*
*
The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish.
Robert Jackson
"Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will nevertheless be identical: the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality. What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its present strongest version, climate alarmism.
"I am afraid there are people who want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living (though not their own) and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries. This ambition goes very much against past human experience which has always been connected with a strong motivation to better human conditions. There is no reason to make the change just now, especially with arguments based on such incomplete and faulty science. Human wants are unlimited and should stay so. Asceticism is a respectable individual attitude but should not be forcefully imposed upon the rest of us. I am also afraid that the same people, imprisoned in the Malthusian tenets and in their own megalomaniacal ambitions, want to regulate and constrain demographic development, which is something only the totalitarian regimes have until now dared to experiment with."
Vaclav Klaus President of the Czech Republic, from a recent speech at a climate change conference.
There must be a new shipment of ice in town, judging by my observations on my morning walk; 6am, autumn, and it's still dark. But there's groups still in the street who clearly haven't been to sleep, mingling with the factory workers on their way to another toilsome day. On the block they sit around in a group, yarning away about God knows what, surrounded by bottles. Other people pick their ways through the rubbish, an ancient people on an ancient land, here in the dawn, waiting. There is dereliction in all our souls; yet the country is run by socialist millionaires who despite all the rhetoric of "working families" wouldn't have a clue what it was like to survive on a normal wage.
In fact, surviving on a normal wage has become almost impossible in this town. The average mortgage in some western suburbs is 60% of the average wage. Many people are now spending more than 40% of their incomes paying off debt; credit cards, personal loans, mortgages. The city has turned in on itself, vicious, nasty, a scrabbling, unpleasant place, chocking in traffic and fumes, road rage, hatred spewing forth in the exhaust fumes. It has split in two; the wealthy home owners, and the scrabbling rest, struggling to make ends meet, ripped off by generations of self-serving politicians, local, state, federal. Even Bob Hawke, a previous labor Prime Minister, came out the other day talking about what an insanely over-governed country we are.
Deborah Cameron, who I knew from my days at the SMH, has taken up the morning job as compere on the breakfast show at the ABC. It's been a baptism of fire, for a while she was absolutely awful, her PC earnest well meaning tones too much to bear. But she's been running an interesting series on freedom of information, talking to various experts around the country. It's staggering what you can't find out in this country: how many Christian churches are vandalised each year? what is the name of the restaurant with the worst health record? how many clients of the Child Support Agency die each day? You'll be left whistling; in the dark literally. They don't want us to know.
Accretions of government, accretions of control, layer after layer of bureaucracy and bullshit, it has turned this country into a communist state. And in Sydney, decades of mismanagement by successive government is clear for all to see. The only thing that works in Australia, as I and many others are fond of saying, is the NRMA, the National Road and Motor Association, which still shows up within the hour, a pleasant, helpful bloke will fix your car, and you'll be on your way with minimum fuss or expense. Nothing else works. Despite the bleating of the left over public transport, the trains are cattle carts, crowded, often late. Yet there are more than 20 people in State Rail on incomes of over $300,000, six times the average wage. How is that justifiable? And the head, Vince Graham, who had clearly done little or anything to fix the mess, has just taken another job on something like $480,000 a year.
All this has got much worse over the last decade, a decade when we were ruled by a conservative government. Public servants can now count their wages in multiples of the average wage, which is in the order of %50,000. But you're not going to find many public servants on less than $100,000. Almost everyone in Sydney says the same thing, it's become an impossible place to live. I used to love it 30 years ago, it was bohemian paradise, I say; thinking of glory days hanging around the Cross, autumn leaves floating on to mystery streets, the world a glorious place. Once, as a teenager, I found five dollars in the street, enough to buy several drinks in the Rex Hotel. These days five dollars will barely buy you a coffee.
How sweet things were, how glorious, before time took its crooked hand. The taxi driver is almost in tears, telling me how much he wants to leave, how impossible it has become for an ordinary person to survive. Yet the other day on television there was a real estate agent talking about the boom time at the top; the houses worth ten, twenty, thirty million dollars, lined along the strip of sand known as the Gold Coast, the same strips of sand which were once an isolated, picturesque holiday destination. The same show flashed on to two houses owned by Malcolm Turnbull, the opposition Treasury spokesman, magnificent piles stepping down to the Harbour foreshore, estimating their value at around $50 million. These are insane figures no ordinary person can imagine, struggling to pay bills.
