I don't know what it is about the journalists at the ABC and the SMH, but they mustn't get out much. They must live in a pretty peachy little world in Ultimo and wherever the hell it is that the SMH gets produced these days.
In fact I can attest that the ABC boondoogle office block in Ultimo is a nice place to be. Take it from me, having seen a few floors in that place, the ABC is not short of money. I went to the floors where the shitkickers hang out, and by the standard of most companies, they were nice floors. Spacious, good views, nicely fitted out, recent model PC's, that kind of thing. You can tell if a company is tight fisted as soon as you walk around the back office. If the staff are sitting on milk crates at trestle tables and the PC's are all IBM XT or AT models with green screens and the phone handsets are those horrible old white analogue things that Telstra (back when it was Telecom) used to giv everyone, then you know the place is run by tightwads. That is not the ABC.
We even got taken to an in-house cafe. Yes, we had to pay for our coffee, but the place was in house on something like the 9th floor. It took up a huge amount of floor space. If it was one of our buildings, you'd be talking about 1/4 of a floor. Yes, ABC management can say that they are not having to buy tea and biscuits for staff, but think of the rent that is being spent on providing an enormous cafe area indoors. I reckon you could have stuffed 20-30 workstations into the area that the cafe took up.
It means of course that the staffers never have to venture outside, where they might meet real people.
The real people have been making some pretty amazing demands this week. I'm talking about the aftermath of the shooting in Iraq where the Army brassed up some cut lunch commando's. Yes, bad things happen in nasty places, but I loved how some bloke came out and started telling that the wheat trade would be cut off unless compo was paid.
By any stretch of the imagination, that's a pretty strong position to start negotiations from. However, I don't see that as being out of place in the middle east. The locals would just take that kind of comment with a grain of salt. It would be like me running over the neighbours cat and the neighbour then threatening to nuke our house unless compo was paid.
I take it as a sign of a society that is not used to redress through the courts. If I run over the neighbours cat, he has various legal avenues to pursue to claim a fair and just settlement. That is the world that the SMH and the ABC lives in. A legalistic, moralistic, "fair and just" kind of place.
Saddam did not leave a strong legal system in place when he was given the boot. He had not produced a society that had much concept about fairness and justice. He left behind a dog-eat-dog, beggar-thy-neighbour kind of place. Hence the looting after the invasion. What kind of nutbags loot hospitals and schools?
Clearly, the crap that has been sprouted after the shooting is just crap. Of course we will pay compo - that's the way things are done. Hell, even Wellington used to pay for the supplies he bought in Spain during the Peninsular War (although I'm not sure he paid for the collatoral damage that his battles caused). The west has a long tradition of paying its way.
The Frogs never did of course. Napoleon was a great one for taking whatever he wanted without compo, and looting ruthlessly.
Back to the stipid SMH. I don't see why they can't understand that the Iraqis are just making excitable statements as a means to up the compo payment. We should just ignore the hyperbole and stick to paying the going rate. We don't need the SMH and the ABC to ramp up the amounts we pay for ventilating people. I thought those two institutions were "culturally sensitive" enough to know how people in other countries and cultures bargain. Hell, the closest I got to the Middle East was a carpet bazaar in Turkey, so I have a small understanding of how to bargain and haggle. The smart thing to do at the start is to make some outrageous statements in order to strengthen your position. If those wankers in Ultimo could extract themselves from their plush offices and fly to say Egypt, they might bring a bit more of the real world into their reporting.
Although we could always pay the compo out of the ABC budget...... I'm sure their response then would be to pay the families 8 cents a day........ They'd probably contract in the Israelis to do the haggling for them.
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