prevents the oats from adhering as one stirs and thus preventing the porridge from clumping together. These spurtles were turned from Huon pine and form an unusual present for my Scottish friends – cheaper than whisky. Today, I rarely have porridge; and except for Weet-bix we never ate the products which the Seventh Day Adventists through John Kellogg and his disciple Edward Halsey had foisted onto the Australian breakfast menu. On my mother’s rather lengthy list of proscribed people were Adventists. There was one cereal exception and that was rice bubbles with their characteristic “snap, crackle, pop”, which I, the kid, insisted on pouring the milk over to elicit the sound. The actual consumption was very much a secondary phenomenon.

I always want tea in the morning and, as varieties of tea multiplied, I have settled on Earl Grey tea as the preferred one. A minor point was that my mother insisted on never having Bushell’s tea in the house; never knew why. At the same time during the War, coffee was very difficult to obtain, and chicory was the substitute. I remember Turban essence!

Countries where tea does not form part of the normal breakfast, I suppose I tolerate, except when the tea is made with the water not boiling. After my mother died, my father had Mrs Ruff come in and cook our breakfast which was invariably fried eggs and bacon every weekday morning. As you would imagine, this is not now my favourite breakfast even when it is offered “sunnyside up.”

I suppose university, when I barely woke up before lectures, was a time I ate very little breakfast and where instant coffee was de rigeur. It was a time when I first became acquainted with Italian style coffee – the cappuccino and the long black. Breakfast was always rushed, a piece of fruit, a piece of toast. and not enjoyable, unless the marmalade was special. Otherwise, Vegemite abounded; or in my early years it was Marmite.

And of course there was one fad, which became a stable on the breakfast table, and which mostly I avoided especially when I was dieting – and that was orange juice. “OJ” is calorie packed and moreover I sympathise with the American writer who commented: “Scientists still don’t know exactly why orange juice and toothpaste combine to create a taste somewhere between sauerkraut and battery acid, but the suspicion is it has something to do with sodium lauryl sulphate, the primary ingredient in toothpaste’s cleansing agents.”

Then for ten years in later life I used to live for part of the week in a motel in the Victorian town of Cobram where I was working. My breakfast invariably was a plate of sausages, and these sausages were the best breakfast sausages I had ever tasted. For the first time in years I had time to read the paper and have a meal I really enjoyed, day after day.

There have been memorable breakfasts. One was in a hotel on the island of Guernsey, where the boiled eggs were just “runny” right in which to dip “the soldier toast”. The other was at the Randolph Hotel looking out on the Oxford streetscape and tucking into a plate of kippers. Then I have also written a poem about the time we had breakfast on the Moonie River among the coolabah trees, which is soon to be published. The Moonie flows by the settlement of Flinton, where we were staying at the time, in Southern Queensland near the NSW border, before emptying into the Barwon River near St George.

Nevertheless, overriding every breakfast is the perfect cup of tea. I unfortunately have the propensity of not drinking mine until it has passed its prime. There is a point when tea is sublime, but you have to know the point when you have drunk of it.

One way of Putting It

Thus it is with a feeling of guarded optimism that we, as a nation, reach the end of this disturbing year and, thankfully, enter the holiday season. The festivities are somewhat subdued this year, as inflation forces consumers to cut back; according to the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Conifer Statistics, the Median Household Christmas Tree Height (MHCTH), which last year was “LeBron James,” currently stands at “Danny DeVito.” – Boston Globe.

Mouse Whisper

With acknowledgement to Mr A.B. Paterson:

CHRISTMAS AMONG THE AZERI

(or if we had no Joyce in the matter?)

On the outer Baku where the churches are few,

And men of religion ride donkey,

On a tarmac never cross’d ‘cept by folk that are lost,

One Alan Joe Joyce has a shonky.

For our pocket Ulysses the last verse goes something like this…

And Joey Joyce has been made an AC

And the one thing he hates more than sin is

To be asked by the folk who think him a flea,

When oh, when will he bloody well finis’

A Courageous New Year to you All from Me and The Mouse

Modest Expectations – Ted Greatorex

For a couple of years in the 1980s, we spent Christmas at the Savoy Hotel in a suite which enabled us to look straight down the Thames and Christmas lunch was in the Savoy Grill. One of the offspring who had taken a year off to fence in Paris and Budapest (he was actually based in the latter but had a great many contacts in the stylishly named Racing club in Paris) came over to London to have lunch with us. The food was excellent; the wine flowed; the jollification found him taking off his jacket. The Christmas cracker, suitably extravagant, yielded a parachuting man. Never mind that the son draped the parachute, to which a tiny figurine was attached, on his head so that the figurine was dangling over his nose. One of the waiters sidled up to him and murmured: “It appears that Sir’s jacket has slipped from Sir’s shoulders. Perhaps I could help Sir to put Sir’s jacket back on.”

