The photo is kind of the story of my cycling life.
Sitting on the side of the road, preferably in the shade or out of the rain, fixing a flat tyre.
I am a crab when it comes to fixing flats. It takes me 10 minutes to swap out a tube, I always end up black shit smeared all over my body, and I generally manage to sprain a thumb or bruise a finger in the process.
Today's flat is brought to you by some broken glass that some tool left on the side of the road near the Barnwell Park golf course.
If you run into the back of another car and break your headlight or smash their tail light, do me a favour - sweep ALL the glass off the road. Sweep it down a storm water drain for all I care - just get it off the fucking tarmac.
Wednesday, 20 February 2008
Hell's Accountants
Is there anything sadder than a couple of middle aged accountants on a Harley?
I hope I don't get this stupid when I reach their age.
I hope I don't get this stupid when I reach their age.
Is Australia a religious country?
Plenty of people think not. I don't think we are especially religious or observant.
But check out this war memorial (in Burwood). The inscription at the top says "Thanks be unto God who gave us the victory".
That tells me that we were once a religious country, given how many memorials are dotted around the country with similar sentiments. Try and raise a memorial these days with the word "God" on it and see how far you get.
Things like this are all around us, and they should remind us that our forebears were a lot more Godly than we are today. However, some people like to act like we were never a religious country, and that religion had no part to play in our history.
Well, here is a rather large fact, carved in stone and set in a prominent location - making it a bit hard to ignore. But modern revisionist historians can walk past things like this all day and never take the slightest bit of notice.
Never trust a historian who can't see what is right in front of his fucking nose.
But check out this war memorial (in Burwood). The inscription at the top says "Thanks be unto God who gave us the victory".
That tells me that we were once a religious country, given how many memorials are dotted around the country with similar sentiments. Try and raise a memorial these days with the word "God" on it and see how far you get.
Things like this are all around us, and they should remind us that our forebears were a lot more Godly than we are today. However, some people like to act like we were never a religious country, and that religion had no part to play in our history.
Well, here is a rather large fact, carved in stone and set in a prominent location - making it a bit hard to ignore. But modern revisionist historians can walk past things like this all day and never take the slightest bit of notice.
Never trust a historian who can't see what is right in front of his fucking nose.
Not quite Venice
Apparently Venice is short of water. So short, some of the canals are dry.
Amazingly, none of the articles that I read on this topic mentioned global warming. Not one! Something is wrong here.... surely global warming must be to blame somehow.
The only reasoning that I can make up is that the water in Venice is actually polar bear wee, and we all know what's happening to polar bears......yes, they are multiplying like rats. So expect Venice to be eleventy-nine feet under water when the bears wake up and have a post-nap wee.
Even the Bay near Five Dock is looking a little dry. Given the way this area smells some times, I reckon my polar bear wee theory holds water (nyuk nyuk).
Amazingly, none of the articles that I read on this topic mentioned global warming. Not one! Something is wrong here.... surely global warming must be to blame somehow.
The only reasoning that I can make up is that the water in Venice is actually polar bear wee, and we all know what's happening to polar bears......yes, they are multiplying like rats. So expect Venice to be eleventy-nine feet under water when the bears wake up and have a post-nap wee.
Even the Bay near Five Dock is looking a little dry. Given the way this area smells some times, I reckon my polar bear wee theory holds water (nyuk nyuk).
Segway
Haven't seen too many of these things around. This bloke was unloading his from a neat little carry thing on the back of his car as I drove past. His movements were a bit jerky, so I suspect he might have had some sort of motor-neuron thingy, which would explain the use of a Segway around town.
It barely took him any time at all to unload the Segway, mount up and shoot through. I barely had time to do a U-turn, pull out the camera and grab a snap before he was off.
I still remember the hype that was generated before these things were released. And look at them now - how many are around? Stuff all. They never took the world by storm as expected.
It barely took him any time at all to unload the Segway, mount up and shoot through. I barely had time to do a U-turn, pull out the camera and grab a snap before he was off.
I still remember the hype that was generated before these things were released. And look at them now - how many are around? Stuff all. They never took the world by storm as expected.
Unadulterated twat-monkeys
The scene: the spot where the bike/pedestrian path from the Anzac Bridge disgorges bikes into Pyrmont.
Here we have a classis case of delivery truck wanker-itis. On the left, you can see a bike coming down the bike path, and he has to make a sharp right onto the street just behind where this truck is parked. If you misjudge the turn, you'll go straight into the tailgate of the truck.
The truck was delivering a piano by the way.
To a block of flats.
Bet the other residents will be impressed.
What shits me about this truck is that it completely and utterly blocks the view that a cyclist has of vehicles coming from the right of this photo. The only way to find out what is coming is to stick your nose out from behind the truck, and hope that your front wheel is not taken off by a passing fuck knuckle taxi driver as it screams past (as they are wont to do around this location).
In short, it is Retarded Parking 101.
Here we have a classis case of delivery truck wanker-itis. On the left, you can see a bike coming down the bike path, and he has to make a sharp right onto the street just behind where this truck is parked. If you misjudge the turn, you'll go straight into the tailgate of the truck.
The truck was delivering a piano by the way.
To a block of flats.
Bet the other residents will be impressed.
What shits me about this truck is that it completely and utterly blocks the view that a cyclist has of vehicles coming from the right of this photo. The only way to find out what is coming is to stick your nose out from behind the truck, and hope that your front wheel is not taken off by a passing fuck knuckle taxi driver as it screams past (as they are wont to do around this location).
In short, it is Retarded Parking 101.
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
How much culture is sufficient
I like to leave the odd comment over at Tim Blair. I would like to think that I recently coined a new phrase, describing the Policies of the Mungbeans as creating Potemkin villages of Aboriginal culture.
A Potemkin village has been described thusly:
The term is now widely used to describe elaborate and superficial constructions designed to pass official inspection, but lacking any real substance...
Well, as far as dinky-di Aboriginal culture goes, that sounds fairly good to me.
But perhaps we should be asking a deeper question - how much culture is enough?
J's background is Croatian. Her uncle is a tremendous supporter of the local Croatian club, which is presumably one of the favourite methods around here for preserving an element of Croat culture in Australia.
But what does that mean - "preserving some Croat culture?"
Having briefly studied her relatives, I think it includes the following:
I think they deliberately turned their back on Croatian culture because they didn't like what they saw before they left, and they split Croatia for a good reason - war, death, pestilence and all that sort of thing. They didn't like the things that their old culture led to, like lots of people being killed, so they took on a new culture - the Australian culture - which didn't get off on things like killing every Serb in artillery range.
The thing is though, people can live here for 5 or 6 generations and still hang onto many elements of their parent culture. Just look at the Chinese or Italians or Greeks that have been here for yonks. They're as Australian as me, with my British background (from about 150 years ago), yet they still follow many of their old cultural traditions when at home or at a festival.
Culture dies hard.
At least the core elements die hard. Various unimportant bits might be dropped pretty quickly when one culture meets another, but the core continues.
