Renovating, country style

Some friends of mine used to own a fruit farm in rural WA. This is the kitchen in their farm house. When they bought the place, the house was a flea infested dump. The previous mob had dogs, and the dogs had fleas. All the carpets had to be pulled up and burned. Everytime I visited, they had not gotten around to replacing the carpet, so the floors were bare concrete.


Trendyman renovated the kitchen in his usual fashion. Some rich luvvie decided she wanted a new kitchen for her McMansion, so the old one was ripped out and thrown away. Trendy, never able to resists a bargain or a freebie, kindly took it off her hands. It was an almost perfect fit for the farmhouse, apart from the bench closest to the camera. It stuck out about a foot too far to the right.

Some people would approach this delicately, carefully marking the wood to be removed, cutting it with a circular saw and then sanding back the edges before restaining the wood.

Trendy hacked it off with a chainsaw. If you walked past the bench and nudged it with your arm, you collected splinters. He was too cheap to hire a plumber, so he also did all the pipework for the plumbing - instead of welding or soldering the pipes, he used superglue.

It was bloody perfect, if you ask me. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting at that bench and drinking a few beers after a hard day of sitting on the verandah and watching the Swedish backpackers pick fruit in their bikinis.

Christmas reading

Back before we had kids, my parents used to rent a house at Yallingup (near Margaret River in WA) for a week or 10 days over Christmas. We did this for a number of years. It was a short drive to the beach, but utterly remote from everything else. It had a winery on one side and a national park on the other, so we never saw another soul. At dusk, we'd sit on the balconey and watch the kangaroos emerge from the bush in the valley that we overlooked, and have a drink or ten.

There was no TV or radio reception, and no mobile phone reception. We gave the landline number to no one. There was a small TV upstairs with a VCR, but we never turned it on. We spent a week snoozing on the couch in the afternoon, doing jigsaw puzzles, reading and body surfing. And cooking up fabulous meals for breakfast, lunch, dinner and afternoon tea.

My family are a rather bookish crowd, and we generally give each other books as presents. Going away as a family with a pile of books was always a wonderful occasion - we'd open the presents on Christmas Day, then rush for the comfy sofas and steal each others books. I read this stack (and more) in one week.

• Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain. Since then, I have bought another of his books, plus his cook book. Neither were as good as Kitchen Confidential - still the best book by a chef.
• Cooking Spaces - my brother was designing his house at the time, so we read a lot of architecture those holidays
• Measuring America, by Andro Linklater. A book in the vein of "Salt" and "Nutmeg" and so on. It was very good. It was all about the surveying of the US.
  
• On food and cooking, by Harold McGee - a very good read for anyone interested in food, and cooking.
• War Without Blood, by Russell Schneider - a book about Fraser as PM
• The Last Diaries, by Alan Clark - still the most stunning set of diaries that I have ever read. A must read.
  
• The art of kitchen design
• Mitchum - a biography of Robert Mitchum. Paco would love it.
  
• The Forbes - about the family. Don't remember much about this.
• Wellington, by Richard Holmes. I loved this book - couldn't put it down. A great book on the Peninsular Campaigns.
• I think the blue book is on icecream manufacturing, and the one under that is something like "Nutmeg".
  

The jigsaw that this pile is sitting on contained about 5000 pieces. We'd buy one and give it to Mum for Christmas, then spend the rest of the holiday piecing it together.

Each day would go something like this.

Get up at dawn, go to the beach for a swim.

Have breakfast, discuss which wineries we should visit that day, then flop on the couch with a book. At the end of each chapter, do a bit of jigsaw for 10 or 15 minutes. Sleep. Read some more. Go outside and look at the sky and chat about whether it was nice enough to spend a few hours driving around the wineries. Argue about whether we should visit the gourmet icecream factory to buy icecream, or make our own (my brother always took his icecream maker on these holidays). Read some more (from a different book). Nick someone else's book when they are doing the jigsaw, and refuse to hand it back. Argue about the best way to put a page marker in a book. Decant wine for dinner - should we have Grange, or something else? Fight over book that you nicked, and has been nicked back. Sleep on couch. Invite friends over for dinner. Sleep some more. Have another swim. Sit on the balconey with a beer, watching the sun go down. Go inside when the moths appear. Eat, drink and collapse on couch with a book and a glass of plonk. Snore. Loudly.

Repeat each day for a week.

Bliss.

Breakfast of champions

Back in 2003, our family went to Darwin to celebrate Mum's birthday. We spent some time in Darwin itself (my sister was living there at the time), a few days visiting Kakadu etc and a few days on Crab Claw Island. Unless the only thing you want to do with your life is go fishing, I would avoid Craw Claw. It's nice, but there is nothing to do but kill sea kittens all day long.

This is what we had for breakfast on the day of Mum's birthday. Beans on toast, washed down with Moet. (Moet was a Dutchman by the way, so you pronounce the "t" - it is not "mo-ee", it is "mo-eT").


The "resort" (if you wish to call it that) is all built on stilts, with each cabin being linked by a pathway in the sky. The bugs are absolutely ferocious. You can drive there, but it is quite a hike, or you can catch a small plane across Darwin harbour - takes about 15 minutes (that's what we did).



Whilst in Kakadu, my brother and me took a scenic chopper flight. It turned out that the pilot and I were in the same boarding house at school - he was a few years younger than me. At one point, my brother asked over the intercom "So, did Boy beat you up when you were at school?"

In response, the pilot threw the stick hard over and tried to tip me out of the chopper into a crocodile infested swamp.


You have to be careful who you thump when you are at school!

From tarragon to toast

No, this is not a dope plant. This is the start of a tarragon hedge. I found to my cost last year that there are two main types of tarragon - French and Russian (I think) and one is lovely and edible and the other is completely yuck. The first variety that I planted was of course the one that was absolutely dreadful.


As I said last night, my intention tonight was to make a tomato salad using a yard of tarragon. Note the tape measure on the benchtop - it is set to 100cm, or about a yard. [As an aside, the ammo belts in WWII fighters were nine yards long, hence the saying "going the whole nine yards", which meant filling a Jerry full of lead].


The end result. Oil and toast some slices of sourdough, spoon over the top and enjoy immensely. The pommegranate in the background is for my next adventure in salads.


Burrrp!

Growth in Chinese CO2 slows - and we're buggered

This week saw grim news that the Chinese aren't in the mood for us to dig up the north of our continent and ship it to their infernal factories and dark, satanic mills. Krudd made a speech saying how terrible it was that China's growth has stalled.

KEVIN Rudd has warned that the sudden collapse in China's economic growth reported yesterday will wipe $5 billion off Australia's annual exports and destroy domestic jobs.

Oh dear. Let me see if I have this straight. If China slows down, Australians lose their jobs. The main things China imports from us are commodities. So if China imports less of our commodities, that is a bad thing because people lose their jobs. I get it now.

Mr Rudd said it was now clear the deterioration of global financial markets was continuing despite global efforts to stimulate economic activity. He said the recovery of the economy of China was as important to Australia as that of the US - the initial source of the global crisis.

So we want China to recover, and go back to importing Australia one state at a time. It's very important for governments to stimulate economic activity, so miners can go back to hacking into the bowels of Gaia, and shipping it offshore so that it can be turned into metals, toxic waste and CO2.

"People are anxious, people are concerned, people are afraid," he said. "And these things are true because the consequences of which we speak (job losses) are real."

Isn't it strange how when the Greens propose something like a ban on logging or refusing permission for a new mine to open, the fact that jobs are lost, or potential jobs are not created is no big deal. When times were good, we could afford to throw a few hundred timber workers out of work here, or block the creation of some mining jobs there without worrying about it. But now that times are bad, suddenly job losses in the mining sector, and losses in other sectors from the knock-on effects, is a terrible, terrible thing. When loggers were thrown out of work, were they not "anxious, concerned and afraid"?

Yes, the consequences are indeed real.

"They confirm that the Chinese boom that has supercharged the Australian economy over the past five to seven years is receding rapidly," he said. "That's a big problem for Australia."

