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Readers guide to Friday on My Mind

Friday-on-My-MInd-Bob-Wilson — “Retired” journalist Bob Wilson with five years’ worth of Friday on My Mind. Photo by She Who Rarely Gets A Mention

A few weeks ago I promised you an overview of the past five years’ worth of Friday on My Mind missives, but the Federal election got in the way. Sorry about that. Today it’s a mostly politics-free zone.

I started this weekly column (it was supposed to be a one-off) with my theory (and not at all an original idea), about taking refugees and asylum seekers off Nauru and Manus Island and resettling them in small Australian towns.

But ‘The Pittsworth Solution’ wasn’t the first to get a run.

Other topics got in the way, like explaining why Morris dancers dance up the sun on the first of May. That was episode No 1; and not only have I written about this pagan ritual since, I have actually participated.

I write on random topics, often mixing subject material so if you have specific interests (solar energy, travel, politics, refugees, media analysis), use the search function to find stories.

We were travelling the outback in 2014 and on many occasions since, so there are many road travel adventures. In my naivety, I wrote about crossing the Nullarbor as if no-one had ever done it (or written about it) before.

Some of the outback posts were popular, including one about people dumping garbage (Kiljoy was here) and the time we met the Black Dog Ride, a gang of motorcyclists circumnavigating the continent to raise awareness about depression and suicide.

Some 264 episodes (316,884 words) later, I’m still FOMMing (the weekly missive is known among hard-core fans as FOMM).

Thanks to my elder sister who lives in New Zealand, I have five ring binders crammed with hard copies of Friday on My Mind. She does not have a computer so every two months or so I print out the latest and mail them off. I got in the habit of printing two copies so now have a filing cabinet drawer full of fat FOMM folders. (Downsizing, dear, remember the promise about de-cluttering. SWTSO (She who throws stuff out)

Those of you adept in the online arts might scoff to learn it took me a couple of years to discover I could insert a search function into the website. This is a very handy way to check if you are about to repeat yourself, which is not hard to do when you’ve been maintaining a blog for a long time. One of Australia’s longest-serving bloggers, economist John Quiggin, had one solution for this, posting at Christmas 2015:

“Here’s a Christmas post from my blog in 2004. The theme is that nothing about Christmas ever changes” (although he does go on to discuss the “war on Christmas”).

This is billed a readers’ guide to FOMM, as at last two thirds of readers receive the weekly email and have no need to visit the website other than out of curiosity or because I have linked an old (but relevant) article. Tip: Links to other articles are coloured blue.

I had occasion to update my curriculum vitae (CV) the other day and found that, yes, you can teach the old dog new tricks, as 107-year-old Swedish blogger Dagny Carlsson put it, after taking her first computer lesson at 99.

Under ‘other skills and experience’ I can now add webmaster, after designing and maintaining two WordPress websites with little outside help.

When you first visit the <bobwords.com.au> website, click on ‘Bio’ in the header. This is where I talk about myself in the third person, which, as any clinical psychologist would tell you, is not a healthy thing.

Nevertheless, here’s a line from my self-penned bio which has been quoted elsewhere. I said I’d started FOMM mainly from a sense of exasperation with the sins and omissions of the daily media.

“ As Bob (that’s me) told a fan: “not that I want to bite the hand that used to feed me, but I think intelligent readers want more than a picture of Kate Middleton’s bum.”

Amen, brothers and sisters.

My Recommended Reading section keeps evolving. The website statistics manager tells me it has had 199 visits of late, so hopefully some of you will also become fans of writers suggested there.

Some recommended blogs disappeared as they fell victim to blogging deficit syndrome. I’m not aware of anyone who keeps actual track of the world’s 500 million blogs, but it’s a fair guess at least half of them were single-use, short-term or, if they started out with ambitions of longevity, fizzled out after a year or two.

I have written a couple of pieces about blogging, including the one when I stumbled upon Dagny Carlsson and explored the wonders of Wikipedia.

In this one, I discovered how blogging in some countries can be a life-threatening activity.

I started off quietly, emailing the weekly rant to a small email list which grew and grew as people shared with their friends. Then, as the list got larger, I enlisted MailChimp, which somehow evades spam catchers and also schedules delivery if you are not going to be home on the day you would normally send the email. MailChimp also tells me how many of you actually opened the email!

FOMM is neither a blog nor a citizen journalism site as it mixes news, research and whimsy with a fair amount of (small l liberal) opinion.

I had a conversation on election day with a former colleague. We bemoaned the absence of what was once the journalist’s mantra – “tell both sides of the story”. Hard to believe there was a time not so long ago when one would never put personal opinion into a news story, or the news pages for that matter.

I regard Friday in My Mind as a newspaper column without the newspaper. Some columns provoke a torrent of emails; other times there is a lamb-like silence. If I make a mistake and SWTSO misses it too (uncommon), I am certain to find out about it from an alert reader, sometimes within minutes. The beauty of being online is you can correct it right away.

Few people post online comments, but those who do are inevitably adding something relevant to the topic. Despite the relative lack of feedback, my website statistics show a fairly consistent readership. Inexplicably, the most-read column of the past five years is this one about bipolare disorder and gout, where I found research that made the connection between one and the other.

Other popular reads were first-person accounts about adverse reactions to paralysis ticks and at least six items dealing with depression and anxiety.

Readers liked my recent take on the Christchurch tragedy and, going back a while, tributes to David Bowie and Gough Whitlam.

So if you have joined the FOMM flock in the last year or two or more recently, there’s quite a trove of documented journalism and comment to explore.

For example, if you enter ‘David Bowie’ in the search window you will be rewarded with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s celestial performance of Space Oddity.

Depending which boxes you ticked below the line on May 17, you may have to take the ‘leftie rubbish’ with a grain of salt, as a few long-term conservative readers apparently do.

We can thank Pliny the Elder for translating addito salis grano. In the modern context it means to view something with scepticism or not to interpret something literally. A good motto for Friday on My Mind, I reckon.

Volunteering and election fatigue

Image: Volunteers for Habitat for Humanity building a new home on Vancouver Island. Photo by Jon Toogood

It’s National Volunteer Week, as good a time as any to encourage people to offer their skills and labour to community organisations and causes they believe in.

For those who donated their time to support a political party or independent candidate, though, battle fatigue has set in.

More than four million Australians voted during the three weeks leading up to last Saturday’s Federal election. This was more than double the pre-poll vote in 2016. Instead of election volunteers concentrating their efforts on just one day, it meant putting in that sort of effort for 17 consecutive days.

University of Sydney senior lecturer Stephen Mills says the pre-polling trend is changing the traditional election campaign in unexpected ways.

“Candidates are spending less time campaigning in the community and more time at pre-polling stations. Parties are announcing their more attractive promises earlier. Party volunteers are being exhausted by long weekday shifts on the hustings. And many voters are casting their votes with incomplete knowledge.”

Mills and co-researcher Martin Drum of the University of Notre Dame Australia found that three weeks of pre-polling stretched the resources of the smaller parties.

“Early voting is not a level playing field, Recruiting and organising volunteers for three weeks is more of a challenge for smaller parties and independents than for the major parties.

“Incumbent MPs are more available to stand at pre-poll centres all day than, say, a minor party candidate with a job and other non-campaign commitments.”