So how much Aboriginal culture is it necessary to hang onto in order for "Aboriginality" to survive? Do we need to have people living in communes in the middle of nowhere, supposedly with the aim of them keeping alive 100% of their cultural traditions? If muslims can move here from Iraq and manage to hang onto a huge swag of cultural baggage whilst living in Sydney or Melbourne, why do we think that Aboriginal culture is so fragile that it will not survive contact with the urbanised world?
If anything, we tend to be more worried about cultural traits amongst certain immigrants groups that have proven so resistant to elimination - like slicing bits off vaginas at an early age.
If people are really interested in maintaining their culture, they will go to extraordinary lengths to sustain it. Groups of like minded people will get together and form a club, subscribing funds towards buying a clubhouse. They'll spend inordinate amounts of time publishing newspapers in the old lingo, organising festivals, running language schools on the weekends, ensuring that the religion is sustained and all that sort of thing. Culture will only survive if the members of that culture want it to, and culture can survive in very hostile environments (just think about being a Christian in Iraq at the moment).
We should not presume that Aboriginal culture is so fragile that it needs to be put on life support in some socialist utopia cocoon in the middle of nowhere. If anything, these nirvanas are probably killing it off.
I'll know there is hope for it when I flick open the yellow pages one day and find that alongside the Gaelic Club and the Italian Club and the Macedonian Club, there is an Aboriginal Club.
Until then, all we can expect is for it to fade away to a hollow shell, listlessly subsiding in the Potemkin Villages of Culture.
A Potemkin village has been described thusly:
The term is now widely used to describe elaborate and superficial constructions designed to pass official inspection, but lacking any real substance...
Well, as far as dinky-di Aboriginal culture goes, that sounds fairly good to me.
But perhaps we should be asking a deeper question - how much culture is enough?
J's background is Croatian. Her uncle is a tremendous supporter of the local Croatian club, which is presumably one of the favourite methods around here for preserving an element of Croat culture in Australia.
But what does that mean - "preserving some Croat culture?"
Having briefly studied her relatives, I think it includes the following:
- knowing enough language to hold a conversation with grandma, who knows very little English
- being able to read a Croat newspaper (equivalent difficulty of say the Daily Telegraph)
- having a liking for traditional foods - but not necessarily be able to prepare them (that's what grandma does)
- attending the appropriate church on a regular basis (ie, more than Easter and Christmas)
- drinking too much grappa at the club each week
- turning up at the various annual festivals and knowing how to do a few of the old dances
I think they deliberately turned their back on Croatian culture because they didn't like what they saw before they left, and they split Croatia for a good reason - war, death, pestilence and all that sort of thing. They didn't like the things that their old culture led to, like lots of people being killed, so they took on a new culture - the Australian culture - which didn't get off on things like killing every Serb in artillery range.
The thing is though, people can live here for 5 or 6 generations and still hang onto many elements of their parent culture. Just look at the Chinese or Italians or Greeks that have been here for yonks. They're as Australian as me, with my British background (from about 150 years ago), yet they still follow many of their old cultural traditions when at home or at a festival.
Culture dies hard.
At least the core elements die hard. Various unimportant bits might be dropped pretty quickly when one culture meets another, but the core continues.
So how much Aboriginal culture is it necessary to hang onto in order for "Aboriginality" to survive? Do we need to have people living in communes in the middle of nowhere, supposedly with the aim of them keeping alive 100% of their cultural traditions? If muslims can move here from Iraq and manage to hang onto a huge swag of cultural baggage whilst living in Sydney or Melbourne, why do we think that Aboriginal culture is so fragile that it will not survive contact with the urbanised world?
If anything, we tend to be more worried about cultural traits amongst certain immigrants groups that have proven so resistant to elimination - like slicing bits off vaginas at an early age.
If people are really interested in maintaining their culture, they will go to extraordinary lengths to sustain it. Groups of like minded people will get together and form a club, subscribing funds towards buying a clubhouse. They'll spend inordinate amounts of time publishing newspapers in the old lingo, organising festivals, running language schools on the weekends, ensuring that the religion is sustained and all that sort of thing. Culture will only survive if the members of that culture want it to, and culture can survive in very hostile environments (just think about being a Christian in Iraq at the moment).
We should not presume that Aboriginal culture is so fragile that it needs to be put on life support in some socialist utopia cocoon in the middle of nowhere. If anything, these nirvanas are probably killing it off.
I'll know there is hope for it when I flick open the yellow pages one day and find that alongside the Gaelic Club and the Italian Club and the Macedonian Club, there is an Aboriginal Club.
Until then, all we can expect is for it to fade away to a hollow shell, listlessly subsiding in the Potemkin Villages of Culture.
Evil old man
I have followed this bloke twice in the last few weeks. He seems to be about 55 years old, 5 feet tall and he goes like the clappers. The first time I followed him, I was going too fast to safely take the camera out of my pocket to grab a snap. He had slowed down marginally today - just enough for me to risk grabbing a photo.
This photo is a bit grainy, but check out the calf muscles on the old dude.
This photo is a bit grainy, but check out the calf muscles on the old dude.
Monday, 18 February 2008
Odd sight of the week
Spotted in town last week. Crossing at the lights in front of me - a lady dwarf. What's odd about that?
Nothing, apart from the yoga mat in her bag.
I simply find the idea of watching a dwarf doing yoga to be....odd. That's all.
Nothing, apart from the yoga mat in her bag.
I simply find the idea of watching a dwarf doing yoga to be....odd. That's all.
Useful idea for air miles
From the Devil's Kitchen:
Ministers are banned from using air miles accrued on official trips, and are expected to put them towards reducing the cost of future ministerial travel or donate them to charity.
Why would you donate air miles to a charity? Such as one that caters to the homeless.....
.....unless the idea is to send your homeless winos somewhere on a one way ticket, such as Uganda (assuming you can get a ticket on air miles to Uganda). Otherwise, I guess you just ship them off to Romania.
And if they want to come back? Well, have you ever tried booking a seat with air miles? They'll be away at least six months before they get a seat back.
Ministers are banned from using air miles accrued on official trips, and are expected to put them towards reducing the cost of future ministerial travel or donate them to charity.
Why would you donate air miles to a charity? Such as one that caters to the homeless.....
.....unless the idea is to send your homeless winos somewhere on a one way ticket, such as Uganda (assuming you can get a ticket on air miles to Uganda). Otherwise, I guess you just ship them off to Romania.
And if they want to come back? Well, have you ever tried booking a seat with air miles? They'll be away at least six months before they get a seat back.
Government
Why is it that you often read of "government advisors" in the press, but never hear about the following job descriptions:
- Government Decision Maker
- Government Buck Stops Here
Sunday, 17 February 2008
Is this Melbourne or Sydney?