This is from the same bunch of clowns that have spent the last 5 years weeing in their bags over the amount of CO2 that China has been dumping into the atmosphere - a consequence of China importing vast amounts of Australian dirt. Now, China is going to be producing less CO2 - or at least the growth in its emmissions will slow right down - and that is "a big problem for Australia?"

Spare me while I throw up in the corner.

He said the Government would consider its response and was prepared to take whatever action was required to support jobs and economic growth.

Hang on, now he wants to support our extractive and processing industries - those same industries that he is trying to strangle with his "carbon pollution" scheme? Get a grip, Krudd - get a grip. It's one thing or the other.

"When someone loses their job - and they have and they will - our responsibility is not just to see that person as a statistic," he said.

Would he be saying the same thing if people were losing their jobs as a result of his carbon pollution scheme - given that the slowdown in China and a carbon reduction scheme essentially amount to the same thing. Destroying the economy and throwing people out of work.

"Our responsibility is to reach out and help at the level of government, at the level of community and at the level of being someone's neighbour.

Oops, I want to hurl again after reading that piffle. If he says, "I feel your pain", I will want to punch someone in the face.

"It's not just the fact of someone losing their job - it's the human person and their dignity and the impact on their family which lies beyond that as well."

Really? I reckon if you go down to Newtown tonight, they'll be dancing in the streets - just like the Palestinians did after September 11. You see, to the birkenstock wearing clowns with rings through their faces and a dole cheque in one pocket and a flyer from Socialist International in the other, this is the best thing since sliced bread. Thanks to the global crisis, Gaia will be saved. It will be saved by greedy Wall Street bankers rather than swampies protesting in the streets - how ironic can things get?

Government should stick to doing hard things

The Iraq War and its aftermath introduced us to the term "soft power", with the idea being that the US should try to influence the world through "soft power", like aid projects and so on, rather than "hard power" - which is having the Air Force bomb the crap out of things, and then having the Marines stomp all over what's left.

"Hard power" and "soft power" apply just as well to domestic government tasks. For a state government, hard power encompasses things like building dams, bridges, roads, pipelines and buildings. It involves the construction of physical things, tangible things that we can touch and smell (in the case of a rubbish dump).

Soft power is the delivery of services, like education, health, child care, policing and so on.

Government tends to do hard power with a reasonable level of incompetence, and soft power with an incredible level of incompetence.

For most of history, government stuck to hard power. The Egyptian government did chariots, road, pyramids and canals. The Greek government did monuments, plazas, forums and triremes. The Romans did aqueducts, colloseums and roads, and then came unstuck with bread and circuses. The British government around the time of the Napoleonic wars did fighting ships and not much else.

For the western world, everything went to pot during WWII. Up until about that time, government shied away from even doing most of the hard things. Private companies raised the money to build canals and railways. The churches or local communities took care of "social security". "Charter hospitals" took care of health. State schools hardly existed 100 years ago.

Things have always been a bit different here in NSW. The private sector started building the first rail line, but that company went broke, so the state stepped in and finished it. And then it kept on going..... and look at our rail system today. Broke, and in a shambles.

The state built our dams and water supply system. Now, we don't have enough dams, and our pipes leak like unrepaired, unreplaced, hundred year old collanders.

With electricity, the state mainly kept out of it until about 1950. Until then, building power plants was taken care of at a municipal level. However, the boards that built and ran the power stations couldn't raise the money to build extra capacity to deal with rapid post war population growth, so the state government stepped in. Now, we have a union dominated electricity industry that we can't even sell.

When Greiner became Premier, he gave up on the idea of even trying to get the state to build roads, so he opened road building to the private sector, which is how we ended up with tollways - which came in under budget, to specification and were opened sooner than expected. If the RTA had built them, they'd still be under construction, bits would be falling off them and they would have cost us eleventy-seven trillion pesos by now. Oh, and they would have started in a rubbish tip in Homebush and finished in an unused funeral home in Silverwater. And been built without entry ramps, lane markings or drainage.

If government is so hopeless at dealing with hard things (remember how the US Military was ripped off over hammers and toilet seats?), why do we even consider the idea of letting it do soft things? At least with a hammer, if the government buys one, you can walk down to Bunnings and compare prices to see whether the taxpayers got their faces ripped off again. With soft items, you can't. You just have to trust that they're doing a good job.

This is where things get interesting. Trust.

I have to laugh at lefties who insist that we trust the government with our money and our lives, and then turn around and insist that the Police (government employees) cannot be trusted to tell the truth in court. The hypocrisy that they demonstrate when they proclaim that you and I should pay more tax so that the government can pursue "social justice", whilst at the same time saying that the most solid arm of government is untrustworthy, is breath taking. If the leftie, criminal liberties crowd won't trust the Police, why should I trust a leftie dominated state sector to use my cash wisely?

WWII convinced many people that government could do things effectively - after all, big government defeated Hitler, so it must work. However, those same people forget that for years after the war, there was rationing of most essentials (hardly a sign of success) and the government was weighed down by the most incredible levels of debt (again, hardly a sign of success). Yes, big government won the war, but it just about throttled the country in the process.

Which is why I view all government "wars" on anything but a foreign enemy with much suspicion. The "war on obesity", the "war on smoking", the "war on drugs", the "war on speeding", the "war on Iran" (oops, made the last one up). How will we end the war on obesity? We knew when the war with Hitler was over - we have photos of Russkis planting their flag on top of the Reichstag. We knew when the Japs gave up - the recorded plea by Hirohito that essentially said, "I don't wanna be nuked no more" was a dead giveaway.

But how will we know with the "war on obesity"? Will it be denoted by a black and white photo of a bunch of fitness instructors climbing up a mound of dead obese people and planting a flagpole in the bum of one of them? Will we see grown men dancing behind trams in the city centre? Will we celebrate it with a "VO Day", complete with tickertape parade and marching bands?

I think not.

Making people lose weight is all about soft power, and soft power is weak and often useless. Think of how you would prefer to tow your car out of a creek. You can use hard power and attach a steel tow rope to a winch and drag it out, or you can develop an advertising campaign to encourage the car to leave the creek, and back it up with brochures inserted into daily newspapers.

Changing our physical environment (eg, bulldozing a hill flat to put a road through) is a much easier task than changing our mental or emotional environment - and as soon as government ventures down that path, it gets lost in a swamp of dashed expectations.

I have enough trouble trying to bring up our kids as decent human beings - teaching them not to swear or snatch things, to respect other people and their property, to do things properly, to respect their elders, to not butt into conversations, to eat with their feet off the table, to use a knife and fork, to clear the table after they've finished eating, to not leave wet towels on the floor, to make their beds, to put their clothes away - all the little things that go into producing someone that you can take to a restaurant without fear of enduring epic social embarassment. We work at it every day, from the time they wake up to the time they go to sleep.

It is two on one or one on one most of the time, and we have to be persistant for as soon as we think a lesson has been drummed in regarding removing tissues from pockets before the pants go into the wash, we find that the next load is covered in shreds of tissue paper. It is a task that we will have to persist with for perhaps 20 years, before they finally start to emerge as an adult around age 21.

Can government do that?

If there is one thing that the TV show "The Biggest Loser" should have taught us, it's that overcoming obesity is a long, arduous process. Some who try will fail (I almost wrote that as "some who try will whale"). It takes almost round the clock observation and input by incredibly motivated staff to get a result, and the participants need to be motivated by very large financial rewards.

Now stack that up against a TV campaign that you might see once in a blue moon that encourages you to walk more often. Compared to "The Biggest Loser", how much impact will it have?

Zero. It is our money - as taxpayers - being pissed up against the wall. The only government agency that does something like The Biggest Loser is the Army, and although "war" and "army" generally go well together, I don't think any arm of the defence force is going to jump with joy at the prospect of forcing a million fatties to tone up. The best we could do would be to get the RAAF to strap a parachute to each fatty and toss them out of a Herc over the highlands of PNG. Or maybe two parachutes. Or maybe a cargo chute. Take your pick. My brother in law is up there at the moment, and he was a skinny bugger before he left. He has lost 13kg since arriving a few months ago. Walking up and down mountains in tropical heat and living on fruit and rice will do that to you.