While the long-term trend towards volunteering is down, 5.8 million Australians aged 18 and over carry out volunteer work every year. Volunteering can range from high-risk activities (bush fire brigades, surf lifesaving and State emergency services), to delivering for meals on wheels or selling raffle tickets outside the local Neighbourhood Centre.

My father (and maybe yours as well) would often use a barracks catch-phrase from time serving in WWII – “Never volunteer for anything.” So I can use that as an excuse for rarely volunteering, apart from local fairs, fetes and music festivals.

Big music festivals like Woodford and the National Folk Festival need thousands of volunteers to ensure that they run smoothly. This year in Canberra, the NFF engaged 1,300 volunteers on tasks ranging from MCs and stage managers to garbage detail. Even small festivals, like the re-born Maleny Music Festival, need about 180 volunteers. Music festival volunteers are given weekend tickets in exchange for an agreed number of volunteer hours ranging from 20 (NFF) to 25 (Woodford).

Volunteering for an election campaign is a bit like being one of the 45,000 Australians who held their hand up to help run the Sydney Olympics. It’s a massive job, but once it’s over you won’t have to think about it again for years.

In 2019, tens of thousands volunteered for political parties large and small. The Greens said in an email last week they needed 10,000 people for Election Day alone.

In any one of the 151 electorates, parties needed two to four people to hand out how-to-vote cards in each booth. An average sized electorate with 30 polling booths would need 120 volunteers over a 10-hour period for this one job. Each party also needed volunteers for door knocking and phoning campaigns and then to help staff pre-poll centres for two or three weeks.

It’s not just political parties that need volunteers. Lobby group GetUp said that more than 9,000 volunteers made 712,039 calls to voters and knocked on 36,315 doors. More than 1,800 volunteers put in 5,954 hours on the campaign to elect independent candidate Zali Steggall in Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah.

Even small campaigns need the support of volunteers. Controversial Anglican priest Fr Rod Bower contested a Senate seat for Independents for Climate Action Now. He told me that 50 volunteers worked with him on the campaign. It was a first for Fr Rod, who is best-known for maintaining an ever-changing campaign of political slogans outside his Gosford Parish. It was also a first for ICAN, which gained 18,430 votes in New South Wales (all-up 32,525 votes in a three-state campaign).

Who knows how many of the election volunteers of 2019 will hold their tired heads up again in 2022. Some will probably be part of a trend that began in 2014 when an Australian Bureau of Statistics social survey showed that the rate of volunteering had slipped from 36% in 2010 to 31%. The next ABS social survey can be expected later in 2019.

It may come as a surprise to find that the largest proportion of volunteers is not, as you might think, drawn from the post-retirement age group. As Professor Melanie Oppenheimer, Chair of History at Flinders University, wrote in The Conversation, the highest rates of volunteering are among people aged between 35 and 54, working full-time, with young children.

“Busy people are able to find the time to volunteer, possibly because it is important enough for them to be able to overcome their time limitations.

“The most regularly cited reasons given for not volunteering are ill health, lack of time, and lack of interest.

“With an ageing population, ill health is likely to grow as a barrier, while at the same time (there is) increasing demand for volunteer-provided services such as health or aged care.”

In a separate study, academics from Curtin University and the William Angliss Institute discovered a volunteer crisis unfolding in small rural communities across Western Australia. The researchers surveyed 10,000 people in rural WA, to find that volunteering in that part of the country is a way of life, with participation well above the national average. However, 35% of those actively involved in volunteering said they were planning to move away from rural areas, with more than half citing a lack of essential services or the cost of accessing these services in larger towns.

Australian volunteer participation is ranked second behind the US as a percentage of the adult population. The UN Volunteers global report found it accounts for the equivalent of 109 million full-time workers. The majority (57%) of this figure are women, while in Australia, the percentage is even higher, with 63% of volunteers being women. Another pattern observed in Australia found organisation-based volunteering rates were higher for the youngest group of people (aged 14 to 24) and people over 65.

ABS data shows that Australia’s volunteers each put in an average of 135 hours a year – 783 million hours of unpaid labour per year. According to Volunteering Australia, they are involved in areas including arts/heritage, business/professional/union, welfare/community, education and training, animal welfare, emergency services, environment, health, parenting, children and youth. As the global study found, 70% of volunteering is informal and community-based, including ‘spontaneous volunteering’, after floods, bushfires or cyclones have left communities devastated.

Flinders University researcher Lisel O’Dwyer has estimated the economic contribution of volunteering in Australia at $290 billion, surpassing revenue from major sectors including mining and agriculture. (The figures, revised in 2014, take into account the value of lives saved by volunteers such as firefighters, SES crews and life guards.)

Try telling the mining lobby that.

Global Insights On Neglected Political Issues

There have been issues aplenty for people to mull over ahead of tomorrow’s Federal election, not all of them as obvious as climate change, refugees or the Murray Darling.

Chair of Australia21, Paul Barratt, named those issues as his top three in a contribution to John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations newsletter. But he also added 10 neglected political issues. They include inequality, reversing the cuts to research and development, early childhood education and a world-class NBN. Barrett, a former Departmental secretary of Defence and Primary Industries and Energy, would be aware of the global statistics on internet speed. Increasing the latter is, after all, the main aim of a world-class NBN.

A report in the Canberra Times last month showed that Australia dropped three places to 62nd for fixed broadband. The latest Ookla Speedtest Global Index showed that Australia is far behind many comparable economies and a few developing nations. The download speed of 35.11 Mbps recorded for March is only 60% of the global average of 57.91 Mbps.

However, a spokesman for Communications Minister Mitch Fifield told the Canberra Times Ookla didn’t measure the speeds of which the NBN is capable.

“It measures the speed packages that households purchase – which is the main determinant of speeds received.” The spokesman said around half of the 5.1 million people connected to the NBN had chosen 25 Mbps or lower, eschewing the faster options.

Australians not yet connected to the NBN network are limited to an average speed of 8 Mbps with an ADSL connection (by way of explanation if I have not replied to your emails).

Barrett points out that faster internet is not just about downloading films or online gaming; it is about the needs of industry in the city and the bush as well as social benefits like remote delivery of medical services.

Coal and climate change

Whether you believe that climate change is the only real issue in this election or not, Australia is demonstrably dragging the chain in terms of mitigation. This is without a doubt the No 1 neglected political issue.

Australia is performing worse than most other advanced countries in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The global SDG Index ranked Australia 37^th in the world (down from 26^th last year and behind most other wealthy countries including New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Efforts to sway the country away from its love-affair with fossil fuels have struggled against the incumbent government’s determination that ‘coal is good for humanity’. There’s no doubt about the growing demand for coal to generate electricity in China and India and there’s no shortage of players, including Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer, poised to open up new mines in the Galilee Basin. It’s not hard to figure out why. Australia exported $US47 billion worth of coal – 36.9% of global trade in 2018. Demand for thermal coal to fuel power stations is highest in China, the US and India. New coal-fired power stations planned by those three nations total 334,773MW of capacity – an increase of about 23%. Research portal carbonbrief.org exposes the folly of this, saying that CO2 emissions from existing plants alone are enough to ‘breach the carbon budget’ limiting global warming to1.5 or 2C.