Tuesday. I get up, look out the window, decide it won't rain and so ignore my rain jacket. Five minutes into the ride - just at that point where there is no way in hell I am doing a U turn and going home to get some warm clothing - it starts to bucket down. It's a brisk 17 degrees, so I start to wonder whether I am going to start suffering from the cold or not when it stops raining. Phew. Lucky escape.
Wednesday. Looks like rain, so this time I wear my rain jacket. 10 minutes later, I stop and take it off because I am baking, and not a drop has fallen.
Note to self - stop annoying the weather gods.
Wednesday. Looks like rain, so this time I wear my rain jacket. 10 minutes later, I stop and take it off because I am baking, and not a drop has fallen.
Note to self - stop annoying the weather gods.
Pointy headed turds
Here we have a local charity bin.
I can think of two reasons why all that charity clothing and pots and pans are lying on the ground.
Some lazy sod couldn't be bothered getting his stuff in through the slot at the top. I doubt that, since anyone who is organised enough to get all their old crap together and to take it to a charity bin is not the type who will baulk at the last hurdle and fail to stuff their old tweeds into the bin.
The more likely explanation is that some local shithead has decided to go rooting through the bin for something useful, and couldn't be bothered to clean up after themself post mess making.
We have a lovely town square in Five Wog. I'd dearly like to bring back the stocks. And a spot of birching in public.
I can think of two reasons why all that charity clothing and pots and pans are lying on the ground.
Some lazy sod couldn't be bothered getting his stuff in through the slot at the top. I doubt that, since anyone who is organised enough to get all their old crap together and to take it to a charity bin is not the type who will baulk at the last hurdle and fail to stuff their old tweeds into the bin.
The more likely explanation is that some local shithead has decided to go rooting through the bin for something useful, and couldn't be bothered to clean up after themself post mess making.
We have a lovely town square in Five Wog. I'd dearly like to bring back the stocks. And a spot of birching in public.
New shoes
After pretty much utterly anihalating my old riding shoes, I finally worked up the courage recently to buy a new pair. I have been insanely hesitant to do so, mainly because of the ridiculous width of my feet. The old pair were the widest I could find, yet they still caused my little toe to disappear off the nerve network after about 25km of riding. Over the last two years, I have been through a good half dozen bike shops, looked at what seems to be every pair of shoes on the market, and been put off by the worry that I'll splash out $300 on a pair of clogs that don't fit.
But things finally got to the point where I had to bite the bullet and get a new pair. The soles on the old ones had started peeling off from the heel, and they were starting to look like they wouldn't see out the month without a catastrophic sole peeling episode halfway home.
So I bought a new pair. And I left them in the box for a week whilst I bedded in the new bike computer and worried about the chinstrap on my new helmet.
Then the day dawned when I finally worked up the courage to try them on.
Fuck! - they are so comfortable, they make the old lot seem like an iron maiden. What was I thinking?
Shoe shopping - the bane of straight men everywhere.
But things finally got to the point where I had to bite the bullet and get a new pair. The soles on the old ones had started peeling off from the heel, and they were starting to look like they wouldn't see out the month without a catastrophic sole peeling episode halfway home.
So I bought a new pair. And I left them in the box for a week whilst I bedded in the new bike computer and worried about the chinstrap on my new helmet.
Then the day dawned when I finally worked up the courage to try them on.
Fuck! - they are so comfortable, they make the old lot seem like an iron maiden. What was I thinking?
Shoe shopping - the bane of straight men everywhere.
Numbers
This is a post about cycling and numbers. Every week, I have the same set of numbers running around inside my head.
If I am to break the magic 150km a week mark, I must do 30km every weekday. That means at least one "long" ride each day (hard core cycle nuts would probably piss themselves laughing at the thought of 20km being a "long" ride, but it's the best I can do in the time available between leaving work and having to do family stuff at home).
That means riding 5 days a week. If I am to crack the 200km mark, which seems to be an ever illusive mirage shimmering in the distance, then I must do two long rides per day, which means getting up before 6am and leaving the house before 6.30am. If some bastard at work has organised at 8am meeting, I have to depart even earlier.
Every day, the numbers keep going around and around as I cycle into work or return home. I do the calculation every time I get in the saddle - am I going to keep my average up at 30km today? Can I extend it and go past 150km this week? I'm feeling like crap - if I drop out early today, can I keep the average at the required level?
So far this year, I have hardly been able to make even the 150km mark. Some conspiracy of medical appointments or work scheduling restricts me to four days of riding. Punctures, mechanical failures and just plain bad weather leave me no option but to keep the ride distance to a minimum in order to get home in one piece. Muscle fatigue hasn't really been a problem this year, which has surprised me greatly.
Every 20km in the saddle represents about an hour of good, sustained exercise. So cracking the ton, or 160km, means 8 solid hours of exercise per week.
I can't get over the fact that various government agencies are still promoting the idea of half an hour of moderate exercise a couple of times per week. I work my arse off making 160km, and the waistline barely shrinks. I presume that the agencies are worried that if they tell people they need to do 2 solid hours of hard exercise per day, it will scare everyone off exercise for good.
Face it, 50 years ago, most of us would have been doing a hell of a lot more exercise than we are now. Even if I do 90 solid minutes per day, I am probably doing less than half of what someone like me would have been doing in say 1935. As a nation, we've largely forgotten what hard work involves, having mechanised just about every possible chore. Even farming has gone soft, thanks to chainsaws, things that help with fencing, tractors with lots of hydraulics and bulk loading. Imagine having to do everything with an axe, shovel and horse.
Ugh. The easier we make our lives, the harder we have to work to stay in shape.
If I am to break the magic 150km a week mark, I must do 30km every weekday. That means at least one "long" ride each day (hard core cycle nuts would probably piss themselves laughing at the thought of 20km being a "long" ride, but it's the best I can do in the time available between leaving work and having to do family stuff at home).
That means riding 5 days a week. If I am to crack the 200km mark, which seems to be an ever illusive mirage shimmering in the distance, then I must do two long rides per day, which means getting up before 6am and leaving the house before 6.30am. If some bastard at work has organised at 8am meeting, I have to depart even earlier.
Every day, the numbers keep going around and around as I cycle into work or return home. I do the calculation every time I get in the saddle - am I going to keep my average up at 30km today? Can I extend it and go past 150km this week? I'm feeling like crap - if I drop out early today, can I keep the average at the required level?
So far this year, I have hardly been able to make even the 150km mark. Some conspiracy of medical appointments or work scheduling restricts me to four days of riding. Punctures, mechanical failures and just plain bad weather leave me no option but to keep the ride distance to a minimum in order to get home in one piece. Muscle fatigue hasn't really been a problem this year, which has surprised me greatly.
Every 20km in the saddle represents about an hour of good, sustained exercise. So cracking the ton, or 160km, means 8 solid hours of exercise per week.
I can't get over the fact that various government agencies are still promoting the idea of half an hour of moderate exercise a couple of times per week. I work my arse off making 160km, and the waistline barely shrinks. I presume that the agencies are worried that if they tell people they need to do 2 solid hours of hard exercise per day, it will scare everyone off exercise for good.
