Saying "thank you" to the police

has been under discussion after the deaths of two police officers in a neighbouring state. 

The two officers were allegedly shot and killed by a man who apparently calls himself a "sovereign citizen". As I write this the heavily armed man is still on the run. He is apparently an excellent bush man who knows the territory around his disappearance and knows it well. 

It is an appalling situation for all concerned and a reminder I would much rather not have of how dangerous the job of policing can be. 

While this has been going on the police union in this state is making demands which cannot be met under current funding. Their leader is criticising the senior management over the type of policing model which has been put in place and more. 

I do not know as much as I would like about this but I do know that, for the most part, members of our police force are not trained to communicate as well as they might be. They are trained to do things in ways which I find unacceptable but there may be good reason for this.

I remember when, because they could find nobody else, they came to inform the Senior Cat of his cousin's death. They came mid-evening. The Senior Cat was getting ready to go to bed. He was ninety-four or five at the time, a frail old man on a walker. There were two officers, one of them a woman who told him calmly and sensibly what had happened. She used words she had obviously been trained to say. They were adequate in the circumstances and "correct" but entirely lacking in empathy.  She was doing her job, a difficult job.

All that was not a problem but what was a problem was that the male policeman refused to sit down even after I asked him to do so twice. He stood close enough to be a threat and made no attempt to say anything. I doubt it was intended but it was intimidating rather than reassuring. It is likely he behaved this way to be ready to restrain the Senior Cat or myself if necessary. I can recognise that but it did not help, especially as I then had to make a call to a cousin in another state and inform him so cousin D's sister could be informed. 

This approach is typical of our police force. They lack training in communication skills and it seems they are trained to put up a sort of barrier between themselves and those with whom they are dealing. This is not simply imagination on my part because a member of the force who had transferred from Manchester actually raised it with me one day on public transport. It is rare to have a casual conversation with any member of the police force here.  On another occasion I nearly got myself into trouble for intervening when another of the force was getting irritated with someone. I had to point out that the person they were questioning did not understand the question being asked. A little training in asking questions might help but it seems they get none.

The discussion around the issue yesterday revolved around members of the public not thanking the police for doing their job. It's a fair point but it is difficult to do when they stride through the shopping centre and snap out their order for a takeaway coffee without making eye contact. Communication is a two way thing and our police need more training in that. It will make their job much easier and perhaps there could be a campaign to get the general public to say "thank you". 

All that said if you live in this state and you are going to the state Show this week there will be police around. Perhaps you could give them a "thanks for your service" and see if it helps them?  

The Brittany Higgins saga

is not yet over. It should have been over long ago. Perhaps it should never have occurred in the first place.

I am no "conspiracy theorist". I am of the view there are generally good, rational reasons for things that have happened.  It may make life less fun but it definitely makes life more comfortable.

The Higgins saga is a curiosity rather than a conspiracy. Ms Higgins alleges she had non-consensual sex with another member of staff in the office of a then Senator at the parliament building in our nation's capital. The story did not come out immediately. It took Ms Higgins two years to go to the police. That in itself is enough for some conspiracy theorists especially as her story about the incident was in the public domain by then. When it did enter the public domain there were  accusations that she had not been supported by her bosses in the office. The damage was great enough to undermine the government of the day. It was a story which caused great harm to all concerned. The then Opposition pounced on it and used it to help them bring down a government at the next election.

The matter was taken to court as an allegation of rape, an allegation which was never proven. Ms Higgins was alleged to be unable to continue with the case due to the mental stress it was causing. It was receiving immense publicity. Despite the lack of a conviction Ms Higgins received a multi-million dollar payout from the new government on the grounds she would never be able to work again. 

There is a widespread view that someone who claims to have been raped is to be believed and many people will say they believe the story told by Ms Higgins is true. To say otherwise is to bring the wrath of the PC police on your head.  In the case of Ms Higgins very few people dare to question what she has alleged. 

Despite claims to the contrary Ms Higgins had the support of her then boss - the Senator. She also had the support of the office staff.  She was advised to go to the police. I have a friend in similar circumstances. She lost her job and her reputation making a similar allegation against a public figure. I know how hard it can be to go to the police and say, "This was done to me." I also know that many women are not believed when they do make a complaint. It is particularly difficult to make if you have been drinking alcohol.

In this case Ms Higgins does appear to have been successful in being believed, certainly the matter ended up in court. I have never read the transcripts but what was reported was interesting if you find sordid details of any interest. Certainly the media was very sympathetic towards her and so was the now government. I cannot remember any other case where a multi-million dollar payout has been made even when a case has not been concluded and no finding of guilt on the part of the alleged perpetrator has been made.  It is little wonder there are multiple conspiracy theories floating around the case.