Ah, the good old days, when Mr Pickwick stalked the land, but the offspring did not reply to the waiter “You jest, good sir. Be of good cheer.” He obeyed and put on his jacket, and Grill etiquette was restored. The parachute remained on his head for the duration.

Yuletide Greetings Everyone.

Ernie Toshack

When I see Scott Boland bowl, with his very understated approach behind a line of more famous fast bowlers, I was reminded of Ernie Toshack, whose nickname was the “Black Prince”. He was born in Cobar and during WW11 worked in the munitions factory at Lithgow. When he was not working, he tried his hand at cricket. The man who became a member of Bradman’s Invincibles in 1948, started in the Marrickville 4^th in 1941. He was initially rejected by Petersham. His progression during the war years to his first test, being against New Zealand in 1946 at the age of 32, was spectacular. Even given that the number playing competitive cricket would have been thinned by the War, nevertheless his progression to Test status was impressive. In fact he had only two years at Test level, before chronic arthritis in his knees forced his retirement. Lindwall, Miller, and perhaps Bill Johnston were the fast bowlers our generation venerates, but Toshack? He was no batsman and therefore it was his bowling for which he was selected.

He was a left arm medium pace bowler who was very accurate. It is said Bradman would walk down the pitch and put a sixpence on the pitch, point to it and say to Ernie that was where he wanted him to put the ball. Ernie would respond, which made him not only a very economical bowler but also underrated because he lacked an explosive delivery.

Toshack had an exotic genealogy. He was not of Aboriginal descent as Boland is. It is said that his ancestor was John Randall, believed to be originally a slave from the United States and a soldier who fought for the British in the American War of Independence. He arrived in Sydney with the First Fleet in January 1788. Skilled in musket use, Randall was soon employed as a hunter, sourcing wild game for the British officers.

The comparison between Boland and Toshack: they both had no whitefella heritage – one Aboriginal; the other in the parlance of our time, Afro-American. They were both very accurate medium fast bowlers, often but not always first change, came to Test cricket late – and their progression was unheralded, but their first test against England was memorable. In the first test against England in Brisbane in 1946, Toshack took 6/59; not quite the 6/7 that Boland claimed in his first test in Melbourne in 2021.

When you look at them more closely, there was not that close a comparison; I cannot see Boland affecting a bowler hat and a furled umbrella that the “Black Prince” would wear and carry. Nevertheless, when I first saw the understated Boland coming into bowl, I did think of Toshack.

Look good in a Suit

This response was prompted by the belated response to the antics of Shane Fitzsimmons, whose professional life was fenestrated by his leadership in time of disaster. This is the man who has been NSW Person of the year, and who this year at the CWA Conference said:

“I was broken during the fire season when we lost people. It was very challenging on some days: hoping for moisture, but all we got was lightning and more fires. But I was inspired by the tenacity of all the fire workers, by the tenacity of communities, by the outpouring of love and kindness of people in communities.

“My way of coping is talking openly to others about how I’m feeling,”

His speech is the type of avoidance that failure bestows upon its author. Read carefully and see no admission of accountability. This is a guy who has a formula for survival, which in the end was not enough. He was sacked last week from an organisation that did not have what its name implied – Resilience NSW.

But then he was not on his Pat Malone. Nevertheless, that is not an excuse for appointing people because they rise to the top in what are as closed an order as the Trappist monks, just different regalia.

We coined shorthand for the incompetent in high places: “looks good in a suit”.

However, let’s get to the mists of youth, a time of socialisation and when the young me became very sceptical of braid and the inherent sense of self-importance it brings.

My time in cadets at school introduced to me to a uniformed service. Being a cadet was important in my rebel socialisation. Membership of the cadet corps was virtually compulsory when I was at school, and I distinguished myself with being one of the few who went through the three years without being promoted, although I was entitled to crossed flags on my sleeves to signify that I had passed some test for the signal corps. My mate, who also was never promoted, not only had crossed flags but also crossed rifles on his sleeve to signify that he was a crack shot in the shooting team. It was a time when the school had a rifle range on the top floor of a then new building.