Face it, 50 years ago, most of us would have been doing a hell of a lot more exercise than we are now. Even if I do 90 solid minutes per day, I am probably doing less than half of what someone like me would have been doing in say 1935. As a nation, we've largely forgotten what hard work involves, having mechanised just about every possible chore. Even farming has gone soft, thanks to chainsaws, things that help with fencing, tractors with lots of hydraulics and bulk loading. Imagine having to do everything with an axe, shovel and horse.
Ugh. The easier we make our lives, the harder we have to work to stay in shape.
How useful are you?
Mirande Devine rightly puts the boot into the idiotic Jenny Macklin today in the SMH:
Why, asked Kerry O'Brien, had the Government made housing the priority of its new policy commission on indigenous disadvantage?
On the other hand, I have friends who have lived in rather small weatherboard houses - accommodation that must rank as a much worse alternative - who have lived a normal family existence.
The quality of the housing stock that you live in does not appear to be a good indicator to me of how well your children will perform at school (assuming you bother to send them to one), how much money you earn or how many times DOCS comes knocking at your door.
I reckon if some horrible disaster struck Five Wog and we were all forced to live in a tent city erected on one of the local parks, that life would go on much as before. It would be harder, but the kids would still go to school, I would still go to work, and things like washing, homework, cooking and all the rest of it would continue to be done on a daily basis.
I can state that because I have spent several months living under canvas, cooking in the open air, crapping in an outdoor latrine dug into the ground, and working off a trestle table and reading by a gas lantern at night. Yes, showers are not as comfortable when they are cold and only last 3 minutes and have to be taken under a showerhead strung from a tree, and it's a pain to queue up to do a bundle of laundry at the communal washing machine, but it's not an excuse for sitting on your bum doing nothing.
There would of course be some people that would sit around on their arse all day, expecting "the government" to do everything for them. That's just human nature - on the great bell curve of life, there are those that make things happen, those that watch things happen and those that go "what the fuck just happened?"
Personally, unless they were 90 years old (like my neighbour) or struggling with a bunch of kids under the age of 5, I'd leave them sitting there - once they get hungry and cold enough, they might get off their arse and do something about it.
On the other hand, having worked with some world class whingers that wouldn't work in an iron lung, I think all that would happen is that the volume of whinging would steadily increase until those of us that had been working all day got sick of it and went and helped them out. Probably by whacking them over the head with a shovel.
Why, asked Kerry O'Brien, had the Government made housing the priority of its new policy commission on indigenous disadvantage?
"So that children can sleep safely at night, so that kids can do their homework in the afternoon, so that mothers and fathers can get ready for work the next day," she said.
What planet is she talking about where bricks and mortar can create such miracles?
How right she is. Housing is not the problem. The problem is the behaviour of the people residing in that housing. We've spent billions over the past decade on building very nice brick and tile houses for poor trash, both black and white, and the behaviour of the recipients of much of that largess has not improved one iota.On the other hand, I have friends who have lived in rather small weatherboard houses - accommodation that must rank as a much worse alternative - who have lived a normal family existence.
The quality of the housing stock that you live in does not appear to be a good indicator to me of how well your children will perform at school (assuming you bother to send them to one), how much money you earn or how many times DOCS comes knocking at your door.
I reckon if some horrible disaster struck Five Wog and we were all forced to live in a tent city erected on one of the local parks, that life would go on much as before. It would be harder, but the kids would still go to school, I would still go to work, and things like washing, homework, cooking and all the rest of it would continue to be done on a daily basis.
I can state that because I have spent several months living under canvas, cooking in the open air, crapping in an outdoor latrine dug into the ground, and working off a trestle table and reading by a gas lantern at night. Yes, showers are not as comfortable when they are cold and only last 3 minutes and have to be taken under a showerhead strung from a tree, and it's a pain to queue up to do a bundle of laundry at the communal washing machine, but it's not an excuse for sitting on your bum doing nothing.
There would of course be some people that would sit around on their arse all day, expecting "the government" to do everything for them. That's just human nature - on the great bell curve of life, there are those that make things happen, those that watch things happen and those that go "what the fuck just happened?"
Personally, unless they were 90 years old (like my neighbour) or struggling with a bunch of kids under the age of 5, I'd leave them sitting there - once they get hungry and cold enough, they might get off their arse and do something about it.
On the other hand, having worked with some world class whingers that wouldn't work in an iron lung, I think all that would happen is that the volume of whinging would steadily increase until those of us that had been working all day got sick of it and went and helped them out. Probably by whacking them over the head with a shovel.
Local government 101
Why does the media have such a problem reporting the plight of many aboriginals?
Partly because they fly in and fly out and have a very limited amount of time to grab a story - and they want a story with plenty of blood - something that will generate a headline with a bit of luck. They need a story with a strong emotional hook, and have no interest in something as boring as the machinations of local government.
Local government is generally laughed at as a repository of lots of little wanna-be Napoleons and ridiculously jumped up shopkeepers, but it's the layer of government that probably has more impact on your life than the other two.
The federal government could probably all decamp to Tasmania for a decade and we probably wouldn't notice that they've gone. But if the local council is a day late in collecting the garbage, you'll know all about it.
Here's something interesting - I have been in contact with various arms of government for multifarious reasons over the last 10 years, and I've found time and time again that the local mob are the most responsive. The mayor and the councillors and probably most of the staff live here. They care about say the state of the local park as much as I do - because they use it to. We share common vested interests, and when they intersect, things happen remarkably quickly.
State governments are more removed from the local action, and by definition, the commonwealth mob are so removed, they might as well be operating from Moonbase Alpha.
Here in whitey-land (as in that part of Australia inhabited largely by white or yellow people of some description), local government gets things done because that is their job. If I ask the Council to fix a pot hole in our street, they don't ask me which family I am member of, which party I voted for at the last election or whether I am a drinking buddy of a councillor. They just fix the flipping thing, because most of us are treated reasonably equally most of the time.
I'm not saying that a bit of favouritism isn't applied from time to time - human nature says that favours will be done in all organisations at all levels. However, basic service delivery is not predicated on you being on the right side of the Mayor. I can sling as much shit at the greasy little bastard as I like, and my rubbish will still be emptied once a week. That's the nature of things. Service delivery is as apolitical as it can be made.
In short, we do not suffer from the "big man" syndrome here in whitey-land. The idea of paramount chiefs or lords doling out favours on a whim disappeared from our culture so long ago, we are no longer able to accept that such a thing exists in any human society. We've grown up believing that the rest of the planet is as polite and civilised as we are.
Well, sorry to break it to you, but most of the planet runs on the spoils system. Why is Kenya in the shit at the moment? Because the mob that are in power, and have been raping the state for the last 30 years, have been unelected, and they don't want to let go of the piggy bank. They've been doling out fat to their supporters, and only their supporters, for years. Those that have benefited don't want to give up the spoils either.