The good news, if you are a climate change believer, is that 14 countries (including the UK and Canada), have signed up to phase out coal power generation by 2030.The Stop Adani campaign had its genesis in 2007 when environmental campaigner Tim Flannery alerted people to the likelihood of the Galilee Basin in central west Queensland being exploited. The arguments against development of the 27 billion-tonne thermal coal resource include the low quality of Galilee Basin coal, a required expansion of an export port too close to the Great Barrier Reef for comfort and the environmental record of the applicant (Adani).

As the above infographic explains in detail, there are concerns about the amount of water required to operate (a) the mine and (b) the port. The Indian coal and power company has posted a rebuttal of claims that it will take 12 gigalitres of water from the Great Artesian Basin.

Refugees and border paranoia

The United Nations Association of Australia set out its position on refugees and asylum seekers in April last year, saying that current policies and measures need to be reviewed.

“Australia’s current policy only shifts the problem to other countries.”

“Australia’s reputation as a welcoming host country and as a responsible global citizen is diminished by our current treatment of asylum seekers and refugees arriving spontaneously, as evidenced by arguments from within the Australian community and from the UNHCR. There are alternatives.”

The UNAA states the obvious – processing arrivals offshore is not cost-effective. Between 2012 and 2016, the cost to Australia was an estimated $9.6 billion. Though costs have reduced as arrivals have decreased, the estimated cost of offshore processing for 2017-18 was $714 million.

(Offshore processing costs blew out by 52% during 2018-19. The latest Budget records that estimated actual spending in 2018-19 on offshore processing will be $1.158 billion – Ed)

Despite the weight of international criticism, Australia has persisted with the practice of detaining refugees offshore and turning boats around.

It is important to know that the Labor Party has largely promised to maintain the status quo, although it would look at New Zealand’s offer to resettle refugees from Manus and Nauru,

Australian expat musician James Fagan, who has been living in the UK for 20 years, has often had to wear criticism of Australia’s refugee policies.

But he is being asked less often, since the Brexit campaign revealed what he called the “dark underbelly of xenophobia and racism in the UK”.

“Five or 10 years ago, when Tampa and all that stuff was in the news, I used to get a lot of questions in the UK. The one that sticks in my mind was the Armenian delicatessen owner who asked me about how I felt about my homeland’s treatment of refugees. He had Armenian friends and relatives in Australia and had been following the Tampa situation closely. He asked me if I was embarrassed. I said yes!

“But I’ve stopped being asked the question and the sad truth of it is that the longer a country persists in a particular course of action, the less it becomes newsworthy.”

Which brings us to No 10 in Paul Barratt’s list of neglected political issues – the need for empathy and compassion in government.

“It should be a matter of conscious public policy that empathy and compassion underpin everything we do in the public sphere,” he writes.

“Recent Royal Commissions have demonstrated how strongly human motivations drive behaviour. Humans have a powerful competitive and acquiring motivation, which tends to turn off other motivational systems that link to caring and supporting others.

“So developing a compassionate mindset is important because it has shown that this mind-set organises our motives, emotions and actions in ways that are conducive for our own and other people’s wellbeing.”

“Recognising the needs and aspirations of every human being necessarily implies refraining from demonising any social group – refugees, the unemployed, the poor, the homeless, etc.”

Mr Speaker, I commend the Mindful Futures Network to the House (and the Senate).

(The above quote could well have come from the late ex-Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Valé to a great Australian politician who was respected by both sides of politics. SWETB) (SheWhoEditsThisBlog)

More reading – what Labor and the Greens were saying about a coalition before the 2016 election. https://bobwords.com.au/greens-coalition-bridge-far/

Refugees settling in despite funding cuts

refugees-Toowoomba-funding — Multiculturalism: Toowoomba’s Mayayali Association (Kerala province south India) participates in the city’s annual Carnival of Flowers parade. Photo by Bob Wilson.

While refugees and migrants have been welcomed into Australia’s rural communities, successive Budget cuts have made life difficult for refugee support services. Although not attracting too many headlines, a $50 million cut in the 2018-19 Budget, and another $77.9 million over four years in the 2019-20 Budget, means that organisations trying to help refugees with the transition to a new country, a new culture and a new language are left scrambling.

The Refugee Council of Australia pointed out that the Budget found $62 million extra for Operation Sovereign Borders, while spending $50 million less on refugee support services.

“The Government has savagely cut its allocation for financial support for people seeking asylum by more than 60% in just two years, from $139.8 million in 2017-18 to $52.6 million in 2019-20”.

The 2018 cuts were particularly bad for organisations like Toowoomba Refugee and Migrants Services (TRAMS), because the government also stopped funding translation services, which means TRAMS and other networks throughout Australia have to fund their own.

Over the past 15 years, more than 4,000 families have settled in Toowoomba,130 kms west of Brisbane. They came from conflict-torn homelands of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan.

TRAMS director Kate Venables told regional ABC that Federal funding was cut from $390,000 to $240,000 in late 2018, taking the organisation by surprise.

“Part of that funding now goes towards an interpreting service that was previously government funded. So really our funding was reduced to $160,000, a massive reduction for us.”

About 400 TRAMS clients are Yazadi, a persecuted religious minority from Iraq. The Yazadi follow their own religion and speak the little-known dialect of Kurdish-Kurmanji.

According to the 2016 Census, 3,657 people living in Toowoomba spoke a language other than English at home. They included Mandarin (934), Arabic (879), Tagalog (482), Dinka (474) and Afrikaans (444). Tagalog is the language of Filipino natives while Dinka is spoken by South Sudanese ethnic groups. Most of the Yazadi refugees arrived after the Census was taken.

Toowoomba’s population has more than doubled from 73,390 in 1986 to 160,799 in 2016. In a provincial city settled mainly by people of Anglo-Saxon or German descent, that is considerable growth and diversity of population. The city also has significant communities of migrants from India and the Philippines.

When we visited last September for the Carnival of Flowers, I was taken with the way the traditional street parade had become a celebration of multiculturalism and diversity. If you want to know how multicultural Toowoomba has become, the weekend we were there, more than 2,000 South Sudanese people attended a funeral for a local Anglican priest. Some of these people came from out of town, but such was the show of support they had to hire a high school hall for the service.

According to a survey of 155 newly arrived adult refugees and 59 children from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who settled in suburban Brisbane, Logan and Toowoomba, those who settled in Toowoomba had the easiest time integrating and feeling a part of their local communities.

The survey by Professor Jock Collins, Professor of Social Economics, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney and Professor Carol Read, Professor, Western Sydney University, was funded by the Australian Research Council. The findings are the first to emerge from a three-year study of settlement outcomes of recently arrived refugees in NSW, Victoria and Queensland.

Nearly all refugees surveyed in Brisbane and Logan are Christians – a consequence of the Turnbull government favouring mainly Christian refugees from Syria and Iraq. As well as settling Yazidi refugees, Toowoomba also welcomed a smaller number of Muslim refugees from Afghanistan.

I recall checking out an Afghan takeaway and grocery shop in Toowoomba’s Margaret Street. We chatted to the young man behind the counter who said that while he liked Toowoomba well enough, he found it very quiet after the constant hubbub of Kabul (population 4.65 million).