Perhaps it was our bringing alcohol into the cadet camp and having a brawl with senior NCOs who, in our other life, were just fellow students but with chevrons on their sleeve that gave them power in the environment of a cadet camp. Thus, when the fight broke out, I was rebelling against authority, and the fight was all the more vicious, terminated when I was hit by the butt of a rifle that night. I learnt to cop it, leave the dispute in the tent and not to complain. Any friendship I may have had within the class where there was no rank ended there and then.

Against that personal background, when I was President of the University of Melbourne Student Representative Council, I was faced with confrontation with the head of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Fire Brigade. It was the end of first term and the engineers and commerce students were having their annual “marbles match” on the lawn outside the Union building. The lawn was once a lake and therefore it took little rain to turn it into mud. The ‘marbles match” quickly degenerated, as it always did, into a form of the Eton wall game with all the combatants covered in mud. I never knew what the aim was, but I had a bird’s eye view from the SRC office.

The “mud match” was cracking on, and there was much student activity, when the inevitable happened. Somebody broke the fire alarm in the Union, and before long, with bells ringing, the fire cart arrived driving through the milling mob in front of the Union, where it stopped. Before the firemen could get out of their vehicle, some idiot student dumped a bucket of mud over them.

A few of us immediately went down, two of those accompanying me later became very senior judges – one of the Supreme Court and one of the Federal Court. With that amount of student firepower we were able to quieten the mob and isolate some very angry firemen covered in mud, issue an apology and offer to pay for the cleaning.

The University was a very different place, being the only one then in Victoria. Thus, it was very much a place of privilege and very much left to govern itself. At no stage did I remember police being on campus in response to any student activity, and such was the case here. A delegation, led by myself, later in the afternoon went down to Eastern Hill, where the firemen bosses were located. We were ushered in and the elderly fire chief was there glowering, surrounded by his lieutenants, all of whom affected a mixture of disdain and anger. There was no holding back as we were dressed down by this choleric elderly fire chief in his full braid. Any effort to apologise and to offer to pay for any damage was lost in a shouted invective, where top hat versus cloth cap confrontation was not far from the surface.

The newspapers were there to photograph us as we left the premises, and the incident was splashed across the front page of The Age. I do not remember being criticised by the Vice-Chancellor, with whom I met on a regular basis. It was my first introduction to a non-military uniformed service, but even at a young age I was not impressed by this braided bully, a standover merchant. OK, there are dopey students who do dopey things, but his response was completely over the top.

I was only 20, and at that age, we all move on, even if there was a post-riot hiccough, which was not related to the meeting with the fire chief. Several decades later, I was asked to review the NSW Ambulance Service. It was a time when what I knew as “ambulance driver” when I first graduated, was translating to a more professional workforce where the driver connotation had been transposed to “ambulance officer”. No longer the stretcher bearer, but a service where a cohort of newly-minted “paramedics” was being trained.

The problem was that the training was internal, there was no reciprocity between the States, and one of the teachers was reputed to have a baseball bat as allegedly one of his teaching aids. Then, within the NSW Ambulance Service, there was the “Brotherhood” – membership of which was said to be important for promotion. What was fact was that the Service had more levels of rank than the British Army. Trying to reform entrenched uniformed essential services is very difficult, even if the heads of the services are what you might call “look good in a suit”. They had risen through the services, knew all the buttons not only to polish but also to press to rid themselves of outside recommendations.

In this case, as with the hapless Fitzsimmons, it was the powers that wanted change. In our case reviewing the ambulance service, we avoided our recommendations being debated in the media. The most significant recommendation apart from reduction in the number of ranks, was to establish university-based paramedic training courses, which then led to reciprocity across the States – and at that time in the NSW Ambulance Service, an improved standard in leadership was implemented, and the ranks collapsed into a fewer number where competence trumped time in the service.

The NSW government has made a very definite and welcome decision to abolish Fitzsimmon’s empire. No worry, he’ll still look good in a suit with all those medals he gleaned as he floated to the top.

The New Health

The central objective of insurance – the removal of uncertainty – cannot be achieved through a cash reimbursement scheme unless the fees against which the benefits are paid are also predictable – R.B. Scotton 1969.

The common misapprehension about the Australian health system, whether it be called Medibank or Medicare, is that it sets the fees for doctors, because that is how the Federal Government intervention is interpreted.