The big man still exists in Australia, but only in blackfella-land. I guess we rationalise it by dropping it in "culture" bucket - as in, "It's ok if they do that - it's part of their culture".
Funny how the activities that we have long accepted of some Aboriginal big men would get a white man locked up for about 50 offences involving corruption, nepotism, favouritism and all the other -isms that I can't think of right now.
Maybe it's time the tilty heads woke up to the fact that one reason why we have an advanced society is because we ditched the idea of the big man a long time ago. It is an impediment to progress. If you go to an aboriginal community and find that some people are living very well (thank you very much) whilst others are suffering all sorts of appalling deprivation, it's a sure sign of the big man syndrome in operation, because the big man always creams off plenty for himself and his family (leaving a much smaller cake for the plebs).
I would not be surprised to find the 80/20 rule operating in a lot of fucked-up communities - 80% of the resources are gobbled up by 20% of the ruling elite, leaving the remaining 80% of the people to get by on 20% of the cake.
Socialists and their ilk are always raving about income distribution and how skewed it is in white society (the paypackets of CEO's vs the average worker), but they've never bothered to study real income distribution in an aboriginal community. I'm not talking about what people get paid officially - I'm talking about what they end up with in reality after various nefarious schemes and lurks have redistributed the money. And I don't mean redistrbution along the lines of our progressive tax system - I mean redistribution from the have-nots to the haves, and from the poor to the rich. I'm sure a reverse Robin Hood is in action in a lot of these places.
Think I'm barmy? How else can you explain how so much money can be tipped into these places, yet there is so little to show for it (apart from some very new and shiny Landcruisers and aircraft being bought on a regular basis by the select few).
You want to fix up some of these shit holes? Give the people the same type of local government that you and I are used to. If that means smashing up the "culture" then so be it. We did it to ourselves a few hundred years ago, and the results were good. Why are we so hesitant to demolish the worst aspects of aboriginal culture?
What's good enough for white people is good enough for black people.
Partly because they fly in and fly out and have a very limited amount of time to grab a story - and they want a story with plenty of blood - something that will generate a headline with a bit of luck. They need a story with a strong emotional hook, and have no interest in something as boring as the machinations of local government.
Local government is generally laughed at as a repository of lots of little wanna-be Napoleons and ridiculously jumped up shopkeepers, but it's the layer of government that probably has more impact on your life than the other two.
The federal government could probably all decamp to Tasmania for a decade and we probably wouldn't notice that they've gone. But if the local council is a day late in collecting the garbage, you'll know all about it.
Here's something interesting - I have been in contact with various arms of government for multifarious reasons over the last 10 years, and I've found time and time again that the local mob are the most responsive. The mayor and the councillors and probably most of the staff live here. They care about say the state of the local park as much as I do - because they use it to. We share common vested interests, and when they intersect, things happen remarkably quickly.
State governments are more removed from the local action, and by definition, the commonwealth mob are so removed, they might as well be operating from Moonbase Alpha.
Here in whitey-land (as in that part of Australia inhabited largely by white or yellow people of some description), local government gets things done because that is their job. If I ask the Council to fix a pot hole in our street, they don't ask me which family I am member of, which party I voted for at the last election or whether I am a drinking buddy of a councillor. They just fix the flipping thing, because most of us are treated reasonably equally most of the time.
I'm not saying that a bit of favouritism isn't applied from time to time - human nature says that favours will be done in all organisations at all levels. However, basic service delivery is not predicated on you being on the right side of the Mayor. I can sling as much shit at the greasy little bastard as I like, and my rubbish will still be emptied once a week. That's the nature of things. Service delivery is as apolitical as it can be made.
In short, we do not suffer from the "big man" syndrome here in whitey-land. The idea of paramount chiefs or lords doling out favours on a whim disappeared from our culture so long ago, we are no longer able to accept that such a thing exists in any human society. We've grown up believing that the rest of the planet is as polite and civilised as we are.
Well, sorry to break it to you, but most of the planet runs on the spoils system. Why is Kenya in the shit at the moment? Because the mob that are in power, and have been raping the state for the last 30 years, have been unelected, and they don't want to let go of the piggy bank. They've been doling out fat to their supporters, and only their supporters, for years. Those that have benefited don't want to give up the spoils either.
The big man still exists in Australia, but only in blackfella-land. I guess we rationalise it by dropping it in "culture" bucket - as in, "It's ok if they do that - it's part of their culture".
Funny how the activities that we have long accepted of some Aboriginal big men would get a white man locked up for about 50 offences involving corruption, nepotism, favouritism and all the other -isms that I can't think of right now.
Maybe it's time the tilty heads woke up to the fact that one reason why we have an advanced society is because we ditched the idea of the big man a long time ago. It is an impediment to progress. If you go to an aboriginal community and find that some people are living very well (thank you very much) whilst others are suffering all sorts of appalling deprivation, it's a sure sign of the big man syndrome in operation, because the big man always creams off plenty for himself and his family (leaving a much smaller cake for the plebs).
I would not be surprised to find the 80/20 rule operating in a lot of fucked-up communities - 80% of the resources are gobbled up by 20% of the ruling elite, leaving the remaining 80% of the people to get by on 20% of the cake.
Socialists and their ilk are always raving about income distribution and how skewed it is in white society (the paypackets of CEO's vs the average worker), but they've never bothered to study real income distribution in an aboriginal community. I'm not talking about what people get paid officially - I'm talking about what they end up with in reality after various nefarious schemes and lurks have redistributed the money. And I don't mean redistrbution along the lines of our progressive tax system - I mean redistribution from the have-nots to the haves, and from the poor to the rich. I'm sure a reverse Robin Hood is in action in a lot of these places.
Think I'm barmy? How else can you explain how so much money can be tipped into these places, yet there is so little to show for it (apart from some very new and shiny Landcruisers and aircraft being bought on a regular basis by the select few).
You want to fix up some of these shit holes? Give the people the same type of local government that you and I are used to. If that means smashing up the "culture" then so be it. We did it to ourselves a few hundred years ago, and the results were good. Why are we so hesitant to demolish the worst aspects of aboriginal culture?
What's good enough for white people is good enough for black people.
Saturday, 16 February 2008
The past is a third world country
The whole "sorry" thing is an exercise in judging the actions of the past by the conditions of the present.
And that, my friends, is frogshit.
The past is the past. The conditions of the day that motivated people to do certain things are different to the conditions of today. Lefties always go on about "context", but I am yet to hear anyone use that word when it comes to saying sorry. Context has become the dirty word as far as the sorry shock troops are concerned.
I hate using the "c" word as well, since I think it has been horribly overused, so I will not use it again. But keep it in the back of your mind.
I'll start with an analogy. When I was a student 20 years ago, this was our idea of a pretty flash car. A 1979 Commodore, three speed auto with a 3.3 litre carby engine. Out of all the cars my friends had, it was the only one to have air conditioning.
Until Trendyman wrote his off by smashing it into a tree in Kings Park (during what I suspect was a blowjob), it was the ducks nuts of cars in our troupe.