I'm pretty sure the canibals in the highlands would also welcome us dropping endless loads of "long pig" from the sky as well. Think of it as the western world "sharing its largesse" with the starving third world.

The thing that strikes me about Obama is that he believes government can do soft things well. That's because he was a community agitator, and his job was to annoy government until it got so sick of him, it handed over money. If that is your idea of succesful government action, then we're in a great deal of trouble. You see, he's never worked for a part of government that was involved with soft service delivery - health, education, public transport, child protection, policing and so on. He's worked outside those agencies, essentially putting the boot in to extract cash for his constituency.

He hasn't seen how tough it is to be on the inside, dealing with whackos like him on the outside, whilst simultaneously dealing with budget issues, unions, bloodyminded staff, media pressure, OH&S Nazis, political inference from on high and continual policy changes - and all the time trying to deliver services to the people you were setup to help, rather than those freeloaders seeking to suck on the government tit.

I think he is in for a rude shock.

As much as I occasionally like to deride teachers who have become politicians (most of the Australian Democrats seemed to start out that way), at least they had a grounding in front line service delivery. It would not surprise me to find that the experience turned them into raving lunatics, which is why they became Democrats.

Obama's biggest problem is that he is so smart. Yes, he is smart - I'll give him that.

But smart people have a big problem when their brain power collides with the state sector. When you start out (and I was one of them, for I am reasonably smart - although maybe not in the Obama league), you think that because you are smarter than your average pube, you will make an incredible difference. You can see how to do things more efficiently and effectively. You can see obvious cost savings. You can see strategies that are likely to work. You can see simple changes that will bring about big improvements to service delivery.

And then when you start proposing these things, you run full tilt into a very large, very solid brick wall.

I did that. Almost broke my nose in the process.

I then spent the next few years trying to get through, over, under or around that brick wall. I suceeded on a few occasions, only to find that behind that brick wall, there was another. After a while, I discovered faint scratchings on the bricks, and it suddenly became clear that they had been put there by the fingernails of all the smart people before me, who had clawed away at those walls, just like me.

I got out before I burned out. In every government agency, you'll find wise old owls who were once bright young things, and they hung around until they burned out, and were then pensioned off into a dusty office somewhere. They watch the new whizzkids come in (the FNG's), and they nod at each other and take bets as to how long they will last.

Stalin is the only person I know who managed to get a public sector to do what he wanted, and he had to shoot about 10 million people in order to bend the public sector to his will.

Right now, in offices across the US, many public servants will be celebrating the election of The One, and feeling altruistic about their duties.

By about Monday, they'll be back to squabbling with each other about budgets, responsibilities, chains of command, who gets the leather office chairs and whether biscuits are permitted in meetings or not.

The sooner the elctorate learns that most governments can't do soft power effectively, the better off we'll be. It can spend money on soft power, but not try to do it itself. There is a big difference. I see no problem with the state paying to educate all children, but I do not see that the schools and teachers need to be provided by the state. I am not a huge fan of the state paying for health care, but I am no fan at all of governments owning hospitals, or employing nurses and doctors.

Government is a mindless machine. It brings out the very worst in a lot of people. It attracts the power hungry as employees, who evolve into psychpathic managers or bloodyminded underlings. The number one aim of every government department is making life nice for the staff (or at least the managers), with service delivery being a distant 23rd. Change is the enemy (again, Obama is going to have fun trying to ram change through the state sector). Many public servants come to see their entitlements as the most important things in their working lives, rather than outcomes.

At present, the best and the brightest get sucked into these agencies and they disappear like a small drop of red ink in a vat of blue ink. If we want the brightest and best to make a difference (and they can), the only solution is to dramatically shrink the number of drones and the number of functions. If you have one smart person to every 1000 drones, they'll never make a difference. I you have a ratio of 1:50, you have a chance. If each smart person has to deal with 100 functions, they will make no difference. If they have to deal with 10, you have a chance.

I want a government that does a small number of things exceptionally well, rather than one that does lots of things incredibly badly. I'm afraid Obama has an apetite for government doing even more things than it does now, so allow me to write him off today as a failed president. It won't be for lack of trying - it will be because he will be trying to do too many things, especially too many things for which government is utterly unsuited.

Melting

I am typing this from our backyard. It's nearly midnight, and it's too hot to be inside. Out here in wogville, we are living like our ancestors did - no air con. We've talked about buying a portable unit for nights like this, but decided that there is no point in spending a packet of cash on something that we might only use for 2 weeks of the year - plus we have nowhere to store it when we aren't using it.

If I was 20 years younger, there is a chance that I would have been silly enough to sign up for some action and adventure, and would currently be somewhere like Afghanistan, sweltering under body armour and a helmet and lugging a machine gun and 20 kilos of assorted stuff up and down forbidding hills. There are tougher places to be than sweating a bit in a nice backyard in wogtown. Think of how lucky you are.

It's been too hot to cook in the kitchen this week - even slicing stuff for a salad is enough to bring on a sweat. We've therefore abandoned the kitchen and retreated to the backyard, where dinner consists of something on the BBQ and a couple of salads. J gave me a great little electric BBQ for Christmas - but as she is a "polotarian" (eats chook, but not red meat), its use is restricted to grilling vegetables and chicken. It does a great job, and unlike the old red-meat beast, it's clean. You could eat off it. The old thing looks like a cross between a grease trap behind a Chinese restaurant and a rusted sheet of tin.

Monkey is the most fortunate, since he is still small enough to fit into his old baby bath. It's his equivalent of those hip baths that you see in Western movies (he's not allowed to smoke a cigar in it though, or have his back scrubbed by a hooker). He can't lie down in it - it's definitely a sitting bath, but when we eat outside, he sits in his tub and eats dinner from there. Sheer luxury if you ask me. I'm thinking I might flop the canoe down on the grass and fill it with water and emulate the Monkey. We did something similar when Junior broke his leg - he couldn't bathe in the bathroom due to the layout of the room, so he bathed in the canoe in the backyard. Not sure what the neighbours made of that.

This week saw a new salad being introduced to my repertoire. Another Christmas present was a book containing 400 sauce recipes, and sauces include salad dressings. I like a good tomato salad, and often curse the food retailers around here for no longer stocking interesting tomato varieties. We had a grocer that closed his doors last year that used to sell the oddest looking tomatoes, but the remaining grocers have not moved to fill that niche in the market. They were genuinely ugly and feral beasts. So we are stuck with the plain old garden variety tomatoes - at least until I figure out how to grow them successfully. I have tried growing them three years in a row, and the sum total of my efforts has been about half a punnet of cherry tomatoes.

The new salad that we tried this week was a simple variation on one that I have done a lot - chop up a few tomatoes, then make a dressing of one part balsamic vinegar to four parts olive oil, and add to that one crushed clove of garlic and a huge whack of tarragon. Don't forget the salt. We normally do it with basil and/or mint, but tarragon was a new variation for me.

Which is good, since I planted a small tarragon plant in our garden before winter, and it has turned into a tarragon hedge. It has truly gone ballistic. It hangs out over the lawn and sheds leaves onto the lawn, so mowing the lawn can be quite fragrant and pleasurable when one runs over the leaves with the mower. The tang of tarragon in the air is quite amazing. I'm thinking of attacking it with the whipper-snipper, just to see how it smells.

The nice thing about the salad is you can throw in a ridiculous amount of tarragon - so long as you like that aniseed-type taste. The first time I did it, I snipped off a stalk about a foot long and used the leaves from that. The second time, I moved up to two feet of tarragon. Next time, I will go for a yard of it - it's not like we are about to run out of it, and J and I both love it.

This is a salad that you need to allow to steep. You don't dress it just before serving - you chop everything up and dress it an hour before hand, allowing the precious bodily fluids to mingle for a goodly amount of time.

It also helps if you skin the tomato first. I was sceptical of that, so I did one with skins on and one with skins off, and removing the outer layer definitely makes a positive difference.