The Grattan Institute is at it again. The Australian health system is built around providing a patient benefit for medical services, which are provided by doctors who are working in private practice. The Grattan Institute has a solution, so simple that the media can understand. I for one am bemused by the comment that “GPs should be able to choose a new funding model that supports team care and enables them to spend more time on complex cases, by combining appointment fees with a flexible budget for each patient based on their level of need.” Compare this confused thinking with succinctness of the late Dick Scotton above.

The Constitutional Amendment in 1946 enabled the Federal government to provide medical, dental, hospital and pharmaceutical benefits. No government has taken the opportunity to set up a universal dental system, (and that deserves a separate discussion), hospital benefits which are not at present available, instead the Federal government provides funding for the States, but the area of Federal-State relations unfortunately has become one area of significant double-dipping. The whole area of State-Commonwealth relations has been very fraught; the answer to double-dipping has been to look the other way and not proscribe this scam. Much of this playground developed in Victoria when Kennett was Premier.

Pharmaceutical benefits provide subsidised drugs on a schedule of benefits. That is the invariable, that is if the government sets a benefit it needs to provide a list of value of benefits. This has also been an area where special pleading for very expensive drugs has the form of a lottery, where who you know is of as much importance as proven efficacy of the drug.

Then there are medical benefits, which are the core of the health system, whether it be the initial Earle Page iteration or the post-Nimmo Inquiry, Medibank or Medicare, the architects of which were the late John Deeble and Dick Scotton.

The core of these later proposals was universality. Every Australian was entitled to free care – medical and hospital care; and for pensioners and other poor people identified, free drugs provided they were on a benefit schedule or made available through a hospital pharmacy. The government set a tax levy to cover the cost of Medicare.

When there is an open funding model coupled with changes in the technology to improve the efficiency, if these are not appropriately monitored, as has occurred, then the result can mean the funding model is now completely out of whack.

Any system which pays on the basis of benefits has a major subjective element. If you base it on the fair and reasonable fee that a medical practitioner charges, the value of the benefit is dependent on the particular segment of the profession being as objective as can be in the value of the treatment. In the initial establishment of the benefits, the ophthalmologists based their “fair and reasonable fee” on the highest charging colleague in the country, which produced an exaggerated benefit. This was 1971 and with time any improvement in technology that improved throughput made the benefit more lucrative. Nevertheless, it did not prevent most ophthalmologists currently charging far more than the patient benefit.

Despite an increasingly elaborate medical benefits schedule, a doctor can charge what he or she likes as long as it can said to be “fair and reasonable”. The benefits schedule was also constructed to provide a small incentive for bulk billing, for which swiftness and surety of government payments was the reward. The Schedule benefit for general practitioners has encouraged turnover and episodic treatment, and therefore the Schedule has become an object for gaming. This applies particularly to all consultations, pathology and imaging.

Procedural medicine is divided into diagnostic and curative/palliative. At the outset the benefits schedule was also constructed for professional services. One of the consequences of the increasing differentiation of medicine is the increase in the number of procedures which, in turn, has led to the increase in the size and complexity of the Schedule list, and consequently tracking benefits against the fees charged requires collection of data.

Yet an immense amount of time is spent determining the value of procedures, using varying levels of evidence, as if each item has a unique fee. That may be correct, but the government is concerned with providing a range of patient benefits commensurate with what the item of service is worth.

Once the benefits and the fees for procedures were more or less aligned, but that has changed. Over time there has been dislocation of the fee charged from the patient benefit accepted as full payment by the proceduralist. Those who cannot afford the added impost end up on a public health care waiting list. Added to this, the payment for prostheses has never been properly codified for benefit payment. There are resultant anomalies. Dressings for chronic skin infection are not covered by benefits – either Medicare or private health. The whole benefit for this area has never been satisfactorily confronted, while the number of prostheses continually increases.

Once general practices, imaging and pathology services were Australian owned – essentially cottage industries – but the profitability did not go unnoticed by business and gradually the multinationals have bought up the practices. Medicare funding thus is allegedly ending up in offshore funds. In other words, the Medicare system is providing a means exported profits. These hedge funds and other financial vehicles do not invest to lose money. In other words, Australian government funding is providing sustenance to those “altruistic entities” located in the Cayman Islands and its ilk.

The system needs re-structuring. Recently yet there has been a seemingly endless review headed by Bruce Robinson, which seems to have become arcane groups of specialists debating the equivalent of angels on pinheads. It was supposed to review the health system and hopefully repair the system. Like so many of the reviews since Nimmo and after the last AMA-Government Inquiry in 1984, money is funnelled into the big consultancy firms, many of which are peopled by former public servants, for little result in terms of improved health care.