One key issue related to immigrant and refugee settlement in regional and rural Australia relates to the warmth of the welcome. Collins and Read said 68% of the refugees in Queensland overall – and 81% in Toowoomba reported that it was “very easy” or “easy” to make friends in Australia. About 60% found it “very easy” or “easy” to talk to their Australian neighbours.

“When we revisit these families in 2019 and 2020, we expect the numbers will even be higher,” the survey authors said.

Syrian refugee Yousef Roumieh, a bi-cultural support worker with TRAMS, helps Yazadi refugees with day-to-day tasks, such as booking appointments and reading mail and text messages.

He learned to speak Kurdish-Kurmanji during a five-year stay in an Iraqi refugee camp.

“There is not enough funding to pay for the supports, this is a big problem,” Mr Roumieh, formerly a pharmacist from Damascus, told the ABC.

The Department of Social Services made it clear the onus was (now) on refugee support services to provide their own interpreting services. The department said the previous arrangement was ‘contrary to the intent of the Free Interpreting Service program’.

You may recall the Australian Story episode Field of Dreams in 2016, which told of the positive outcomes flowing from settling African refugees in the New South Wales border town of Mingaloo. It’s not difficult to find similar stories, particularly in rural Victoria and NSW. The Economist published a story in January about the 400 Yazadi refugees resettled in the NSW regional town of Wagga Wagga. The primary school in the town had to hire interpreters to communicate with families (a fifth of its students are refugees) and the local college is busy with parents learning English and new trades. As the article observed “Few locals seem fussed about the changes and to those fresh from war zones, ‘Wagga’ is an idyll.”

Many grassroots organisations and charities have weighed in to help refugees make the transition to new towns in Australia. Rural Australians for Refugees (RAR) said resettlements had occurred in Hamilton, Swan Reach, Kerang, Nhill, Bendigo, Castlemaine, Shepparton, Albury/Wodonga, Wagga, Griffith, Leeton, Armidale, Mingoola and Townsville – “to name a few”.

In the tiny Victorian town of Nhill (pop 2,184), 160 refugees from Myanmar helped boost the town’s economy by taking jobs with a local poultry farm.

Funding for refugee support services is often derived from a variety of sources. The Nhill initiative was co-funded by the Federal government, Hindmarsh Shire and the poultry farm, Luv-a-Duck.

A report published by Deloitte Access Economics and settlement agency AMES Australia said the initiative has added more than $40 million and 70 jobs to the local economy between 2010 and 2015.

At its annual conference in December, the Labor Party made a commitment to increase community-sponsored refugee programmes up to 5,000 places per year, and boost funding for regional processing and resettlement. The unequivocal promise of support is in stark contrast to the $50 million cut to refugee services by the Coalition. Coincidentally, this is the exact sum set aside for the redevelopment of the site at Botany Bay where the British explorer and his crew first set foot on Australian soil in 1770.

That’s what elections are all about, really; you vote for the party that spends (or doesn’t spend) money on things you care about.

FOMM back pages:

Errata: Last week I somewhat underestimated the cost of a political bill board, which an informed reader told me was $10,000 a month.

Three (Political) Billboards Outside Caboolture, Queensland

political-billboards-Queensland — Billboards outside Caboolture, Queensland and all the way to Canberra

A week before Easter, I was driving back from Bribie Island when my travelling companion pointed out the first of three political billboards. The first read: “Don’t Vote Labor”. A little further down the road: “If Shorten wins, you lose.”

The third billboard featured the face of a minor party leader known for her dubious skill in empathising with those in the community who have a morbid fear of ethnic minorities.

“I’ve got the guts to say what you’re thinking,” the political billboard states.

As much-quoted advertising guru Todd Sampson said on Twitter: How do you say racism without being racist? It’s surprisingly clever…

That’s not an endorsement, I’m sure, just an adman’s view of what works.

My passenger said: “Don’t they have to say who authorised those billboards?” I didn’t see anything.”

That’s the problem with advertising on billboards – the message has to be extremely pithy and in letters big enough to be read from a car passing by. The driver has only a few seconds to take in the message; no chance to read and absorb the small print which, as required, must state the name, affiliation and domicile of the person authorising the advertising.

These political billboards were sighted in the seat of Longman, which was wrested from the LNP with a 4.73% swing by Labor member Susan Lamb in 2016. After the dual-citizen fracas, Lamb resigned from the seat but won it back again at a by-election in July 2018.

Longman includes the satellite suburbs of Caboolture and Morayfield and the retirement communities of Bribie Island. High pre-poll support for One Nation had highlighted Longman as the electorate to watch, but on the day, Labor held the seat against the LNP with a two-party preferred swing of 3.7%.

One Nation was third on the ballot with some 14,000 votes. Perhaps it was the inclusion of six minor parties and an independent alongside the four main contenders that did the damage, but the LNP lost support.

As The Conversation observed at the time, the Coalition’s by-election primary vote plunged 9.4% in Longman, compared with the 2016 election. The 3.7% swing against the LNP’s Trevor Ruthenberg vindicated election analysts’ warnings about the reliability of single-seat polling.

“While senior Coalition MPs have since put this down to an ‘average’ anti-government swing at by-elections, few in the party would have expected such a kicking in a historically conservative seat,” wrote Chris Salisbury, Research Associate at the University of Queensland.

As Salisbury warned, by-election results should not be extrapolated to likely voting patterns at a general election. But those three billboards outside Caboolture, might, I suggest, be a warning to the local sheriff to watch her back (cultural reference to a 2017 movie by Martin McDonagh, starring Frances McDormand).

As we set off the following week on a circuitous back roads journey to Canberra, I inevitably began noticing billboards, As a rule, billboards positioned outside rural towns advertise food, accommodation, fuel and agricultural products. Sometimes you will see a religious message and on occasions a hand-made billboard damning fracking or coal mining. But a month out from a Federal election, it was no surprise to see political billboards as parties ramping up their profiles.

One of the most common billboards we spotted on the road proclaimed “Unsee This”, which turned out to be a house ad for a billboard company with space to rent.

As you’d imagine, advertising your wares on the side of the highway is an expensive business. Most billboard companies offer a 28-day minimum ‘lease’.

A campaign source told me it cost about $10,000 a month for a billboard and $16,000 for a mail-out to the electorate. So all up a major candidate is up for $60k to $100k for a Federal campaign

United Australia Party leader Clive Palmer estimated he has spent $50 million on various forms of election advertising, including ubiquitous billboards featuring the man himself with upstretched arms. The original pitch was “Make Australia great”, but UAP has swung away from that slogan to wordy headlines about fast trains and zonal taxing.

One of my musician friends who drove through New England on her way home from Canberra spotted a Barnaby Joyce billboard in a field. She seemed surprised, maybe assuming that after the former deputy leader’s fall from grace in 2018, he might have quit politics for good.

But no, Barnaby Joyce is once against contesting the seat of New England for the National Party, seemingly unbeatable in an electorate where he holds a 16% majority. As one of the best-known politicians for the wrong reasons, Barnaby doesn’t really need to pay to have his face recognised in the electorate.

Inverell farmer Glenn Morris, while not running for New England or putting his face on a billboard, nonetheless attracted a lot of media attention. He put climate change firmly on the agenda with a five-day horseback ride over the Anzac Day weekend. Morris and his horse Hombre rode from Glenn Innes to Uralla, wearing a drizabone raincoat with the words “Climate Action” on the back, urging voters to consider the environment in the upcoming election.