Ms Higgins own behaviour has added another layer to the already complex web covering the incident. She "tweeted" some statements alleging that, among other things, she had not had the support of her former boss. It may be that she believed this at the time she wrote them but by then the Senator had had enough. The tweets were, in her view, defamatory. There was evidence to show she had been very supportive. She asked for an apology and did not receive one. In her view her reputation was damaged. When she had exhausted other options she took Ms Higgins to court - and won.

It is only a partial victory however. The financial cost has been huge. The sum awarded in damages is substantial but it is unlikely to cover the cost of taking the matter to court. It is also likely all this has occurred with no real result. Supporters of Ms Higgins are, to put it mildly, not pleased by the result. They are strongly opposed to it. They want the Senator to be held responsible for something which did not occur. They want Ms Higgins to be free of any responsibility for what may or may not have occurred.

Yes, it is all interesting in its way. It is not yet over. Costs still have to be awarded in this case. It may well be that there will be "no order as to costs" meaning each side must pay their own. If that is so then the Senator will still have incurred a severe financial loss. 

All this bothers me because the initial case has never been resolved. The alleged perpetrator took the matter to court too. He also claims defamation. The judge found him guilty "on the balance of probabilities" rather than "beyond all reasonable doubt". It is a finding which has caused quite a stir in legal circles and more than one suggestion that it was wrong. 

It may well be that it was not simply Ms Higgins alleged mental state which caused the abandonment of the trial. The likelihood that the prosecution believed they would lose is a major source of concern even among those who believe Ms Higgins' story. 

Whatever is going on the matter is not finished yet. Does it mean that there was a successful attempt to bring down a government? Or does it mean that everything which occurred was a sordid chain of events that happened to occur at the time? Is there something more to the story? 

I have no idea but the conversation I had to endure hearing on the train yesterday was interesting to say the least.  

So, what's in your lunchbox?

I know I wrote about the "food police" some time ago. You know the people I mean, the adults who have taken all the fun out of school lunch times.

They were under discussion last week. I spent almost four full days working at our state showground helping to set up the Handicrafts area. Those of us working there get rewarded with morning tea and lunch from the kitchen run by the Country Women's Association. They know how to feed us!

We get fresh scones for morning tea and cake. At lunchtime there is a choice between a sandwich, pie or pasty or soup and a roll. There is also a second course of some sort - fruit crumble and custard is a favourite but there might be sticky date pudding or trifle - all made in the kitchen there. It is good "tucker". It is the only time of the year I actually eat cake. If I want something sweet during the rest of the year it is likely to be biscuits. I just don't make cake apart from the Christmas cake. It would go stale before I ate it even if other people had eaten at least half of it.

The women in the kitchen know me after fourteen years of volunteering and they know my order will be a brown bread cheese and salad sandwich. When they were getting us to write the lunch orders the other day the woman who had come up from the kitchen looked at me and asked, "The usual Cat?" I said yes please and that was it.

But school lunches are not like that. Yes, the food police would probably approve the sandwich. They might applaud the fact that I never eat the second course (because the sandwiches are large and well filled). Children however are different. Their fuel needs are different. They would likely want a pie or pasty in preference to a sandwich and they would likely want the second course...and more perhaps.

The idea that a child is going to be satisfied with a "healthy" lunch of hummus and carrot sticks and perhaps an apple is nonsense. It is not the way children function. More often than not the carrot sticks will get left in the lunch box and the apple might too. (No, don't cut the apple into quarters and cut out the core. It goes brown and won't get eaten that way either.) A child is more likely to eat a Vegemite (Marmite) sandwich than a browning apple or overly soft banana. They would prefer to have a hot pie in winter to the healthy salad enlivened with chick pea chips. 

Yes, we ate white bread sandwiches with Vegemite in them for the most part. We were hungry. We had been active. I do not remember many children being fat or even mildly overweight. I was a very skinny child (and just wish the same was true now). The lucky children bought their lunch - pies, pasties and sausage rolls for the most part. There were "cream" buns and other delights too. Even the home packed lunch box had home baked cake or biscuits. There was often a piece of fruit - and most of us did eat that. We were in fact more likely to eat it then than children are to eat it now. 

I think that says something. Children will eat that fruit if they see it as the "sweet" thing after the sandwich. The food police have taken the fun out of seeing how far you can spit an apple pip! 

The excellent food we are provided with as volunteers is almost exactly like the food we are as children at school. We know we are going to burn a great deal of energy.  Our lovely and very hardworking Convenor found her pedometer showed she had walked sixteen kilometres one day. Perhaps children need the opportunity to exercise more - without adult supervision so that it is not seen as a chore? 

Home ownership should not be

an impossible dream but apparently it is for many people. We are constantly being told that the generations below me are finding it "difficult" or "impossible" to buy their own home.