It goes really well with wog bread as well. I buy old fashioned loaves from the local deli and then paint slices with olive oil (both sides) and pop them in the toaster. Easiest way to make bruscetta. I have a big tub of semi-dried tomatoes in the fridge, which I top up with olive oil. I then use a pastry brush to paint the oil on the bread slices, so they are properly coated from edge to edge. You have to be careful with the toaster - the bread toasts a lot faster with oil on it, so you have to dial it down to about half the normal level to avoid carbonated bruscetta.

We've been accompanying that this week with coleslaw, freshly made and dressed with J's special dressing. After years of eating mushy coleslaw out of a can at boarding school, it was over 20 years before I could face eating it again. I can thank Jamie Oliver for giving me the inspiration to give it another go. I always use a green cabbage and a purple one to add a bit of colour, and J has taught me to go easy on the carrot. I never thought much of the radish either until I tried this dish, and I now find myself munching through the crunchy little buggers with delight. It also helps to throw in a handful of dried cranberries (for sweetness), or raisins if you don't have them handy.

Dad told me once that a bloke he knew had been stuck on Malta during the siege in WWII. He lived on tinned carrots, and almost nothing else, for months. 50 years later, this bloke could still not face carrots. Dad had a similar experience with rice pudding. His corvette (a small escort vessel, not a sports car) spent a few months tooling around the Arabian sea (also in WWII), dropping off chests of gold to various Bedouin chiefs in order to keep them friendly with the allies. All they ate for 3 months was tinned rice pudding - breakfast, lunch and dinner. That is one dessert that Mum didn't put on the table much when I was a kid. I've seen Dad eat all sorts of bits of an animal (mum and dad also belong to an offal club, which is a bit much for me), but the only food I have ever seen him blanch at is rice pudding.

Thankfully, my coleslaw aversion did not last quite that long.

Bloody hell, it's hot.

Nitwits

I've come to the conclusion that the Franklins supermarket up in Drummoyne is a looney magnet. Seriously. Whenever I go in there, I end up dealing with a looney. On my last visit, I was verbally abused by a nutjob woman who stalked me around the supermarket after I committed a minor transgression of aisle etiquette, and this time I had to put up with a bloke in front of me going postal with a case of checkout rage.

Where do these nitwits come from?

The supermarket closes at 9pm. I hit the checkout about 8.45pm, just as they were turning down the lights to let customers know the doors were closing soon. There was a woman at the checkout trying to pay with a credit card, and a bloke in the queue behind her waiting for his groceries to be processed.

For whatever reason, the woman's credit card wasn't being processed. The bloke manning the checkout tried a number of times, then called his manager over, who was the only other staffer on site. It transpired it was not a credit card problem - the checkout terminal had frozen.

It was pretty clear to me, and the four people patiently standing behind me, that they had a problem. The bloke tried to unfreeze the terminal, while his boss went to a phone on the wall to call their help desk. As I watched, she made 2 or 3 calls, trying different numbers as the help desk was not picking up the phone. She was obviously busy with that. The bloke running the checkout was obviously busy trying to get it working again.

After at most five minutes of faffing around, they made a decision to move to another checkout terminal, which turned out to not be suffering the same problem. I quietly packed up my groceries into a hand basket and carried them across to the next checkout. The queue reformed in the same order as it was before, and this time the woman's credit card was processed.

The bloke in front of me then started going off. He verbally abused the manager for being an idiot, for having no customer service skills and when she had the temerity to say something like, "We are trying out best, sir", he accused her of being aggressive and confrontational and having zero customer service skills.

Everyone in the queue went a bit red at this point, and most looked at the floor in embarrassment. I was about to butt in, because this idiot's purchases had been processed and his credit card had been swiped through the machine, but the checkout bloke was waiting for him to key in his PIN. He kept trying to interrupt the idiot's flow of invective to ask him to key in his PIN so he could finish serving him and deal with the rest of us.

But the idiot payed no attention to him, and continued his rant without regard for the rest of us patiently waiting for him to clam up and go.

I was in a quandary - if I tapped him on the shoulder and told him to shut up and key in his PIN, because the rest of us wanted to go home and hear nothing more from him, would he have then gone off at me? My experience with the previous nutter was that they fixate on the last object to hold their attention, so he would have ignored the supermarket manager and gone ballistic at me for daring to touch him (on his hairy shoulder - he was wearing a blue singlet) or some other trivial transgression.

So I let it go, and waited for him to run out of steam and depart - which he eventually did.

In the process, he of course managed to completely wind up the manager and put her in a state - just what you really want at the end of your shift on a hot night. Once he was out of earshot, I told her to ignore the idiot - it was clear to the rest of us they had problems, and we didn't need handholding like he did. I thought the staff did the right thing. I was satisfied. He was clearly a jerk.

As I was walking out to my car, this guy passed me going in the opposite direction. He had put his bags in his car and was going back to give them another serve.

That was something I was definitely not going to get involved in.

I bet this guy is the sort of jerk that walks in the middle of our bike paths. I bet he drives like he owns the road too.

And to think that I was going to write a nice post tonight on tomato and tarragon salad, and the pleasure of eating in a cool backyard in the midst of this heatwave.

Thanks arsehole, for ruining the evening for lots of people.

The piffle has started

Who writes this garbage?

The President is scheduled to meet his high-powered team of economic advisors as he tries to push a trillion-dollar stimulus package through Congress designed to kick-start the staggering economy and create or save millions of jobs.

"High-powered"? A rifle is high-powered. Economics advisors with guns are people to avoid. But shooting advisors that provide poor advice might help to "encourage the others" to get it right next time - or shut up.

"tries to push"? The Democrats are salivating at the thought of approving the largest barrel of pork in the history of the planet. A billion pigs will have to be sacrificed to supply all that pork. There are not enough pigs in China to provide that much pork. He doesn't need to "push" his package - if anything, he needs to act in a dignified manner as Congress snatches it out of his hands and whacks it with a huge rubber stamp (made in China).

"designed to kick-start"? You kick-start motorbikes. You have to start them because when you finish your journey, you switch the motorbike off. An economy never stops moving. Does anyone imagine that the economy, like the TV test patterns of old, goes to sleep at 10 o'clock at night, and needs to be "kick-started" by the Treasurer at 6am? Presumably after the crowing of a rooster?

"staggering economy"? Gee, did you just see the economy stagger out of that pub? It lurched over there and vomited in that rubbish bin, then it curled up in that park over the road and went to sleep. It's been burping and farting and snoring all night. And the stench! Staggering - pfft.

"create or save millions of jobs"? What is a job? Is it like a whale? We are fond of saving whales from being stabbed with an explody-harpoon, then thin sliced and served on top of tasty morsels of rice, but in the end, even those "saved" whales die. Of natural causes. Unless whales live forever, like the Rolling Stones. But jobs are the same - no job lasts forever. The continual process of creative destruction, of technological and social progress, ensures that many of the jobs that existed when we were born will have disappeared by the time we die - or even by the time we hit middle age. Met a chimney sweep lately? Or anyone that mines coal by hand? Char maids seem pretty rare, and the job of bookkeeper has been superceded by accountants and financial controllers. Companies come and go too - Sydney is littered with department stores that were all the rage in the 1920's, and have since ceased to be. You can no more save a job than hope to live forever - even the North Koreans are going to find that out one day, when there will no longer be a need for bum-wipers to the Kim dynasty.

It gets worse:

"He used this opportunity on his first day in office to communicate his commitment to active engagement in pursuit of Arab-Israeli peace from the beginning of his term," said Mr Gibbs

Try reading that slowly, and then try and figure out what he meant. What a carton of spawning frog shit.

"He used this opportunity" - he made a phone call.

"to communicate his commitment" - meaning, "next time you start shooting at each other, I will make some mighty pronouncements. With pauses in appropriate places." He might as well have said, "I am committed to commitment", or "I am committed to committing to commitment".

"active engagement" - meaning, "I'm sending Hillary. Thanks for getting her off my hands".