“This is an urgent message. We need climate action, we need our leaders to step up and we also need our community to demand more from our leaders,” Morris told the Northern Daily Leader

“I’ve watched too many elections come and go while I’ve been researching climate change, with no emphasis at all on the environment.”

That much is certainly true, with The Guardian saying that the partisan climate debate, characterised by hyperbole and misinformation, had paralysed Australian politics for a decade.

Labor is promising stronger policy which the Coalition has merrily dubbed “Carbon Tax 2.0”, claiming it will impose a massive regulatory burden on Australia.

As you may have read, among a long list of measures, Labor wants to set a higher emissions reduction target (45% by 2030, compared with the LNP’s 26%), reintroduce the Coalition’s abandoned National Energy Guarantee, launch a carbon credit scheme for heavy polluters, and implement strict vehicle emission standards.

As The Guardian rightly points, out, this is policy which may not even happen, despite Labor’s best intentions. “The Coalition is not showing any sign of having a substantial conversion on climate change. Labor will likely need the Greens to get various changes legislated and the Greens will want a higher level of ambition than is evident in this policy.”

As is apparent from its strong advocacy against new coal mines, The Greens will want Labor to exit coal sooner than later.

So even though many lobby groups are wont to call this the ‘climate change election’ it is entirely possible the long-running ideological deadlock will continue, with little or no change.

Sweden’s teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg says she wants adults to behave as if their house is on fire.

Unfortunately, the ‘adults’ in Canberra appear to have taken the batteries out of their smoke alarms so they can char their T-bone steaks with impunity.

For those who just joined us here at Friday on My Mind, yesterday was our fifth birthday! Give me a week to cogitate about that and next week we will have a completely subjective review of five years’ of FOMM. For now, enjoy the first episode, and, if you got up early on Wednesday to Dance up the Sun, good for you.

The back roads to Canberra and musical reunions

canberra-musical-reunions — The Fagans – a musical reunion (L-R) Bob Fagan, Nancy Kerr, Margaret, Kate and James Fagan

When we planned a 2,500 kms round trip to the National Folk Festival via the back roads to Canberra, it seemed like a monumental expedition. Now that we’re home again (via Dubbo and Goondiwindi), it seems a weak effort compared to the distances travelled by overseas guests including Manran (Scotland), Nancy Kerr and James Fagan (UK), April Verch (US), George Jackson (US) and Vila Navio (Portugal).

For example, George Jackson committed himself to a 35,000 km round-trip, flying with his two other band members direct from Nashville to LA (3,218 kms). From there, they flew to Sydney (12,065 kms) then by road to Canberra (286 kms). After arriving in the late afternoon, there was barely time to eat and rest before the first gig at 11pm on Saturday night. Such is the peripatetic life of a professional bluegrass musician.

While the musicians involved in more than 120 acts were wending their way to Canberra, we chose mostly secondary roads, including an excursion through the verdant Bylong Valley in New South Wales between Denman and Bathurst.

At times I wondered if we would get there. We were towing a caravan, albeit a small one. The winding mountain road on either side of the Bylong Valley was particularly challenging. There were hairpin bends, one way bridges, narrow sections where two cars scarcely had room to pass by. Not to mention frequent signs warning of fallen rocks (and we did see a few on the sides of the road).

My main mission at the five-day National Folk Festival was to catch every concert by the fabled Australian family band, The Fagans, re-uniting for the first time in three years. Bob and Margaret Fagan and their adult children James and Kate are these days joined on stage by James’s partner Nancy Kerr. James and Nancy live in the UK, where Nancy has established a strong solo career. It reached a high point in 2015 when she was judged BBC Folk Singer of the Year.

I caught up with James for a chat and started by commenting that his guitarist Dad (Bob) gets a real charge out of playing opposite his adult son (who plays bouzouki)

“Yes it is quite obvious, isn’t it? He revels in it. I wouldn’t say the music is secondary, but looking across the stage and seeing Margaret and then his two kids singing in harmony, it still visibly moves him and he talks about it openly.

“When we were children we just wanted to be doing a slick and professional show. But as I’ve got older and I’ve got children I completely understand that there are some things more important than being professional. It’s still very valued in the folk world – being yourself and being true to your story.”

That elusive musical quality emerged when the Fagans employed four-part acapella singing. Their stirring version of Alex Glasgow’s Close the Coal House Door and its third verse about the Aberfan colliery disaster raised ‘goosebumps’. The refrain “Close the coal house door, lads, there’s bairns inside” references the 1966 disaster in Aberfan, Wales, when a colliery slag heap collapsed on a school, killing 114 children and adults.

Folk songs often tell real stories and some don’t pull punches, like British leftie songwriter Leon Rosselson’s hard-hitting The World Turned Upside Down. The song tells the story of The Diggers, a ragtag group of latter-day socialists who in 1649, after the execution of Charles I, occupied the land at St George’s Hill in Surrey. They believed that the land could now be used to establish collaborative farming communities. It is supremely ironic that today, St George’s Hill is an enclave of the super-rich; lavish mansions and acreage estates owned by Russian oligarchs, TV personalities, film stars and rock musicians, not to mention the landed gentry.

You might know the song through the 1984 version by Billy Bragg, but my preference is the Fagans singing this socialist anthem in four-part harmony.

James and his sister Kate started performing with their parents in the late 1980s while in their early teens. From performances at Sydney folk clubs, they graduated to the Maleny Folk Festival (before it grew too big and went to Woodford). James had just left high school when the group recorded their first album, ‘Common Treasury’, in 1991.

Some 28 years later, James and Nancy and their two children travelled 10, 662kms from Sheffield in the UK to the Blue Mountains. Not to mention a 600 kms round trip from the Blue Mountains to Canberra.

Yes, the trip was worth it; a family reunion, a musical reunion and time for Bob and Margaret to spend time with their grandsons Harry and Hamish. The latter appear to be following the family tradition, sharing the stage with James and Nancy, to perform ‘Mr Weather’. Nancy said the children deserved to be there because “they totally gave me the idea for this song”.

James and Nancy recently recorded their first duo album in a decade, a live album, ‘An Evening with Nancy Kerr and James Fagan’.

“The time’s not been idly spent,” James said of the past 10 years. “The last (duo) album came out in 2010, a big departure for us, as it was all songs and tunes written by ourselves.

“At the same time that album emerged, so did our first child, Hamish, and that required us to give up the lifestyle of living on a narrow boat and being troubadours and river gypsies.

“It was a big life change. The children came along, we moved into a house, we formed a new band and started diversifying what we did so one of us could be home.”

James reckons he has been to the National Folk Festival at least 20 times and fondly recalls scoring his first professional solo gig there when he was just 18.

This was also the case for bluegrass fiddle player George Jackson, who also enjoyed this year’s festival as a family reunion. His parents made the journey from Alice Springs to attend the festival and spend time with him. Mind you, it’s hard to pin down a dedicated musician at a music festival – they are usually picking up extra gigs. For example, George and two other bluegrass musicians stepped up for a spontaneous gig with songwriter John Flanagan.

It might have seemed like a jam, but when musicians of this calibre get together, magic things happen.