But look at it now. If you told a kiddie these days that a friend owned this car, they'd look at you oddly and then say, "What the hell were you thinking?" By the standards of today, it is a total bucket of shit. The engine was underpowered, the styling attrocious, it had the handling characteristics of a delivery van and the interior was designed by bogans. It also lacked ABS, cruise control, climate control, an MP3 player and possibly power steering (I don't recall any of our cars back then having cruise control - I think obesity became a problem when we stopped having to work hard to park our cars).
In 20 years, our country has come a long way. We are much, much richer than we were back in 1987. Engineering improvements have delivered incredible jumps in the standard of the things that we have at our fingertips. Humble items like washing machines have more computing power than the XT computers that I did my uni work on back in '87.
The era that I grew up in is quite different from today in terms of attitudes, wealth, technology, communications and all that. The only thing that doesn't seem to have changed is that people are still beastly to each other.
If you consider how much has changed in 20 years, then try and think how much things have changed since the 1930's.
The 1930's might as well be a different country. If today is Australia, the 1930's are Kenya, Uganda or perhaps the highlands of PNG. We are talking about a country that by the standards of today, would be considered decidely third world. A simple thing to imagine is that the street outside your house is unpaved gravel, rather than tarmac (this does not apply if you are living on a farm).
If you think that's a bit of a stretch, I recently looked at some photos of Haberfield, which is a very nice suburb just around the corner. It's hard to buy a 3 bedroom house there for under a million bucks. It was one of the first "garden suburbs" to be developed in Australia. All the streets in the photos are gravel, and the blocks had laneways at the back for the dunny cart.
If your definition of the first world is where your shit gets taken away in a bucket by a horse drawn cart, then you need to update your view of the world. If you look at all the indicators of wealth that define a modern country today - the percentage of kids that go to secondary school, infant mortality rates, the prevalence of certain diseases, percentage of income spent on food, square metres of living space per person, access to clean drinking water and a proper sewerage system, then by any definition, my parents grew up in a third world country.
Most people walked to work. The last place I saw that was South Africa in 1994, and the only people walking to work were the blacks who lived in mud houses without electricity on the outskirts of the towns. (I recall driving past entire villages at night that failed to show a single light. Once the sun went down, everyone went to bed. It was like medieval England).
The infant mortality rate had dropped quite substantially by 1930, but in 1900, it was up around where the Congo is today, and the Congo is a country completely fucked by civil war, misgovernment and banditry.
Steam trains were the high-tech way to get around.
Most cooking was still done with wood fired stoves. Gas and electric cooking would not make serious inroads into the middle class home until after WWII. Again, the last time I saw a lot of people cooking at home over a wood fired stove was in Soweto, which we drove into by accident.
Drugs like penicillin had not been invented. Medicine was still pretty crude. Most homes did not have a telephone. Mum grew up on a farm out in the wheatbelt, and it was pretty much on the edge of civilisation - if not beyond it. The walls of the house were made of hessian, the uprights of bush poles. Meat was kept in a meat safe - refrigeration was beyond their reach. Hot water did not come out of a tap - it came out of a kettle that you boiled over a fire. Given that she grew up during the Depression, her experience was probably a little rougher than that had by many, but not untypical.
But note that she still grew up with a good education - good enough to get a Masters degree later in life. Her handwriting is beautiful to behold - far better than mine. She is a human calculator - I think my generation are the last of a breed that can add up a supermarket docket in their head - and she leaves me for dead when it comes to spelling, grammar and punctuation.
I mention these things because although both my parents grew up in environments that would no doubt be defined as "deprived" these days, they turned out to be tough, self-reliant, well adjusted people, and they have gone on to achieve a lot in their lives, including bringing up me and my siblings as succesful, happy, well adjusted people (although sometimes my rantings might give you reason to question that last item).
They did things differently back then. They thought differently. They acted differently, because it was a different country to the one we live in today.
Take Dad. He dropped out of school because WWII had been declared, and he knew that he would be signing up, along with every other male of his age - and he figured that if WWI was any guide, a lot of them would not be coming back, so doing the year 12 exams did not rate high on his list of priorities.
Imagine that - every 17 year old male knowing that they had a duty to serve, even after living with the results of WWI for their entire lives up until then. Fathers and uncles that did not return from France, neighbours hopping around on one leg and some crutches, or the local shopkeeper with only one arm. The enormous repatriation hospitals housing thousands of those that had been gassed or too badly wounded to live a normal life. Seeing men with one arm or one leg was the norm - not an oddity.
And you know what? They all went and queued up and off they went, and thankfully most of them came back in one piece.
But I digress. Or do I? Can you imagine the same thing happening today? Do we live in a country that contains hundreds of thousands of patriotic young Australians who are willing to risk it all for freedom?
I hope we do. I grew up as one of them, and I'd like to think that I grew up with people like that. But I sometimes think that we are a shrinking breed, slowly being squeezed out of existence by the social engineers with the tilty heads.
Those young men and women who queued up at the recruitment centres back in 1939, 1940 and 1941 like my father, his brother and pretty much everyone they knew, looked at the world differently to the way we see it today. Sure, they think a bit differently today to how they thought in 1940, but that's because they have adapted and changed as the world has changed around them. But the reasons for why they did the things they did back then have not changed, because those things were done back then - 60 years ago or more. The reasons have not changed or adapted over that time, because the decisions were made with respect to the thinking,the culture, the attitudes, the technology and the resources that existed at that time.
Once a decision is made, it is made. You can't go back later on and change the reasoning behind why you made that choice. The reasoning is fixed in stone, cemented in the time in which that decision was made.
People have such a bad habit of looking at the past and deriding the decisions that were made because we think we know so much better today. But when you make a decision, you make it with the information you have at the time - not the information you have 50 years down the track. They say that the future is uncertain with good reason. We have no information about the future. We have information about the past, and information about now, but the future is guesswork. Judging the past is the height of intellectual masturbation.
I will wrap up with these thoughts. I have been through a lot of historical houses in my time, and it strikes me that the ones that we have kept are generally those of the elite of that time - we have preserved the houses that were owned by the equivalents of the 1890's Kerry Packer. There are some places around that are a bit further down the scale, but they were probably owned by the upper middle class - think of homes today that are worth say $1.5 million or more.
We have not preserved the hovels of the poor, and with good reason. As soon as we could afford it, we flattened them. Some of the inner city suburbs still have plenty of examples of where the poor white trash lived back in say 1920, but even they have been scrubbed up by bringing the toilet inside, adding a hot water system and a gas stove. Most of us have no conception of how the poor really lived 80 years ago, because we have done away with the shabby infrastructure which housed them. The rat infested, typhoid ridden shacks that made up most of The Rocks were flattened to build the Harbour Bridge. Several generations of renovators and rebuilders have flattened and rebuilt or gutted and renovated the warrens of the lower classes, and instead of a family of 10 living in a cramped, narrow two bedroom terrace, we now have a couple of trendy arty types luving it up in a gentrified existence in Newtown.