"in pursuit" - meaning, we never intend to actually get anywhere - we'll just run around in circles for a while, looking busy and saying that we are pursuing something, anything - even if we are pursuing our tails.

Gibberish. Utter gibberish. And the papers print it like it's holy gospel.

What a pack of fungus covered arseholes.

Change and hope

Oops, you say, didn't you get that the wrong way round?

Nope.

If I'm going to say something about the current Obama-frenzy, I might as well get it over and done with. J taped part of the inauguration, and I listened to about 30 seconds of it. I then tuned it out. The gist of his speech seemed to be this:

"If we throw smarter people and more money at government, it will solve all our problems".

I beg to differ. But before I start, was his inauguration longer than the wedding of Charles and Di? It seemed to go on forever.

To "change and hope."

I spent a few years working in the public sector. I started near the bottom, and being a reasonably smart cookie, I moved up through the ranks. At various times, I either worked directly for a chief executive (two of them), or was at most three rungs removed from the top banana. I saw life at the bottom of the heap, experienced life in the middle, and dealt with board-level stuff quite extensively for a while. I even got some experience working closer to a Minister than most pubes get.

In short, I got around.

I met some very smart people, including a bonafide rocket scientist who was a genius. I met some incredibly hard working people. I met people who were a cross between a library and a who's who in terms of their knowledge of public service history and who did what. I dealt with budgets in lean times and propserous times. I hired a lot of people, fired the odd one and did my best to motivate people to deliver good results at low cost.

I also met my fair share of dummies, lazy-arsed bastards, psychopaths and axe-wielding maniacs.

But on the whole, the cross section of the public sector is no different to say the cross section of all the people in the supermarket that you last visited, or the pub that you last had a drink at. Public servants are no smarter or dumber on average than people working in most companies in the private sector. Yes, there are some companies that work very hard at recruiting exceptionally bright and talented people, and they can afford to pay enough to attract those people. But if you take someone on $60k in the public sector and match them up against someone earing $60k in the private sector, they'll be much the same in general.

This is one of the reasons when I laugh at the idea of public service attracting the "brightest and best". The public sector already has a good share of those people. Most of them are beavering away, working terrible hours and making hurculean efforts to try and get the public sector to deliver reasonable services with some level of value for money.

Most of them are failing.

It's not for want of trying, or lack of money. Although they'll swear they are all about to expire from poverty, many public sector agencies and departments are awash with money. The problem is that the budget process means it is unevenly distributed, so that within one department, group A could be drowning in cash, unable to spend it, and group B is shivering around a fire made up of lumps of coal collected from passing coal trains.

All departments could free up a lot of cash straight away through the simple expedient of sacking people - who are expensive. But they'll never do that. If DOCS needs to buy a car so that field staff can actually visit children at risk, but they have no money to do so, instead of getting rid of a few useless mouths and freeing up the money, they'll keep the useless mouths on and all the field staff will spend their days sitting in the office, drinking tea and eating biscuits and moaning about the uselessness of their management.

Throwing more smart people into the system won't help either. The trouble with smart people is that most of them like working hard and they love a challenge. Government is forever throwing up challenges, and the smart people react like a shark to a bleeding penguin. They want in, they want action, they want to solve this problem. And that problem. And this problem as well, and that one over there, and....... but there are too many problems in the world for even the biggest government to solve them all. They're like hyperactive chipmunks with a can of Coke.

Smart people generally lack filters. The public sector desperately needs a big set of filters, where they look at problems and sort them like sheep at a muster. We kill this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and we'll consider keeping this one to work on.

If the public sector/government used that sort of process, they might actually have a hope in hell of delivering some of the things that they set out to achieve. I like to think of McDonalds. McDonalds makes no pretence about serving fancy food, or having a wide menu. They offer simple food, generally bland in taste and appearance, that is cheap, quick and easy to prepare and serve. The Quarter Pounder shows the genius of simplicity. A meat patty, plastic cheese, three slices of pickle and a squirt of ketchup. Horrible, somehow delicious, and the same in Ulan Bator and Hooflungdung.

The public sector is anything but McDonalds, and it's that way because the people working in it and the people driving it from the top don't want it to be McDonalds. McDonalds is not seen as challenging enough for smart people - who wants to deliver bland, boring products that never change? Smart people want to deliver smart, sexy, forever changing products - just like the mobile phone market.

I will try and get to "change and hope".

In my time, I saw a lot of "change and hope". Orders would come down for a change to be made, and we'd hope that it would work.

It generally didn't. We might get someway towards our target, but then we would change again, and hope that this time it would work.

I spent some time working with a bloke who swore that in his career, he could list 30 distinct organisational reshuffles and reporting structure changes. Many of them simply reversed an earlier change. By the time I started working with him (the result of another change), he had given up all hope. We parted ways soon after, thanks to another restructure.

I am cynical about all this "change and hope" guff, because hope is not a substitute for action. It is not a subsitute for failing to think through the consequences of your actions. Praying that it will be "alright on the night" is not a recipe for success.

"Change and hope" really means a bunch of air-head, power-mad lefties running around trying to make the world a better place by throwing scads of money at people who have consistently failed at almost everything they have done in the past - the public service - and hoping that they will get it right this time.

That's not hope and change.

That's insanity.

Firegazer ends the beer drought

I mentioned to Gaydancer - sorry, Firegazer - the other night that we still hadn't gotten around to stocking the new fridge with beer. The old fridge was so small, there was no room for it, so I'm not used to the idea of putting beer in the fridge - or taking it out for that matter.

Pinkprancer - sorry, Firegazer - generously donated two bottles of Boag's, one of which can be seen in the Monkey chair at left (how is it that the only chair that we own with a beer holder belongs to a three year old?)


The fridge has now been christened. I hope Balletdancer - sorry, Firegazer - is happy that the world is a more sociable place.

[Sorry M, but whenever I think of Firegazer, it immediately brings to mind Mills & Boon. "Penelope waited as Stargazer rode towards her on his unicorn, her loins heaving with lust blah blah blah".]

I join the compassion junkies

Today, I have decided to jump on the compassion junkie bandwagon, and see what it feels like to propose a propose a solution to poverty that has no hope of being implemented. But I am sure it will feel good, which is the important thing. Actually solving the problem is secondary to making the appropriate noises and gestures. I'll start my hand-wringing now.

One thing low income people do more than high income people is that they smoke. Gallup has a great graph illustrating this, and although the data is American, I am pretty sure this would hold true in most western countries. Poor people spend a higher proportion of their income on tobacco products than other income groups, and they are more likely to suffer financial stress.

NSW also has one of the lowest smoking rates in the Western world (13.9%). Thanks to years of anti-smoking campaigns and high taxes, pretty much the only people still smoking are a hard core. They are unlikely to give up, come hell or high water.

So let's cut tobacco taxes in order to help the poor. Smokes cost, what, over ten bucks a pack? A huge chunk of that is tax. Let's say your average tattooed, uggboot wearing, unemployed bogan in a housing commission slum smokes a packet a day - that's over $70 a week going up in smoke. That's a huge hit for someone on welfare, unless they are supplementing their income with a bit of drug dealing, theft and welfare fraud on the side.

If we cut the cost of a pack to $5, that will immediately put at least $35 a week into their pocket. That's $35 more that they can spend on booze, tyres for their sports car, tattoos, chunky gold chains, mobile phones and fast food. We need that kind of economic boost right now. Or $35 less per week that they have to garner through credit card fraud, extortion and break and enter.

Face it, these bogans are never going to stop smoking until the coffin lid is being nailed shut. They smoke because they like to smoke. Their friends smoke, so it's very social. They have enormous amounts of time on their hands, because they don't work, and smoking is a great way to kill time. That is why enormous numbers of prisoners smoke - they have all the time in the world.

Government programs of all types fail badly when aimed at these people - they don't read the SMH, and they are all watching cable TV, so they don't see the anti-smoking ads. Or any ads that cajole them to lose weight, not throw their rubbish in the street, not speed or street race or hoon generally, not to do drugs, not to binge drink and not to bring stupid stuff in through customs. They have very thick hides when it comes to government do-gooding messages.