Is that really true? I suspect the situation is far more complex than is suggested. It is about a great deal more than "not even being able to save for the deposit" and the "need for two incomes" and more.

Most people did not own their own home until they were in their fifties at the earliest. What they owned even then was often a "basic three bedroom house" which they had spent more time and money on. Yes it was on that famed "quarter acre block" but the house itself had started as something very ordinary by today's standards. I think that may be part of the problem now. People want a great deal more than they wanted in the past. 

Now the government is saying they have just made it much easier for people to buy their own home. "All you need is a deposit of five percent," the Prime Minister is saying. 

Oh, please read the fine print. You are not going to own your own home at all. The government is going to co-own it with you. You will still have a mortgage to pay and all the responsibility for caring for it. If you need to move for any reason there will be financial penalties. 

And the price of housing is going to go up still further. It will go up simply because more people will be looking to buy. The housing "crisis" is actually going to increase under this policy. We are also going to have some unfortunates who lose their homes because they cannot afford to go on paying the mortgage, a mortgage they probably should never have been able to get in the first place.  

This policy is not the answer to housing the increasing number of migrants the government is bringing in to try and prop up the economy. It is not the answer to housing those who are already here or were born here.

Home ownership should be possible but we need to change our ideas about what we can afford and how we can make it happen.   

President Zelensky is the legitimate

President of Ukraine. For Sergei Lavrov to suggest otherwise and use it as an excuse to continue the war is to say "Russia does not want the war to cease until we have what we want". 

I think we all know that. Zelensky is legitimate because the Ukrainian constitution expressly forbids elections during war time - and Ukraine is under invasion. It is a war zone. Perhaps Lavrov thinks otherwise because his President still calls it a "special military operation".  It is nothing of the sort of course. It is an illegitimate attempt to cease territory which does not belong to Russia.

What makes all this even more interesting is that the Russian government is not a legitimate government. Under their Constitution a President can only have two terms in power. Putin has been there for six terms (sixteen years) so far and shows no signs of relinquishing the role. He was Prime minister too and the Director of the Federal Security Bureau before that.  

 Putin had "elections" held in the annexed territories and those "elected" sit in the Duma. These so-called elections were illegal under both international law and under the Russian Constitution in which international law takes priority over state law. This effectively means that the entire Russian government is illegal - and yet they are trying to say the elected President of Ukraine is illegal?

 Putin has had elections rigged, banned opponents from standing (and imprisoned them) and murdered dissidents. He has taken children from their families and had them "adopted" into Russian homes. He is using prisoners as front line "soldiers" knowing they will not survive but giving them the false promise they will come back as free men. 

We criticise the Prime Minister of Israel - and rightly so. Netanyahu is to be condemned but is he really any worse than Putin? The situation in Gaza is immensely complex and the reporting is - let's just say "biased".  Despite that we have hundreds or thousands of people "protesting" against his policies when there is no more than a whisper about Ukraine. 

There is something very wrong here. I can only imagine that, when the war is over, Zelensky will be relieved to hand over his role to someone else. 

Remote area schooling is expensive

and still does not offer the same resources as urban schooling.

There was one of those "human interest" articles in the paper yesterday and it was being discussed this morning by two former neighbours I happened to see. They hauled me into the conversation because, as they said, I experienced remote area schooling.

My initial year at school was fine. It was at a three teacher school in a moderately sized "town" (small village to those of you in Upover).  Some children came in from surrounding farms but quite a number lived in the town itself.

In my last two years of "primary" however I went to a two teacher school. My parents were the teachers. The Senior Cat, who taught me and my brother, had four year levels to teach and a further year of "correspondence" classes to supervise.  It was, to put it mildly, difficult to do. One reason for this was because intermarriage in the area meant there were a number of very "slow" learners and another was that some of the students were simply "marking time" until they were old enough to leave school. They would then go back and work on the farm. Then there were the handful of students who wanted to go on to a much better secondary and tertiary education.

I had already been promoted above my age group, indeed was almost two years younger than anyone else in my "year". My brother was not quite so badly off being only twelve months younger. The son of one of the "roving professionals" (people who came to do things like banking or teaching) was also given accelerated promotion. It was the only way to cope with a very, very bright child. (He later became a solicitor.) We were left largely to learn alone. There was no choice about this. 

The school had very limited resources and it was the Senior Cat who first organised the  box of books from the Country Lending Service each term. (My brother and I and the future solicitor also borrowed books and shared them with each other.) Even so many of the children did not read the books which were sent. They could not read well enough. Their parents did not read. There were no books in their homes.

Most of the local students came in via the two "buses" - in reality mini-vans that had extra seats put in for the morning and afternoon runs. During the day they served as farm vehicles. (No, there wasn't a seat belt in sight!) 