We don't see real poverty in the city anymore. You can see a bit of it if you want to - just visit the Block down at Redfern, but most people are not game to visit, since the chance of being mugged by a drug-fucked young fool seems to be abnormally high. The Block is shuttered away so that people like us can safely ignore it. And we do.
When I think of poverty, I think of the mental cases that you occasionally see wandering the streets of the CBD. They're usually drunk, they are badly dressed and filthy, they stink (generally having pissed in their clothes in their sleep, or even crapped in them) and they are all completely off their heads, hearing voices and talking back in an animated fashion. Those people are poor - they lack a roof over their heads, they can easily go hungry, they lack access to washing facilities and toilets and it is doubtful they will ever be gainfully employed.
Now, consider this. Almost all the nutbags are white. None are asian. Their accents indicate that they were born here - none seem to be immigrants. They are home grown nutters.
If one of them had a kid in tow - say four years old - would you think it appropriate to allow them to hang onto that kid?
I doubt it.
The kid would be whisked away before you could say 'boo', and you'd be hard pressed to find someone that would think that unfair and unwise.
Now travel down the road a bit to the park opposite Central. On most days, that park will contain up to a dozen blackfellas, who will be happily getting on the turps and pestering those passing by for change. Most of them appear to sleep rough. Like the white winos, they smell. Some have clearly fried all their remaining brain cells. The only difference between black and white drunks is that the whites seem to be happy on their own, whilst the blacks are a more sociable bunch. I might have to think on that one day.
But let's imagine that the gaggle of blackfellas also have a couple of 4 year old kids with them. Would we think it appropriate that they should continue to grow up in such a fashion? Or should the authorities take them away?
Let's assume that you have voted for removal.
Now transpose the scene to a 'township' out in the NT somewhere. The drunks are the same, except a bit dustier, and all the circumstances are the same except that there are no white people walking past every day. The place is entirely black, and whilst some people are making a go of it, they're constantly dragged down by their drunken, violent, destructive kith and kin.
Would we leave kids in that environment, or take them away?
Me, I'd be stuffing them on a bus and heading for a boarding school in Darwin as fast as the speed limit would allow. And I'd fight tooth and nail to stop the little buggers from escaping and running away to head back to a shit hole like that - a shit hole with no future. Who in their right mind would let them go back to that?
Whilst you ponder this, I'll add something else into the mix. Remember what I told you about the 'country' that my parents grew up in? Try and imagine what the black townships looked like before the government started pouring in money for housing, Landcruisers, phones, electricity, water supplies, sewerage, schools, medical centres, roads, washing machines, sinks, beds, kitchen tables, chairs, fridges and all the other things that we take for granted today.
Imagine growing up in a place without any of that stuff, but instead of growing up with religious, deeply moral and hardworking parents that have very little (like my parents), imagine growing up surrounded by drunks, raised by your mum because your dad has shot through, and without a welfare system to support you, your mum and your sibblings.
I don't have a problem with anyone being removed from a place like that, no matter what their colour.
So all I can say Kevin, is that you can stick your sorry up your arse.
And that, my friends, is frogshit.
The past is the past. The conditions of the day that motivated people to do certain things are different to the conditions of today. Lefties always go on about "context", but I am yet to hear anyone use that word when it comes to saying sorry. Context has become the dirty word as far as the sorry shock troops are concerned.
I hate using the "c" word as well, since I think it has been horribly overused, so I will not use it again. But keep it in the back of your mind.
I'll start with an analogy. When I was a student 20 years ago, this was our idea of a pretty flash car. A 1979 Commodore, three speed auto with a 3.3 litre carby engine. Out of all the cars my friends had, it was the only one to have air conditioning.
Until Trendyman wrote his off by smashing it into a tree in Kings Park (during what I suspect was a blowjob), it was the ducks nuts of cars in our troupe.
But look at it now. If you told a kiddie these days that a friend owned this car, they'd look at you oddly and then say, "What the hell were you thinking?" By the standards of today, it is a total bucket of shit. The engine was underpowered, the styling attrocious, it had the handling characteristics of a delivery van and the interior was designed by bogans. It also lacked ABS, cruise control, climate control, an MP3 player and possibly power steering (I don't recall any of our cars back then having cruise control - I think obesity became a problem when we stopped having to work hard to park our cars).
In 20 years, our country has come a long way. We are much, much richer than we were back in 1987. Engineering improvements have delivered incredible jumps in the standard of the things that we have at our fingertips. Humble items like washing machines have more computing power than the XT computers that I did my uni work on back in '87.
The era that I grew up in is quite different from today in terms of attitudes, wealth, technology, communications and all that. The only thing that doesn't seem to have changed is that people are still beastly to each other.
If you consider how much has changed in 20 years, then try and think how much things have changed since the 1930's.
The 1930's might as well be a different country. If today is Australia, the 1930's are Kenya, Uganda or perhaps the highlands of PNG. We are talking about a country that by the standards of today, would be considered decidely third world. A simple thing to imagine is that the street outside your house is unpaved gravel, rather than tarmac (this does not apply if you are living on a farm).
If you think that's a bit of a stretch, I recently looked at some photos of Haberfield, which is a very nice suburb just around the corner. It's hard to buy a 3 bedroom house there for under a million bucks. It was one of the first "garden suburbs" to be developed in Australia. All the streets in the photos are gravel, and the blocks had laneways at the back for the dunny cart.
If your definition of the first world is where your shit gets taken away in a bucket by a horse drawn cart, then you need to update your view of the world. If you look at all the indicators of wealth that define a modern country today - the percentage of kids that go to secondary school, infant mortality rates, the prevalence of certain diseases, percentage of income spent on food, square metres of living space per person, access to clean drinking water and a proper sewerage system, then by any definition, my parents grew up in a third world country.
Most people walked to work. The last place I saw that was South Africa in 1994, and the only people walking to work were the blacks who lived in mud houses without electricity on the outskirts of the towns. (I recall driving past entire villages at night that failed to show a single light. Once the sun went down, everyone went to bed. It was like medieval England).
The infant mortality rate had dropped quite substantially by 1930, but in 1900, it was up around where the Congo is today, and the Congo is a country completely fucked by civil war, misgovernment and banditry.
Steam trains were the high-tech way to get around.
Most cooking was still done with wood fired stoves. Gas and electric cooking would not make serious inroads into the middle class home until after WWII. Again, the last time I saw a lot of people cooking at home over a wood fired stove was in Soweto, which we drove into by accident.
Drugs like penicillin had not been invented. Medicine was still pretty crude. Most homes did not have a telephone. Mum grew up on a farm out in the wheatbelt, and it was pretty much on the edge of civilisation - if not beyond it. The walls of the house were made of hessian, the uprights of bush poles. Meat was kept in a meat safe - refrigeration was beyond their reach. Hot water did not come out of a tap - it came out of a kettle that you boiled over a fire. Given that she grew up during the Depression, her experience was probably a little rougher than that had by many, but not untypical.