There were other highlights among the 150+ acts at the NFF including Scottish band Manran and their Scottish Gaelic songs, the virtuosity of instrumental band Kittel & Co and their marriage of Celtic music, bluegrass and classical, and the innovation of original Portuguese band Vila Navio.

Rounding out this eclectic festival, I was fortunate to catch one of comedian Martin Pearson’s daily ‘Brunch’ sessions where he trades barbs with guests. Singer and debater John Thompson was the guest that day. They traded Catholic school day experiences at the hands of teachers like Pearson’s “Sister Genghis”.

Amid a hilarious skit “how to wash a cat” they were interrupted by a loud ‘ting’ as one of Canberra’s brand-new shiny red trams arrived nearby.

“It’s not a tram,” said Thompson, crossly. “Trams share the road with other traffic. This has its own dedicated track. Therefore it is not a tram, it is light rail.”

I asked John about this later and he emailed me yesterday.

“There is some disagreement online about this distinction.

All trams are light rail, but only light rail that features “street running” can be called trams.

“The Canberra light rail only has “street running” at a couple of corners – it’s not a tram!”

That’s the thing about folkies – they have strong opinions.

Tom, Dick, Harry and Paul

moither-duck-tom-dick-harry-paul — Photo by Paul Williams https://flic.kr/p/NFKTu

Brisbane songwriter Sue Wighton has a zany song about the daft names people give their children, with a droll chorus that starts: ‘Whatever happened to Tom, Dick and Harry?’ It’s a good question.

It would never have occurred to me as a song subject, but Sue is an ex-school teacher, so that explains a lot. She will have seen her share of exotic baby names like Joaquin, Griffin, Phoenix, Jasper, Peregrine and Fox. I’m only indulging myself with boy names here – as this essay progresses, the why will become obvious. If you are truly fascinated by the subject of unusual girl’s names, US website www.popsugar.com explores the A to Zee of names like Aria, Darby, Kaia, Marisol, Yani and Zaylee.

Yani’s not that unusual – I actually know one and if you like choir singing, you probably do too.

But as for the children of celebrities forced to wear names like Heavenly Harari, Pilot Inspektor or Sage Moonblood, some, on reaching adulthood, may apply to change their names to Fred Smith or Bob Wilson.

I thought about this (a while ago), when doing the crossword in the Sunshine Coast Daily, which just happens to be on the same page as Showbiz News. Somehow my eyes always drift to the top of the page. Here I learned that Kim Kardashian and husband Kanye West were going somewhere or other with their daughter North West (u-huh). The Kardashians have since spawned two more children, dubbed Saint and Chicago. They also have a Pomeranian named Sushi, although that is something of a non-sequitur.

It reminded me of that movie ‘Captain Fantastic’, about an anti-establishment chap and his wife who raise six children off-grid in the American wilderness and bestow upon them “unique” names like Bodevan, Gellian and Vespyr.

My childhood was blighted to a degree because the family moved to New Zealand, where my common enough Scottish middle name produced howls of laughter and derision. So yes, I empathise with people whose parents have dubbed them names which may provoke schoolyard bullying.

As Christian names go, Robert or Bob is common enough, though its use today is well below its peak in 1930, when matinee idols Robert Mitchum and Robert Taylor inspired those with child at the time.

Rankings of the top 50 boys’ names in Australia, are led by William, Jack and Oliver. Tom (6) is still in vogue and Harry (30) is still a popular choice of name for British babies, thanks to the next generation of Royal princes.

But Richard (Dick) wasn’t sighted, possibly because a generation of fathers called Richard took offence at their name being shortened to Dick and its sniggering variants.

Aussie parents don’t go too far out on a limb with baby-naming – Jayden, Braxton and Jaxon are the only ones that look odd to the eye. Religion still has some influence, apparently, with Matthew, Luke and Noah in the top 50. Mark, however, is missing, so too Saul and Paul.

You can always pick people whose parents hero-worshipped movie stars of the 50s by their names – Kirk, Victor, Marlon, Burt or James.

Folk were much less adventurous in the middle part of the 20th century. Popsugar.com dipped into the US Department of Social Security archives to inform us that Michael was the most popular boy’s name from the 1960s to the 1990s (since supplanted by Jacob). Lisa (1960s), Jennifer (1970s, Jessica (1980s and 1990s) and Emily (2000) lead the girls’ list, although that’s the last I’ll have to say about girls for now.

Pop Sugar’s 2018 take on this subject was to come up with a list of ‘unique’ boys’ names including Aaro, Abbott (truly), Ackley, Alber, Arian, Banner, Benton, Binx, Bowie and Brantley. A few cool ideas there if those with child want to have a look.

Christian names tend to become popular/trendy through celebrity, be it TV, movies, music or other forms of artistic endeavour. The name Paul reached the pinnacle of its popularity in the US in 1969 (1.4% of all boy’s names), coinciding with the popularity of folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel, who had universally known hits through the sixties until breaking up in 1970.

Few people would know why I chose to write a song about the famous Pauls of the world, other than to recount the story of the six Pauls we knew in our home town at the time.

She: “I saw Paul up the street.”

He: “Paul Who?”

It became a thing and the strange song got a hold of me and wouldn’t let go. This link takes you to our soundcloud page where you can listen to the song and others.

I stayed away from religion – I just assumed everyone knew there have been eight Pope Pauls and Paul the Apostle was just too obvious.

It’s a fair guess Paul Keating’s parents did not foresee the “small and/or humble” Paul (the Latin meaning of the name) become a wily Federal politician, the “World’s Greatest Treasurer” and eventually Prime Minister. And he still won’t go away, bobbing up on national current affairs programmes waxing eloquent about leadership and policy.

This website reveals everything you’d ever want to know about the name Paul. I wish to hell I’d found it before starting on my song!

I don’t much see the value in explaining all the references in Paul Who – some things deserve to remain a mystery, and besides, it’s fun to read between the lines.

I make an exception for a reader from Portugal who apparently downloaded the album on ITunes. He sent me a short email: “Who is the “making gravy guy”? I replied in detail about How to Make Gravy by Australian writer Paul Kelly. The story, as you know, is a letter from Joe to Dan, who has the responsibility of making Christmas go smoothly as he (Joe) will be behind bars for the duration.

The hidden agenda in ‘Paul Who’ is the cult of celebrity, mostly dominated by men. There’s only one Sheila (Aussie parlance) mentioned here, because of her notoriety on the extreme fringes of politics.

For what it’s worth, I thought a song dedicated to all the Pauls out there was long overdue. This website reckons 1.37 million boys in the US have been named Paul since 1880, though it tapered off in the 1970s. The most people given this name (26,968), was in 1957. Those people are now 62 years old. In Australia, Paul has fallen off the top 100 list, although Dylan is still there.

Curiously, if you are curious, the name Muhammad and all its variant spellings came in at number 1 in the UK (ranked 100 in Australia). The suspicious old journo who lives under my left hearing aid whispered “urban myth” so I dug a little bit more. The Spectator did the work for me, analysing the official statistics, saying that even when the variations in spelling are taken into account, Muhammad/ud/ed is still the single most popular boy’s name in England and Wales (though to be balanced, closely followed by Oliver, Jack and Harry). In Australia, Oliver tops the list of boys’ names. So, of course, In England and Wales, as in Australia, ‘Christian’ names far outnumber ‘Islamic’ ones.