Then the Senior Cat had the task of setting up an Area School in another part of the state. It was a very difficult job because there were small two high schools within the distance of school bus travel. Some parents had wanted their children to attend one or other high school but they were forced to send their children to the local "area" school. This was where the school bus would take their children, There were two "streams", one for public examinations (rather like O and A levels) and another for rural studies. If you were "smart" you did PEB (Public Examinations Board). Yes, classes were small but subject choices were non-existent - no languages, no classics, no history or social sciences. The Senior Cat taught English and maths and ran the school. He would often have to leave us to work alone while he dealt with other problems.

This sort of thing went on as we moved around. I longed to do a language and history. I wanted to do "art" but was sent to "dressmaking" because all the girls did that. That I could not even thread a needle was not a consideration until the Senior Cat managed to get permission for two of us to do "art by correspondence". There were units for that and I took all the history of art units and somehow managed to get through the rest with a creditable pass, still working by correspondence, at yet another school. 

I say all this but also admit I was well off. I did not have the sometimes two hour bus journey in the mornings and another two hours at night. Homework had to be done on the bus because there was farm work to be done when you arrived home. That a few students managed to get to university was nothing short of miraculous. 

Of course parents who could afford it sent their children off to boarding school but that was, and still is, a huge expense. Even boarding with a family in the city and going to the local public high school was beyond many people. There were other issues with that as well. My parents sent me to a boarding school for the final year and it was one of the worst experiences of my life. (What saved me was the "Matron" of the girls' boarding house recognising this and, quite illegally, sending me off to my paternal grandparents each weekend. I would not have survived the year or managed to learn much without that respite from the constant bullying. It was simply too late to send me (or anyone else) as a boarder.)

Even now if parents do afford it there is the expense of getting their children home for holidays. Most of the time "exeat weekends" (half-term) would see some students staying on at school or, if they were fortunate, being invited to stay by day students.

I worked as a "junior housemistress" in another boarding school. It was a good deal better than the one I attended but there were still issues, most often because of the immense distances the students had travelled to actually be there. It does make a difference if your parents are not there when, as one girl had happen to her, you are fitted with a back brace for scoliosis and your parents are almost a thousand kilometres away. Others had braces on their teeth and one girl was an insulin dependent diabetic. It was very hard for them to deal with all this and all the other issues of growing up. 

The boarding school several streets from here is very different but it is still not "home" and the school is acutely aware of that. They do the very best they can but the cost is enormous - and not just financial. 

As the mother in the article in yesterday's paper mentioned, perhaps the very least the government could do would be see that students who must leave home to continue their education were given some financial assistance - at least enough to get home for the holidays.  

Book Week was something

we celebrated by writing books...and then getting our pupils to write books. This was many years ago and I wonder what would happen if the same "competition" was reintroduced into schools. It won't happen.

The state newspaper ran this competition and the schools participated. Not all children wrote books of course and the "books" were often nothing more than an illustrated school "composition" made into a book like format.  The books and other book related items would be displayed at a major department store in the city. They had a sixth floor auditorium used for such things and school groups could visit during the week.

It was all hard work but a lot of learning went on. I remember teaching my year six students about book binding. We read Cynthia Harnett's "The load of Unicorn" which they rated as "a super story miss!" There were no budding authors in the room but they all helped to produce a respectable display at school. The following year I was promoted to school librarian and organised another display for Book Week.

Book Week was about reading and writing all those years ago. Yes, it is a long time ago and things have changed. Now Book Week seems to be about dressing up as a character in a book. There are costumes available from the cheap shop at the shopping centre and from the "untidy" shop near another shopping centre and even in one of the supermarkets. I have heard parents and grandparents worrying about the costume a child is going in and more. I am not sure what this has to do with books.

Yesterday the knitting group met at the library. Our year 8 student was present. She is one of those highly intelligent, hard working students who likes to be involved. Her school was "celebrating Book Week"  and she told us, "Everyone was supposed to dress up as something or other. There were a whole heap of things you were supposed to do but it didn't have much to do with reading. I took a sick day and went to woodwork with my mum and learned how to do something I have wanted to do for ages."

I would not normally condone something like skipping a school activity but it was right for R.... She did not need that "heap of things" that "didn't have much to do with reading". From other reports the day was undoubtedly fun for most of the students but one of the teachers admitted to me "There was very little learning going on."  Some of the costumes would have been simple but many would have been costly. Some of the students were not free to participate in all the activities because they come from different cultural backgrounds. 

The school thought it was a successful day and perhaps it was but how much more the students could have achieved if they had been asked to turn one of their creative essays into book form. Some of them are old enough to write "chapters" and more. What about researching and writing some simple non-fiction for a younger sibling - and then illustrating? There are potentially no end of activities more valuable than dressing up and playing games and they might end with actually reading more books.