Everyone says the same thing: I'm working my butt off and getting nowhere. You cannot get ahead in Sydney. And I agree with them every time, my own heart broken by the difficulty of it all, bringing up two kids on my own, ploughing through the day. Perhaps I should have re partnered, it's meant to be the best thing for your psychological health, but for years I couldn't look at a woman without thinking TROUBLE in capital letters, vibrating, or was it shuddering, at the thought. There was no way back, I couldn't become the person I once was. I couldn't once more be filled with hope; accept beauty as my due, fob off all the attention as a laugh a minute, be full of hope and laughter, virtually dancing down the street, flashing round town in smart cars. Young, wealthy, famous, that's what everyone wanted to be, where the zeitgeist lay, in a shallow physical triumph, on top of a social score board. Instead we faced another day, quietly mustering what dignity we could, our grey hair barely noticed in a city and an environment that was now, literally, someone else's dream come true.
THE BIGGER STORY:
icasualties.org
BAGHDAD -- The body of a Chaldean Catholic archbishop who was abducted by gunmen last month was discovered today in the northern Iraq city of Mosul, while a car bomb killed 18 people in Baghdad.
The corpse of the Mosul Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was found in the city's Intisar neighborhood, a police official said. His body was being taken to a hospital to determine the cause of death, church officials said.
Rahho had been kidnapped and his three bodyguards shot to death on Feb. 29 after the archbishop had finished celebrating the Stations of the Cross.
Pope Benedict XVI condemned the death, calling it "an act of inhuman violence that offends the dignity of mankind and does grave harm to the cause of brotherly coexistence among the beloved Iraqi people."
Rahho's kidnappers had informed church officials in Mosul where they could find the prelate's body, reported AsiaNews, a Catholic news agency that specializes in the Middle East.
A bearded, rotund man of 67, Rahho had been ill and had suffered a heart attack a couple of years ago. The kidnappers had demanded as ransom millions of dollars, weapons and the release of Arab inmates in Kurdish prisons, AsiaNews said.
Christians in Iraq have been repeatedly targeted by Sunni militants, who suspect them of collaborating with the Americans.
Meanwhile, a car bomb exploded in central Baghdad, killing 18 people, police officials said. The explosion near the popular Tahrir Square was the latest in a string of high-profile bombings in the capital that have come following a relative lull in the violence.
The blast wreaked havoc in the commercial area near Baghdad's high-security Green Zone. Shorefront windows were shattered and blood stained the ground.
From icasualties.org
A rocket attack on a US military base south of Baghdad on Wednesday killed three soldiers and wounded two in the third lethal attack on troops this week, the military said.
There was an indirect fire incident that killed three coalition force service members and wounded two,'' military spokesman Lieutenant Michael Street told AFP.
An Iraqi civilian was wounded in the attack.
The US military usually uses the term ``indirect fire'' to indicate rocket attacks.
The latest deaths bring the military's losses in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 3,987, according to an AFP tally based on independent website icasualties.org.
The US military has lost 11 personnel in the past three days.
On Monday, eight were killed in the deadliest day for the US military since August.
Five of them died in a suicide bombing in Baghdad as they were on foot patrol in the capital's once upscale Mansur neighbourhood.
Three were killed along with their translator in a bomb blast in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad.
The last major attack against US troops was on January 9 when six US soldiers were killed when they entered a booby-trapped house in Diyala.
On August 22, 2007, 14 American soldiers were killed in northern Iraq after their Blackhawk came down during a pre-dawn flight.
The mounting toll comes at a time when the US military is reducing troop numbers amid claims by American commanders that daily violence has fallen 60 percent in Iraq since June.
Last year proved the deadliest year for American forces in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, with at least 901 soldiers killed.
The military's losses in Iraq are one of the key issues in the US presidential election and have hit the campaign of President George W. Bush's Republican party.
The rising death toll comes amid talks between US and Iraqi officials on the future of the US military presence in Iraq.
On Monday, US and Iraqi delegations began talks on arrangements for long-term cooperation and friendship, including an agreement on a temporary US troop presence in Iraq, the Iraqi foreign ministry said.
This is my son Sam with his friend Jessy from school. She has moved out of home recently, causing quite a stir amongst the boys.
No comments:
Post a Comment