No need to worry, Pauline and Fraser….

A Few Observations About Ice and Glaciers

ice-glacier-climate-change — Fox Glacier image by Cath Singleton

One Thursday night while watching rugby league, I went to the freezer, extracted some ice cubes and wrapped them in a tea towel. The aim was to encase my throbbing thumb in an icy blanket of numbness.

It’s just arthritis, the doctor said, examining the swelling of the thumb joint. Gardening, playing guitar and driving tends to bring on the pain and swelling. Importantly, the doctor did not recommend ice, instead suggesting anti-inflammatories (tablets or gel).

For athletes the world over, ice has for decades been part of the treatment for swelling and pain brought on by sporting injuries. It was quite a revelation, then, to discover that ice no longer has the imprimatur it once had for treatment of bruises and sprains. It seems that doctors and physiotherapists now believe that moving the injured body part helps more with recovery than numbing it with ice.

To digress for a moment, a Deloitte survey of media and entertainment habits cited here a few weeks back found that 91% of survey participants multi-task while watching TV. I scoffed at the time, then started thinking about the things I was doing while ‘watching’ footie.

The ritual of icing my thumb expanded into googling (on my phone) all manner of references to ice (frozen water) as a future FOMM took shape. I may have toyed with my crossword book (seven down: a permanent mass of ice caught in a mountain pass).

I may also have left-handedly replied to two texts and three emails while watching the Brisbane Broncos make multiple mistakes, run sideways, miss tackles and wonder why they got beaten.

When it comes to ice and rugby league, you often footie players sitting forlornly on the bench with bags of ice strapped to their shoulders, knees, thighs or ankles. The most common rugby league injury is what is euphemistically known as a ‘cork’ which is what we kids used to call an ‘Uncle Charlie’, that is, when the schoolyard bully knees you in the thigh muscle. The result is extreme pain, as a deep-seated bruise takes shape within the traumatised tissue.

You will notice I have reclaimed the original definition of ice (the solid form of water). It takes this form when subjected to temperatures of zero and below. In contemporary culture, ice is most frequently used to serve chilled drinks and to create temporary fridges at large family gatherings.

The times when ice (frozen water) most often makes it into the news is when storms drop hailstones as big as golf balls, tennis balls, cricket balls or even bowling balls. It’s no fun being caught out in a hailstorm and can even be dangerous. There have been reports of people dying, going back to France in 1360, during the Hundred Years war, when 1,000 English soldiers were killed in a freak hailstorm. The deadliest of the last century was when 246 people died in Moradabad, India, in 1988.

Hailstorms bring out the worst in headline writers, as they struggle to find four or five letter words that create panic pictures (‘wreak havoc’ is a favourite) and so is ‘freak’, as in ‘a very unusual and unexpected event or situation’.

Hailstorms also play freakish havoc with the balance sheets of general insurers. The Insurance Council of Australia reveals its biggest payout in recent times was the $1.7 billion in losses a 1999 hailstorm caused to Sydney’s city’s east. Then there was the $31 million in losses caused by Sydney’s Anzac Day hailstorm of 2015. Not to mention the trauma and loss of production suffered by crop farmers and fruit-growers and the long queues of car owners waiting for their turn in the panel shop.

You may have already gathered I might steer this conversation from freak hailstorms to what climate change means for the world’s glaciers and arctic ice sheets.

As Sarah Gibbons wrote in National Geographic this week: “Like an ice cube on a hot summer’s day, many of Earth’s glaciers are shrinking.”

The article is based on new data from researchers at the University of Zurich. They found that melting mountain glaciers contribute roughly a third of measured sea-level rise. This is about the same sea level rise as the Greenland ice sheet and more than the contribution of the Antarctic. Their research also highlighted that many of the world’s glaciers may disappear in the next century. Sea levels rose 27mm between 1961 and 2016, roughly half a millimetre a year. NASA now says sea levels are rising at the rate of 3mm a year, with melting glaciers contributing about a third of that volume.

Glacial movement is caused by variations in temperature with snow accumulating or melting, the evidence seen at the glacier terminus. The sheer weight of the glacier causes it to move slowly downhill, whether or not the glacier is advancing or retreating.

New Zealand’s Fox Glacier advanced between 1995 and 2009 at the rate of a metre per week. Since 2009, the glacier has begun retreating again, as it did in the decades prior to 1995.

Fox and neighbouring Franz Josef are not typical glaciers, though. They retreat or advance 10 times faster than glaciers located in other countries. This is partially to do with the excessive precipitation on New Zealand’s west coast, but also the extremely large neve* above the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers.

(*that’s glacier-speak for snow accumulated above a glacier).

The New Zealand situation seems anomalous, however, as US scientists found that 2017 was the 38^th year in a row of mass loss of mountain glaciers worldwide. According to the State of the Climate in 2017, the cumulative mass balance loss from 1980 to 2016 was 19.9m, the equivalent of cutting a 22m-thick slice off the top of the average glacier.

My original premise of using ice to soothe pain arose again when friends came over to watch A Star is Born. You know that scene where Bradley Cooper’s character Jackson Maine drags Lady Gaga’s character Ally into a suburban all-night supermarket? This is not long after Ally has biffed an off-duty cop in the face and apparently damaged her hand.

“Better get something on that, before the swelling starts,” Maine says.

So he scurries around the supermarket, putting together a makeshift icepack to soothe Ally’s bruised knuckles. (I read this as a bit of rock star foreplay, giving Jackson an excuse to stroke Ally’s hand).

Gabe Mirkin, author of “The Sports Medicine Book,” where the RICE (rest-ice-compression-elevation), acronym first appeared in 1978, now says the rest and ice part of the cure is no longer recommended. He changed his mind after reviewing the latest research, which includes a study published in 2014 by the European Society of Sports Traumatology, Knee Surgery & Arthroscopy. The report found that icing injured tissue shuts off the blood supply that brings in healing cells. “Ice doesn’t increase healing — it delays it,” Mirkin says, and the studies back him up

It would seem the rugby league fraternity did not get this memo.

Perhaps they should take the tip from commentator Gus Gould, who, despite a seven-year footie career marred by injuries, appears to advocate stoicism.

“Aw that’s nothing,” says Gus. “It’s just a cork – he can run that off.”

#shutupgus

Electoral roll closes tomorrow

Election countdown special No 1

electoral-rolls-close-tomorrow — Image: war-time voting at Perth Town Hall, State Library of WA https://flic.kr/p/eUK9Pa

This pre-election series will include timely public interest notifications and random observations about polling (the electoral roll closes tomorrow), leadership and grassroots campaigns. Readers are urged to share this with their young adult children, nephews and nieces and Joe at the bottle-oh.

Most urgently, if you are not already on the electoral roll for the 2019 federal election, you need to do it by 8pm tomorrow (April 18). If you are an Australian citizen aged 18 years or older you are required to vote in the federal election. To enrol, follow this link to complete the online form.

If you are confused about who to vote for, the ABC’s Vote Compass interactive tool will give you a fair idea. I completed mine last week and was aghast to find that 6/10 was the best I could do for a preferred leader (out of four possible choices, I scored two of them 1/10!)

This is perhaps not surprising when you learn that the figureheads of the main parties (LNP and Labor), can’t scratch up 50% as preferred leader.