The central agency nightmare is if the Benefits system is extended to the whole raft of health professionals, other than those as specified in the constitutional amendment. However, a “weasel clause” came in 1974 with the extension of a limited patient benefit to optometry, by “deeming optometry services medical”. The inclusion of health professionals since then has been based on them being undertaken under “medical supervision”.

These professions wish to have independent access to items that generate patient Medicare benefits, and many would object to the “deemed medical” rubric as infringing on each individual skill set. However, to my mind any such benefit systems could be challenged on constitutional grounds. The community indignation which would ensue would likely be such that a resultant constitutional amendment put to referendum would be overwhelmingly passed and the resultant floodgate of expenditure would provide the Federal government with potentially massive expenditure – and headache.

There are exclusions from Medicare benefits – in other words, government can exclude procedures or anything they deem ineligible, as has been done with most cosmetic surgery. Limitations on the number of courses of IVF treatment are imposed. This can be a blunt object, and with every inclusion or exclusion there inevitably are grey areas – and controversy.

My view, after many years of being involved with Medicare, is that the construction of the benefits list is all important, and patient benefits need to be clearly differentiated for the purpose of calculation into four components. The three traditional components are professional, technical and capital, to which I would add the educational component to boost the value of the benefit for consultative medicine. Technical and capital component can be calculated based on actual cost, providing that the ratio between actual use and capacity does not allow windfall gain. Professional is how much a person’s skill and time taken are calculated. Educational component takes into account concomitant teaching occurring when the doctor is consulting and has been the basis of a submission I made to government some years ago. Then, instead of valuing each individual item of service, the government could consider providing the benefits on the basis of bands: one for episodic treatment for acute cases and second, courses of treatment for the chronically ill.

Patients’ benefits can be set either based on episodes, (predominantly acute – e.g. appendicectomy) or courses of treatment (predominantly chronic e.g. radiotherapy for cancer), or a mixture of both ( e.g general practitioner attendances). This would enable the schedule to be collapsed in a range of benefits, based on the above considerations. It is a pity that the AMA no longer has expertise in this area, because this was the basis of the AMA / Government Inquiries where neither the AMA nor the Department was asleep at the wheel.

Because of the indifferent quality of the Health Ministers since Michael Wooldridge, with surprisingly the possible exception of Tony Abbot, the Health Department has little desire to be involved in health financing – at least seriously – and increasingly finds itself at the mercy of the financial strictures of the “central agencies” – so very little changes unfortunately and thus neglecting the truism incorporated in Dick Scotton’s prescient words over 50 years ago.

A reminder of what I wrote in my blog

As I write this blog on Easter Sunday, maybe Albanese will start to rise to the task; and the proposal for an Integrity Commission is a very good place for him to start.

One thing he should remember is to pick on the topic where the Government is vulnerable and then hammer it. Add a pinch of climate change and the country being held to ransom by the very wealthy “oligarchs”, whose wealth has been tied up in fossil fuels, and the formula becomes stronger. However, whether Albanese can dispense this prescription will unfold over the next little while.

The problem with “over a next little while” is it is as long as a piece of string – as short as a piece string for that matter.

One great advantage Albanese has is, in one word, Dutton, completely unelectable outside Queensland. A second great advantage is the former Prime Minister, who should relinquish his electorate of Cook and this time have a long holiday evangelising outside Australia, under volcanoes reminding him of his fire and brimstone Pentecostalism. Hawaii – the Big Island would be a good start.

Mouse Whisper

A civilised community exists on a basis of trust.

When you destroy that trust, then in the end you believe in nobody. You are in a dark forest inhabited by the symbols of demons or warlocks or any of the representations of Beelzebub, because they are the enemy – and you alone are the symbol of purity. What has happened to America is a man with artificial golden mane, golden face, golden geegaws (unsurprising given from ancient times religious icons are smothered in gold) burst upon a country, already conspiracy ripened by the pastors of the Second Coming and satanic interpretations of the Book of Revelations. Coupled this with those playing in the shadow isolation of video violence and how can anybody trust anybody. In the end the one supreme person who did not trust, who never trusted the law, did not understand impartiality reigns supreme with all the bodies whom he/she/it did not trust littered all around.

On that cheerful note…

Happy Christmas from Mousehole.