So why continue to punish them with high tobacco taxes? It's akin to charging cancer patients a huge tax for chemotherapy drugs - I know that is a terrible thing to say, putting smokers and cancer patients in the same bucket, but both desperately need their drug, and both will pay or do anything to get it.

Governments are simply being needlessly cruel by continuing to punish smokers through high taxes. The burden falls most heavily on the poor. All those whining social justice baboons would be doing their client base a huge favour if they supported this change.

Ahhhh, I feel better already.

Where does the SMH get these clowns?

The SMH dug up a professor from Deakin University's school of law this morning, and asked him to write an incredibly stupid article. That, at least, is the only reason why I can think this pile of putrid garbage was published today.

Having read it twice, I have come to the conclusion that either the dumbing down of our universities has gone so far, even the professors have an IQ of fish shit, or our havens of tranquility are returning to the drug culture of the 1960's.

Apart from being even more badly written than one of my thrown together rants, get a load of this stupidity:

It is also why developing countries are entitled to refuse to adopt greenhouse targets. Global warning has been caused solely by Western nations, whose use of cheap energy increased their prosperity, while at the same time refusing to share the largesse with the largely hungry Third World. People in developing nations are no less entitled to improve their lot.

Western countries are the sole cause of global warming? Has this guy never heard of China and India?

Then there is the crack about "cheap energy". If you want cheap energy, the places to look at are Iran, Venezuala and most of the middle east - hardly "western countries". Petrol is so cheap in Iran, smugglers are smuggling it out of the country to sell it at higher prices elsewhere, leading to chronic shortages in a country sitting on an oil lake. India also heavily subsidises energy costs for farmers - the government pretty much gives electricity away over there. The same holds true in a lot of South America. Sure, the supply can be pretty rough and ready, but it's cheap.

He then has to say that we are refusing to share our largesse with the "largely hungry" world. I guess he is referring to third world shit holes like the Congo, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Somalia, which do contain a lot of hunger. But how would "sharing our largesse" help these countries? If we give aid to Zimbabwe, Bob Mugabe and his mates just steal the lot. If we give aid to the Sudan, the government steals it, sells it and then uses the cash to buy weapons in order to kill more of its citizens. We tried to help out Somalia, and ended up with Black Hawk Down. A stack of aid was even sent into Gaza last week - Hamas looted 100 trucks worth of aid and then sold it on the street.

The west has been sharing its largesse with the poorer parts of the world for centuries. We have developed most of the technology that shapes the modern world, and we have been sharing it and transferring it to other countries without regard for race, religion, creed or political persuasion. Think of Japan prior to the Meiji Restoration in 1868 - today we would see it as a backward, third world dump (with nice artwork and good baths). The west transferred all the new technologies of the day to Japan in a short period of time - the railways, telegraph, electricity, ship building, modern armaments and so on.

Pearl Harbour was not pulled off by a bunch of backward, starving, third world spear chuckers.

The British exported one of the most revolutionary technologies to every continent in the 19th century - the railways. They built railways in India, China, all over South America, Asia and Africa. With the railways came the telegraph, and then electric lights, dams, sewers, modern health practices (vaccinations etc) and on the list goes. Radio, radar, television, the modern printing press, the motor vehicle, bridge construction techniques, computers, power stations, fridges blah blah blah.

Some countries, which were utterly bombed out wastelands 50 years ago (Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan) siezed on the opportunities that the west gave them, which also included transfers of capital and injections of modern management techniques (the Japanese lapped up Quality Management from Demming, an American) and quickly turned themselves into modern industrial or trading powerhouses. Other countries, such as Zimbabwe and Burma, started from a better position than say South Korea - bombed flat by 1953 - and turned themselves into economic wastelands.

Is that our fault? Did they fail because we didn't share enough largesse?

No. They failed because they fucked it up. And they will continue to fail until they reform the way they do things. Us giving them more money won't fix things. I've never been attracted to the idea that giving a junkie more heroin will entice them to give up taking drugs. The same goes with pouring money into fucked up, kleptocratic, murderous regimes.

This moron though can't help himself.

No Australian living below the poverty line should pay tax. It is mindless, especially as they are then subsidised by the welfare system. It is bureaucratic, unjustifiable nonsense. About 10 per cent of Australians are living below the poverty line (about $700 a week for a family of four).

I think everyone should pay income tax, even if those on low incomes only pay a very small amount. The reason for that is I don't want to see a society created where you have one group paying all the tax, and getting little in return (the well off) and another group paying no tax, but getting all the benefits. The danger is that if the latter group grows large enough, they will simply ratchet up the taxes and benefits until it becomes unsustainable. People who pay no tax will always be happy to vote to increase the taxes on those that subsidise their lifestyles. Everyone should have some skin in the game, no matter how minor it is.

Yes, it is bureaucratic nonsense at one level, but it helps to glue society together - everyone contributes. Those on low incomes, no matter how little they are earning, should feel the pain of paying income tax. That way, they might think twice before wanting to "soak the rich".

When morons like this suggest ideas like this, I have a simple proposition. If you don't want a low income family to pay income tax, that's fine. You pay their tax bill for them. You feel their pain. I'm not interested.

I will now drift off on a tangent.

When the social welfare safety net was setup decades ago, it was supposed to be a temporary net for working people that had fallen on hard times. Let's say I can't get work this year, and we run down our savings to the point where there is nothing left, and I have to feed a family of five. At that point, I can understand Centrelink kicking in with welfare payments to keep us alive until the economy picks up and I get a job. But it is a temporary thing - to tide one over when times are bad. I have worked since I got my first job at 12, and even if I end up out of a job, it will be temporary - I intend to work again.

Thanks to social justice jerks like this professor of stupidity, that has morphed into the idea where it is no longer "employment insurance" - it is now a lifelong support system for those that don't want to work. The "intent to work" has gone. The "temporary" nature of welfare was gone by the wayside.

I don't particularly want to work either. I'd love it if my parents were loaded, and left me with a trust fund to live off. I'd spend six months of the year skiing, and the rest surfing or loafing on the beach. But what I want to do and what I have to do are two different things, so I work.

That's just tough shit.

But we now have an entire class of people for whom the idea of "tough shit" does not apply. They can fail their way through school without consequences, for it does not matter if they graduate as utterly unemployable goons - the state will provide. It does not matter if they are feckless, reckless and useless - the state will provide. The idea of work has gone right out the window. A temporary palliative has become a lifelong crutch.

Which is why I laugh when I read people moaning about the poverty line. What Professor Stupid should be asking is, "Why are these people below the poverty line?"

If the answer is, "they jerked around at school and made life a misery for their fellow students and all the teachers", then I say, "tough shit then - suffer in your jocks."

Actions have consequences. You screw up at school, you potentially screw up your life.

If the answer is, "they are addicted to ice/heroin/speed/dope", then I say, "tough shit - how does that make you deserving of paying less tax?" (One might in fact ask why all welfare payments are not dependent on passing a fortnightly drug test).

If the answer is, "I have two kids, and the fathers of both shot through when I got pregnant", then I really start to feel a good belly laugh coming on. In the dim, dark past, women usually checked a man out before rooting him - in order to see if he could provide for a family. Only suitable breadwinners had a hope of getting a root. Women were not so liberal with their favours, because no one wanted to get up the duff to a complete duffer, who'd shoot through and leave you barefoot, pregnant, broke and hungry.

Now, the state will provide. You can get knocked up, and the state will hand over the moolah. A baby bonus for starters, and a fortnightly deposit after that for the next 18 years.

But the downside is that if your "man" does a runner, you might find it tough to find work as a single mum. The consequence of that is you will be poor - the state will feed, clothe and house you, but it is not obliged to turn on the gravy tap. People who work hard get to live in a McMansion with hot and cold running champagne and nine Mercedes in the garage. If you choose to fuck completely useless dickheads, then you'll soon find that actions have consequences, and they are generally unpleasant.