An IPSO poll released last week put Scott Morrison (46%) ahead of Bill Shorten (34%) as preferred Prime Minister. Let’s not get despondent about the apparent lack of confidence in political leadership. Polls like these can be decidedly inaccurate.

For example, Paul Keating went into 1992 with a personal approval rating of just 25%, ebbing to 17% just before he won the 1993 election. Other PMs who failed to garner support as preferred leaders include Julia Gillard (23%), Tony Abbott (24%) and Malcolm Turnbull (34%). Those numbers were when all four leaders were at their lowest point of public support.

If you would like to take the temperature of the over-60 cohort, a survey by the website www.startsat60.com asked readers to rank Australian PMs between 1968 and 2018.

John Winston Howard won in a hand-canter with 58.3%; despite saying he’d never say sorry, despite the children overboard mistruths, despite following George Bush Jnr and Tony Blair into an unwinnable and unjustifiable war. Still, he did ban guns after the Port Arthur massacre. Bob Hawke ranked second in the over-60 survey with 17%, just behind Gough Whitlam (15.2%).

The other nine leaders all scored less than 5%, with Malcom Fraser and Scott Morrison attracting no votes at all. Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd polled equally poorly with 0.6%.

I offer no conclusions on political surveys except to say that even when conducted by professional polling companies, they ought to be treated with caution.

The budget that forgot climate change

climate-change-power-station — power station image by Benita Welter from Pixabay

‘The budget that forgot climate change’ may be a slightly misleading headline, even though Greens Leader Richard Di Natale essentially said as much when interviewed on 2GB. He was elaborating on a press release issued on Budget night which castigated the Federal Coalition for virtually ignoring climate change.

“(Treasurer) Josh Frydenberg said in his speech that we owe our children budget discipline,” Di Natale said. We owe our children a plan for their future, and that should mean tackling climate change through a managed transition away from fossil fuels to a clean, green, jobs-rich renewable economy. By any measure this budget fails to do that.”

The Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) was blunter still, describing it as a “nightmare” budget.

“Scott Morrison’s government has given us budget that sets more money aside for a ring road in Cairns than for dealing with climate change – the biggest social and environmental crisis facing our generation,” the AYCC said.

“The LNP intends to set aside just $189 million over the next four years to deliver their so-called climate action plan – which, by the way, fails to so much as mention a transition away from coal and gas”.

To be fair, climate change did get two mentions in a Budget loaded with tax cuts to woo the nation’s middle-income earners (and an ‘oops we forgot the poor people’ moment, when the energy supplement was later extended to include NewStart recipients).

You know the old adage about shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted? The Coalition’s idea of dealing with climate change is to create a $3.9 billion Emergency Response Fund which will be used to mop up after severe storms, floods, bushfires and cyclones. The fund will grow to $5 billion over the next decade, the Treasurer said.

The Australian Financial Review’s Queensland Bureau chief Mark Ludlow outlined where the government had found the money for the Emergency Response Fund.

“The fund, which will need to be passed in legislation, will be created from the leftover allocations from the former Labor government’s Education Investment Fund as well as money that had previously been allocated to the National Disability Insurance Scheme which is no longer needed.”

One ought to mention, as Ludlow did, the government already picks up the tab for post-disaster funding under the existing Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements. The NDRRA comes into play once State or Territory funding has been exhausted.

More promisingly, the government announced a $3.9 billion Future Drought Fund, which at least acknowledges that Australia needs to plan on the assumption that drought will continue to plague the outback, if not the entire eastern seaboard.

The Climate Council took to Twitter on Budget night to spell out its disappointment.

“The divide between the parties when it comes to Coalition’s focus on tax and surpluses, and Labor’s focus on climate policy, might come down to this: would you rather leave your children with a smaller federal debt or a worldwide climate crisis.”

The tweet was linked to a University of Melbourne Budget analysis which said Australia was not on track to meet its Paris Climate commitment of a 26% to 28% reduction in emissions off 2005 levels.

“We are projected to achieve a 7% reduction, and the budget on Tuesday night offered little to suggest we can change course.”

The Climate Action Tracker (CAT) rates Australia’s position on climate change as “insufficient”, which is the same rating given in 2011. CAT is an independent scientific analysis produced by three research organisations tracking climate action since 2009. CAT tracks progress towards the globally agreed aim of holding warming well below 2°C, and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.

The Climate Action Tracker’s latest verdict (December 2018) notes that Australia’s climate policy has further deteriorated in the past year, “as it focusses on propping up the coal industry and ditches efforts to reduce emissions”.

“The Federal government is ignoring the record uptake of solar PV and storage and other climate action at State level.

“The Australian government has turned its back on global climate action by dismissing the findings of the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C and announcing it would no longer provide funds to the Green Climate Fund (GCF).”

The 2019 Budget confirmed that Australia’s contributions to the UN’s major fund would end in December, with a final contribution of $19.2 million. Australia has given $187 million to the fund, which finances developing world projects that cut emissions or promote resilience to climate impacts.

You may recall when John Howard belatedly made a pre-election commitment in 2007 to establishing a national Emissions Trading Scheme, starting no later than 2012.

Dubbed the Climate Change Fund, it promised that revenue from emissions trading was to be re-invested into climate change initiatives.oward made

I mention this only to point out that Tuesday’s announcement was just a rebadged Climate Change Fund – a new name for the same objectives.

The Morrison Government pre-committed $2 billion to the ‘Climate Solutions Fund’, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the economy. It does so by (continuing) to purchase low-cost abatement through the existing Emissions Reduction Fund. Already there are claims that the government plans to use ‘Kyoto carryover credits’ to reduce our greenhouse gas pollution, even though comparable countries have ruled out doing this.

Ah well, at least we signed up for the Paris agreement, well after incoming Prime Minister Kevin Rudd honoured a pre-election promise and ratified the Kyoto protocol in 2007.

Some 195 member countries including Australia agreed to the Paris agreement in late 2015. The agreement’s long-term goal is to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, and to limit the increase to 1.5 °C.

So it has been a long journey from the first Australian greenhouse gas emissions reduction proposal 30 years ago. In 1989, Senator Graham Richardson, who must have had an inkling of what lay ahead, made a Cabinet submission for a 20% reduction in 1988 Australian greenhouse gas emissions levels by 2005.

So what does the future hold after the budget that forgot climate change, some six weeks out from a crucial Federal election where the Opposition Labor Party offers a mixed bag of policies, including a big commitment to renewable energy and climate change mitigation?

A book delivered to my mailbox yesterday delivers an unpalatable verdict. Author Anna Skarbik says Australia can be a carbon-neutral country by 2050 – “if we just get on with it”.

Skarbik is a contributor to Advancing Australia – ideas for a better country, just published by The Conversation through Melbourne University Press.

She states that the Federal Coalition’s current emissions reduction target of 26% to 28% by 2030 is not enough to meet the zero target by 2050. Federal Labor will also have to boost its promise of a 45% reduction in carbon emissions to meet this target.

“Australia would need to cut emissions by 55% below 2005 levels by 2030 to get there without undue economic disruption,” Skarbik wrote.

As she observes: “Lack of consensus on climate policy over the last two decades has cost us dearly.”

Recommended viewing:

Y dig up coal? Maleny’s contribution to the Stop Adani campaign: