This blog is on the move

I have been getting quite a few comments from people - old-fashioned, face-to-face ones - about how they aren't sure how they can make a written comment on this site. I gather that this might be a bit of a problem with Blogspot generally so I'm packing up and moving to Wordpress. You can find all this content and more if you follow this link:

http://theinternetatemyblog.wordpress.com/

At least, I hope you can.

Regards

Brendan O'Reilly

In praise of low-speed rail

I caught a bus from Albury to Melbourne last Wednesday. It left Albury station at 4.52 and stopped all stations to Seymour where we waited 24 minutes for a train to take us to the railway station formerly known as Spencer Street. We arrived there at 9.36 pm. All of these times were scheduled. There were no delays. So it took four hours and forty four minutes to get from Albury to Melbourne, a distance of about 327 kilometers.

It has been impossible to get a V-Line train from Albury to Melbourne for about two years. They fixed up the track and this fixing didn’t work and so now they are fixing it again. Nobody has any idea of when it might be fixed.

So buses now run instead and the trip takes nearly five hours.

I for one am sick of hearing about “high-speed rail.” Just get the normal-speed rail working first. Set modest goals. When you’ve shown you can run a normal train service at normal times then maybe we’ll think about letting you play with the more expensive model.

But first things first.

Was Jeanette Howard "under-employed"?

In Wednesday’s Herald Sun Andrew Bolt complains at length about the Prime Minister’s overseas visit. He manages to fit in a lengthy insult of her partner Tim Mathieson and among this man’s crimes are the fact that he isn’t married to the woman he loves, he wore a sports jacket without a tie and he is also “under-employed.”

Now could someone with more time on their hands than I have (and a strong stomach for this sort of thing) please do a bit of checking? How many times during the Reign of the Rodent did Andrew Bolt criticise Jeanette Howard for what she wore?

And how many times did he describe her as “under-employed”?

That’s all I want to know.

He's not a miner, he's a very naughty boy

I keep reading in the paper and hearing on the news that “miners oppose the super-profits tax” or “miners” want this or think that. But when I read on or listen some more I find out that the people they are talking about are not “miners” at all. They are in fact people who own mines, or people who are the Chief Executives or the main shareholders in massive corporations that own mines. They are people who do not go underground or into an open cut each day to earn their crust. They do not dig into the ground with picks and shovels, nor do they drill into rock and pack the gap with explosive.

They are not miners! They are very rich, very powerful people with a vested interest in low taxes, weak unions and a deregulated economy. They ought to be called then, “mine owners,” or “chief executives” or “leading shareholders in mining corporations” because that is what they are.

In fact miners, real miners that is, the ones who risk their lives and get very dirty, are quite particular about who is called a “miner” and who is not. I have a friend who used to be a Health & Safety Officer in the Pilbara and he will say, ironically, “well, as an ex-miner…” and launch into some comment about hard work or dangerous machinery. But you see, he is being ironic. Yes, he used to work in a mine. No, he doesn’t really claim to be a miner. Yet he was much closer to being a miner than Clive Palmer or Twiggy Forrest or Hugh Morgan, all of whom will be described in the mainstream media as “miners.”

I have another friend who was born in Broken Hill as were his parents, all of his grandparents and many of the generation before that. His father worked underground, in the mines, for twenty or thirty years. But if you speak to him he will make a point of saying “I wasn’t a miner though.” You see even though he was deep under the earth for much of his working life, he wasn’t literally at the coalface (well, it being Broken Hill, it wasn’t so much a coalface as a silver or lead face) wielding a pick and shovel or a bloody great drill, so he wasn’t a miner and will make a point of saying so.

Why is that working people have some pride about not claiming to be things they are not? And why is it that super-rich mine owners want to describe themselves as “miners”? God forbid, Twiggy Forrest made himself a multi-billionaire before his company had even sold a shovel-full of ore. Yet he is known as a “miner.”

The reason of course is simple. It sounds better to say “miners oppose the super-profits tax” than to say “mine owners oppose the super-profits tax.” It sounds like hard-working people in hard hats with dirt on their hands are opposing a fair distribution of our common wealth. When in fact it is the super-rich selfishly holding onto the wealth that is not theirs to begin with.

Miners! The likes of Clive Palmer and Twiggy Forrest claiming to be “miners” is like a transport minister claiming to be a bus driver.

The new prison at Inverbrackie

The more I hear and read about asylum seekers the more I come to believe that this government doesn’t have a clue. They don’t have a clue about being humane and they don’t have a clue about politics.

South Australian premier Mike Rann was on PM last night talking about the new prison that is being built in Inverbrackie in the Adelaide Hills. The locals seem to be pretty angry about having several hundred asylum seekers imprisoned in their community. The way the government and the Greens are responding to this is instructive. It is the locals protesting against the new prison who have got it wrong, the line goes. The people imprisoned there are not bad people, the locals are told. Their children won’t overcrowd the local schools. The locals should make them welcome, not protest at their coming.

But why not side with the locals? Why shouldn’t they be upset? It is the government who have gotten it so wrong, who have made this into a problem when it doesn’t have to be one and who have thrust this problem onto the people of Inverbrackie.

I can’t be the only one who can see that this mess is entirely of the government’s own making. If they didn’t imprison asylum-seekers they wouldn’t have to build new prisons to put them in. Then they wouldn’t have a problem with a local community who feel, rightly, that the government’s problem is being landed in their backyard.