The current economic circumstances aside, this is a land of opportunity. You don't have to be a swot at school to pull down a six figure income - if you are prepared to work in the middle of nowhere, driving a truck on a mine can deliver $100,000 per year to people who might be anything but rocket scientists. And yes, times are tough and mines and closing and those jobs are rare these days, but we've just had a boom like no other, with jobs like that 10-a-penny, and useless sacks of shit on the poverty line could not be arsed to put in a hard days yakka in order to triple or quadruple their income.

What is mindless is the idea of trapping people in the underclass through a raft of do-gooder ideas that have spectacularly backfired.

Instead of finding new ways to betray the constituency that gave him power, Rudd could contemplate one good reason for not increasing the tax-free threshold to the poverty line.

Because the idea was suggested by a moron, who has no place teaching impressionable minds at one of our universities. You wonder why the courts are choked with lawyers arguing that their criminal clients are "victims"? Look no further than this twat.

An excellent set of laws

I'm not qualified to judge most of these, but the 2nd law is universal.

More photos for Harold

There is the world that Harold Scruby inhabits, and then there is the real world. When I write about things, I divide my statements into two groups - those which are based on direct observation, and those that are based on conjecture.

For instance, in this photo, we directly observe two pedestrians ignoring the pedestrian lane to their right (the pink path near the water) and walking along the bike path (I waited until they were standing right on the bike logo before taking this photo). Direct observation tells me that there are a lot more pedestrians straying into bike lanes than there are bikes straying into pedestrian zones.

I will now speculate. I will add conjecture. I think these pedestrians are doing it because they are fat-headed, care-nothing-for-thou pricks. I bet these are the same people that behave stupidly in supermarket queues. I bet these are the sort of people that cut you off when they are driving a car. I bet they are the type that talk loudly in cinemas, and spend the entire movie talking on their mobile. If they own a dog, they are the type that lets it crap on your lawn, and then doesn't pick up after the dog.

The Americans have a nice term for these people - "ass clowns". I'm not sure exactly what an "ass clown" is, but I am sure I am looking at two prime examples right here.


Here is a better photo of where your tax money has gone. Council has put a lot of effort into building one path for pedestrians and one for bikes, colouring them differently, separating them with a garden and erecting signage every hundred metres or so. The only people who have an excuse for walking in the bike lane are the blind, because the bastards in the council have completely ignored the disabled (not that I see much point in a blind person walking around an area that has a smashing view - kind of defeats half the purpose of doing The Bay).


This section is slightly different, in that both lanes are black - but it's still screamingly obvious to all but the utterly oblivious that one lane is for those on two (or four) feet and the other is for those on two wheels.


Last year, another cyclist wrote to our local paper and described this section of path as the "inner west intelligence test", implying that a reasonable number of pedestrians are too thick to pass a fairly basic test. I tend to agree. I'd be happy if Harold suggested implementing a test for pedestrians. Those that failed would be shackled with a ball and chain, thus limiting their ability to go very far at all, where all they do is annoy the hell out of the rest of us.

I just thought of another directly observed example of stupidity. When I was shopping tonight, my access to part of the milk fridge was blocked by a woman who had propped the fridge door open and was reading the label on a carton of milk. She didn't open the door, take out a carton, close the door, step back and then read it - she kept the door open, letting cold air out and blocking everyone else who wanted that variety of milk.

Luckily for me, the stuff I wanted was in the next fridge. When I got to the end of the cold aisle, having stocked up on OJ and apple juice and other dairy products, I turned and found that she was still standing there with the fridge door open - except a queue of very polite shoppers had formed behind her. She was utterly oblivious to her impact on her fellow shoppers.

I bet she is the sort of person that does that, then complains to the store manager that the milk is warm!

In the end, pedestrians are not idiots. Cyclists are not idiots. Motorists are not idiots.

People are idiots.

If you are an idiot in one walk of life, chances are you are an idiot in all walks of life.

Can't we banish these people to an island or something?

Be upfront, you slimey toads

The Fairfax press proved once again today that it is a brazen front for unions, socialists and other rent-seeking, power hungry doom-mongers from the left. It did that by publishing a story titled Study condemns ramshackle schools.

The Australian Education Union put out a press release about a report that it commissioned, and the SMH printed it without batting an eyelid. The story has not been fact checked. There are no comments from any other interested parties that might have a different opinion to what the report contains. There is no attempt to see whether the report has been peer reviewed before publication. It’s just blatant lefty propaganda from a bunch of private school hating fellow travellers.

Let me have a go at it, paragraph by paragraph.

AUSTRALIAN public schools have been allocated far less to upgrade buildings and classrooms than schools in the United States and Britain, renewing concerns that too many students are studying in dilapidated conditions.

Having read the report from cover to cover, I can find nothing that supports this paragraph. The report throws dollar figures from the US around (for instance, that “in the last six years, of the $124 billion spent on school construction…), but no numbers for the UK. No tables are presented to show how we are spending much less than the US and the UK. It is a statement plucked out of thin air.

Nothing is said about how the US figure of $124 billion is derived. Every country funds education differently. In the US, a lot of the state system is funded through property taxes at the local or municipal level. Each municipality decides how much money to raise and spend on its public schools. The differences across the country are huge.

The US Federal government has recently thrown a lot of money at the school system, but without explaining where the money has been spent, for all we know a big chunk of that $124 billion might have been spent on buildings in private schools (I mention that because the main thrust of this AEU report is that private schools spend a lot more on buildings in Australia than state schools, and that this is unfair and horrible and so on).

We are not told the exchange rate at which that $124 billion is converted to Australian dollars.

In short, the first paragraph is baseless. No evidence is presented to show we spend less. None.

As schools prepare to reopen, research has found Australian governments are spending about $1000 less for every student on school infrastructure than the US and Britain, a funding gap of $11.2 billion since 2002.

One thing I have read is that the yanks have thrown so much money at school buildings, they now have a lot of schools standing empty. There was so much money sloshing around, a lot of it was spent incredibly badly. Schools were built where there are no kids, so they’ve been mothballed. Throwing a lot of money at something will not necessarily yield good results. We used to call that sort of spending "pork" and/or "waste".

In the UK, schools are being built through a PFI scheme (Private Finance Initiative), and there are reports coming out that the UK government has had its face ripped off by financial sharks. Again, simply spending a lot of money on a school is not necessarily going to provide a good result for the taxpayer. You can easily buy a Kia for the price of a Rolls Royce if you are an idiot.

The great unspoken bogeyman here is the fact that enrolments in the state system are shrinking, and have been for decades. We don’t necessarily need to build more buildings at state schools to cater for more students, because the system has fewer and fewer students every year.

There may in fact be a case for demolishing unnecessary buildings – the NSW state government has certainly tried to close state schools in the last decade that didn’t have enough pupils. The AEU thinks that if a tonne of money is thrown at state school bricks and mortar, this decline will be reversed. Flash new buildings are seen as the holy grail of rebuilding state school enrolments.

Sorry to disappoint you guys, but the answer is software rather than hardware. Lefty, state school ideologues think that parents send their children to private schools because they have ivy covered buildings.

Wrong.

The hardware is attractive, but it is secondary to the software.

The software is what they teach and how they teach it. The software is the teachers, their principles and their morals.

25 years ago, I went to a very expensive private school. Today, my eldest goes to a state schools that costs us about $1,000 a year in fees and so on. The teaching facilities at the state school today crap all over those that my private school had 25 years ago. But if I was given a choice, I would send him to that private school of 25 years ago, because he would certainly get a better education than he’s getting now. Call me an old fossil if you like, but I'm not impressed with the new age shit which passes for educational techniques in the state school system.

As for $1,000 gap in spending per student between Australian and the US/UK, consider a study done back in 2005 into school costs.

The study looked at government schools and came up with all sorts of numbers, but this one stood out at me:

The average cost per student in a state high school is $8,068 – that includes teacher salaries, admin costs, operating expenses and depreciation.

The least cost state high schools ran at $7,006 per student – a gap of $1,062. The biggest areas of difference were admin and support salaries (least cost were 45% below the average) and operating expenses (54% below average).