But note that she still grew up with a good education - good enough to get a Masters degree later in life. Her handwriting is beautiful to behold - far better than mine. She is a human calculator - I think my generation are the last of a breed that can add up a supermarket docket in their head - and she leaves me for dead when it comes to spelling, grammar and punctuation.
I mention these things because although both my parents grew up in environments that would no doubt be defined as "deprived" these days, they turned out to be tough, self-reliant, well adjusted people, and they have gone on to achieve a lot in their lives, including bringing up me and my siblings as succesful, happy, well adjusted people (although sometimes my rantings might give you reason to question that last item).
They did things differently back then. They thought differently. They acted differently, because it was a different country to the one we live in today.
Take Dad. He dropped out of school because WWII had been declared, and he knew that he would be signing up, along with every other male of his age - and he figured that if WWI was any guide, a lot of them would not be coming back, so doing the year 12 exams did not rate high on his list of priorities.
Imagine that - every 17 year old male knowing that they had a duty to serve, even after living with the results of WWI for their entire lives up until then. Fathers and uncles that did not return from France, neighbours hopping around on one leg and some crutches, or the local shopkeeper with only one arm. The enormous repatriation hospitals housing thousands of those that had been gassed or too badly wounded to live a normal life. Seeing men with one arm or one leg was the norm - not an oddity.
And you know what? They all went and queued up and off they went, and thankfully most of them came back in one piece.
But I digress. Or do I? Can you imagine the same thing happening today? Do we live in a country that contains hundreds of thousands of patriotic young Australians who are willing to risk it all for freedom?
I hope we do. I grew up as one of them, and I'd like to think that I grew up with people like that. But I sometimes think that we are a shrinking breed, slowly being squeezed out of existence by the social engineers with the tilty heads.
Those young men and women who queued up at the recruitment centres back in 1939, 1940 and 1941 like my father, his brother and pretty much everyone they knew, looked at the world differently to the way we see it today. Sure, they think a bit differently today to how they thought in 1940, but that's because they have adapted and changed as the world has changed around them. But the reasons for why they did the things they did back then have not changed, because those things were done back then - 60 years ago or more. The reasons have not changed or adapted over that time, because the decisions were made with respect to the thinking,the culture, the attitudes, the technology and the resources that existed at that time.
Once a decision is made, it is made. You can't go back later on and change the reasoning behind why you made that choice. The reasoning is fixed in stone, cemented in the time in which that decision was made.
People have such a bad habit of looking at the past and deriding the decisions that were made because we think we know so much better today. But when you make a decision, you make it with the information you have at the time - not the information you have 50 years down the track. They say that the future is uncertain with good reason. We have no information about the future. We have information about the past, and information about now, but the future is guesswork. Judging the past is the height of intellectual masturbation.
I will wrap up with these thoughts. I have been through a lot of historical houses in my time, and it strikes me that the ones that we have kept are generally those of the elite of that time - we have preserved the houses that were owned by the equivalents of the 1890's Kerry Packer. There are some places around that are a bit further down the scale, but they were probably owned by the upper middle class - think of homes today that are worth say $1.5 million or more.
We have not preserved the hovels of the poor, and with good reason. As soon as we could afford it, we flattened them. Some of the inner city suburbs still have plenty of examples of where the poor white trash lived back in say 1920, but even they have been scrubbed up by bringing the toilet inside, adding a hot water system and a gas stove. Most of us have no conception of how the poor really lived 80 years ago, because we have done away with the shabby infrastructure which housed them. The rat infested, typhoid ridden shacks that made up most of The Rocks were flattened to build the Harbour Bridge. Several generations of renovators and rebuilders have flattened and rebuilt or gutted and renovated the warrens of the lower classes, and instead of a family of 10 living in a cramped, narrow two bedroom terrace, we now have a couple of trendy arty types luving it up in a gentrified existence in Newtown.
We don't see real poverty in the city anymore. You can see a bit of it if you want to - just visit the Block down at Redfern, but most people are not game to visit, since the chance of being mugged by a drug-fucked young fool seems to be abnormally high. The Block is shuttered away so that people like us can safely ignore it. And we do.
When I think of poverty, I think of the mental cases that you occasionally see wandering the streets of the CBD. They're usually drunk, they are badly dressed and filthy, they stink (generally having pissed in their clothes in their sleep, or even crapped in them) and they are all completely off their heads, hearing voices and talking back in an animated fashion. Those people are poor - they lack a roof over their heads, they can easily go hungry, they lack access to washing facilities and toilets and it is doubtful they will ever be gainfully employed.
Now, consider this. Almost all the nutbags are white. None are asian. Their accents indicate that they were born here - none seem to be immigrants. They are home grown nutters.
If one of them had a kid in tow - say four years old - would you think it appropriate to allow them to hang onto that kid?
I doubt it.
The kid would be whisked away before you could say 'boo', and you'd be hard pressed to find someone that would think that unfair and unwise.
Now travel down the road a bit to the park opposite Central. On most days, that park will contain up to a dozen blackfellas, who will be happily getting on the turps and pestering those passing by for change. Most of them appear to sleep rough. Like the white winos, they smell. Some have clearly fried all their remaining brain cells. The only difference between black and white drunks is that the whites seem to be happy on their own, whilst the blacks are a more sociable bunch. I might have to think on that one day.
But let's imagine that the gaggle of blackfellas also have a couple of 4 year old kids with them. Would we think it appropriate that they should continue to grow up in such a fashion? Or should the authorities take them away?
Let's assume that you have voted for removal.
Now transpose the scene to a 'township' out in the NT somewhere. The drunks are the same, except a bit dustier, and all the circumstances are the same except that there are no white people walking past every day. The place is entirely black, and whilst some people are making a go of it, they're constantly dragged down by their drunken, violent, destructive kith and kin.
Would we leave kids in that environment, or take them away?
Me, I'd be stuffing them on a bus and heading for a boarding school in Darwin as fast as the speed limit would allow. And I'd fight tooth and nail to stop the little buggers from escaping and running away to head back to a shit hole like that - a shit hole with no future. Who in their right mind would let them go back to that?
Whilst you ponder this, I'll add something else into the mix. Remember what I told you about the 'country' that my parents grew up in? Try and imagine what the black townships looked like before the government started pouring in money for housing, Landcruisers, phones, electricity, water supplies, sewerage, schools, medical centres, roads, washing machines, sinks, beds, kitchen tables, chairs, fridges and all the other things that we take for granted today.
Imagine growing up in a place without any of that stuff, but instead of growing up with religious, deeply moral and hardworking parents that have very little (like my parents), imagine growing up surrounded by drunks, raised by your mum because your dad has shot through, and without a welfare system to support you, your mum and your sibblings.
I don't have a problem with anyone being removed from a place like that, no matter what their colour.
So all I can say Kevin, is that you can stick your sorry up your arse.
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