And it’s no use telling the locals “the asylum seekers are not a threat to you.” If that’s the case then why are they locked up? Is the government actually admitting then that it spending millions of taxpayer dollars locking up innocent people? Why is it doing that then?

And it might be unfair to the Greens but I heard Senator Hanson-Young speaking on this recently and she seemed to have bought into the logic of the government and was expressing concern that some of the locals were so vociferous in their opposition to the new prison. Some of them even expressed racist sentiments. Gosh golly. But who in their right mind would be in favour of a new prison being built next door to house hundreds of asylum seekers? I wouldn’t be. Would Hanson-Young be thrilled at the idea?

You don’t have to be a racist to oppose an asylum-seeker prison being established in your community. You just have to be a normal human being.

So here’s how the government could make the headache go away. Don’t lock up innocent people in the first place! Then you don’t have to spend hundreds of millions building new prisons. Then you don’t have headlines screaming about overcrowded prisons and hundreds more boat people on the way. People arrive, you lock them up for a few days while they have health and security checks. Then you let them go and they get on with their lives.

There are no longer overcrowded prisons full of people going mad. There are no longer angry local communities wondering why an incompetent government is dumping its problems on them. There is suddenly a hundred million dollars available for the causes of good instead of evil.

But first of all stop calling these prisons “detention centres.” They are prisons, so call them prisons. The people in them are not “detainees” they are prisoners. So you should call them prisoners. You’ll be amazed at how little sense mandatory detention imprisonment makes when you start discussing it in Plain English.

Paul Kelly, Thomas Gray and the trip to my Mum's place.

I drove up to my Mum’s house on Friday night. I didn’t leave Melbourne until 7.15 and the trip can’t be done in much under four hours with no stop at all. And I’m a stopper when it comes to driving so I thought four and a half was about right.

So I stopped once at the Mokoan truck stop. I like to stop in the gardens in Benalla but they did not appeal at nine o’clock at night, so stayed on the highway and pulled over at Mokoan. After I’d eaten my ciabatta with hommus and salad and had two cups of tea and a Monte Carlo or two I was on my way again by ten. I was very tired and I told myself “in Wodonga by eleven, at Mum’s before twelve.”

Indeed it was eleven when I pulled over in the main street of Wodonga. I had listened to Mumford & Sons since Mokoan, the whole disc plus the first three tracks again, and now I took that CD out and put on Post and it was playing as I pulled out and got going again. I had chosen it because I can sing along to every line and I thought that would be good for keeping me awake. And this proved to be the case and the album is the perfect length of course, so that I sang the last line of Little Decisions ten seconds before pulling up at Mum’s front gate.

I love singing along to Post and I noticed last night, for the first time, that there are gentle harmonies on Little Decisions and they are very subtle and very beautiful and I must have heard that album a thousand times and I’ve never noticed them before. And if I sing along to the whole album, in a full-throated fashion, when I get to Little Decisions my voice is sometimes loose enough to reach the high notes on “...big resolutio-o-o-on...” which is incredibly gratifying. It’s the highest note on the album and the one I’ve always struggled with and I noticed a year or so ago as I washed up and sang along that my voice was soaring and I not only held the note but I soared up and down on it just as Kelly does and I felt like the king of the world.

And thinking about those previously un-noticed harmonies I thought of all the great and beautiful things that are done and which go un-remarked by most people. And a few devotees might pick them up and comment as the art becomes known and studied but then again they might not. And it’s quite possible that the singers of these harmonies and the people who thought to arrange them have never, ever, been thanked for the beauty they brought to the world.

So I say to Michael Barclay and Toni Allaylis who seem to have done these harmonies, “Thank you. Thankyou for laying down your tracks for me to discover after listening to your song for the one thousandth time, for making so sweet the last few miles to my Mum’s house late on a moonlit Friday night. And thank you to the geniuses who put this record together.”

When we were children Dad read to us once or twice selected verses from Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. He was most fond of the lines:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

And if he were still alive I would make a point of seating him on the sweet spot on the couch where the CD can be heard perfectly and getting him to hear these harmonies and say to him “Dad I never noticed these harmonies for twenty five years and this is my favourite record of all time. Do you think Gray might have appreciated this moment of my discovery?”

I think he might.

Labor’s bold play to win ‘pink vote.’

This was the headline in Saturday’s Age which I had the pleasure of not reading until last night, as I was at my Mum’s place in the country. Naturally on reading the headline I assumed our brave state government was now in favour of gay marriage. Or rather, was now opposed to the homophobic aspect of the marriage laws which annihilate the love between men and between women. As if.

I am so weary of this sort of hand-wringing cowardice. If you hate gay people, just come out and say so. But if you think it’s okay to be gay then you have to be in favour of gay marriage. You just have to be. Otherwise it’s like saying, “I think black people should be treated the same as white people. Except that black people should not be allowed to get married.” Can you get away with this crap anymore? Well, no if you’re talking about race. But yes if you are talking about sexual preference.

Just come out and do it. You’ll feel so much better and you won’t have to waffle on endlessly anymore about civil unions and registrations of relationships and recognition of overseas marriages (although not as marriages, as such, of course not, but merely as “relationships.”)

Or don’t do it, suit yourselves. But don’t get all sooky and precious when you lose seats to the Greens. Or to the Liberals. Or to any party or grouping or individual who show a sausage-skin’s worth of intestinal fortitude.