In state primary schools, the least cost ran at $4,982 per student, with the averate at $6,050 – a gap of over $1,000.

Hmm. Maybe, just maybe, we have put different priorities on our schools - we prefer teachers over buildings. We prefer software over hardware. A big chunk of that $1,000 difference can be explained by "children at risk", which is a PC term for what we used to call retards. Yes, that's an offensive term, and shouldn't be used, but Junior comes home and complains about how the retards in his class are disruptive, the retards are screwing up his education and the retards make trouble on the bus, so I think it is only fair to him to use his exact description. He hates the retards. (His friends also like to describe things they don't like as "gay").

He's completely unfair of course, but that is the nature of teenagers. From my reading of various reports, the extra costs come from dealing with Aboriginal kids, kids from homes where English is a second language, and slum kids (oops, there I go again). Sorry, lower socio-economic groups.

You may like to consider for a minute this conundrum. Our state school system is creaking because it costs a lot more to teach kids who don't speak English. Resources are being diverted to give them extra teachers, additional programs and the like. These kids are from migrant and refugee families. If we think our state school systems are going down the gurgler, why are we continuing to load them up with refugee kids who have all sorts of psychological problems, have missed years of schooling, don't speaka the lingo and so on? It's the same with our carbon emmissions. You want to stabilise CO2 output? Stabilise the population.

I have nothing against migrants. The mother of my children is the child of migrants who came here unable to habla the lingo. If it costs more to teach them, and Australians think it is a good idea to take in more migrants, then so be it. But it shits me to tears when the likes of the AEU ponce around saying, "it's so unfair, the private system has all these advantages" when that is often not the case. The private system is not unfairly advantaged. The state system is not funded to service the needs of refugees, migrants and so on. Either admit that, and give state schools a wedge of cash, or cut off the flow of refugees. But don't dick around saying the problem is that the private schools get more money because parents are prepared to pay high school fees.

Rant over (for the moment).

A report by Adam Rorris, an education economist who has worked for the United Nations, says investment in public school buildings is about one-third of the amount spent by private schools.

I tried looking this guy up, and couldn’t find exactly what it was that he did for the UN.

As for investment in state school buildings being 1/3 of that at private schools, I can believe that figure. However, you have to ask why this is the case, and whether boosting spending to the same level as private schools is necessarily a good thing.

“Keeping up with the Joneses” is not the way to run education policy. Should I renovate my house to take it from 3 bedrooms to 5, and from one bathroom to three, and to add a home cinema because my neighbour has just done that? Do I need any of those extra toilets and a home cinema? God no. I need that like a hole in the head. So what is the point of just doing something because someone else is doing it too? My mum used to say to me, "Would you jump off a cliff if all the other kids were doing it?"

If you ask me, a lot of private schools have massively overbuilt. My old school has spent millions on fancy new buildings, and from what I have seen, I am not sure that most of them added much value.

Private schools seem to be locked in an arms race with each other, with the worry being that if a school falls behind, it will fail to attract students. Headmasters also get a hard-on for new buildings, particularly if one will be named after them once they retire.

The alumni association that I belong to is ruthlessly efficient at raising cash from old boys. I won’t give them a cent, as I think that what they’ve got now is good enough. The old science block was demolished and a new one built, but I can’t see how chemistry has changed so much in the last 20 years that new classrooms are required to teach it. The old rule still applies that if you add water to pure sulphuric acid, it will blow up in your face.

If public schools need new buildings, then the amount of money needed to build them should be based on actual requirements, not some arbitrary need to keep up with the private system. This report reeks of class envy and the kind of stupidity that leads public servants to put up buildings that are not required, just because they have money in the budget to do so.

"We need additional funding to modernise our school buildings and ensure they are fit for 21st century learning," the president of the Australian Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, said.

I’d love someone to explain to me how “21st century learning” differs from the “20th century learning” that I went through.

The figures show that in 2002 US schools received $1892 per student, British schools received $1013 a student, and Australian public schools received $453. In 2006 British schools received $1791 a student. The figure for US schools was $1525 and for Australia it was $659.

None of these figures appears in the report. I searched on all of them. Angelo is pulling numbers out of his bum. They don’t appear in the press release either. I guess the journalist rang the AEU, and someone fed them some unsubstantiated numbers that sounded good.

For all we know, the US and UK figures might have been calculated by including both the state and private funding numbers from those countries, thus skewing them upwards. Without access to the raw numbers, who can tell where these figures came from.

"The two countries that are absolutely loved by Australian policymakers are the US and the UK … yet Australian public schools have been about $1000 behind for the last five years for which we've had … consistent data," Mr Rorris said.

These two countries are currently mired in utter financial crisis. According to Obama, the US is in a depression, and the UK is not far behind. They are sinking under a mammoth load of government debt, and enormous budget deficits. The US and UK governments have both been spending like drunken sailors for a decade, and the UK is seriously approaching bankruptcy. The US financial mess is like nothing we have seen in our lifetime.

They’ve brought that mess upon themselves by wasting money on things they didn’t need, year after year. That includes throwing insane amounts of money at schools, erecting buildings when they didn't have the kids to fill them.

And the author of this report, and the AEU, and Fairfax apparently, think this is a good idea? I say thank goodness for 10 years of prudent financial management. I say thank goodness that we didn’t spend a decade throwing pork at every school project that looked like it might have generated a vote.

I will now turn my attention to the press release, which you can find here.

The independent report by Education Economist, Adam Rorris

Interestingly enough, Adam Rorris does not list his educational qualifications anywhere in the report. Authors usually like to tell you where they got their degree, and what type of degree they got – a bachelors degree, honours, a masters or a PhD. Adam lists nothing. The only mention I could find of him being connected with a university is an old document from the University of Sydney in 1985, where he is intriguingly listed as one of two “Co-ethnic affairs officers” on what I presume was the Students’ Representative Council.

As for “independent”, Adam is listed as a fellow of the Centre for Policy Development.

The Centre for Policy Development is a leftist think tank. If you don’t believe me, check out the Board of Directors, the staff and the fellows. The information in italics is lifted directly from the centre's website, and is just a small portion of the people who work there:

They are a collection of union hacks:

• Martin Foley is a former senior adviser in the Victorian Government and former Secretary of the Victorian Branch of the Australian Services Union,
• Stephen Jones is the National Secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), taking up a three year term from 1st January 2006. Stephen has worked in the union movement for 15 years including twelve years with the CPSU and 2 years at the ACTU) ,

Labor-appointee public servants and Labor policy advisors:

• John Menadue was Private Secretary to Gough Whitlam from 1960 to 1967

Environmentalists:

• Tony Douglas is a director of media and polling group Essential Media Communications, which specializes in campaigns on public education, the environment, workers rights and other public issues. Prior to EMC, Tony was a broadcast journalist, designing and producing Australia’s first national environment radio program..)

Social justice freaks and environmentalists and Greens shills:

• Kate Walsh currently works with a range of non-profit social justice and environmental organisations as a consultant specialising in strategic communications, campaign development, facilitation and organisational sustainability. Most recently she was the Campaign Coordinator at GetUp! during the 2007 Federal Election and prior to that Director of the Mittagong Forum. Between 2001 and 2005 she was a Director of AID/WATCH and has also worked for the NSW and Australian Greens

This is not an "independent" think tank. The AEU is not a neutral group either - I read somewhere in all this that they described themselves as one of the key groups that worked to bring down the Howard government.

NewMatilda wrote about the launch of the Centre for Policy Development in 2007.

The Centre took over what used to be the New Matilda’s Policy Portal. If you are wondering what sort of things New Matilda publishes, look no further than 9 Jan 2009 when they published a piece by our favourite tool, Antony Lowenstein.

Plus our other favourite tool, Irfan Yusuf.

So, what do you think of the SMH after all that?

Funnily enough, the Silly published an article in 2006 that said:

"Some groups involved in public debate may not be quite what they seem"

The article of course only attacked right wing groups like the Institute of Public Affairs, and the SMH usually puts a rider on anything to do with the IPA by labelling it "right wing" right off the bat.